.J I
^A ^00 k of Essays
By
G.K.CHESTERTON
LONDON
1910
OiVT SHILLING NET
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GEORGE BERNARD RUST
YOU ARE WELCOME TO BORROW IT
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Twelve Types
By G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
1910
Fifth Impression
These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with the kind permission of the Editors of The Daily News and The Speaker.
G. K. C.
Kensington.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2007 with funding from
IVIicrosoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/12typesch00chesuoft
CONTENTS
FAGB
Charlotte BRONTfi ivol<3rci dfc cidf
William Morris and his School . . 15 2. tube The Optimism of Byron .... 31 pessimists* f^^ Pope and the Art of Satire ... 45 <ibrkltj wtsc
Francis r . dg^^ort \\ asecll
Rostand ypou »or»t l«s aJ'J'
Charles II. .,,.,. 93
Stevenson ...•.,, 107 not ml'enieJiU
Thomas Carlyle l2o^triottSTi>;^^
Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity . I39^«»e W ^l'^*'
Savonarola 167
The Position of Sir Walter Scott . i79Dl*n<5®vw^
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man the precise points which are unim- portant. It reveals and asserts and insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly uncon- scious ; his exact class in society, the cir- cumstances of his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which do not, properly speaking, ever
A 1
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
arise before the human vision. They do not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these are not sanctities ; they are irrelevancies.
A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontes. The Bronte is in the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of col- lecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights and sticks and straws which will go to make a Bronte museum. They are the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and pictur- esque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontes. For the Bronte genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme unimport- ance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a * bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities in- side a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of merino and the soul of flame. It is signi- ficant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole
4:
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
of the interior might be made sublime. She chose the ughest of women in the ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens of Dante. It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately- said that the externals of the Brontes* life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a ship- wreck or been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them. But
the whole aim and purport and meaning
6
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
of the work of the Brontes is that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story as *Jane Eyre' is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so prim- evally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. * Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to some- thing resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to
be found in any other branch of art, except
6
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
at the end of the pantomime, where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, *Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the in- destructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and im- probable than *Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than ' Wuthering Heights.' It would not matter if George Read stood on his head,
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Bronte character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except the essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on his arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right place.
The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly edu- cated, hampered by a humiliating inex- perience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of humanity to sup- pose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening and having a box at the theatre every first night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure ; it is not the man of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit him, whose gloves will not go on, whose com- pliments will not come off, who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He
is frightened enough of society actually to
9
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of fear which is one of the eternal ingredi- ents of joy. This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more commerce with the awful and ele- mental forces which drive the world than a legion of lawless minor poets. She ap- proached the universe with real simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she
had possessed herself of the only force
10
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure.
Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the dark wild youth of the Brontes in their dark wild Yorkshire home has been somewhat ex- aggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions, emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the spring- tide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace,
in which there was, under whatever im-
11
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
becile forms, all the deadly stress and panic of * Wuthering Heights.' Every one of us has had a day-dream of our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than *Jane Eyre.' And the truth which the Brontes came to tell us is the truth that many waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found any ex- pression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But
12
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
out of all these silent ones one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her name was Charlotte Bronte. Spreading around us upon every side to-day like a huge and radiating geo- metrical figure are the endless branches of the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each
of these houses stands in the centre of the
13
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to some one at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel.
14
WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL
It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of WiUiam Morris should approxi- mate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of genius in the Vic- torian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in
common necessities of workmanship which
15
WILLIAM MORRIS
gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when it was con- ceived to be irrelevant to describe William Morris as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become gradu- ally and painfully conscious of an improve- ment in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock- coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes grad- ually approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus ; as an ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern,
fit to be the nails of the Cross.
16
AND HIS SCHOOL
The limitations of William Morris, what- ever they were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the un- nameable terrors, and the yet more unname- able hopes. So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chest- nut colour of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would B 17
WILLIAM MORRIS
be serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a de- corative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely coloured cardboard.
But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of human nature — took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere aesthete. He perceived a great public necessity and ful- filled it heroically. The difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing.
He felt that it was monstrous that the
18
AND HIS SCHOOL
modern man, who was pre-eminently cap- able of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the cling- ing curse of ugliness which blights every- thing brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and thick- ness just neutralising each other ; its colour
19
WILLIAM MORRIS
is the most repulsive of colours — a fat and
soulless red, a red without a touch of blood
or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins.
