FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

LONDONCONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD1917

_First published, December 1916. _

_Reprinted, January, June 1917. _

TO

JOSEPH CONRAD

WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION

CONTENTS

 PAGESAINT AUGUSTINE 1

CHARLES LAMB 13

VILLON 37

CASANOVA AT DUX 41

JOHN DONNE 80

EMILY BRONTË 109

EDGAR ALLAN POE 115

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 122

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 130

GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET 141

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 153

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 201

A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY 207

LÉON CLADEL 216

HENRIK IBSEN 222

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 268

TWO SYMBOLISTS 300

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 310

WALTER PATER 316

THE GONCOURTS 336

COVENTRY PATMORE 351

SAROJINI NAIDU 376

WELSH POETRY 390

SAINT AUGUSTINE

The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and theyhave this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that theyare addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is thelast, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiantconsciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He feltthat all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the worldwere at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions. The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, theprotesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, tothe world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himselfwas after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He feltthe silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrotehis autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices ofpraise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man whohas conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him tothink of going down into his grave without having made the whole worldhear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that itmay smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of along life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth, with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their beingforbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked backupon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himselfto go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts, firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and thenbecause he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudeshimself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in thewrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, thewriting of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation thatwas left to him, and he accepted it energetically. 

Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of anautobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also toothers. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appearsto be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficultywhich every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond oftelling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer, such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of thosesubterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen andinfinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, asno other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, sofamiliar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without achange of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of thosepears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tenderhuman affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that bewhich is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweetfriend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimesThou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul, rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I knownot what in it would not belong to the life to come. ' And evenself-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind ofmathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpenthought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, becomealso lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of thedivine. 

To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at evenwith this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blunderingin the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it isnatural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, itleaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's, though all vice is man's. 

This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to thebook, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it avery impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, toall of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to putit so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothingwhich happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, whennothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which isbeing played, not so much by as through you, there can be noexteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived. And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details inproportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least, being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happenedto him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is withoutsignificance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human eventis of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it wouldbut induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part. Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without acertain _naïveté_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic, geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty orany instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because bothquickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift. 'Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thoumade him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I hadno part in that boy, but the sin. '

Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the veryforce with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relatesto that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' inall those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves, ' wesee the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate alife, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinfulin him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value tothe most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the mostestimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess itunto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if anyfinds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for manyyears wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not derideme; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himselffor my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ. 'And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his mostbeautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to departthis life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass, Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and Istood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the gardenof the house where we now lay, at Ostia. .. . ' It is not often thatmemory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, andair, ' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for himamong the desirable things which are to be renounced for a moredesirable thing. 

That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles whichhappen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments whichalone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine hasrendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out fromthe memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, itmight seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous momentof the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under acertain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears . .. When lo! I heard froma neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop'sword to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is notpossible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man, 'joking and joyous, ' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparentlytrifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with amore reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known tome. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or hasreally seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubledcoming and going. 

I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truthsmay seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearerthe sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queenof colours, the light. ' There is a passage in the tenth book which mayalmost be called a kind of æsthetics. They are æsthetics indeed ofrenunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the oneBeauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because thosebeautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into theircunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls. ' And itis not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, orwho feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of itsseduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodieswhich Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attunedvoice, ' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the wordssung. ' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the severalaffections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own propermeasures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondencewherewith they are stirred up. ' It is precisely because he feels sointimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dogcoursing in the field, a lizard catching flies, ' that he desires to passthrough these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire ofall seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of allthe powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;and their form of beauty gave the answer. ' And by how concrete a seriesof images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passageof pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I lovethee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor thebrightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies ofvaried songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, andspices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements offlesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kindof light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when Ilove my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of myinner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth whatbreathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I lovewhen I love my God. '

Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be ofimport to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaidmany things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What, then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as ifthey could heal my infirmities, --a race curious to know the lives ofothers, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significantmentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture herefor our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not evenfind all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of thesurface of the mind's action, which we call character, or the surfaceemotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supremesouls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it hasapprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many thingswhich you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it willremember everything which it is important to remember, everything whichthe recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, hasalready inscribed in the book of the last judgment. 

1897. 

CHARLES LAMB

I

There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work. Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but thesupreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose outof the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copiedinto one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the bookis such as I am glad there should be. ' The beginnings of hismiscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferretsme day and night, ' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressingoccupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip. .. . He has lugged me tothe brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for afirst plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, theanatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know, and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwalltells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays. '

He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really asthe poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject andtangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _RosamundGray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing, ' as Shelleycalled it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. Itis a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, andrecurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of pastpleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like adream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood andmoment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but theseflicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity ifthere were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint ofthat divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour ofthe later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is alreadya sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though noskill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of themorals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinkshe has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may. '

Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only forthe moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony. All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might havebeen so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three togetheron the stage at once, ' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and therethey stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdrawthem. ' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him byanother, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures ofUlysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest tosuccess in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have lessthan the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father'sWedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the mostbeautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern. 'There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most ofthe best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, byaccident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly throughletter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses, ' he speaks of, in a letter toManning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it wasthis wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessentialpart of himself. 'Truth, ' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, likethe cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face thatmultiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could notbelieve it could be put to such purposes. ' It was to his correspondents, indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes moreperhaps than the mere materials of his miracles. 

To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, aname, 'Elia, ' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundaboutborrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heightenand soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. Inthe letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writesto Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, thepartitions perfectly invisible. ' The correspondents were alreadyaccustomed to this 'heavenly mingle. ' Few of the letters, those works ofnature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken onoath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns ofsober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of apreliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends in art. 

II

'I am out of the world of readers, ' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate allthat do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gathermyself up into the old things. ' 'I am jealous for the actors whopleased my youth, ' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not knowwhether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinatelyto cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to theusual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in sinceseems of any value or importance compared to the colours whichimagination gave to everything then. ' In Lamb this love of old things, this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imaginationcame to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves allthrough his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this goodworld, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond hisdeservings. ' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that peoplehave had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love, ' he saysin the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets. ' He wasa man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything thatwas contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy. Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing toothers, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living, and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he leftto others to remember him by. 

Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters, religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the lastcentury'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, sowas he in faith an Ancient Christian. ' He himself tells Coleridge thathe has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit, ' and, later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has goneoff. ' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more intohimself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent withhim. 'Such religion as I have, ' he said, 'has always acted on me more byway of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferringchurches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done. To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow overit. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was notlightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude, that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summerholidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meatsand fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, andfire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _ironyitself_--do these things go out with life?'

It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life sohumbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation ofall that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said ofhim, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in thatspecies of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold. ' And thismoral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a'spirit of youth in everything, ' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, andsober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gonestale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truthof the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to themost religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy. 

Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laidout before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of themost precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write, surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios. 'I like books about books, ' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'Ilove, ' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am notwalking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. ' Hewas the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not tobe taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the mostextraordinary persons of the age, ' he says of him, on but a slight andpartial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ areconfusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Amongthe Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it, ' and can define preciselythe defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters ofescape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does notoften make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity ofexpression. ' I choose these instances because the final test of a criticis in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found itmuch easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford, and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was ofColeridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' ofColeridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledgeis not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge, ' hecan write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that hisvery finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantlydetect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of awould-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin. 

Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There hasbeen no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, sointimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when hespeaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting ofMunden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, theBeethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands aleg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplacematerials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him. 'He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly. When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the verywires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in lovewith Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words thatmight apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying ofMrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; aprivileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness. 'Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I mayuse the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a goodand innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents arevisitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when shedoes so, I am not sure that she is not greatest. ' Is not this, with allits precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up ofno poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination allcompact, ' poetry in substance?

Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said), ' he admitted, 'is but as a house tolive in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company, ' he assuredWordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. Ihave passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many andintense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done withdead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, theinnumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--lifeawake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility ofbeing dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sunshining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all thesethings work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power ofsatiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walksabout her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strandfrom fulness of joy at so much life. ' There, surely, is the poem ofLondon, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover'scatalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, hecould say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latternot one known one were remaining. ' He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of hisfriends, 'the very streets, he says, ' writes Mary, 'altering every day. 'London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitiveprison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself outof it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these allcame in on the town part, and thither side of innocence. ' To love Londonso was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has doneas much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('bywhose system, ' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liverin towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers andhills. 

And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands, ' as heconfessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciationof natural things, once brought before them, as he was in hisappreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He wasa great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'Iwish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread inair and sunshine. ' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about hismountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them toManning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never receivedfrom objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. .. . Infine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that whichtourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before. ' And toColeridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to thelast day I live. They haunt me perpetually. ' All this Lamb saw and felt, because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But hewrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because heput into his published writings only the best or the rarest or theaccustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew byheart. 

III

Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. Thereis hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhereexemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always withsomething final about it. He is never more himself than when he says, briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had byAffectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when heexpands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damnedhis play in Drury Lane:

 It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are desirous to please them!

Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of histongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is asfull of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incrediblyfine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse anidea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by someunaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quitethrough the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of thetune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense intosix words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret ofColeridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prosethat he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity. '

To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clearshis brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all hissenses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like highpure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but itis that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety, in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitivethan that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embracesmankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with anindividual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far asvirtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which isnot the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had anunsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noblethings, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil. '

No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or madesuch a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letterto Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote, and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people, as they are called, ' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I wantindividuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answeringneedles. ' He counts over his friends in public, like a child countingover his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. Hehas delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noblethat they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe, there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which wasmade up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy withwhat came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and thatparadox of his position, by which he supports that by which he issupported. 

It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to ourhearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or atleast in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact, flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well becomedespair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, sooccasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastlyvest of white patchwork, ' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is itthat gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, itsjocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his ownwords, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define whatcan, after all, never be explained?

IV

Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward, concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal orhealthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammeringtongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as thebrain did, 'by fits. ' 'You, ' we find Lamb writing to Godwin, 'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose. .. . Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find any story. '

'My brain, ' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, andsnatches off hints from things. ' And, in a wise critical letter toSouthey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judgesystem-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars. '

Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, reallyapologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne, who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries ofsucceeding essayists, ' affected no humility in the statement of almostexactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument thatfortune offers me, ' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; Inever design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the wholeof anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me. .. . Ingeneral I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre. ' There, in thetwo greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to themaking of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneousattack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams, memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or consciousguiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony moreproperly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements, which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _OldChina_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. Youwill see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idlememories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with theactual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of apoem. 

Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; hesaw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section ofsocial life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He likedexceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of therule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all hisexcesses something of 'the good clerk. '

Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearerthan them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from thevery heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. WhereColeridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearestshort-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it. 

And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To himthe essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readierwhen the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners, books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion, 'he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous toshare with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keepsome tenets and some property properly my own. ' And then he found, inrarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like mostothers, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with thebest. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, andWordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All theothers, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal, went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering, never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayedfrom the road. 

The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hiddenin his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him thetragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness tothe heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising withthe enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you considerwell his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of theintellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intensedelight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. Shehad seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the funhad not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pureintellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition. 

1905. 

VILLON

Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets. One requires a certain amount of old French, together with someacquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words inwhich he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and thingshave only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, nopoet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidencemore simply, than this _personnage peu recommandable, fainéant, ivrogne, joueur, débauché, écornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles, escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres_. The mostdisreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness inwhich shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. GastonParis, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for betterfor worse, finds it necessary to apologise for him when he comes to theballad of _La Grosse Margot_: this, he professes, we need not take as apersonal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if weare to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _la grosseMargot_ from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but onewho loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything forits own sake: _la grosse Margot_ in the flesh, _les dames du tempsjadis_ in the spirit, Sausses, brouets et gros poissons, Tartes, flaons, oefs frits et pochez, Perdus, et en toutes façons, his mother, _le bon royaume de France_, and above all, Paris. _Il aparcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression decampagne. C'est un poète de ville, plus encore: un poète de quartier. Iln'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Geneviève, entre lePalais, les collèges, le Châtelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, lestripots et les rues où Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagnetiennent leur 'publique école'. _ It is in this world that he lived, forthis world that he wrote. _Fils du peuple, entré par l'instruction dansla classe lettrée, puis déclassé par ses vices, il dut à son humbleorigine de rester en communication constante avec les sources éternellesde toute vraie poésie. _ And so he came into a literature of formalists, like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company ofgreybeards. 

Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by theirnames, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He wasa thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to besincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him, to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in hissoul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit, forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in thecloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dreamexquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who hadgone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of hissatirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was makingthe testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live onwind, ' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knewall the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like theKing, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamentalevasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond, loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well asthe only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greaterartist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the mainpart of the history of poetry in France is the record of a longforgetting of all that Villon found out for himself. 

1901. 

CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY

I

The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of abad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious studentsof literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful booksin the world, ' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt totake Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and inhis relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps themost valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenthcentury; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, theyare more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _Monte Cristo_, or any of theimaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have beenwritten in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who lovedlife passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, themost important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world wasindifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him showsus a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calmresource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, anadventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester, one 'born for the fairer sex, ' as he tells us, and born also to be avagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of hisown life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not liveto write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live nolonger. 

And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all themore valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs andpeople most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenthcentury. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italianparentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Château of Dux, in Bohemia, on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled, as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he metVoltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert andCrébillon at Paris, George III. In London, Louis XV. At Fontainebleau, Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. At Rome, Joseph II. At Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by theInquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, themost famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break offabruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and thepermission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He didreturn, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returnedas secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year wefind him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at theVenetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian atDux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life livedat Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs_. 

Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the _Memoirs_ (which thePrince de Ligne, in his own _Memoirs_, tells us that Casanova had readto him, and in which he found _du dramatique, de la rapidité, ducomique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitablesmême_) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought tothe publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled_Histoire de ma vie jusqu'à l'an_ 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova. This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written onfoolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides ofthe page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows thatsome pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets ofthinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome, unmistakablehandwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, correspondingwith the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one placeis there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume aremissing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'Itis not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from themanuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believethat the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, ofre-writing them, but without having found time to do so. ' The manuscriptends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as thetitle would lead us to suppose. 

This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. HerrBrockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translatedinto German by Wilhelm Schütz, but with many omissions and alterations, and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828, under the title, _Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova deSeingalt_. While the German edition was in course of publication, HerrBrockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the Frenchlanguage at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correctingCasanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian, French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressingpassages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of moralsand of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referredto, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text waspublished in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourthin 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfthin 1837; the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig andPonthieu et Cie at Paris; the next four the imprint of Heideloff etCampé at Paris; and the last four nothing but _À Bruxelles_. The volumesare all uniform, and were all really printed for the firm of Brockhaus. This, however far from representing the real text, is the onlyauthoritative edition, and my references throughout this article willalways be to this edition. 

In turning over the manuscript at Leipzig, I read some of the suppressedpassages, and regretted their suppression; but Herr Brockhaus, thepresent head of the firm, assured me that they are not really veryconsiderable in number. The damage, however, to the vivacity of thewhole narrative, by the persistent alterations of M. Laforgue, isincalculable. I compared many passages, and found scarcely threeconsecutive sentences untouched. Herr Brockhaus (whose courtesy I cannotsufficiently acknowledge) was kind enough to have a passage copied outfor me, which I afterwards read over, and checked word by word. In thispassage Casanova says, for instance: _Elle venoit presque tous les jourslui faire une belle visite. _ This is altered into: _Cependant chaquejour Thérèse venait lui faire une visite. _ Casanova says that some one_avoit, comme de raison, formé le projet d'allier Dieu avec le diable_. This is made to read: _Qui, comme de raison, avait saintement formé leprojet d'allier les intérêts du ciel aux oeuvres de ce monde. _Casanova tell us that Thérèse would not commit a mortal sin _pourdevenir reine du monde_: _pour une couronne_, corrects the indefatigableLaforgue. _Il ne savoit que lui dire_ becomes _Dans cet état deperplexité_; and so forth. It must, therefore, be realised that the_Memoirs_, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vividcolours of the original. 

When Casanova's _Memoirs_ were first published, doubts were expressed asto their authenticity, first by Ugo Foscolo (in the _WestminsterReview_, 1827), then by Quérard, supposed to be an authority in regardto anonymous and pseudonymous writings, finally by Paul Lacroix, _lebibliophile Jacob_, who suggested, or rather expressed his 'certainty, 'that the real author of the _Memoirs_ was Stendhal, whose 'mind, character, ideas and style' he seemed to recognise on every page. Thistheory, as foolish and as unsupported as the Baconian theory ofShakespeare, has been carelessly accepted, or at all events accepted aspossible, by many good scholars who have never taken the trouble to lookinto the matter for themselves. It was finally disproved by a series ofarticles of Armand Baschet, entitled _Preuves curieuses del'authenticité des Mémoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt_, in _LeLivre_, January, February, April and May, 1881; and these proofs werefurther corroborated by two articles of Alessandro d'Ancona, entitled_Un Avventuriere del Secolo XVIII. _, in the _Nuova Antologia_, February1 and August 1, 1882. Baschet had never himself seen the manuscript ofthe _Memoirs_, but he had learnt all the facts about it from Messrs. Brockhaus, and he had himself examined the numerous papers relating toCasanova in the Venetian archives. A similar examination was made at theFrari at about the same time by the Abbé Fulin; and I myself, in 1894, not knowing at the time that the discovery had been already made, madeit over again for myself. There the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonmentin the _Piombi_, the exact date of escape, the name of the monk whoaccompanied him, are all authenticated by documents contained in the_riferte_ of the Inquisition of State; there are the bills for therepairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; thereare the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested, forhis too dangerous free-spokenness in matters of religion and morality. The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to theInquisitors of State, dating from 1763 to 1782, among the _Riferte deiConfidenti_, or reports of secret agents; the earliest askingpermission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard tothe immoralities of the city, after his return there; all in the samehandwriting as the _Memoirs_. Further proof could scarcely be needed, but Baschet has done more than prove the authenticity, he has proved theextraordinary veracity, of the _Memoirs_. F. W. Barthold, in _DieGeschichtlichen Persönlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren_, 2 vols. , 1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions towell-known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six orseven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only asingle one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry onwhat Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy andGermany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, thatCasanova himself wrote the _Memoirs_ published under his name, thoughnot textually in the precise form in which we have them; and, second, that as their veracity becomes more and more evident as they areconfronted with more and more independent witnesses, it is only fair tosuppose that they are equally truthful where the facts are such as couldonly have been known to Casanova himself. 