Yet there is no reason whatever why such
hideousness should possess an object full
of civic dignity, the treasure-house of a
thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand
souls. If the old Greeks had had such an
institution, we may be sure that it would
have been surmounted by the severe, but
graceful, figure of the god of letter- writing.
If the mediaeval Christians had possessed
it, it would have had a niche filled with
the golden aureole of St Rowland of the
Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands
at all our street-corners, disguising one of
the most beautiful of ideas under one of
the most preposterous of forms. It is
useless to deny that the miracles of science
20
AND HIS SCHOOL
have not been such an incentive to art
and imagination as were the miracles of
reUgion. If men in the twelfth century
had been told that the lightning had been
driven for leagues underground, and had
dragged at its destroying tail loads of
laughing human beings, and if they had
then been told that the people alluded to .
this pulverising potent chirpily as * The T 7
Twopenny Tube,' they would have called /
down the fire of Heaven on us as a race
of half-witted atheists. Probably they
would have been quite right.
This clear and fine perception of what
may be called the aesthetic element in
the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the
work of a great reformer; it requires a
fine effort of the imagination to see an
evil that surrounds us on every side. The
21
WILLIAM MORRIS
manner in which Morris carried out his
crusade may, considering the circumstances,
be called triumphant. Our carpets began
to bloom under our feet Uke the meadows
in spring, and our hitherto prosaic stools
and sofas seemed growing legs and arms
at their own wild will. An element of
freedom and rugged dignity came in with
plain and strong ornaments of copper and
iron. So delicate and universal has been
the revolution in domestic art that almost
every family in England has had its taste
cunningly and treacherously improved, and
if we look back at the early Victorian
drawing-rooms it is only to realise the
strange but essential truth that art, or
human decoration, has, nine times out of
ten in history, made things uglier than
they were before, from the 'coiiFure' of a
22
AND HIS SCHOOL
Papuan savage to the wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.
But great and beneficent as was the fiesthetic revolution of Morris, there was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses of modern ladies, ' upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped like women,' as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold, up for practical imitation the costumes and handi- crafts of the Middle Ages. Further than this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil quali- ties, but there was at least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give.
WILLIAM MORRIS
They would have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an aesthetic blue, after the cus- tom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no sub- stitute or satisfaction to turn life into an
interminable historical fancy-dress ball.
24
AND HIS SCHOOL
But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We may best suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy- tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant ; but it is not such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of lies ; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us
that of all the fairy-tales none contains so
25
WILLIAM MORRIS
vital a moral truth as the old story, exist- ing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he hated modern life, instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet can love this fabulous mon- ster as he is, can feel with some generous excitement his massive and mysterious * joie- de-vivre,' the vast scale of his iron anatomy
and the beating of his thunderous heart,
26
AND HIS SCHOOL
he cannot and will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvan- tage was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal in- fluence in the aesthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions, which are steeped in his per- sonality like a chapel in that of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these aesthetic shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things that are so touched are the
ancient things, the things that always to
27
WILLIAM MORRIS
some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs, beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful. There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter - boxes, beautiful engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And this was because, with all his healthi- ness and energy, he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.
But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great reformer : that he left his work incomplete. There is,
perhaps, no better proof that a man is a
28
AND HIS SCHOOL
mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures em- blematical of the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State. Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and genuine move- ment of our time towards beauty — not
29
WILLIAM MORRIS
backwards, but forwards — does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, crafts- man in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and proved that this painful green- ish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the grey- ness of dawn.
ao
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
Everything is against our appreciating
the spirit and the age of Byron. The
age that has just passed from us is always
like a dream when we wake in the
morning, a thing incredible and centuries
away. And the world of Byron seems a
sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman
world, where men were romantic in whiskers,
ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and
the very word has the sound of a piece
of stage scenery. Roses and nightingales
recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The
31
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word 'artificial.' Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-consciousness : as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.
The remarkable fact is, however, and it 32
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
bears strongly on the present position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of this : a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equa- torial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature ; silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe
that they are toys out of a child's play-box, 0 33
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
artificially carved and artificially coloured.
So it is with the great convulsion of Nature
which was known as Byronism. The volcano
is not an extinct volcano now ; it is the
dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.
But Byron and Byronism were something
immeasurably greater than anything that is
represented by such a view as this: their
real value and meaning are indeed little
understood. The first of the mistakes
about Byron lies in the fact that he is
treated as a pessimist. True, he treated
himself as such, but a critic can hardly
have even a slight knowledge of Byron
without knowing that he had the smallest
amount of knowledge of himself that ever
fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The
real character of what is known as Byron's
34
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
pessimism is better worth study than any real pessimism could ever be.
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost every- thing in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.
One after another almost every one of
the phenomena of the universe has been
declared to be alone capable of making
life worth living. Books, love, business,
religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private
emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard
work, a life close to nature, a life close to
Belgrave Square are every one of them
passionately maintained by somebody to
be so good that they redeem the evil of
an otherwise indefensible world. Thus
while the world is almost always condemned
35
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
in summary, it is always justified, and in- deed extolled, in detail after detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously among them. Schopen- hauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working depart- ment and eulogises a life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Crea- tion, his one pang of joy in the achievement
joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with
36
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.
Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored by an over- whelming majority, almost every individual of which despised the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated pessimism is an oddity ; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than they would light bonfires
for the arrival of cholera or dance a break-
37
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
down when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about some- thing even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was to them
what talk and fashion were to Carlyle,
38
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seri- ously that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shatter- ing sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melan- choly of the older earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very
young and very happy. There is a certain
39
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impos- sibly red ; the sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronie school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr Aubrey Beardsley's alle- gorical designs. Here we have to deal
40
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
with a pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pes- simism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity ; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has posi- tively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere ; in their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were his frivolous
moments. He went on year after year
41
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
calling down fire upon mankind, summon- ing the deluge and the destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub- conscious mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote 'Don Juan ' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilari- ous laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody.
And all the time that Byron's language
42
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a
bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may arraign
existence on the most deadly charges, he
may condemn it with the most desolating
verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that
on some walk in a spring morning when
all the limbs are swinging and all the
blood alive in the body, the lips may be
caught repeating :
* Oh, there's not a joy the world can give
like that it takes away,
When the glow of early youth declines
in beauty's dull decay ; 'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush
that fades so fast. But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.' That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.
43
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident, and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional arti- fices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard, political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of that buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass
of a meadow or the spears of the enemy.
4A
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes, one may justifiably answer by asking anyone to try. It may be easier really to have wit, than really, in the bold- est and most enduring sense, to have im- agination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge
in a sham rhapsody, because it may be
45
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintel- ligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet: he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjurer. Therefore, it may be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's
46
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
' Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,' the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man?
* A being darkly wise and rudely great.' Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than that old anti- thetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more pro- found. The one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing
*A being darkly wise and rudely great,'
the contemporary poet, in his elaborately
47
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
ornamented book of verses, would produce something like the following : — * A creature Of feature More dark, more dark, more dark than
skies, Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise : Darkly wise as a formless fate And if he be great If he be great, then rudely great. Rudely great as a plough that plies. And darkly wise, and darkly wise.' Have we really learnt to think more broadly ? Or have we only learnt to spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet might manu- facture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time
48
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
that the very antithesis of the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of divin- ity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we cannot imagine courage existing except in con- junction with fear, or magnanimity existing D 49
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
except in conjunction with some temptation to meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses were fully in harmony with ex- istence, which is itself a contradiction in terms.
Pope was really a great poet ; he was the last great poet of civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental. But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting ex- periment. Its perruques and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea Islander — the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he
was supreme. In one especially he was
50
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
supreme — the great and civilised art of satire. And in this we have fallen away utterly.
We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and hostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of furious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them. It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy, though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And yet, despite all this, these people pro- duce no satire. Political and social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.
It may seem a singular observation to
say that we are not generous enough to
write great satire. This, however, is ap-
51
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
proximately a very accurate way of de- scribing the case. To write great satire, to attack a man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only another way of putting the simple truth that in ordei* to attack an army we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points. England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a people by
ignoring all the particular merits which
52
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
give them a chance of trampling upon us.
It has become a breach of etiquette to
praise the enemy ; whereas when the enemy
is strong every honest scout ought to praise
the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish
an army without having a full account of
its strength. It is impossible to satirise a
man without having a full account of his
virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as
utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his
country, as utterly cynical, which no man
ever was since the beginning of the world.