II

For more than two-thirds of a century it has been known that Casanovaspent the last fourteen years of his life at Dux, that he wrote his_Memoirs_ there, and that he died there. During all this time peoplehave been discussing the authenticity and the truthfulness of the_Memoirs_, they have been searching for information about Casanova invarious directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble, or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in preciselythe one place where information was most likely to be found. The veryexistence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to mostof these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune wasreserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to bethe first to discover the most interesting things contained in thesemanuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself visited Dux, had indeed procured copies of some of the manuscripts, a few of whichwere published by him in _Le Livre_, in 1887 and 1889. But with thedeath of _Le Livre_ in 1889 the _Casanova inédit_ came to an end, andhas never, so far as I know, been continued elsewhere. Beyond thepublication of these fragments, nothing has been done with themanuscripts at Dux, nor has an account of them ever been given by anyone who has been allowed to examine them. 

For five years, ever since I had discovered the documents in theVenetian archives, I had wanted to go to Dux; and in 1899, when I wasstaying with Count Lützow at Zampach, in Bohemia, I found the way kindlyopened for me. Count Waldstein, the present head of the family, withextreme courtesy, put all his manuscripts at my disposal, and invited meto stay with him. Unluckily, he was called away on the morning of theday that I reached Dux. He had left everything ready for me, and I wasshown over the castle by a friend of his, Dr. Kittel, whose courtesy Ishould like also to acknowledge. After a hurried visit to the castle westarted on the long drive to Oberleutensdorf, a smaller Schloss nearKomotau, where the Waldstein family was then staying. The air was sharpand bracing; the two Russian horses flew like the wind; I was whirledalong in an unfamiliar darkness, through a strange country, black withcoal mines, through dark pine woods, where a wild peasantry dwelt inlittle mining towns. Here and there, a few men and women passed us onthe road, in their Sunday finery; then a long space of silence, and wewere in the open country, galloping between broad fields; and always ina haze of lovely hills, which I saw more distinctly as we drove backnext morning. 

The return to Dux was like a triumphal entry, as we dashed through themarket-place filled with people come for the Monday market, pots andpans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the roughpaving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but justroom for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of anenormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like aroyal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemianfashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as if it were in themidst of the country. I walked through room after room, along corridorafter corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere portraits ofWallenstein, and battle-scenes in which he led on his troops. Thelibrary, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and whichremains as he left it, contains some 25, 000 volumes, some of them ofconsiderable value; one of the most famous books in Bohemian literature, Skála's _History of the Church_, exists in manuscript at Dux, and it isfrom this manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed. The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wingof the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of armsare arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the wallswith strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected byCasanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full ofcurious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally, we come to the library, contained in the two innermost rooms. Thebook-shelves are painted white, and reach to the low-vaulted ceilings, which are white-washed. At the end of a bookcase, in the corner of oneof the windows, hangs a fine engraved portrait of Casanova. 

After I had been all over the castle, so long Casanova's home, I wastaken to Count Waldstein's study, and left there with the manuscripts. Ifound six huge cardboard cases, large enough to contain foolscap paper, lettered on the back: _Gräfl. Waldstein-Wartenberg'sches RealFideicommiss. Dux-Oberleutensdorf: Handschriftlicher Nachlass Casanova_. The cases were arranged so as to stand like books; they opened at theside; and on opening them, one after another, I found series afterseries of manuscripts roughly thrown together, after some pretence atarrangement, and lettered with a very generalised description ofcontents. The greater part of the manuscripts were in Casanova'shandwriting, which I could see gradually beginning to get shaky withyears. Most were written in French, a certain number in Italian. Thebeginning of a catalogue in the library, though said to be by him, wasnot in his handwriting. Perhaps it was taken down at his dictation. There were also some copies of Italian and Latin poems not written byhim. Then there were many big bundles of letters addressed to him, dating over more than thirty years. Almost all the rest was in his ownhandwriting. 

I came first upon the smaller manuscripts, among which I found, jumbledtogether on the same and on separate scraps of paper, washing-bills, accounts, hotel bills, lists of letters written, first drafts of letterswith many erasures, notes on books, theological and mathematical notes, sums, Latin quotations, French and Italian verses, with variants, a longlist of classical names which have and have not been _francisés_, withreasons for and against; 'what I must wear at Dresden'; headings withoutanything to follow, such as: 'Reflexions on respiration, on the truecause of youth--the crows'; a new method of winning the lottery at Rome;recipes, among which is a long printed list of perfumes sold at Spa; anewspaper cutting, dated Prague, 25th October 1790, on thethirty-seventh balloon ascent of Blanchard; thanks to some 'noble donor'for the gift of a dog called 'Finette'; a passport for _Monsieur deCasanova, Vénitien, allant d'ici en Hollande_, October 13, 1758 (_CePasseport bon pour quinze jours_), together with an order forpost-horses, gratis, from Paris to Bordeaux and Bayonne. [1]

Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in thisnote, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate theFrench literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits arethat I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believethat they can all be found at Roman's. ' Usually, however, these notes, though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off intomore general considerations; or else begin with general considerations, and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of threepages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is apositive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembledwith fear. ' A manuscript entitled _Essai d'Égoïsme_, dated, 'Dux, this27th June, 1769, ' contains, in the midst of various reflections, anoffer to let his _appartement_ in return for enough money to'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague. ' Anothermanuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly, ' and begins with a long series ofantitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men arefools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy. ' On the samesheet follows this instance or application:

 Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short, ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because he confided it to me tête-à-tête. I had, it is true, difficulty in believing him; but what is one to do? Either one must believe, or suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother is not a fool. 

Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinkingon paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter, on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informaldiary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curiousmind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merelypersonal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purelyabstract; at times, metaphysical _jeux d'esprit_, like the sheet offourteen 'Different Wagers, ' which begins:

 I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds will weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any difference, he will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not sufficient force to kill a man. 

Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come moreserious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress sincethe year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution ofproblems of the second degree, inclusive. ' A scrap of paper tells usthat Casanova 'did not like regular towns. ' 'I like, ' he says, 'Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa. ' Then he becomes abstractand inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious, out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise:

 The name of Paradise is a name in Genesis which indicates a place of pleasure (_lieu voluptueux_): this term is Persian. This place of pleasure was made by God before he had created man. 

It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, becauseVoltaire had told him frankly that his translation of _L'Écossaise_ wasa bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in thisstyle of righteous indignation:

 Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle; Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts, and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise. 

Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the _Memoirs_:

 A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man cannot please her by any means, even if his passion be criminal, she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty. 

Occasionally he touches upon æsthetical matters, as in a fragment whichbegins with liberal definition of beauty:

 Harmony makes beauty, says M. De S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre), but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to be said. 

At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down foruse in that latter part of the _Memoirs_ which was never written, orwhich has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September, 1791, ' and headed _Souvenir_:

 The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes, ' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret. ' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (_sic_) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a monument there which relates to him when he was Grand Duke. ' 'In that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the Egyptian prints. '

 The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology. 'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire. ' See what a lie leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to Dux, I shall kill myself. 

'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot, ' says Casanova in one ofthe most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many;but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of theplace which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tiredof dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all thatmy pen has vomited. ' Here we see him blackening paper, on everyoccasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinishedstory about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'ShortReflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring hisown death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, daydedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life. ' A big budget, containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there isthe title-page of a treatise on _The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academiesof Europe_. [2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in allstages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appearin half a dozen tentative forms:

 _Sans mystère point de plaisirs, _ _Sans silence point de mystère. _ _Charme divin de mes loisirs, _ _Solitude! que tu m'es chère!_

Then there are a number of more or less complete manuscripts of someextent. There is the manuscript of the translation of Homer's _Iliad, inottava rima_ (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the _Histoire de Venise_, of the _Icosameron_, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be'translated from English, ' but really an original work of Casanova;_Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels_, a long manuscript neverpublished; the sketch and beginning of _Le Polémarque, ou la Calomniedémasquée par la présence d'esprit. Tragicomédie en trois actes, composée à Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Année, 1791_, which recursagain under the form of the _Polémoscopé: La Lorgnette menteuse ou laCalomnie démasquée_, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her châteauat Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, _Delle Passioni_;there are long dialogues, such as _Le Philosophe et le Théologien_, and_Rêve: Dieu-Moi_; there is the _Songe d'un Quart d'Heure_, divided intominutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of _Bernardin deSaint-Pierre_; there is the _Confutation d'une Censure indiscrète qu'onlit dans la Gazette de Iéna, 19 Juin 1789_; with another largemanuscript, unfortunately imperfect, first called _L'Insulte_, and then_Placet au Public_, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790, ' referring to thesame criticism on the _Icosameron_ and the _Fuite des Prisons_. _L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la République de Venise, qu'onappelle les Plombs_, which is the first draft of the most famous part ofthe _Memoirs_, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and, having read it inthe Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from thisindignant document that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss, who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography. '

III

We come now to the documents directly relating to the _Memoirs_, andamong these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see theactual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled _Casanova auLecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_. There is also a brief and characteristic _Précis de ma vie_, datedNovember 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887. But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which, apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled_Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that onwhich the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; andthough it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events, the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have alreadyreferred, Chapters IV. And V. Of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. Inthis manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story isinterrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III. ; we find Mariuccia ofVol. VII. , Chapter IX. , who married a hairdresser; and we find alsoJaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier thanSophia, the daughter of Thérèse Pompeati, whom I had left at London. '[3]It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies theone missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered byany of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over theDux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the casein which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating toCasanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. Ihave told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV. And V. In their places when the long-looked-for edition of the completetext is at length given to the world. 

Another manuscript which I found tells with great piquancy the wholestory of the Abbé de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess deConti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is toldvery briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. Iii. , p. 327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw withCount Branicki in 1766 (vol. X. , pp. 274-320), an affair which attracteda good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an accountin a letter from the Abbé Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati, dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life ofAlbergati_, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwritinggives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled, _Description de l'affaire arrivée à Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona, in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. Lxvii. , p. 412), referring to the AbbéTaruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slightdiscrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duelwas fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. Inthis manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai isevidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text. 

In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon, which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of theharpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. Thismanuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months andhave been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their ownhouse, ' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who gothere to lose their money in gambling. ' This manuscript adds somedetails to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the_Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and ahalf years before, described in Volume V. , pages 482-485. It is writtenin a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written byCasanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he hadreceived in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting isknown. ' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles ofletters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that littlescraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in theirplaces. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, onpaper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however, almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague, Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc. , and are addressed toas many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women, some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps ofpaper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully, imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; anotherlaments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living withhim, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more inItalian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimoe Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women arein some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over andrearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I foundletters in the same handwriting separated by letters in otherhandwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. Thereare a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'FrancescaBuschini, ' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian, and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend'). Others are signed 'Virginia B. '; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October15, 1773. ' There is also a 'Theresa B. , ' who writes from Genoa. I was atfirst unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters inFrench, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned, occasionally signed 'B. ' She calls herself _votre petite amie_; or sheends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep betterthan I. ' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Neverbelieve me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall loveyou always. ' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, shewrites: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing canchange my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change itsmaster. ' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from ManonBaletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volumeof the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759, Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriagewith 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; shereturns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them. Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burnthem afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters, promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life. ' 'These letters, 'he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of fourpages. ' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seemsto me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon'sletters, and that it is these which I have found. 

But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set ofletters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette, whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will beremembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _à propos_, twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanovaproposing _un commerce épistolaire_, asking him what he has done sincehis escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him allthat has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting herletter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence thatshe offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She relatedto me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. Ifshe dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; butto-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old. ' It hasnever been known what became of these letters, and why they were notadded to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quantity of them, somesigned with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann, ' and Iam inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the lettersis dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They areremarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy anddistinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end ofthe last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible tobe sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, myMentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I weredamned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette deSchnetzmann. ' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now, herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as ifthe fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithfulaffection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovershave had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-longcorrespondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova notquite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, whoperhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:

 True love in this differs from gold or clay, That to divide is not to take away. 

But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most, they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondencewhich I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who wasafterwards to bring the manuscript of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; fromBalbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from theMarquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there issome account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguishedman of letters whom I was anxious to see, ' Casanova tells us in the samevolume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; fromZulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _belhomme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le goût de la bonne société_, whocame to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from theProcurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his'protector, ' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission toreturn to Venice. His other 'protector, ' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had, says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on amost interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundleof no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, datingfrom 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-twoletters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring tohis visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:

 I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which ended only with his death four years ago in 1792. 

Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the earlypart of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week, 'during the four months he was there. It is with this year that theletters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792. In his _Mémorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a manknown in literature, a man of profound knowledge. ' In the first editionof 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. De S. Galt' should not yethave been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in thesecond edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Thenthere are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova'scurious relations with Mme. D'Urfé, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_, 1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the_Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. Theonly letters in the whole collection that have been published are thosefrom the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig. 

IV

Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux, he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring hispoor existence, or sending him out of his mind, ' by writing ten ortwelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us howpersistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, inaddition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he publishedduring those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes intohis head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought ofpublication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises onabstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted beforeCount Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages, indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialoguesin which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensivecorrespondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women. His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious asthe activity which he had expended in living a multiform andincalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, soin his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he hadwelcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remainsnot less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with everyone; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping upmiscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions, that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it overagain in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interestedhim most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see thebroad daylight of publication, ' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we maybe sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come tohim. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, itwas this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely tobe anything but frank. 

'Truth is the only God I have ever adored, ' he tells us: and we now knowhow truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this articlethe most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts anddates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts wefind innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value astestimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have alreadyknown, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not alwayseasy to take people at their own word, when they are writing aboutthemselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova ashe represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he istelling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. Butthe letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women ofCasanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity whichhe attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of asfervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in thewhole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bringbefore us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come uponCasanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, alreadyperfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux. 

1902. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference totaking a passport, _Memoirs_, v. 238. 

[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathématiques de Casanova_. Rome 1883. 

[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq. _

JOHN DONNE

I

Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Deathof Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line tothe 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is thetouch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and withso vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as theportrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. Butthat is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is sobeautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because itis a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme formusic. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece, for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise asometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking, a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, apiece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his_Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps themost solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to Englishliterature, and we may well believe that it will remain the finalauthority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the firsttime, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefullyarranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he reallywas, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of hislife. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collectedhis documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding usadroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but notallowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. Andhe has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highestimportance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but avery ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive, somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword sotightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous, large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloakfolded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tighteningabout his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblemset as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped alreadyin his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tiedtogether like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollowclosed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards fromthe lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's doneafter the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there isless ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of aman who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the lastlivery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them theseportraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells useverything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, sosimple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, asfresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seemto have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzlingcreature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as wetry to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends. 

Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, wasthe mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is apoet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in theabstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because hehas observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellectto satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh whichspeaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored inthe same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him forlove's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally, religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtleindifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. Afew poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship orfor money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head, ' as we say;nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake. He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; andit is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry, or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others. He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the wholeforce of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine, he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means ofexpressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prosewas another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events andpersons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself. 

And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himselfto study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days. Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books inhis library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in hisverse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are leastwelcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasmof Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries, then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned theother worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an accountof themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that nonew thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukeshimself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is anhydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages. ' Attwenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went onthe 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled overmany parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices. Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrotebooks on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he hadtaken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbidspeculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's trainingfor dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the darkbusiness of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in themidst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I mustshipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency mighthave some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have somuch as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. ' 'Though I be in such aplanetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly, ' heconfesses later in the same letter. 

No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was amatter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time thewasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seemsto have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at timesdepressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the wholeorganisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led himto write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, andat the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying, was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, towhich so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness. 'Sometimes, ' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myselftransported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels, and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, ofa friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of afamily; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with anothersadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulnessand company. '

At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detailof what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name ordescribe, ' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that myloathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shallwrite no more. ' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_, with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever anyaffliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine ownhand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine ownsword. ' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses wasupon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms ashe lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself, morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as hethe disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, Iover-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear themore because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpnessbecause he would not have me see it. ' As he lies in bed, he realises 'Iam mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them. They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me fordead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and askhow I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practisemy lying in the grave by lying still. ' This preying upon itself of thebrain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neuroticenough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curiousobserver, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. Awonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occursin one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what mustdoubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throwmyself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angelstogether; and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels for thenoise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door;I talk on in the same posture of prayer, eyes lifted up, knees boweddown, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I lastthought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that Iforgot what I was about; But when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. Amemory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a strawunder my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles mein my prayer. ' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and dartingout on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, Icannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the innerlogic is not at first apparent. 

Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, whenwe see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in allthe passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he isa lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement, without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to hishand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then isthe link between these successive periods, the principle of development, the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, ormore, ' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and hisindividuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtleintelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each periodworking in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that Icannot tell what is no wonder. ' Everything in Donne seems to me toexplain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and hisuncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches, nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfactionat last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious, insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he'can do nothing constantly. '

His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way towalk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printedcollection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which Iacknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men, which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confessI wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself. ' Of his legalstudies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding inthe profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased tocorrect that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study ofit my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor designupon the style. ' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations andencouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. Sospeculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasysatisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it maynever be otherwise, ' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of lessimportance than it does to most other people, and especially conductwhich is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, onthe face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or likethose unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans, ' and ofthe dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, thatin his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; andof the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for theother part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, thatmy purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw thegentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spokenthe just truth. ' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial inthe face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, afterall, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman, when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, inthe words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;and they were as perfectly crucified to him. ' From that time to the endof his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: restfor the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divinenature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God, ' through the pulpit;himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It washimself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious atleast of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate ofhis curiosities. 

II

And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which hadfound an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, issimply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bringhimself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speakscontemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets, ' and, when he allowed himselfto write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from whatanybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctivedesire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois, desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed ina passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I havecribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and mustnecessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of mypoems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set downwith so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in thissermon I expressed those two points. ' But he thought there were otherthings more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his waspartly a sign of it. 'He began, ' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as ifpoetry had never been written before. ' To the people of his time, tothose who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of Englishpoetry. 

 The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds O'erspread, was purged by thee, says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:

 Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit. 

Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry thatDonne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a systemof prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in lessarbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging, 'said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet, if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasisof what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in atall events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meantthem to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive. Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. Hetreated poetry as Æsop's master treated his slave, and broke what hecould not bend. 

But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberatenovelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evidenttruth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's realposition in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realisticwriter, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything downin the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actualimages. 

 To what a cumbersome unwieldiness, And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown, he will begin a poem on _Love's Diet_. Of love, as the master of hearts, he declares seriously:

 He swallows us and never chaws; By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die; He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry. 

And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutelynew, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into versereally full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is akind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like mostpoets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained. That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up hisgreatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous andfour-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often theflowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden. ' To write poetryas if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatestpoets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literaturewho thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donneand Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater thanthe qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation ofarrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has allbut run immortally clear. 

Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapturein which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to apitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, asthey do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the heightof their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things thatmatter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and letme love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly, in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you, ' he begins, in his abruptleap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave, tranquil, measureless in assurance. 

 All kings, and all their favourites, All glory of honours, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass, Is elder by a year now than it was When thou and I first one another saw. All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday; Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day. 

This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly becausereason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. Hissenses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies whichmust remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. Hedistinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible, characteristically prosaic image:

 Whoever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick. 

And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress ofphysical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitnesswhich 'leaves no doubt, ' as we say 'of his intentions, ' and can be nomore than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hatepoems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a wholeregion of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, outof Catullus, with such intolerable truth. 

 When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead, And that thou think'st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see: Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call'st for more, And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie A verier ghost than I. What I will say, I will not tell thee now, Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent, Than by my threatenings rest still innocent. 

Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows allthis earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread forangels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication byrevealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in thequintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems tomake a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectlyabstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture ofsolution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _TheEcstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is allclose reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it. 

It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personalverse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses ofmen, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man andwoman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, noone has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety, every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one notthink of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forcesof the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left tothe heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all thecolds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician ofhis disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physicalsickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplesslythe slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeingthrough his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only tothe senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us thebeautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaringpassions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing ofbeauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to awoman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her inabsence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despisesher for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion, and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee tolove, ' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself onhis superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite, appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tendererpoets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and isleast taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. Sowearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence andof her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who cansee so straight into her heart as to have

 found something like a heart, But colours it and corners had; It was not good, it was not bad, It was entire to none, and few had part. 

Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they knowthat he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much morethan forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women mostconscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was agreat lover; he understood. 

And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mentalemotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably, knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point, celebratesthe heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguerwith God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why hebelieved, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over therecording rosary of his devotions. His _Holy Sonnets_ are a kind ofargument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, suchperplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculativebrain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packedlines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:

 At the round earth's imagined corners blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go. 

More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:

 Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 

Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leaveanything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness ofan easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of wordsto render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious ratherthan felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and allthe rest afterwards. 

For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be apoet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had thepassions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make thematerial for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what hereally felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation. Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, agenuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have beenwritten before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itselfwith the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to rememberWordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity, ' fornothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which directemotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent onthe passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is notat the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of thereally great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come toripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as hedrags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour frommen's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinkingheart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives usthe real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetrywill have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated theminto a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of oursas the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of thepoet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supremepoetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and theimaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the artwill be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his owninspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something morethan a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetryspeak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donnewished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it. 

He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty hasrevenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines inwhich he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadowupon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious ofshining. 

 For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it, he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formalexpression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet ofour nation, ' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, whichhad expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful todistinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; sothat we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure thanhis verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne betweenintellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces, which, had they pulled together instead of apart, might have achieved aresult wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever agreat poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step inthe direction of becoming a poet at all. 

Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough ofthe intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first tothe goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The mostlimited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs thatweave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine bestinto garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will everalter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not isno matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always comeright before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of hiswords as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something, whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writerthough he was, I suppose he was more or less unconscious of hisextraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came thanof what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a suddenheightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exaltedmode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then Icannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doinghomage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way. 

1899. 

EMILY BRONTË

 This was a woman young and passionate, Loving the Earth, and loving most to be Where she might be alone with liberty; Loving the beasts, who are compassionate; The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree; Night, bringing dreams out of eternity; And memory of Death's unforgetting date. She too was unforgetting: has she yet Forgotten that long agony when her breath Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death? Earth for her heather, does she now forget What pity knew not in her love from scorn, And that it was an unjust thing to be born?

The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only womanin whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness. Emily Brontë lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet, in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with theanimals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow herwith more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame isalive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself, and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and nooutlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too muchlife. 

Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever beenwritten. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almostall have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least thebare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength andalertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them, and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as

 hostile light That does not warm but burn. 

At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always alandscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tendermemory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone, ' 'A little and a lone greenlane, ' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There isnone of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presencefar more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart'sroots, crying out to its home in the earth. 

At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even tobe ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has nospecial attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space, wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, thatliberty which this woman cried for when she cried:

 Leave the heart that now I bear, And give me liberty. 

To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul, ' which askedof whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure, ' constancy not toforget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions thatcame to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions, ' asshe called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king. ' And weknow that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that sheforgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, forwhom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculinemagnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turninward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her, Where thou, and I, and Liberty Have undisputed sovereignty. 

Yet even imagination, though 'benignant, ' is to her a form of 'phantombliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is theworld without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as asubstitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard againstimagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolvedshall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter, and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She reallybelieved that

 Earth reserves no blessing For the unblest of heaven;

and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation tounhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities ofjoy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe tooimplicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be meredreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing forher that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of hertrue sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even thatmessage of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assureherself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And thatsense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is asense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting ofpersonal identity. 

Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, isone long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard atmoments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem isas if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her ownperson, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner, ' 'Honour'sMartyr, ' 'The Outcast Mother, ' echoes of all the miseries and uselessrebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dyingfaces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely intothe eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is alwaysarguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of aclear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself anaffirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchlesswill' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her painedapprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster'sdirge might have been said over her coffin. 

 What my soul bore my soul alone Within itself may tell, she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, inwhich exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, shewas able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-colouredand desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce theclouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes intothe bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour. 

1906. 

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thoughtpersistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspirationto a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire, when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering asdreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal. ' Not all the poems, few asthey are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the onlyessential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vastpoetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art. Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strangethings with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, howrare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It istrue that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it isthe flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryantand Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let usadmit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare itwith this and that fine specimen of quartz?

Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the firstelement of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty. ' 'It isnot, ' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It isa wild effort to reach the beauty above. .. . Inspired with a prescientecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiformnovelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, toanticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain solely to eternity. ' The poet, then, 'should limithis endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, incolour, in sound, in sentiment. ' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poethere was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favouritequotation: '"But, " says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisitebeauty without some strangeness in the proportions. " Take away thiselement of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--oforiginality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal inloveliness is lost at once. .. . We lose, in short, all that assimilatesthe beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, asanother of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must beindefiniteness. 'I _know_, ' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an elementof the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it anyundue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you depriveit at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essentialcharacter. ' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's'Art Poétique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not theessential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the FrenchSymbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that classof composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper currentof meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondaryimpression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment inmusic. .. . With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not alwaysa distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_. ' Has anything that hasbeen said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer ofverse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly ormore precisely?

And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond thelimits of beauty, ' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Itssole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it hasonly collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally, upon either Duty or Truth. ' And of the poet who said, not meaninganything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truthbeauty, ' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred inhis themes. ' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chieflyamid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widestsense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soulseeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty. ' And, with more earnestinsistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary toguard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will availhimself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categoricalprecision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science byhaving, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, byhaving, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romancepresenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definitesensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension ofsweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined witha pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness. '

And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province ofpoetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A longpoem, ' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing tosee, 'is a paradox. ' 'I hold, ' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem doesnot exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem, " is simply a flatcontradiction in terms. ' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour, ' he says, very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of truepoetry exist. ' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half anhour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely toconvey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poeticaleffect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that oftrue poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that aloftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannoteasily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general nameof poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call evenWordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ asthroughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines ofessential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _ParadiseLost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to holdour attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essencetoo strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, forthe most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in theabsolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfectionalmost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgoree d'arte_, ' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute. 

1906. 

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and indeath, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause whichhe would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical ratherthan a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect firsteditions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance ofpossessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At lastBeddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, thatsuicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his owncharacters. 

'The power of the man is immense and irresistible. ' Browning's emphaticphrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the mostappropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet. I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of theword, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they werewritten just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between theperiod of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning andTennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:

 I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated; My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived; My feet are fixing roots, and every limb Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air: And the abhorred conscience of this murder, It will grow up a lion, all alone, A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy, And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts, Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves, And when I lie tremendous in the desert, Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men Will come to live upon my rugged sides, Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes; I break, and magnify, and lose my form, And yet I shall be taken for a man, And never be discovered till I die. 

How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! Howunlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; thegreatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectfulconsideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could haveachieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But heis a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs. 

The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, _Death'sJest-Book_, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work, except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic. But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this massof admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentiallylyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, astrange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic powerhe had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop acredible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had noconception of what character might be in men and women, he had nofaculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the mostbeautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do youfind one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart, for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: anArab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing thecoast. And this is how he says it:

 I looked abroad upon the wide old world, And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds, The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else, And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul, Far in the north a wind blackened the waters, And, after that creating breath was still, A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind The first faint thought of a great deed arise, With force and fascination I drew on The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear What, or from whom, the vessel. 

In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability tobe natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less thanthat, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. Thefact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and withoutemotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from fleshand blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human, ' Siegfried says, in_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired ofhumanity before he ever came to understand it. 

Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama wassomething wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would bebeneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar tohimself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admittedhis obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were basedon literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimedjustly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, somethingwhich has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ isperhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a pagewithout its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. Aslave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parableof death:

 Sleeping, or feigning sleep, Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb Which she must wear, sooner or later, long: 'Tis but a warmer, lighter death. 

Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was morespellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a newDance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise andridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human, ' he has peopled a playwith confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakersshould pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us bytheir sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except, indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death. 

I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, butlyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quitespontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that heis really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death. '

 If thou wilt ease thine heart Of love and all its smart, Then sleep, dear, sleep; And not a sorrow Hang any tear on your eyelashes; Lie still and deep, Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes The rim o' the sun to-morrow, In eastern sky. 

 But wilt thou cure thine heart Of love and all its smart, Then die, dear, die; 'Tis deeper, sweeter, Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming With folded eye; And then alone, amid the beaming Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her In eastern sky. 

A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetryin dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, ofEnglish poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones andCharles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writerof more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones hadcertainly a more personal passion to express in his rough andtumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actualpoetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:actual poetical genius. 

1891. 

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has toldus, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of themodern novel. ' By the modern novel he means the novel as he hadreconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfectbecause Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to hismethod, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific sideFlaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimatelypersonal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way. The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analystmade _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find theanalyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, andobserved in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert findsthe romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, inprecisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futileaspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give toFlaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out ofreality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomesexquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of acommonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoricin his rendering of it. 

In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historicalnovel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted, doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible, by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of thereality of the things about us, only able to translate themapproximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in theclosest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passingsteamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of aforeigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, momentby moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think, then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past, to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossedwith castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encasedwithin chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period ofwhich we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is lefton another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychologicaldocuments. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage, ' he says proudly, pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished himwith 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, fromwhich he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, fromwhom he gets his Punic names; the _Mémoires de l'Académie desInscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of havingreconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess, with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the templeat Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De DiisSyriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quiteCarthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga, which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller orantiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken. ' But that, after all, ashe admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minuteaccuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness toevery indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience ingrouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details), that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archæology! If thecolour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the mannersdo not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, ifthe characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriateto the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, thereis not harmony, I am in error. If not, no. '

And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can givea historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definitionof the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other historical novels. Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily bebewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is likethat of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even thesecret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coilingperpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it islike a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmlydetached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians, each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there arebattles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a greatcity, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground ispaved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, standagainst the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again, expressing by their gestures the soul of the story. 

Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to themain defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue. 'There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbô. He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitousdescription; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence, near or remote, on the action. ' This is true, and yet, all the same, thepedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô, 'always surrounded withgrave and exquisite things, ' has something of the somnambulism whichenters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and aconsciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. Shepasses before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes, ' encrusted withjewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chaintinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, afixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, withoblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiouslytraced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimicdance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at timesalmost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as inarticulate for us as theserpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hersseems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, acoloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Mâtho, maddened withlove, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draughtof which they are to die, ' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey ofVenus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us, is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vividperson in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, alife 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one ortwo fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall intotheir attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. Theillusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history, but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge intheir minds. 

'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite, ' Flaubert tells us, ofhis style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'tothe amplitude of the phrase and to the period, ' than in _Madame Bovary_. The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity, without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is neverarchaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always forthe precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, bythe large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways ofthought, which, in _Madame Bovary_, bring with them an instinctivelymodern cadence. 

_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notesevery detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things. A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement ofthe thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistledthrough the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying. ' Before thebattle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of theCarthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see theground undulate in the distance. ' Clouds of dust rise and whirl overthe desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems, wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? TheBarbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transversebars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came intoview; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "TheCarthaginians!" arose. ' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes, unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves, taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert putshimself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them asto see for them. 

Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will findthat each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to itssubject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly afault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of mostwriters careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct astyle which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structuralchange; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-paintingof Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, withoutdifficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translatebecause he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regularmarch-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes hiscadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has notheory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is aliving thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes andinterprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the preciseword, believe me, ' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comesinto his words from the precision with which they express definitethings, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where thematerial is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheerexactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure andorder, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at thetime of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on thecorpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains. 

1901. 

GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET

Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He hasboth genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as acounterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. Hehas almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spiritin his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writesprose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writesverse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks inflashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion forwords, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slownessof their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearingthem open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidiousa fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that hemakes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or aline as any one else could have written it. His hatred of thecommonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after thebest that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose hewould have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every linesparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediatelyafter breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise thatthere are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is forwhat is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave anycool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work. His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall iscovered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division offrame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context. As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones. Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted forsolutions. 

In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seemsto come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit. _Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece inpoetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and ofBrowning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse. It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly humana kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotteddown at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like thetouch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have noillusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery oflove itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness ofpassion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness moreconstant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensationcarried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:

 O thou weed, Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!

Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twentyyears after the publication of the volume containing it he published noother volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy ofEarth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _AReading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companionvolume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike anyother nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must bedistinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volumeof 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from thevolume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in thepassion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by noother poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing ofspears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. Thelines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sungor played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There isanother group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret'sBridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The YoungPrincess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _RoadsidePhilosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredithanticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies ofothers. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassionedmeditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France, December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes inContribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900. 

But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to anattitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them analmost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful andbenignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for themaking of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almostscientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seenthrough a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would bepossible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, inwhich, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise, collected ecstasy of Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy ofthe Mænads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living, ' butthe strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with thesanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to beguided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with thetranscendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise becompared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetryout of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from othersoil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken theabstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured wordsin the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have hadlittle time left over for singing. 

Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; _Modern Love_ requiresreading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperatingsemblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. Afreshman who heard Mallarmé lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'Iunderstood every word, but not a single sentence. ' Meredith is sometimesequally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one, clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency throughwhich there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glassfrom the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to theright, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at thecorner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helplessendeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last, in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader ofMeredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is notobvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, notbeautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:

 Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate. 

It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to betoo concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:

 and the totterer Earth detests, Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he. 

In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writessuch lines as:

 Look I once back, a broken pinion I, He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; andhis mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, thisphrase:

 Ravenous all the line for speed. 

An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect, where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only, to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes atonce. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line ison the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to beunriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separatemeanings, and to translate as it goes. 

Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmonywithout melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations uponverse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and theswaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve toastonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technicalskill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technicalskill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith haswritten lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proudof; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as raspingas a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for thebuilding up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for thedelicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of hispoems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this amplemagnificence:

 Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The house of heaven splendid for the bride;

and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:

 With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead, Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged Shall on through brave wars waged. 

Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists intrying to make it into something wholly different, and theseeccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one placeof

 A soft compulsion on terrene By heavenly, which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. Inanother place he speaks of

 The posts that named the swallowed mile, which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps, ' 'thick' and'sick, ' 'skin' and 'kin, ' 'banks' and 'thanks, ' 'skims' and 'limbs. ' Twolines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poemsand Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:

 Life, the small self-dragon ramped, Thrill for service to be stamped. 

Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come likebuffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or lessconsciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for inFrance rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided. Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; inEnglish poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has beenaccepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There issomething a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic clickof emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has alwaysbeen shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to theinarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on theanvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. Hisverse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners. '

To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, andalmost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons, not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, butwith a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poetsput into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every linehaving its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstractideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains commonrhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by hisenormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity. He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is alwayswhat Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelairecalled 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief doesone not lay down this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ offorty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been inwholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitationof art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. Infinding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing awaythe gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation thestone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof oftheir wisdom in rejecting it. 

1901. 

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

I

It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's firstvolume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that weshould have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems ofone of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me, 'Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what Iwrite should find immediate or general acceptance. ' And indeed'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardlylikely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets, or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing moreor less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any morethan gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses. Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had todo with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besidespoetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson. There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was readfor what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has longsince passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the newedition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much asallude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of thatyear, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature. 

A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks abouthimself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best anddearest friend, ' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest, and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, orrather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not onlyinteresting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that, among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyricalpoems, the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test ofthese two poems, ' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should bedecided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense ofthe term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that everaroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind. '

In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better thanany one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any oneelse, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill inthe accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutelyunbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, anacquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no meanseverything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality ofinspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this thepoet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he isscarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is ofquestioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his. Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, inhis own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which, though it means everything, may be absent in a production technicallyfaultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved accordingto rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which hasset _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_, and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives forsetting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains thatthere is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the samedegree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth ofinspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and theode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is nomore likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer ofthose two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne'sown instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France ratherthan as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is aproduct of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is agrowth of the profoundest poetical genius. 

Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps hishighest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which thesincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is thatmarvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in Englishor perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any naturalcommand over the musical resources of his language, ' says Swinburne, 'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift orinstinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our agemust have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musicalexercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_. ' Inmetrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior asthe English language is superior to the French in metrical capability. His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, andunaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or ofColeridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. Butwhere he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricateharmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter likethe waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised thesea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it beengiven to create music with words in so literal an analogy with theinflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea. 

In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication ofthe wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems andBallads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all thatneed ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of notunkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing thevariously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors whoinsisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attemptedor achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursionsof absolute fancy. ' And, admitting that there was work in it of bothkinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot bedistinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to anartist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician'sthan with a sculptor's. ' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinarycriticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poemsand Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these poems were orwere not the record of personal experience was debated with as muchsolemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem hasonce been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it wasinspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? Theremay be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enoughargued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or fromimagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: isit a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neitherbetter nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the otherin 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) onlymake his way slantwise. ' The knowledge of the circumstances or theantecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to humancuriosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardlybe of much greater importance. 

A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying, a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also ascholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe andShakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dustyshelves of libraries. ' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction betweenbooks and life is but a 'dullard's distinction, ' and it may justly besaid of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasmthat he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas isgreat, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately beenrevived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne'slyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To theprose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper andbusiness there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to sounintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, whois without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are notmore troublesome to a sleeper. 

Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around whichthe sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, intheir unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm ofthe sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, arhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebukedby the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars. 'We are what suns and winds and waters make us, ' as Landor knew: thewhole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowingimpetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion andinto his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the lastword of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of hispoetry. 

He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world withoutan emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud ofrapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record ofthings seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into littleseparate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed, thechild's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty inevery sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almostunparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because, to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, andwith books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual innercommuning. 

In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake, the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there arepoems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas, and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books inthis volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greaterBurns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, the poet of strenuous laughter. 

 But love and wine were moon and sun For many a fame long since undone, And sorrow and joy have lost and won By stormy turns As many a singer's soul, if none More bright than Burns. 

 And sweeter far in grief and mirth Have songs as glad and sad of birth Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth In joy of life: But never song took fire from earth More strong for strife. 

 * * * * *

 Above the storms of praise and blame That blur with mist his lustrous name, His thunderous laughter went and came, And lives and flies; The war that follows on the flame When lightning dies. 

Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice. There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations, as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, asit is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, NapoleonIII. Or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, canbe discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must beadmitted, are more interesting, partly because they are moredistinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon thelineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There wasa finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent intoHell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashingvigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply feltpolitical verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songsbefore Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the earlylove poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishesonly a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight, though song only needs wings. 

 I set the trumpet to my lips and blow, said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise, _ when he was the trumpeterof Mazzini. 

And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly whathe has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between theattitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then newand their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty yearsold. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment ofChristianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale asNietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality withoutparallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of thecritics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing butthese accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to thetriumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, ableto take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine andessential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty bywhich the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when weare told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverenttowards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment inscholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order ofSappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writerof these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I havetaken the new book and the old book together, because there issurprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the oldpoems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusuallyvaried in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, amarvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied inform. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if, indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is thereany other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique sounerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has oftenfoolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form isapt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems tome, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking theimaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to usand withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poetspresent us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weightyan accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, forinstance, the line:

 The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell. 

The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past usbefore we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in thelatter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:

 The tyranny Kindled in darkness fell, how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goesto make this song. 

And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds oflanguage, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt, when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs tohim, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead ofcreating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference inthe form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, intranslating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated, he misses the naïve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a versionnot in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtleway, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will notstop to think that 'wife, ' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, isnot a word that Villon could have used, and that

 Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur, though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in

 Two we were and the heart was one, is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by

 Twain we were, and our hearts one song, One heart. 

Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, parcueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Isit not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the handat times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance ordirection of the brain?

Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A ChannelPassage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fiftyyears old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in therecollection of

 Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy, Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy. 

It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sungof it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there apoem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul withthe very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable foran exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of adive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief andconcentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poemsof flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of thepolitical poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. Thesepoems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; tothose who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come withspecial delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almostevery side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius. 

The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley containsthree books, each published at an interval of ten years: the _MidsummerHoliday_ of 1884, the _Astrophel_ of 1894, and the _Channel Passage_ of1904. Choice among them is as difficult as it is unnecessary. They arealike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and greatmen, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finestpoems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the seafrom at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from theheart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine balladesin long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands outas a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of Frenchverse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon usedit as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively iniambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the openair, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, itmay almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no onecan contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily anymore artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne anacrostic would cease to be artificial. 

In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected inthe _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which thatrelative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost, no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualitiesof _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore withthe art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metricaldevelopment is significant of every change through which the poet haspassed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftierthings, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metricalqualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more ofsubtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and pacesof every kind of beauty. 

II

'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you, ' says Swinburne in hisdedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote forantiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with aview to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the BlackFriars. ' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if notmy strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterlyunworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster thepupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets hadleft as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And myfirst book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, boreevidence of that ambition in every line. ' And indeed we need not turnfour pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so closeas this:

 We are so more than poor, The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you Less than mere losing; so most more than weak It were but shame for one to smite us, who Could but weep louder. 

A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:

 All other women's praise Makes part of my blame, and things of least account In them are all my praises. 

And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have comestraight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:

 I am considering of that apple still; It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children, Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come. 

Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come andgo there, as in these lines:

 What are you made God's friend for but to have His hand over your head to keep it well And warm the rainy weather through, when snow Spoils half the world's work?

And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:

 Naked as brown feet of unburied men?

An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _FairRosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank versewhich William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, twoyears earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_. 

So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of thesetwo plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_, though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows someanticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physicalsensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, isaltogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way, than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburnespeaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that thereis in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of suchbetter passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speechesof Catherine and of Rosamond. ' But the difference between these speechesis very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentationsand meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the bestspeeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour oflanguage, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'powerto grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic, reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardlypossible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however theywere presented. Swinburne, however, has done so. ' It seems to me, on thecontrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict senseof the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches ofthe play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things, ' and theone beginning 'I would fain see rain, ' are indeed more splendid inexecution than significant as drama, but they have their dramaticsignificance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is therenot also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in suchlines as these?

 I should be mad, I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God, Whose thunder is confusion of the hills, And with wrath sown abolishes the fields, I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us, Make witness of it even this night that is The last for many cradles, and the grave Of many reverend seats; even at this turn, This edge of season, this keen joint of time, Finish and spare not. 

The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurativemeaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid, less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own inreference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to beharsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holdsout against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop whenhe has said the essential thing. 

In the first book of most poets there is something which will be foundin no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the firstintercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburneis certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his ownlimits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreignfruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two playsthere is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is noevidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidencealready of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poetwith an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, atleast, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened noears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not rememberthat two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books wassaluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision, ' and that two yearslater the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse, _Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, andwas wise. 

The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even ofsplendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slightnovelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires. There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes anactual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing thathe does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores ofpages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifyinghistory as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in theresult less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps becausein this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other thatthe writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men ingeneral prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similarsatisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the onlymodern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of naturaldialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercoursebetween men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found ormade compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse. ' Thismay be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, noneof 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramaticdialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificedto the exigences of metre. ' But when all is said, when an unparalleledskill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form, has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition, one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities ofsubstance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remainsthe question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and thefurther question: can work professedly dramatic which is notconsistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as whollysatisfactory from any other point of view?

The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and mostambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part, _Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881. And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play, _Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as muchcare and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history ofthe period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which camewithin the scope of my dramatic or poetic design. ' Of _Bothwell_, thelongest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence, Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive pieceof work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by theold Shakespearean term of a chronicle history. ' Definition is notdefence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is initself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use ofit proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and totake his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly morereasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrativepoetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle orother, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage ofour time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama wasallowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can weconceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without apause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting beof any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largelyjust such parts as are finest in the printed play. 

There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vitaldramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the sceneleading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenesin drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of thelovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuousstudy of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is assimple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and noone will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:

 Well, all is one to me: and for my part I thank God I shall die without regret Of anything that I have done alive. 

These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways astortuous as this:

 Indeed I have done all this if aught I have, And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw That face which taught it faith and made it first Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes That give love's light to others. 

But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire orcalmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always merespeech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion. And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, notas visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not seetheir faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power ofvisualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itselfit can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama mustbegin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable withoutwords. 

It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not makepictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they makeharmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a masteryover harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has givenhim a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama thelyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but tothe dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute. Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything. It is for this reason that a play like _Locrine_, which is confessedly, by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to beingsatisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive' plays. _Marino Faliero_, though an episode ofhistory, comes into somewhat the same category, and repeats with noblerenergy the song-like character of _Chastelard_. The action is brief andconcentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony, ' its'fervent and inexhaustible declamation, ' have a height and heat in themwhich turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poemcomparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' whichmakes the vast lyric of _Tristram of Lyonesse_. To think of Byron's playon the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can beparalleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, inpoetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for whatis heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in humanspeech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and inthe opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewishrhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre. 

The form of _Locrine_ has something in common with the form of _Atalantain Calydon_, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recursonly once, and less lyrically, in _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_. Itis written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines, without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-linestanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used byShakespeare in the _Rape of Lucrece_, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which athird rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner ofterza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanzaof two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead offorward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who everlived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is notless true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beatingof time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout atwhite heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and achild's prattle, in nine-line stanzas of two rhymes apiece, goes asmerrily as this:

 That song is hardly even as wise as I-- Nay, very foolishness it is. To die In March before its life were well on wing, Before its time and kindly season--why Should spring be sad--before the swallows fly-- Enough to dream of such a wintry thing? Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring Than snow for summer when his heart is high: And why should words be foolish when they sing?

Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can bedone with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these linesfrom _Mary Stuart_:

 She shall be a world's wonder to all time, A deadly glory watched of marvelling men Not without praise, not without noble tears, And if without what she would never have Who had it never, pity--yet from none Quite without reverence and some kind of love For that which was so royal. 

There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of thecadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading_Locrine_, and with _Atalanta_ and _Erechtheus_ in memory, it isdifficult not to wish that Swinburne had written all his plays inrhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories. _Locrine_ has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme wouldsound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent andwell-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translatedEuripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to beinsuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks, or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key. 

The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in _Rosamund, Queen of theLombards_, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in hisdramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel--a storyof the year 573--acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, withsurprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a smallone, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a singlemerely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there thelines become lyric, as in

 Thou rose, Why did God give thee more than all thy kin, Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this? Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not How heavy sounds her note now?

But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business. ' And for themost part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeedwritten with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:

 ALMACHILDES. 

 God must be Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else Live. 

 ROSAMUND. 

 That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou Sure that my will and power to serve it live. Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord. 

Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:

 ALMACHILDES. 

 I cannot slay him Thus. 

 ROSAMUND. 

 Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies, Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once. 

 ALMACHILDES. 

 I cannot. God requite thee this! I will. [_Exit. _

 ROSAMUND. 

 And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see. [_Exit. _

In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuousin this play--a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength thathas always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto drapedelaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. Theoutline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the charactersalways forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precisionin the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in whichthe outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness. Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicitybrings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full ofdramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, andthe lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage andsimple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughtsbefore concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except totell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in _Chastelard_, asomewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's oneline, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:

 I cannot. God requite thee this! I will. 

Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remainswhether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, andwhether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by suchself-restraint. 

The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak inverse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this feltby most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to makethe verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me, the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a newatmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised. The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, totake the supreme example, is great, not because he makes Othelloprobable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that ajealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an imageof more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a moresplendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found tosay. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and yourob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity. A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which acertain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employedfor its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised asconvention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to havesucceeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as hepleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like thisone, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic ofthe writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse thanany other English poet:

 This sun--no sun like ours--burns out my soul. I would, when June takes hold on us like fire, The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here The splendour and the sweetness of the world Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth Is here too hard on heaven--the Italian air Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin, Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be, Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome-- Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall. 

The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heatseems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action. Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled intheir power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalisedvision--it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no Englishpoet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtleintensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the pointof agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotiontortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets barehis heart, confessing:

 The devil and God are crying in either ear One murderous word for ever, night and day, Dark day and deadly night and deadly day, Can she love thee who slewest her father? I Love her. 

Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:

 I am yet alive to question if I live And wonder what may ever bid me die. . .. There is nought Left in the range and record of the world For me that is not poisoned: even my heart Is all envenomed in me. 

And she recognises that

 No healing and no help for life on earth Hath God or man found out save death and sleep. 

The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame, can but question and answer one another thus:

 HILDEGARD. 

 Hast thou forgiven me?

 ALMACHILDES. 

 I have not forgiven God. 

And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the personsof the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror, sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts theresponsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:

 Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's. 

As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_, Swinburne is still drawn to

 see What fools God's anger makes of men. 

He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired theequivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlookupon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, morethan in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that uniquetemperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract thingsso coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost toomuch poetry for a poet--as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to bemingled with alloy. 

There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of theworld, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, thanthe story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another _Cenci_, in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit theone as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with someform of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?

 There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself. 

A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much toteach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral inits presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed theworld; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent, coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in whichthe pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exileunder the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy ofHolies. Alexander, Cæsar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might beshown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his ownchapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated, thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings. Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of theloveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shownit: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancingbefore the cushioned idol and her two worshippers. 

Swinburne in _The Duke of Gandia_ has not dealt with the whole matter ofthe story--only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart oressence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to beseen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, andis, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition, fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has writtennothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only inthe far less effectual _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_; the style, speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullenfierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passingwithout consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she ishidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like herhistorians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learnedmen wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father andson live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back andconsume the cloud. It is Cæsar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexanderthe Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds. The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; hehas no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live abouthim for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now onesteps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, acardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step ofthe Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment ofaction, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open andthen shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible andmagnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itselfonly surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death ofMarlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who canendure to read it, 'moves pity and terror, ' as to Lamb, 'beyond anyscene ancient or modern. ' And only in _Bothwell_, in the whole ofSwinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full offear and suspense. Take, for instance, the opening of the great finalscene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber, and after seven days he appears calmly before his father. 

 ALEX. Thou hast done this deed. CÆSAR. Thou hast said it. ALEX. Dost thou think To live, and look upon me? CÆSAR. Some while yet. ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear. CÆSAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none. ALEX. Wilt thou slay me? CÆSAR. Why? ALEX. Am I not thy sire? CÆSAR. And Christendom's to boot. ALEX. I pray thee, man, Slay me. CÆSAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I Sane. ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood? CÆSAR. They say, Thine. ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not, There is no God indeed. CÆSAR. Nor thou nor I Know. ALEX. I could pray to God that God might be, Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest: I do not pray. 

There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak faceto face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even theselines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that onlyone of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright, and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote playsfor the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only madeeven a temporary success, and _Becket_ is likely to have gone out withIrving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for thestage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with anunexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, areour poets so insistent on using the only form for which a specialfaculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?

A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns intosong as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned intodivine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special geniusfor dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberflöte_ to a bad libretto with asgreat a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one. The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne isready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the formof the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending itto its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling, brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--anact, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, thisoverflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made anew thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has givenits precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blakemight have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. Theconflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'Andnow, ' cries Cæsar, fresh from murder, Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God, Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away This grief from off thy godhead. 

And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:

 Thou art subtle and strong. I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him. 

And the son replies:

 Sire, I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine, I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate, Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine. 

But Cæsar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the wholerepresentation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave theresponsibility of things:

 And God, who made me and my sire and thee, May take the charge upon him. 

1899-1908. 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not beturned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms aboutpoets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridgeamong English poets has anything like the same definite grasp uponwhatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanitypartly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, thathas given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art. 

And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a lineas

 And when the night-vigil was done, is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement ofthe normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is assatisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and'move. ' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythmswhich had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety ofrhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he hasproduced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found butrarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry. 

Like Baudelaire and like Mallarmé in France, Rossetti was not only awholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That hestimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true ofTennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is nottrue of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not thegreatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself onthose who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of anunconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction oneis without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anythingsaid; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seemsworth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems tohave been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated anew sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended. 

Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, thatthey become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keenpractical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outsidethat house of dreams in which the only real things were the things ofthe imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind ofexistence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world, and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but oneworld, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contentedprisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy. The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energyof beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life, that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which thesenses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can butbring disquieting tidings. 

The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or evenself-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to bea failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region whereeverything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet whohas written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness ofloving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort ofnature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the oneecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is likethirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire ofbeauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as withRossetti, there is also the desire of possession. 

Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet'stemperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to ChristinaRossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but towhom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her, and whose poetry is full of the sense of growing things. Rossettiinstinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them ifhe had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never havelearned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields ofthem about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, andchiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found thesupreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and notin any more abstract love, of God, of nature, or of ideas, that he foundthe supreme revelation of love. 

With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in hispainting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what isreally the House of Love _The House of Life_, and this is because thehouse of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mysticto whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression ofthe soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is aparable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew itin as simply as my breath, ' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him, as he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words orcolours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never theprecise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and thelabour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt, that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaboratebeauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute inbeauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst. 

1904. 

A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY

He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working, with an almost painful simplicity--just saved from being painful by ahumorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind ofintellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings offate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. Hisview of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that isirresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that isunreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in hervariability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve ofprivate judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whoma man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regretloving. _Jude the Obscure_ is perhaps the most unbiased consideration ofthe more complicated questions of sex which we can find in Englishfiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work, neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to passbeyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting oflimitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling fornature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kindof communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change ofevery hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in asense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, andpainful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of womanconfirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature bringshim nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All thequite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him fromhis contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth, translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants havebeen compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has theShakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurryinganimal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconsciouswisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things. 

In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous, half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:Nature, 'waking by touch alone, ' and Fate, who sees and feels. In _TheMother Mourns_, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Naturelaments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with herin his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering ofa hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set atwide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear likea knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out ofsleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorryfor man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorryfor Nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in hisveins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to thethings of the earth. 

Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressivepoem?

 AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT

 A shaded lamp and a waving blind, And the beat of a clock from a distant floor; On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined-- A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; While 'mid my page there idly stands A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands. 

 Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space. --My guests parade my new-penned ink, Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink. 'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I. 

No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the peopleof the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_. 

Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, whileall good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent inthe form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of thesame supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that itwill never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here andthere calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric, while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac isalways good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants. To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read _Lavengro_ butnot _Romola_. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all astory-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense andsatisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite withoutnovelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in _The Mayorof Casterbridge_, where the plot extends into almost inextricableentanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can bere-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent thoughoften unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaningbeyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current, around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; storiesof mere action gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardythere is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out ofthe earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is, which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlaststheir interest in the story. 

It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do himjustice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, alwaysa seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morningand evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimatethings. ' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He isalways right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showingthat 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramaticlife than the pachydermatous king. ' But he requires a certain amount ofemotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he hasmerely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on hiscouch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light. ' In the nextsentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotionof the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'Thenight came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was nowdigesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of athousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien. '

No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotionon inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. Forinstance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek wasflaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. 'But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that hesometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the verymoment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'Shehardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear solarge that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, likethe object lens of a microscope. ' And it is this power of seeing toexcess, and being limited to sight which is often strangely revealing, that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that asituation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure inwhat is perhaps his masterpiece, _The Return of the Native_, is in thewords put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectlyimagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be theculminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the wordsare crackle and tinsel. 

What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value andfascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and maywell be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesqueironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good inthemselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of theartist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of anattaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, astory-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this pointno doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next afterthe story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and alittle sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if youare too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes intothe facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be wellcontent to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if yougo further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you needlook for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist hasbeen more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense anovelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is avoice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which isat times, as in _The Return of the Native_, the chief person, or thechorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and womenout of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones ofthe heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show usto ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continualobservation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes ofbirds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and thedeprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?

1907. 

LÉON CLADEL

I hope that the life of Léon Cladel by his daughter Judith, whichLemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for thefame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had thegood fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approvalmattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before hehad printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft ofletters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though heworked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside intohis tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasantsand poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs hisvocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard ofrhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, butwhich drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the veryshape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visibleuncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but theuncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a refinement, and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to be the resultreally of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to bring thespontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously finishedwork. 

In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who hasinherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with morepatience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we havea simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the man. Thenarrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender andclear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement_, she says with truth, _combienseront précieux pour les futurs historiens de la littérature du xix^esiècle, les mémoires tracés au contact immédiat de l'artiste, exposés deses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination deses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques à venir y trouveront de__solides matériaux, ses admirateurs un aliment à leur piété et lesphilosophes un des aspects de l'Âme française. _ The man is shown to us, _les élans de cette âme toujours grondante et fulgurante comme uneforge, et les nuances de ce fiévreux visage d'apôtre, brun, fin etsinueux_, and we see the inevitable growth, out of the hard soil ofQuercy and out of the fertilising contact of Paris and Baudelaire, ofthis whole literature, these books no less astonishing than theirtitles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs_, _Celui de laCroix-aux-Boeufs_, _La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée-Porte-Glaive_. The very titles are an excitement. I can remember how mysterious andalluring they used to seem to me when I first saw them on the cover ofwhat was perhaps his best book, _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_. 

It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_, that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot thinkof it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule_, and it is about aSandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself byan over-strain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of anincident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend thezany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars andcannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if someone who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words. Suchvehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle of aman driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure of afew children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and thissordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals; such avision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible accident, lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable beauty, I havenever felt or seen in any other story of a like grotesque tragedy. Itrealises an ideal, it does for once what many artists have tried andfailed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony out of that subject whichit is so easy to make pathetic and effective. Dickens could not havedone it, Bret Harte could not have done it, Kipling could not do it:Cladel did it only once, with this perfection. 

Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers andthieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; shecalls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in thistumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is torturedto make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. _La recherchedu terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance desvocables puisés à toutes sources . .. La condensation de l'action autourde ces quelques motifs éternels de l'épopée: combat, ripaille, palabreet luxure_, there, as she sees justly, are links with Rabelais. Goncourt, himself always aiming at an impossible closeness of written tospoken speech, noted with admiration _la vraie photographie de la paroleavec ses tours, ses abbréviations ses ellipses, son essoufflementpresque_. Speech out of breath, that is what Cladel's is always; hiswords, never the likely ones, do not so much speak as cry, gesticulate, overtake one another. _L'âme de Léon Cladel_, says his daughter, _étaitdans un constant et flamboyant automne_. Something of the colour andfever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who hasprobably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds. But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mentalself-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche. Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing'scarlet, ' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural écarlate_. Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as apupil of Baudelaire, was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and theeffort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemedmerely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and hisromance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to bein conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face anextraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: thelong hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce broodingeyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind ofstealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock. 

1906. 

HENRIK IBSEN

'Everything which I have created as a poet, ' Ibsen said in a letter, 'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I neverwrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject. ' Yet his chiefaim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, andto stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique ofthe construction, ' he says, speaking of what is probably hismasterpiece, _Ghosts_, 'in itself entirely precludes the author'sappearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression inthe mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real. ' That, athis moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what heachieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yetinevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, thengoing beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessityof his nature. 

In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of thischaracter and this development. The man shows himself in them with nonethe less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificedhimself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic senseof duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hatedand resembled. 

His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation ofself. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; butwhat in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsenwas a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that onlyby giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finestwork. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in aletter to Björnson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, 'his life washis best work, ' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in himthat he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moralfervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of theabundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed hisforce, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times anuneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makesthe most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?

'The great thing, ' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge aboutwhat is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outsidethat has no connexion with it. ' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine, full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard whatconcerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything elseas non-existent. ' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society, ' isconscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays uponhim, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He hasless courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back froma complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so muchworldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds. 

'In every new poem or play, ' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personalspiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares theresponsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. ' Thisqueer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose mainendeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventionsand restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism whichpeep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man, ' he says in aletter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who standsalone. ' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he foundpleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him ismarked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, neverwrites to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels itnecessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there. ''Friends are an expensive luxury, ' he finds, because they keep him fromdoing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not thisintellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practicalcold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I couldnever lead a consistent spiritual life there. ' In Norway he finds that'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small. ' How curious anadmission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, andfeels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been inItaly I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I hadbeen there. ' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here oneis too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day. '

He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon theforms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone ofhalf-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declaresthat wine had something to do with the exaltation of _Brand_ and _PeerGynt_, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of _The Leagueof Youth_. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place thelast-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of viewhas changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even toweariness. ' He says elsewhere that he could only have written _PeerGynt_ where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'writtenwithout regard to consequences--as I only dare to write far away fromhome. ' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strangedocility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life, ' buthis actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and insubstance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse tothe end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is'up-to-date civilisation to study, ' he would certainly never havewritten the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the endof his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I amtaking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at hisword. 

What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in hisdramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural humantendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding ishis main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosedthis unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently thanany other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this broodingover trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant, in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of hisearlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism ofone of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted inlater life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined, ' because a newspaperhad attacked him overnight. 

With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state, ' he besiegesking and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in aletter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the meanbehaviour of the government, ' which, however, he refrains from doing. Hegets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, evenwhen he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on thecalming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian booksellerthreatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter ofit. 'If, ' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathyand support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever allties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again. ' How petty, howlike a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possibletrifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and evennational moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well asbitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more thanothers) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol. 

 During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill. Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?

Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sickscorpion in the glass. 

In one of his early letters to Björnson, he had written: 'When I readthe news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimablenarrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insaneman staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot. ' All his life Ibsengazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less andless of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw theblack spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of theearth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learnedsomething of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much whenhe came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly theenergy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty, ' hesaid, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it deadand soulless. .. . So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggleand says, "Now I have it, " thereby shows that he has lost it. ' He hadlearned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority isalways right, ' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectualvanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where Istood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerablycompact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; fartherahead, I hope. ' 'That man is right, ' he thought, 'who has alliedhimself most closely with the future. ' The future, to Ibsen, was apalpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, buta constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which hewas not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of afollower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' Hisfuture was to be peopled by great individuals. 

It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; andtruth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he soughtfor himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally'efficacious, ' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. Thatpurpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of anartist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing isto become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself--not to determineto do this or determine to do that, but to do what one _must_ do becauseone is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood. ' He conceives oftruth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as amatter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and thekingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnablyminded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing anew work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he neverdeviates at any one time from any one conception. There is somethingnarrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness, this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more ofhimself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind ofreligious sequel to _Brand_. He tells her:

 _Brand_ is an æsthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me. It came into being as the result of something which I had not observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book had no longer any interest for me. 

It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that _PeerGynt_ is a poem, not a satire; _The League of Youth_ a 'simple comedyand nothing more'; _Emperor and Galilean_ an 'entirely realistic work';that in _Ghosts_ 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterancewhich can be laid to the account of the author. .. . My intention was toproduce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessingsomething real. .. . It preaches nothing at all. ' Of _Hedda Gabler_ hesays: 'It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-calledproblems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the socialconditions and principles of the present day. ' 'My chief life-task, ' hedefines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies. '

Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of histools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies, a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, asonly creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and, from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism oflife. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had thesense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt tofly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when hehas been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to buildsolidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his greatwork. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go ondoing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotentpoet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, formore than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear ofthe man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of awonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and givenuncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, hehas set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house, ' and added awindow there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened onornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design. 

In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and theGermans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era ofmarvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondinglyrealistic poetry. .. . We received from it the first idea of a possiblenew poetic world. .. . We were adherents of this new school of realisticart: we had found our æsthetic creed. ' But the maker of this creed, thecreator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content withwhat he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do. It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of whathe can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of, namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in thechoice of means. ' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice ofmeans for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his bestenergies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discoverexactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimentingimpulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin itsdisintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, wasto pay homage to poetry. 

Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be apoet; or who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by thescientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man ofscience. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was along time before he realised that verse was not his native language. Hisfirst three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating withprose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more orless archaic prose; then a satire in verse, _Love's Comedy_, in whichthere is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play, the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose, _The Pretenders_; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems, _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. After this, verse is laid aside, and at last wefind him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse willbe employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediatefuture. .. . It is therefore doomed. ' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be agreat prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet. 

Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making. His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression ofhimself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poeticconvention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material orclarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing somethingpersonal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in avain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_, 'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conceptionof poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to thebook. ' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; itwas a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it wouldnot carve every material. 

Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandestells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the nationalballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Östraat_, we see thedramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts ofromance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concernedwith plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in thepsychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a pieceof strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, andsome good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it, and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal, nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was nothis work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is alreadyhimself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of sciencehas already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried towrite it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts intoverse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and, brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry. 

Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poetwhen he says, speaking of this play and of _Brand_:

 Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words, these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre and rhyme thoughts already expressed. 

_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific, prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as itsticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and triesto lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubblesand children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate. There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse whichhas some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the airof puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The versecomes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him andpoetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, butonly under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet, like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whomcynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures ofhis attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature, and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature. 

The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing andGilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterilethan that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinkshe has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, adenial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literalsuicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some airunbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the oldidea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea ofself-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt ofnature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism ofnature. 

Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in_Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_, which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of ahistorical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. Thestagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect likethunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, aboveall, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there isboth beauty and wisdom. 

It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, notonly in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has beenseriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with_Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made withSidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, ofwhich there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is moreabstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it;their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than apoem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brillianttranslation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like anoriginal, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all thisargumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequateexpression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse ofBrowning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carriedfurther, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter, and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian. The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St. Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings. 

But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine moreprecisely the station and quality of _Brand_ as poetry. Take any one ofthe vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel ofthe poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's _EverlastingGospel_. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry;it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into noother substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting strikingthought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; butwhere is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what, written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of theintellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake every lineleaps forth like lightning from a cloud. 

The motto of _Brand_ was 'all or nothing'; that of _Peer Gynt_ 'to bemaster of the situation. ' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding andlosing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _PeerGynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice. ' It is Ibsen in highspirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequinof a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads init and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded, because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of twoelements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The firstcomes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all thisbrings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce, local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which mayitself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegiansummer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music, childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustratedit. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of thisthat Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischiaand Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, asingle masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, isone and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is itborn of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? Whattouches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times haspoetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, whichcomes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, andunder artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen, rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into thisqueer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the mainvalue it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of thepoet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led awayinto bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its proseequivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally givesus in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind ofrhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry. 

In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had halftaken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy, ' he writes to Dr. Brandes, 'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deepfeelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts. ' He adds: 'It iswritten in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I havepaid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I haveaccomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in factwithout a single "aside. " 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probabilityon the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order ofthings' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but thesatirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and nodoubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, thephotographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relieffrom the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but theintention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps toget the mechanism in order. 

After _The League of Youth_ Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seeksalvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old schemefor a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act playswhich make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the firstwork which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that itcontains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demandedof me so long. ' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirelyrealistic work, ' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual lifewhich I am putting into this book . .. And the historical subject chosenhas a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own timethan one might at first imagine. ' How great a relief it must have been, after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to anold cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is arelief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly onone side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost likea parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial, the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned againsthis hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and theJulian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever_Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the bookis or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw afragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried toreproduce what I saw. ' But in the play itself this intention comes andgoes; and, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbô_ in its attempt totreat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to theexposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance, after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers ofhistorical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideasmore fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as inalmost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point, satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is notyet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus ajustification, of the realism. 

Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars ofSociety_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has madefor itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; themechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a moreconventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place ofsatire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concernedwith society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusationagainst society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling ofa lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be sayingto us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools ofsociety. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here isyour respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father andyour mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of hereditywhispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hiddenbehind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world. 

Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_'preaches nothing at all. ' This pursuit of truth to its most secrethiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogmavisibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogmais terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless, we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I wouldtake _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's threecentral plays, the plays in which his method completely attained itsend, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; andthis work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, isalive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been donein literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy ofthe People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which hadattacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is anallegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form ofallegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission. Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these peoplewho suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies, are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays inwhich the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfectedhis art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramaticillusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work theseliving puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic ironyof a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles, but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet. 

For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantasticelement which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is sosternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _TheWild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicitsymbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony ismore disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on thereformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in thepursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the playswhich follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, thepoetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms ofthe fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination. The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and isdiscontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He wouldextend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to beextended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in_The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of_Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form, not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from theSea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Isit not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Isit not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality andgiving us no spiritual reality in its place?

_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:

 It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day. '

The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised andovercivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model wasactually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as apoet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whomIbsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried toadd his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial andinarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chiefcatchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomesthe Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a deadman and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icyallegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to theyounger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itselfat home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ridethrough the air on the back of the reindeer?

In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and hehad considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now heturns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only lifeinterests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicialirony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimentalartist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. Theman of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wifein _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of asupernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John GabrielBorkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, aplay in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is nolonger content to concern himself with the old material, lies ormisunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but willhave fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _Whenwe Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act akind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to looktheir parts. 

In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not boundtogether and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of theimagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested inthe action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as asoul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul, and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled itslimits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets, shown its 'physical basis. ' And now certain eccentricities in it beginto beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it isdark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the prefaceto the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinckhas pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might pointout to those who have followed him so far on his way, the greatuncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself, as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' isforced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities ofthe ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him touse. 

 _Le poète dramatique est obligé de faire descendre dans la vie réelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idée qu'il se fait de l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle façon, sous quelle forme, dans quelles conditions, d'après quelles lois, à quelle fin, agissent sur nos destinées les puissances supérieures, les influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant que poète, il est persuadé que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est arrivé à une heure où loyalement il lui est à peu près impossible d'admettre les anciennes, et où celles qui les doivent remplacer ne sont pas encore déterminées, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hésite, tâtonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincère, il n'ose plus se risquer hors de la réalité immédiate. Il se borne à étudier les sentiments humains dans leurs effets matériels et psychologiques. _

So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in_Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for oncetaken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if ittakes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, asMaeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see, _quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier à d'autres mystères les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinées, il faut convenir que, si l'atmosphère qu'il parvient à créer est étrange et troublante, elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement raisonnable et réele. _

From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life, they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. Themanager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot getthem back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird, spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, thedramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone backinto their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to makemysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in imagesand take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone outof them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. Thepuppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefiedbeyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they werepuppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man ofscience, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;the poet was not really there to reawaken. 

Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose. All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. UntilIbsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, oreven, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of everydramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and tocreate it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is, of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have madepoetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the onlyadequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work inpoetry was not equal to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revoltedagainst verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common orderof things, ' when he set himself, for the first time in the history ofthe drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translationor transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, thespecial gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same timehe set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama. 

It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use proserather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with theright. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and nogreat dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or aside-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Molière hadused prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself agood craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarilydependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama. Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;think, I will not say of Molière, but of Congreve. What is more romanticthan _The Way of the World_? But Ibsen extracts the romantic qualityfrom drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to writerealistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines, so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the readerthat what he was reading was something that had really happened. ' He isnot even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aiminside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama. 

The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has beencarried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it isno mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatlythis can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is _Ghosts_ toshow us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remainsbeyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shallsee if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grosslyrealistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen--Tolstoi's _Powers ofDarkness_. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem toweigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mindwhen the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearingof noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such adivine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret ofTolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achievedin terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinckhas aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and throughforms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, bythe side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a littletrivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded onthe stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense ofthat surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play, by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoihas learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have beentoiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he hassupplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, outof some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life upinto itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding, by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done whatIbsen has never done--given us an interpretation of life which owesnothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which, in spite of its form, is essential poetry. 

Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a moreprobable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and socompletely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently sounconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we wouldabout real people, and sometimes take sides with them against theircreator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know alltheir tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, theirhabits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time inbringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction, gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. Hischaracters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day ormoment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not metwith, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, aheroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he hasbeen most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision ofhis measurements of just so much and no more of the soul. 

Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great charactersstill exist? Ibsen's exceptional people never authenticate themselves asbeing greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report whichthey are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poetLövborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, ofwhom even Dr. Brandes admits, 'His own words do not convince me, forone, that he has ever possessed true genius. ' When he is most himself, when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself tothat part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the averageman as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, bylimiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinicallyexamine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of thesoul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimateissues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and withOedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; itis universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetescries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that littlesegment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those ofnature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; itis a business association for the capture and division of profits; itis, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a partof the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightlyknown as 'social dramas. ' Their problem, for the main part, is no longerman in the world, but man in society. That is why they have noatmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised. 

The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical. There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it isthe physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespearespeaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, withintoxication, that we see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_, or even_Richard II_. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of adiagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us thepurely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seenso clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable wordsand doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to themodern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas_fils_; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recitethem. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against agreat darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of anironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is thedoctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously ashe infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls arelikely to play. 

If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty ofemotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can beat least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphimelodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly arevelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than astammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinctionbut intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling. But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaboratein supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautifulthing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, notan end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it haslost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is thelanguage of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph. Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than ameans. 

Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words areto be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking withone another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when greatoccasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than thewords they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher thanthose words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen wouldsuppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and theaside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means ofinterpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of theaccident. 

Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never beensurpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen havenever moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world, interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of thefuture. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this newworld, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their owncitizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about usthat they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the powerand privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and thesituation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would thisman be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the mostdeeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies allthe difference between prose and poetry. 

1906. 

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels, are, atall events, the sincere and complete expression of a very remarkablepersonality. From _Marthe_ to _Là-Bas_ every story, every volume, disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries oflife loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation--andsensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be wellor ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for eachof us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears tobe a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with acertain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of atleast temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture ofordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness;in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemedto promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himselfthe delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himselfwould be the first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he hasacknowledged--that the particular way in which he sees life is a matterof personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. TheGoncourts have never tired of insisting on the fact of their _névrose_, of pointing out its importance in connection with the form and structureof their work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin desiècle_ has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of theFaubourg Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point ofmorbid acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. ToHuysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly andunpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessityof contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhatimperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of theideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeableonly that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder ofvision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a dropof impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through atemperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, couldbe more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans. 

To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealedhimself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gaveme the impression of a cat, ' some interviewer once wrote of him;'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready toshoot out his claws at the least word. ' And, indeed, there is somethingof his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, witha look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, thefeatures are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or theStock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, thatlook of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the manmakes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office--he is an employéin the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have seen himin a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I usedto see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on thesofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, lookingat no one and at nothing, while Madame X. Moves about with solidvivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of _bric-à-brac_. The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny _salon_;they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens, brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, theother a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clashin a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room, Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of oneperfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by mylearned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it isthe young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were notimpossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans, without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak verydistinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpiercesit, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or astupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomesmonstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; theunimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. Itis always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but theintensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of thesublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is anepigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speakswith an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, soprofound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility. 

Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours_, and it isjust such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality. With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passionfor a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusivelyan artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, beingproduced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, wouldbe, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. And it isprecisely such a book that Huysmans has written, in the extravagant, astonishing _A Rebours_. All his other books are a sort of unconsciouspreparation for this one book, a sort of inevitable and scarcelynecessary sequel to it. They range themselves along the line of asomewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire, through Goncourt, by wayof Zola, to the surprising originality of so disconcerting an exceptionto any and every order of things. 

The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, CorneliusHuysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the greatperiod--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. Hisfirst book, _Le Drageoir á Epices_, published at the age of twenty-six, is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of littlesketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies ofParisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful, labouredwork of a really artistic temperament; it betrays, here and there, thespirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so much withHuysmans--in the crude malice of 'L'Extase, ' for example, in thenotation of the 'richness of tone, ' the 'superb colouring, ' of an olddrunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and theprecision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of thesubjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture ofthe carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: 'As in ahothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shotout on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-workextended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurledtheir violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharpwhite, against the red medley of quivering flesh. '

In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille_, which followed in 1876, two yearslater, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _LeDrageoir à Epices_, but the book, in its crude attempt to dealrealistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the lifeof a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance uponthe somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is importantto remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Elisa_ and _Nana_. 'I writewhat I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced, ' says the briefand defiant preface, 'and I write it as well as I can: that is all. Thisexplanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of the aim thatI pursue in art. ' Explanation or excuse notwithstanding, the book wasforbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its earliest andmost pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error of evoking nosort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a little from hernative gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the gutter again. Goncourt's Elisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at all eventsappeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like her story. Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been strungtogether, and here they are, with only an interesting brutality, acurious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty forpsychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character, thegeneral dislocation of episode. 

_Les Soeurs Vatard_, published in 1879, and the short story _Sac auDos_, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _LesSoirées de Médan_, show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ ratherthan of _Germinie Lacerteux_. For the time the 'formula' of Zola hasbeen accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a storywithout a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at allevents a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of characterupon incident. But in _Les Soeurs Vatard_ there is no reason for thenarrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles ofdescription--the workroom, the rue de Sèvres, the locomotives, the_Foire du pain d'épice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors, there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Céline and Désirée, and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout cemilieu ouvrier, ce coin de misère et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordureet d'air naturellement empesté_. And with it all there is a heavy senseof stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the bookreappears, in vastly better company, in _En Ménage_ (1881), a novelwhich is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from _L'EducationSentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel--than anyother novel of the Naturalists. 

_En Ménage_ is the story of '_Monsieur Tout-le-monde_, an insignificantpersonality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the supremeconsolation of being able to complain of any injustice in their fate, for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood merit, a force. 'André is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of the invariable heroof Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the commonplace to sufferfrom it with acuteness. He cannot get on either with or without a womanin his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he consoles himself with amistress, and finally goes back to the wife. And the moral of it allis: 'Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we can, in any way we can: butit is almost certain that we cannot. ' In _A Vau-l'Eau_, a lessinteresting story which followed _En Ménage_, the daily misery of therespectable M. Folantin, the government employé, consists in theimpossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M. Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, aninevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of smallinconveniences been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as inthese two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace. It happens toAndré, at a certain epoch in his life, to take back an old servant whohad left him many years before. He finds that she has exactly the samedefects as before, and 'to find them there again, ' comments the author, 'did not displease him. He had been expecting them all the time, hesaluted them as old acquaintances, yet with a certain surprise, notwithstanding, to see them neither grown nor diminished. He noted forhimself with satisfaction that the stupidity of his servant had remainedstationary. ' On another page, referring to the inventor of cards, Huysmans defines him as one who 'did something towards suppressing thefree exchange of human imbecility. ' Having to say in passing that a girlhas returned from a ball, 'she was at home again, ' he observes, 'afterthe half-dried sweat of the waltzes. ' In this invariably sarcastic turnof the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on thedisagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this pointin his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate andto analyse the more mediocre manifestations of _la bêtise humaine_. 

There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation ofstupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction ofthe sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we cometo _A Rebours_. But on the way we have to note a volume of _CroquisParisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist inHuysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volumeon _L'Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists inliterature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation, rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first todeclare the supremacy of Degas--'the greatest artist that we possessto-day in France'--while announcing with no less fervour the remote, reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first todiscover Raffaëlli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky--a sortof Parisian Millet, ' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'levéritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, todo justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist sinceBaudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the_Curiosités Esthétiques_ are, after all, less exact in their actualstudy, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their criticaljudgments, than _L'Art Moderne_. The _Croquis Parisiens_, which, in itsfirst edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffaëlli, issimply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done inaquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types--theomnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts--thesame impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bièvre, forpreference, in all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is amarvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisianmusic-hall, the Folies-Bergère. Huysmans' faculty of description is hereseen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with allthe outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be comparedwith the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, thatbreath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, whatwe never get in Huysmans. 

In _L'Art Moderne_, speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmansattributes to them 'a specious and _cherché_ art, demanding, for itsappreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense. ' To realisethe full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours_, some such initiationmight be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisiteartificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Ménage_ and _AVau-l'Eau_, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordidkind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horrorof human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we haveseen to be the special form of Huysmans' _névrose_. The motto, takenfrom a thirteenth-century mystic, Rusbroeck the Admirable, is a cry forescape, for the 'something in the world that is there in no satisfyingmeasure, or not at all': _Il faut que je me réjouisse au-dessus du temps. .. Quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et que sa grossièreté nesache pas ce que je veux dire_. And the book is the history of a_Thebaïde raffinée_--a voluntary exile from the world in a new kind of'Palace of Art. ' Des Esseintes, the vague but typical hero, is one ofthose half-pathological cases which help us to understand the fullmeaning of the word _décadence_, which they partly represent. The lastdescendant of an ancient family, his impoverished blood tainted by allsorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself at thirty _sur le chemin, dégrisé, seul, abominablement lassé_. He has already realised that 'theworld is divided, in great part, into swaggerers and simpletons. ' Hisone desire is to 'hide himself away, far from the world, in someretreat, where he might deaden the sound of the loud rumbling ofinflexible life, as one covers the street with straw, for sick people. 'This retreat he discovers, just far enough from Paris to be safe fromdisturbance, just near enough to be saved from the nostalgia of theunattainable. He succeeds in making his house a paradise of theartificial, choosing the tones of colour that go best with candle-light, for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes has effected a simpletransposition of night and day. His disappearance from the world hasbeen complete; it seems to him that the 'comfortable desert' of hisexile need never cease to be just such a luxurious solitude; it seems tohim that he has attained his desire, that he has attained to happiness. 

Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but theypass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted byremembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, bringsback a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercisedactively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets, hisfantastic amours: the _repas de deuil_, Miss Urania the acrobat, theepisode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the Sphinxand the Chimæra of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_ MadameLaure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his childhoodwith the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood, the fantasiesof the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_ joining sostrangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer. At times his brainis haunted by social theories--his dull hatred of the ordinary in lifetaking form in the region of ideas. But in the main he feeds himself, with something of the satisfaction of success, on the strange food forthe sensations with which he has so laboriously furnished himself. Thereare his books, and among these a special library of the Latin writers ofthe Decadence. Exasperated by Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace, he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well hemight), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty ofApuleius. His curiosity extends to the later Christian poets--from thecoloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse ofthe incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisiteprinting, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparableBaudelaire (_édition tirée à un exemplaire_), a unique Mallarmé. Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence--for itsvenerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, itsvague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness--DesEsseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, findtheir place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but itis selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be hisonly care in art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificialbeauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exactingnerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, inorder to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangenessdemanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, andsought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicateddeliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over whichhe could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or ofsolid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. Hedelighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for whatit could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, asthough sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle, into asphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an unaccustomedstir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek to determine. ' Sohe comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other, possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity ofexpression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states ofexhausted minds, of desolate souls. ' In Flaubert he prefers _LaTentation de Saint-Antoine_; in Goncourt, _La Faustin_; in Zola, _LaFaute de l'Abbé Mouret_--the exceptional, the most remote and_recherché_ outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is thenovel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy--that novelwhich, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitelyperverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintesis the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume, the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet(forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who arecurious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbière, and the paintedand bejewelled Théodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctivesympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically perverse Decadent ofAmerica; he delights, sooner than all the world, in the astonishing, unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it isin Stéphane Mallarmé that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence ofa literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in itsideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to thecuriosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions ofenjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on itsdeath-bed. '

But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick andcraving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the lastlimits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert offlowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowershe prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is themonstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that hecherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with barbaricnames, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors ofvegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness. Andhis imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like combinationsof music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the trumpet-note ofkirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curaçao, the clarionet. Hecombines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with effects likethose of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for example, themethod of Baudelaire in _L'Irréparable_ and _Le Balcon_, where the lastline of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the languorousprogression of the melody. And above all he has his few, carefullychosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty and strangeterror--the two Salomés of Gustave Moreau, the 'Religious Persecutions'of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His favourite artist isGustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and disquieting picture that hecares chiefly to dwell. 

 A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace like the basilica of an architecture at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle surmounting the altar, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his hands on his knees. His face was yellow, parchment-like, annulated with wrinkles, withered with age; his long beard floated like a white cloud on the jewelled stars that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast. Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen from the domes. 

 In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of this church, Salomé, her left arm extended in a gesture of command, her bent right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus, advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who crouches on the floor. 

 With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel-blue, streaked with peacock-green. 

 * * * * *

 In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman Salomé that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to her, all that look upon her, all that she touches. 

It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate hisalready over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusionis only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. Thisone episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given overto the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projectedvoyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has beenreading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours ofthose ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves uponhis imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that _paysde brume et de boue_, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire forchange, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by avisit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to theoffice of _Galignani's Messenger_, fancying himself, as the rain-dropsrattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already inthe midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches_Galignani's Messenger_, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays, loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and, to pass the time, enters the 'Bodéga' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoliand the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: hesees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, allthe characters of Dickens--a whole England of caricature; as he drinkshis Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into thegood-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bodéga, ' he steps out againinto the rain-swept street, regains his cab, and drives to the Englishtavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he findsa place beside the _insulaires_, with 'their porcelain eyes, theircrimson cheeks, ' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes downwith ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do inEngland, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusionof the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusionawait him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in achair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere, its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The trainis due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen, ' he says tohimself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated withEnglish life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsychange of place, these imperishable sensations. ' So he gathers togetherhis luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docilephantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world. But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth andbrought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized byhallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbidexaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music thatbesieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him, at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, thenormal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death ormadness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of astrange, attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (whichindeed is Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. DesEsseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those whoknow a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: heis the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book asort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in theliterature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but aspiritual epoch. 

_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that dateHuysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which ismerely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_ (1887) and_Là-Bas_ (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neitherof them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, _Certains_(1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Félicien Rops, theetcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a sort of deliberatelyexaggerated record--vision rather than record--of the disillusions of acountry sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town_névrose_. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously wovenout of nothing, and with no psychological value--the human part of thebook being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representationof a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of thecountry. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; butthe long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared withthe reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic creation, on a more solidfoundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of thehistory of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with thecontemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration ofimpotence, the hate of the mediocre--that is perhaps one of the mostindulgent definitions of Diabolism, ' says Huysmans, somewhere in thebook, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection withthe others of that series of pessimist studies in life. _Un naturalismespiritualiste_, he defines his own art at this point in its development;and it is in somewhat the 'documentary' manner that he applies himselfto the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a realmystical corruption that does actually exist in our midst. I do notknow whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously, so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book--is stillenacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horriblepractices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yetperformed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute. The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first inliterature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it issuccessful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which onehesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind, than _A Rebours_. But it is not, like that, the study of an exceptionwhich has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does notprofess to be anything but a disease. 

Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy toestimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too muchrepelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make hiswork, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificialand _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptionalcharacteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fictionimpersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under anymaster. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had butto say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui ont du talent etd'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques, décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour moid'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he hasundergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first hehas had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in_Le Drageoir à Epices_, we find such daring combinations as this(_Camaïeu Rouge_)--_Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette gammed'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait. _ Workingupon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modernstylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, inwhich the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous, 'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phraseof Léon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrifiedsyntax, ' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that _style tacheté et faisandé_--high-flavouredand spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt andVerlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion ofwords--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressivequality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of thingsas no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever sorealised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of theartificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these, rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he isremarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to goon until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychologyis a matter of the sensations, and chiefly the visual sensations. Themoral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the mostpart into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. Theprotagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle ofimpressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness, his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personalwriter--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with alltheir strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as theyare, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of apersonality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer. 

1892. 

TWO SYMBOLISTS

_Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarmé characteristically(_ceux épars et privés d'architecture_) of this long expected firstvolume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prosepoems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers del'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; themarvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and thetheatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner:rêverie d'un Poète français, Le Mystère dans les Lettres_; and, undervarious titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitationof a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last ableto read Mallarmé's 'doctrine, ' if not altogether as he would have usread it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judgehim as a writer of prose. 

In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuablewhich has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shallnot pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every wordof it. _D'exhiber les choses à un imperturbable premier plan, encamelots, activés par la pression de l'instant, d'accord--écrire, dansle cas pourquoi, indûment, sauf pour étaler la banalité; plutôt quetendre le nuage, précieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaquepensée, vu que vulgaire l'est ce à quoi on décerne, pas plus, uncaractère immédiat. _ No, it has always been to that _labyrinthe illuminépar des fleurs_ that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity toinvite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé isobscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinksdifferently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying onthe intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what isunlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links ofconnection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, hehas never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. Hehas made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after allneed not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered itneedful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he washeard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain, that there are many who do not know how to read--except the newspapers, he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, whichmake his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wiselimitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No onein our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of theartist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not alwayswisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from thatmaking of himself 'a motley to the view, ' that handing over of his nakedsoul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wroughtso subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloudon the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdomto hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what hasseemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph fora self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after thewriting of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myselfto the crowd?

It has been the distinction of Mallarmé that he has always aspired afteran impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is frettingand constraining in 'the body of that death, ' which is the mereliterature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only asnotations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must beemployed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in settingthem to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things fortheir own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except bysuggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use ofwords--that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as ifthey had never been used before, that chimerical search after thevirginity of language--is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extremediscontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use wordsfluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from anunconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulousthinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefullychosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic oflanguage, without the formality of an after all impossible description;to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarmé hasconsistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he hassought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul ofdreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into thedepths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last topermit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possibleto avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries, by the way!

Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and thesecret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in amood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consentedto the publication--the 'showing off, ' within covers, as of goods in ashop-window: it is his own image--of these fragmentary suggestionstowards a complete Æsthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; hereand there final; and always, in form, hieratic. 

Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things hasbeen carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books ofbeautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writersVilliers and Mallarmé have most carefully sought the most remote ideal, and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader. Mallarmé, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way, not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive, fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made itdifficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimitedmoney. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the_Premières Poésies_ of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, onribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his booksappeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some ofthem as hideous as the original edition of _L'Eve Future_, with its redstars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city landscape. It istherefore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful bookswhich have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisherof Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poems which has everbeen published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. TheMallarmé is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispieceby Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark greenand gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. VanRysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverentself-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and notthe book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for whichmodern decorators are most conspicuous. 

In the _Poésies_ we have, no doubt, Mallarmé's final selection from hisown poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysteriousfragment of _Hérodiade_, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeedcompleted, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passageon which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curiousto note that the new passage is written in exactly the style of theolder passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one andthe writing of the other Mallarmé had completely changed his style. Byan effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, andthe two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears, still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, tobe added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialoguebetween Hérodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently completein itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly withoutpunctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even ifpunctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every lineof Mallarmé will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek textbecomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably domuch to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholarsonly give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past. Mallarmé can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of thepresent there are the clear and lovely early poems, so delightfullybrought together in the white and red book. 

_L'insensibilité de l'azur et des pierres_: a serene and gem-likequality, entirely his own, is in all these poems, in which a particularkind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarmé is the poet of a few, a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of hisown symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter oftea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower

 _Sur ses tasses de neige à la lune ravie_, a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, hehad felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul. '

A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up thecharacteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he wasa man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass ofimperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatevernotion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, onlooking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, wasthat the selection had been badly made. Where is _Les Demoiselles deBienfilâtre_? I asked myself, remembering that little ironicalmasterpiece; where is _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes_, with itssubtlety of horror; _Sentimentalisme_, with its tragic and tendermodernity; _La Reine Ysabeau_, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in theartistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Secondthoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely havebeen better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us, not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but, throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom weare always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would haveseen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greaternobility than these _Histoires Souveraines_ in which a regal pomp ofspeech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers whomocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; theidealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals. 

1897, 1899. 

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only oneEnglish writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequateabout him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire toEnglish readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing toremember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise inhis book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy onhis death, _Ave atque Vale_. There have been occasional outbreaks ofirrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generallymis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at randomin the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up, over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces ofthe age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?

It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection, and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He onlydid what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life, not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certainthings, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Ofthe men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent hiswhole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetryhas come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes afine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest whichhis generation produced, and a translation which is better than amarvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelairehad never existed? As different a thing from what it is as Englishpoetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among thegreatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, theyinfluence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. Hediscovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with hisvast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong incontemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wroteneither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself towrite either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but itis without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all hisnerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the recordof sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, amoderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader(_Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère_) as a judge rather thanas a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist, with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewilderedthe world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to liveas experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary, secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, _lemauvais moine_ of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of thebrothel. 

To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, notonly the four volumes of his collected works, but every document inCrépet's _Oeuvres Posthumes_, and, above all, the letters, and thesehave only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editorwho has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet. Baudelaireput into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a givenmoment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of everyobserver; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has readthe letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom heshowed his business side, or the letters to la Présidente, thetouchstone of his _spleen et idéal_, his chief experiment in the highersentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, itis true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hearof his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. Thetragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry, Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a littleclearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remainsbaffling, and will probably never be discovered. 

As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses intohis mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see. Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out, through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understandinghim, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that hedefines and explains the origin and real meaning of the _Petits Poèmesen Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeurconstante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même pour traiter des sujetstristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j'ai voulu faire!_ And, writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even moreexplicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: _Avez-vous observé qu'unmorceau de ciel aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deuxrochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idée plus profonde de l'infinique le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?_ It is to anothercasual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasionof his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at lastdone 'a little justice, ' not to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! onm'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai sipatiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La première fois quej'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec épouvante et ravissement, nonseulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi, et écrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant. _ It is in such glimpses asthese that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters. 

1906. 

WALTER PATER

Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpretedBotticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supremeartists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:

 But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority. 

It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, thanthe very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properlyunderstood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'thedelicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have beengreater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, asMallarmé called him, 'le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps. 'For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy ofform, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt hisattraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great ageof Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcelyfail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence, ' but alsoof 'a consideration wholly affectionate, ' not lessened by the slowlyincreasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost bythe world in general, on his name. 

In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard workas if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and tooverhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is likemusic, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, itis precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and itcomes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is astyle in which, to use some of his own words, 'the writer succeeds insaying what he _wills_. '

The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particularqualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often, been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely itsadaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinarycloseness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, inthe man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you gotaccustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, soslow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yetscrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise, pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousnessof utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection andout of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a maskmoulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man, literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more thanthat, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly, intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us, in a slow and gradual revelation. 

He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:

 The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner. 

And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty, or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom, and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor ofthe priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of allthis again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, thecriticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, aconfession, the _vraie vérité_ (as he was fond of saying) about theworld in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he wassure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught thetangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can onlylook, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secretwas in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, anunrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful inpassing things. 

In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soarswholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out theliberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for theabsolute, his 'hunger for eternity, ' and for his part he is content toset all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis, on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asksfor no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he wouldchoose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth justliving, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract itsessence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism, ' even of themind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever isbeautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older headded something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properlyand severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure. ' Pleasure was never, forPater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and notmerely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first, and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it ispassion, ' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealedfor the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; besure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. ' What he cared most for at all times was thatwhich could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; hediffered only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was. 'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the _Renaissance_ tendedmore and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'thediscovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'theimaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even, at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through, _aux abois_ with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powersthat may really occupy it. '

When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for abouttwo years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reachedme when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all mylife, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age ofseventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but hisform of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose, requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's _Studies in theHistory of the Renaissance_, in its first edition on ribbed paper (Ihave the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prosealso could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or, rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. Ittaught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one callsinspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; thatlife (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a workof art; from that book I realised for the first time that there wasanything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. Icaught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction ofcuriosity into definite channels. 

The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, anoccasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, thedefinite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he wasunfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, thanI can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that myfirst volume of verse was published; and it was through his influenceand counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in allmatters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in thedirection of sanity, restraint, precision. 

I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delayingway, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describesupremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'Hedoes, ' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-enginestuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked people to beenthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guardedby the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undueearnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artistis bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand, ' as bad form, which shockedhim as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form ofextravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: hesuffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no lessdislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two wordswhich he often used to express his distaste for things and people. Henever would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of whatseemed to him perhaps unnecessarily 'sordid' in their lives. It painedhim, as it pains some people, perhaps only because they are more acutelysensitive than others, to walk through mean streets, where people arepoor, miserable, and hopeless. 

And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that what Pater mostliked in poetry was the very opposite of such work as that of Verlaine, which he might have been supposed likely to like. I do not think it wasactually one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after his manner inEnglish, that some reviewer once quoted, saying: 'That, to our mind, would be Mr. Pater's ideal of poetry. ' Pater said to me, with a sadwonder, 'I simply don't know what he meant. ' What he liked in poetry wassomething even more definite than can be got in prose; and he valuedpoets like Dante and like Rossetti for their 'delight in concretedefinition, ' not even quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as_Kubla Khan_, which he omitted in a brief selection from the poetry ofColeridge. In the most interesting letter which I ever had from him, theonly letter which went to six pages, he says:

 12 EARL'S TERRACE, KENSINGTON, W. , _Jan. 8, 1888. _

 MY DEAR MR. SYMONS, --I feel much flattered at your choosing me as an arbiter in the matter of your literary work, and thank you for the pleasure I have had in reading carefully the two poems you have sent me. I don't use the word 'arbiter' loosely for 'critic'; but suppose a real controversy, on the question whether you shall spend your best energies in writing verse, between your poetic aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calculating results) on the other. Well! judging by these two pieces, I should say that you have a poetic talent remarkable, especially at the present day, for precise and intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with. Rossetti, I believe, said that the value of every artistic product was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intellectual force that went to the initial conception of it: and it is just this intellectual conception which seems to me to be so conspicuously wanting in what, in some ways, is the most characteristic verse of our time, especially that of our secondary poets. In your own pieces, particularly in your MS. 'A Revenge, ' I find Rossetti's requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things from one who has the talent of conceiving his motive with so much firmness and tangibility--with that close logic, if I may say so, which is an element in any genuinely imaginative process. It is clear to me that you aim at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind, great interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal excellence, greatly preferring 'A Revenge' to 'Bell in Camp. ' Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the lover's gift, is not a little bourgeois, I think this piece worthy of any poet. It has that aim of concentration and organic unity which I value greatly both in prose and verse. 'Bell in Camp' pleases me less, for the same reason which makes me put Rossetti's 'Jenny, ' and some of Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank which many assign them. In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten. Otherwise, I feel the pathos, the humour, of the piece (in the full sense of the word humour) and the skill with which you have worked out your motive therein. I think the present age an unfavourable one to poets, at least in England. The young poet comes into a generation which has produced a large amount of first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of good secondary poetry. You know I give a high place to the literature of prose as a fine art, and therefore hope you won't think me brutal in saying that the admirable qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative prose; as I think is the case also with much of Browning's finest verse. I should say, make prose your principal _métier_, as a man of letters, and publish your verse as a more intimate gift for those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature. I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me. 

 I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor means of communication. Don't come to London without making an appointment to come and see me here. --Very sincerely yours, WALTER PATER. 

'Browning, one of my best-loved writers, ' is a phrase I find in hisfirst letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book onBrowning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention ofany other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossettiwhich I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which Ihave from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter ofbusiness: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I wasdoing, about which he advises and encourages me. 

In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by theirpersistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send bypost was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason forhesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me, ' hewrites in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lestit should get bruised by transit through the post. ' He wrote letterswith distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses orregrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now withpupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or, as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know byexperience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy. ' A reviewtook him sometimes a year to get through; and remained in the end, likehis letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, likehis published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of thethree lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one onMérimée, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other onRaphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severerhumiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony whichcommunicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going intothe hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind alittle, between the discomfort of the underground railway and thedistress of the lecture-hall. 

In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarelyquite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made thegreater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularlyfond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining withhim in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which hetook up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down carefullyagain on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget hadsent him the first volume of his _Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_, and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the partcontaining the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a loverof cats I thought she might have spared him!'

We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I wasof them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I amgetting to find they are very similar. ' Then he began to tell me aboutthe fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublishedfragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of thebooths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts, ' and the littlewild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest ofthe French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his ownwoods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he couldhave seen a tiger. '

I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of thepainter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I believe so, Ialways say so. ' The relationship has never been verified, but one wouldlike to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the Englishwriter. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that hecame to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary _Life ofWatteau_ by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of _L'Artdu XVIII^e Siècle_, out of which he has made certainly the most livingof his _Imaginary Portraits_, that _Prince of Court Painters_ which issupposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom wesee in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889[4]Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, ofwhich _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have been one. He had another subjectin Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he wasgoing to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study oflife in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be amodern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apolloin Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _TheChild in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in_Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapterof a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life, ' something, he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it, the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the oldhouse at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent muchof his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and theircaravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady inher large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors whohad come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train, and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_. ' It was because he alwaysdreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginaryportrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on withit because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of hismind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it, he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, andthat it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, latermanner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which nocontinuation could ever add a more essential completeness. 

Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the courseof his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart fromwhat it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language. ' It hasbeen said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, inPater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angularoutlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphanéité_, there is already thesubstance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate fleshin the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention, but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to concernhimself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickeninginfluence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I haddifficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set ofhis works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the whitebacks, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubertwe rarely met without speaking. He thought _Julien l'Hospitalier_ asperfect as anything he had done. _L'Education Sentimentale_ was one ofthe books which he advised me to read; that, and _Le Rouge et le Noir_of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes inthe former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts hespoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelledhim, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way thingsshould be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read_Madame Gervaisais_, and he spoke of _Chérie_ (for all its 'immodesty')as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies. 

Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said, with a slow smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas. ' He was always alittle on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubertand Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could readZola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there todistract him. I remember telling him about _The Story of an AfricanFarm_, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating hisfavourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose Ishall ever read it. ' And he explained to me that he was always writingsomething, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself toread anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringinga new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that hismind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; itwas that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as awriter to remember, to perpetuate. 

1906. 

FOOTNOTE:

[4] In this same year he intended to follow the _Appreciations_ by avolume of _Studies of Greek Remains_, in which he then meant to includethe studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of puttingtogether a volume of 'theory, ' which was to include the essay on Style. In two or three years' time, he thought, _Gastom de Latour_ would befinished. 

THE GONCOURTS

My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember myimmense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful, ' at Auteuil, of which Ihad heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shownat once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to somefriends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usualloosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearinga straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweepof the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the mostdistinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at oncethe distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artisticgenius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful anddistinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air ofdignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, whichcame out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of havingsaid a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had beenimmediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum, I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which hehandled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little, unconscious murmurs: _Quel goût! quel goût!_ These rose-coloured rooms, with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautifulthings, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!), always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le beau_); albums had been madefor him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others uponsilver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me hiseighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one(a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had beensixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs. 

When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me allhis own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions ofFlaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, ofthe men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with aserene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate;and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the_brouillard scandinave_, in which it seemed to him that France wastrying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvaisbrouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made torepresent the only thing worth representing, _la vie vécue, la vraievérité_. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing, _l'optique_: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have allseen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way ofexpressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal, ' hewent on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands tohis eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. Mybrother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it fromus. '

How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is mostessential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing, literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is inthe invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' ofwhich purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained. You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _CharlesDemailly:_ 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists. ' Well, that istrue, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way. 

'The delicacies of fine literature, ' that phrase of Pater always comesinto my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to methe only English writer who has ever handled language at all in theirmanner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of theirbooks, to _Madame Gervaisais_, to _L'Art du XVIII Siècle_, to _Chérie_;with a passing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this lastbook, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that 'that was how itseemed to him a book should be written. ' I repeated this once toGoncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like;and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what heinstinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was ofcourse far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, lessfeverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealtwith another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth. But with both there was that passionately intent preoccupation with 'thedelicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the mostpersonal sincerity: _tout grand écrivain de tous les temps_, saidGoncourt, _ne se reconnaît absolument qu'à cela, c'est qu'il a unelangue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, estsignée, pour le lecteur lettré, comme si son nom était au bas de cettepage, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial, and therefore reprehensible. 

It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributingto him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his namealone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned. _Mon frère et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in hisjournal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid andadmirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem tohave been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think, had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; forthe novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in eventhat excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yetmore specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt, was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for thequalities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. Ithas been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details ofhuman character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document, the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to thecuriosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistentdevotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a newlanguage: that was the old reproach against them; let it be theirdistinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they havebeen accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberateeccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may, perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It wastheir belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style aspeculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in thehandwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style. Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegantstiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slightnovelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, verydistinguished writing. 

It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, butare perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. Theyhave all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses andthe new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselvescertain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions ofliterary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become atall actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be notmerely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; notmerely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and ofwhat was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating, indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, theeighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and_bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and Japaneseeighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with theiraudacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and theirscrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is thefinest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art. Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand lescivilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire estdrame ou geste. .. . Les siècles qui ont précédé notre siècle nedemandaient à l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portraitde son génie. .. . Le XIX^e siècle demande l'homme qui était cet hommed'État, cet homme de guerre, ce poète, ce peintre, ce grand homme descience ou de métier. L'âme qui était en cet acteur, le coeur qui avécu derrière cet esprit, il les exige et les réclame; et s'il ne peutrecueillir tout cet être moral, toute la vie intérieure, il commande dumoins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique. _From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series ofstudies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^eSiècle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siècle_, _La du Barry_, and theothers), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps ofcostume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of thetime, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce romanvrai que la postérité appellera peut-être un jour l'histoire humaine_. To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, butnot to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice indocuments, to make them more living and more charming than the charm oflife itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is throughthis conception of history that they have found their way to that newconception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art offiction. 

_Aujourd'hui_, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _GerminieLacerteux_, _que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être lagrande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et del'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherchepsychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Romans'est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il pent enrevendiquer les libertés et les franchises_. _Le public aime les romansfaux_, is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman estun roman vrai_. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understoodby _un roman vrai_? The old notion of the novel was that it should be anentertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake;a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce asnearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having beenomitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, itis the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste_. That is nothow the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should berendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inédit_, caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_ of life that theyconceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history. ' And for themthe _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is ofthe sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not ofaction, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, butof an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses. It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists forwhom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: thesensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina. Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that reallymatters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually;the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in hispatient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omitseverything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which hesees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consistsin has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking-upof the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which aregenerally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page inlength. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative hasbeen found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche àl'intérieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparaîtsuccessivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans les intervalles nous échappe. Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. De Goncourt. Encore_, headds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres où l'homme que nous attendionsne passe point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubtthe Goncourts, in their passion for the _inédit_, leave out certainthings because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true andobviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To representlife by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certainsubtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are thesethe only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. Thereare others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, firstof all, as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal_, whichwill remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece ofhuman history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeinglife through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre oeuvre entier_, writes Edmond de Goncourt, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; lespeintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirées de nous-mêmes, et, àforce de nous disséquer, nous sommes arrivés à une sensitivitésupra-aiguë que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie_. Thisunhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well ascertain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' visionof reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth ofthings; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening theacuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derivesfrom haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrantway, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion oftime, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtlerpoetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly, like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert, like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of theGoncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks atCremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors. It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, thereis curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents. 

Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of theGoncourts, with those of Théophile Gautier, who may reasonably be saidto have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, andalso the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, butit is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or, rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell youthe things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points ofview, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute, distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things asan artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might seethem; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberateattempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way inwhich an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, fromno excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarousepithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render asensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, shouldpalpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle inexpression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in theirrelations with language, which they would have not merely a passionateand sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicatelydepraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of Frenchcritics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that thelanguage which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French ofthe past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderfulof all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new visionof things, they have invented a new language. 

1894, 1896. 

COVENTRY PATMORE

There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in theNational Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: thestraggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, thelong, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. Butthe other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that wasabrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstoodpoet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than thewriter of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home, impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not alwaysjust, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging allhuman and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbableomniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, hisintense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutelyself-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr. Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:

 Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life. 

That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of thepages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitelyfascinating person, ' are full of a similar insight. They contain many ofthose anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from themerely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book, written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none amore valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense ofwhat Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's twoportraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood, published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes onthe spiritual side. 

To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and Ihave given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in1897, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplementthese various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussionof a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. Iknew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never withany real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle ofhis letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine, careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of thewriter, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristicenough to be worth preserving. 

The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friendthrough whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpfulfriend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two yearsbefore, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to theStudy of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time, encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in anetwork of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passagesrigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened. At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion, when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, Iknow, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearerunderstanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as amore outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore everprinted. 

 MY DEAR MR. CAMPBELL, --I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons' clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified, as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have attained to the point of view from which all great critics have judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in art is always bad;--he has, in his few best passages, manner, which as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning has done in the estimation of the better class of readers. I do not pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed, for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are mixed up with. --Yours very truly, COVENTRY PATMORE. 

Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fashion against thecriticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, isprinted on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' _Life ofPatmore_. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that

 When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling in Browning, but no true individuality--though of course his manner is marked enough. 

Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofsof my first book of verse, _Days and Nights_, contained a criticismwhich I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticismof my _Browning_. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the wholetruth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and toallow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letteraddressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me fora copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of myown, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments. ' The bookwas a copy of _Florilegium Amantis_, a selection of his own poems, edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmoreexcept fragments of _The Angel in the House_, which I had not had thepatience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read forthe first time some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_, I seemed to havemade a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tractof poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of myenthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among mybooks a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'ArthurSymons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890. '

The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book wasgiven to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, Iremember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion, and he had laughingly, but with a quite naïve gratification, worn it fora while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I haveseen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous. 

In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for afew weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, wentfor a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and Iwrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me. He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:

 I should have been very glad to have complied with your request, had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it a matter of conscience that I should say it. 

Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings, and Patmore wrote on August 16:

 Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have not lost. 

Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come upunder his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had comeup in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper. The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into animpressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and theFlower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:

 The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done. 

In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from aletter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of hisforthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh, Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set theirheels on it accordingly. ' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by'readers, zealously Christian, ' and the readers, instead of settingtheir heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry. '

I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the endof 1893, but it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often, generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. Whenone is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's ownage, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet, who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, notgreatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardlyfail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense ofmy privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that highterrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching himsmoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, orrowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell inthe stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from himall I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of somethings for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics, I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferociousgaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone toSt. Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that otherreligion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without somereference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often andwith so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St. John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upona copy of the first edition of the _Obras Espirituales_ on a stall ofold books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render inEnglish, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa, the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how muchthe mystic of the prose and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_ owed to the_Noche Escura_ and the _Llama de Amor Viva_. He spoke of the Catholicmystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of farcountries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few. 

If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speakingof the later books of prose, the _Religio Poetae_ and _The Rod, theRoot, and the Flower_, some parts of which seem to him 'not veryimportant except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and asgiving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry. ' Tothis I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the_Religio Poetae_, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish tostrengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in theexquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the proseof Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed, 'and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate andachieved prose, of a very rare kind. Thought, in him, is of the verysubstance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at almost the lyricalpitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as of the mountain-topsof meditation; and the spirit of their sometimes remote contemplation isalways in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth, impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed thesepages of chill and ecstatic prose. 

But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as atraveller speaks of the countries from which he has returned, when hespoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. Atfirst I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanentmental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, therest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was anundisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, thanthe more customary 'pride that apes humility, ' or the still baseraffectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, likePatmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justiceto the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he isconscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected todiscriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. Andhere I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington, December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time, ' but had venturedto say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of hiswork. 

 I thank you for the copy of the _Athenæum_, containing your generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae. ' There is much in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table domesticities of the "Angel in the House. "' I think that you have been a little misled--as almost everybody has been--by the differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros. ' The meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter. 

In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, hownearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of hisown intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint ofabsolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed othermen's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, witha measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolishthings about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a greatcritic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, inthose days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of thebasis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods, what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word waswithout its value, was the profound religious gravity with which hetreated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his ownreasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity. 

It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmorewrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood. Even his prose was written with the same ardour and reluctance, and aletter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, inanswer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in acontemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in itsstatement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:

 I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing, or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite deserted me. Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile. 

To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? Inthe case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of apoet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical ornarrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing inPatmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations. Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to himbut 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life, seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation sceneof a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blakeis 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam asa trick of genius. ' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind ofdelightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, asit might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but anecessary part of a very narrow and very intense nature. AlthoughPatmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on'Wagner, the musical impostor, ' or on 'the grinning woman, in everycanvas of Leonardo, ' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty, even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, hewas a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things withthat one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; allthought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of nointerest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetryneed concern itself about doing. 

In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition:

 That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work and probable means of working out my own salvation. 

In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in hislater, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, butwith 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'theburning heart of the universe, ' as he realises it. This conception oflove, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to soincalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man, throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete asatisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; hecame and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than anyone else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when theywere remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really everdid was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought toperfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to befine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw theseven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to bethe image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven. 

Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, andthe _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the firsteighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlestand most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In thisessay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yetis careful to define the 'rhyme royal, ' or stanza of seven ten-syllablelines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse, which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the mostdifficult to write well in. ' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaicand dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability tohandle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself inhis own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and makingthe best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less thanextraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but evenwithin those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanzaof eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he wasusually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eightsand sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of threelong lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, correspondswith this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which thisrearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb thebalance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writingquite such lines as:

 One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size, Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes. 

All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm, seems to have left him suddenly, without warning. 

And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre havinghad its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metreis still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of howliberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance ispurged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden ofprose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, hefinds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a developmentin metre so spiritually significant. 

In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter whichI have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between_The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the differencebetween what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetryalike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetryought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation, or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by thisnew conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, andnot only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fullyclothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gossestates was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley, but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of hisprefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond ofHawthornden. 

Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerableaffinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley isunusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the formof their odes. ' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said, If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most of his measures;

and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The differencebetween the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows thecontours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; inCowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need notsurprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verseof Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose. ' The fault ofhis own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. Thepauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pausefor breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; butthey _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of hisverse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as thecouplets of the _Davideis_. 

 Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form. 

Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy, ' at least in spirit, there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni ofPetrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform, length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangementwith every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the_Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for theirrefrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whateverfurther analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing andthat of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different. The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with thepoems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit ofmingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, likeGoethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregularlyrical verse. 

Patmore's endeavour, in _The Unknown Eros_, is certainly towards a formof _vers libre_, but it is directed only towards the variation of thenormal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time, ' andis therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when itceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free, ' as it is beingattempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, andthe disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, hasindeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the mostpart only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, ofall these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in themost monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the_Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman. Patmore realised that without lawthere can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of aharmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by avoluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discoveryof a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed fromhim all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds inthe handling of 'the accidents of civilised life, ' the unfortunate partof his subject-matter in _The Angel in the House_; it allowed him toabandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of thesame nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into theterms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yetflexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation ofdivine things. 

1906. 

SAROJINI NAIDU

It was at my persuasion that _The Golden Threshold_ was published. Theearliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writerwas seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, whenshe was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to thosetwo periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of theirown, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Yourletter made me very proud and very sad, ' she wrote. 'Is it possible thatI have written verses that are "filled with beauty, " and is it possiblethat you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You knowhow high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seemto be less than beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that Idesire. ' And, in another letter, she writes: 'I am not a poet really. Ihave the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write justone poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should beexultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and mysongs are as ephemeral. ' It is for this bird-like quality of song, itseems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort ofdelicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of awoman of the East, finding expression through a Western language andunder partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of thattemperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is anEastern magic in them. 

Sarojini Chattopâdhyây was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Herfather, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopâdhyây, is descended from the ancientfamily of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout EasternBengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of Yoga. He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburghin 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return toIndia he founded the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since labouredincessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education. 

Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taughtEnglish at an early age. 'I, ' she writes, 'was stubborn and refused tospeak it. So one day, when I was nine years old, my father punishedme--the only time I was ever punished--by shutting me in a room alonefor a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have neverspoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks tome in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to writepoetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamynature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientificcharacter. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or ascientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and alsofrom my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth), proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum inalgebra; it _wouldn't_ come right; but instead a whole poem came to mesuddenly. I wrote it down. 

'From that day my "poetic career" began. At thirteen I wrote a longpoem _à la_ "Lady of the Lake"--1300 lines in six days. At thirteen Iwrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that Ibegan on the spur of the moment, without forethought, just to spite mydoctor, who said I was very ill and must not touch a book. My healthbroke down permanently about this time, and, my regular studies beingstopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my readingwas done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fatvolumes of journals: I took myself very seriously in those days. '

Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr. Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old andhonourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused anequal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a specialscholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval oftravel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London, then, till her health again broke down, at Girton. She returned toHyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to thescandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr. Naidu. 'Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in theair, ' she wrote to me in 1904; 'and if the gods are kind I shall cast mysoul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind--andgrant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my lifeperfect, for the very "Spirit of Delight" that Shelley wrote of dwellsin my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden andchildren in the long-arched verandah. ' There are songs about thechildren in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun ofVictory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight. 

'My ancestors for thousands of years, ' I find written in one of herletters, 'have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, greatdreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamerhimself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificentfailure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whoselearning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men morebeloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and alaugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on twogreat objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courtsevery day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahsand beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixedup, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and daythe experiments are going on, and every man who brings a newprescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, theeternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse, " they arethe twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; andwhat in my father is the genius of curiosity--the very essence of allscientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do you rememberPater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire ofbeauty"?'

It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her 'nerves ofdelight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those whoknew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed toconcentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as thesunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one sawnothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses ofEastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hungstraight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spokelittle, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherevershe was, to be alone. 

Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. Andfirst there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one whoseemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as thischild of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troublesand agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comesearly; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. Butthere was something else, something hardly personal, something whichbelonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, beforewhich everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burntaway in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heartwithout conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart'sviolence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on hislotus-throne. 

And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there waswhat I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasuretransported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in aflower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found inthose things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age oftwelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoketo find herself famous throughout India. 'Honestly, ' she said to me, 'Iwas not pleased; such things did not appeal to me. ' But here, in aletter from Hyderabad, bidding one 'share a March morning' with her, there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: 'Come and sharemy exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold andsapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; thevoluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon thelanguid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little goldand blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy oflife in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent andunashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And, do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from myheart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnatemusic, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerialessence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me, " that part ofme that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little deliberately, triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and tissues thatsuffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twentyyears hence. '

Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and wasalways awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in exquisiteEnglish prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity ofemotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly, un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical senseof humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as thatenthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicatereserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. 'I have taught myself, 'she writes to me from India, 'to be commonplace and like everybody elsesuperficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so "brave, "all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows meonly as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed. " A tranquilchild!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too havelearnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it isa subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die. " I have gone through somany yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to itsfull the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure ofspeech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcelytwo months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to beanything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps mytemperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price. '

Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like thebirds, with a song in my heart. ' A spirit of too much fire in too fraila body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italyshe found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her lettersare radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold, ' she writes from Florence, 'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancingin weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold offireflies in the perfumed darkness--"aerial gold. " I long to catch thesubtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm likethe quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it notbe wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in myhair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gaveme a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfinspirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It isbecause I have a most "unbalanced intellect, " I suppose. ' Then, lookingout on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I amthat I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in thebeauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for thegods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousandyears ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one mightstill find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides ofFiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have foundthem sitting under the olives, in their grave, strong, antiquebeauty--Etruscan gods!'

In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs toattain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, whenone comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, andsees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramaticfaces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed andleft their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no, no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce thiscoloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time, her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at thewomen of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West, ' whom shesees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractivein their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of theirmanner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible, ' 'profound artistsin all the subtle intricacies of fascination, ' and asks if these'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are, to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them withamusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nicechild, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herselfsorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritualbeauty _if_ they are nothing more than they appear to be. '

She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passingbehind that face 'like an awakening soul, ' to use one of her ownepithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall throughthem into depths below depths. 

1905. 

WELSH POETRY

There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concernthemselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celticliterature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against thedespotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, andwhy the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate thatcould well have been chosen to express the character of a literaturewhich is above all things precise, concrete, definite. 

Lamartine, in the preface to the _Méditations_, describes thecharacteristics of Ossian, very justly, as _le vague, la rêverie, l'anéantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixé sur desapparitions confuses dans le lointain_; and it is those very qualities, still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, whichprove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless anddistant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vaguedreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere inthe _Black Book of Carmarthen_, in the _Book of Taliesin_, in the _RedBook of Hergest_, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, andconfusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the realmeaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who seesobscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the momentas representing the 'Celtic note, ' the quality which we find in the workof primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself, under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motionsof men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination, they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things, they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement, in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. Achief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is thestrength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous asthe fire through a chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire. The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire ofspring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault ofspotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; anonset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashenspears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and menin battle-array. ' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'wherethe ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair andclamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing, ' and theyknow all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the'delicate white body, ' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body, ' thatwill be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and theroots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth leftdesolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slenderbrambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, andturned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength andcourage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle. ' Women are knownchiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of heroes; rarely somuch esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'asoft herd. ' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculatinggenerosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and theflowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have thehaughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking, and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing, ' give rewards: 'I amTaliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet. '

And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definitething, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehendthe unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and isyounger and younger continually. ' He wonders where man is when he issleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He isastonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides, and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of thedregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for itspetulance and wonder and mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, orinterpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternalnumeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of thecompanies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';numbers that are 'clean and holy. ' And even in poems plainly Christianthere is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day ofjudgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or whenChrist, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet arestretched with extreme pain. 

It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives itsnote to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, thatthe crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all thebodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen thereis a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and theintolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, andinto that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos atAber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hearthem that will not hear them again!' the sound of the large wavegrating sullenly on the pebbles, --

 The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet: Clear is the sky; large the wave: The heart is palsied with longing:

all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and wave and leaves andthe song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the sameheart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will notundo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note. ''I love the strand, but I hate the sea, ' says the _Black Book ofCarmarthen_, and in all these poems we find a more than mediæval hatredof winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in theLatin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age andsickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are ablind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old aschaos, out of which the world was made. 

Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise ofslaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of a gentlebeauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness inthe tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Songof Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness ofsea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it isgreen, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word thatutters the Trinity. ' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing, ' saysTaliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire andearth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind. ' Andtouches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragicalplaces, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that songof battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I havebeen wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needlessnow for darkness and spirits to lead me astray. ' The same sense of thebeauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysteriousriddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which childrensay to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear inthe air, I have been the dullest of stars; I was made of the flower ofnettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, Islept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was aherdsman. '

And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look atOssian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows, ' whichseemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning ofSaturday, ' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a greatbattle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about. And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'Ihave been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, andfrom the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It ishuman emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death, of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personalmeaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every agebecomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'Iam alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said inthe face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet leaves you withhis thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so largeand remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionatelyfelt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature, with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way oftrusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. Hesays, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a greatway, ' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynonrushed forward with the green dawn, ' it is not what we call a figure ofspeech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. Moredefinite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotionthan most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, inanother sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What hedesired in his mind he had from the world. '

1898. 

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