This kind of invective may often have
a great superficial success : it may hit
the mood of the moment; it may raise
excitement and applause; it may impress
millions. But there is one man among
all those millions whom it does not impress,
53
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
whom it hardly even touches ; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous and re- vengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours of decent work and responsi- bility as any other ordinary man. But behind all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul : behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of
54
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
revenge. It is to these that satire should
reach if it is to touch the man at whom it
is aimed. And to reach these it must pass
and salute a whole army of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
for example, we find that they had this
rough but firm grasp of the size and
strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing
Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and
spirited account of the insane valour and
inspired cunning of the
* daring pilot in extremity,'
who was more untrustworthy in calm than
in storm, and
* Steered too near the rocks to boast
his wit.'
The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and
55
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
picturesque version of the great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill, both Liberal and Con- servative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly, as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross faults, a certain coarse- ness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But he was
a much larger man than satire depicted
56
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
him, and therefore the satire could not and did not overwhehn him. And here we have the cause of the faihire of contem- porary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to be told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be con- tent with nothing except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly stupid — that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If we take any prominent politician of the day — such, for example, as Sir William Harcourt — we shall find that this is the point in which all party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent
57
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
that he is inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and disgrace- ful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we all know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not inept, but is almost the ablest Par- liamentarian now alive. Everyone knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagon- ists. Everyone knows that he is not un- trustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel,
but not at the satire ; for a man is angry
58
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
at a libel because it is false, but at a satire
because it is true.
Mr Henley and his young men are very
fond of invective and satire : if they wish
to know the reason of their failure in these
things, they need only turn to the opening
of Pope's superb attack upon Addison.
The Henleyite's idea of satirising a man
is to express a violent contempt for him,
and by the heat of this to persuade others
and himself that the man is contemptible.
I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr
Gladstone by one of the young anarchic
Tories, which began by asserting that Mr
Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If
these people would, as I have said, go
quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they
would see how a great satirist approaches
a great enemy :
59
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
* Peace to all such ! But were there one whose fires True genius kindles, and fair fame in- spires, Blest with each talent, and each art to
please. And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
Should such a man '
And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in Pope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He said what was really wrong
with Addison ; and in calm and clear and
60
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary temperament : ' Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous
eyes. And hate for arts that caused himself to
rise. • •••••
Like Cato give his little Senate laws. And sit attentive to his own applause. While wits and templars every sentence
raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise.' This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it aims. It is pene- trated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is addressed directly to a man. This
is no mock-tournament to gain the applause
61
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.
In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his merits, we cannot even hurt him.
62
FRANCIS
Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to misunder- stand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joy ful- ness of the one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined to religious asceticism: there is scientific as- ceticism which asserts that truth is alone satisfying : there is aesthetic asceticism which asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which asserts that
love is alone satisfying. There is even
63
FRANCIS
epicurean asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying. Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that *love is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art, science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves, walking - sticks, door- knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar Khayyam says: * A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow. 64
FRANCIS
It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more. The same thing was done by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, of course, be multiplied a hundred -fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that ' From quiet home and first beginning Out to the undiscovered ends —
There's nothing worth the wear of winning .But laughter and the love of friends.' Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true joy ex- presses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if in any case it should happen that
a class or a generation lose the sense of
the peculiar kind of joy which is being E 65
FRANCIS
Celebrated, they immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and self- destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called the monks melan- choly because they denied themselves the pleasures of liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is, however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if science should supply some new and non-competi- tive manner of perfecting the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute contempt and indifference to- wards the feeling called sport, then it is
66
FRANCIS
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained themselves and killed them- selves through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only : we do feel
FRANCIS
the love of sport ; we do not feel the love
of religious offices. We see only the price
in the one case and only the purchase in
the other.
The only question that remains is what
was the joy of the old Christian ascetics
of which their asceticism was merely the
purchasing price. The mere possibility of
the query is an extraordinary example of
the way in which we miss the main points
of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details
and not the vast and dominant features.
We look at the rise of Christianity, and
conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation and
almost of pessimism. It does not occur to
us that the mere assertion that this raging
and confounding universe is governed by
justice and mercy is a piece of staggering
68
FRANCIS
optimism fit to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enj oy ment. The white daylight shone over all the world, the end- less forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that the ascetics were pessimists be- cause they gave up threescore years and
FRANCIS
ten for an eternity of happiness. We for- get that the bare proposition of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thou- sand times more optimistic than ten thou- sand pagan saturnaUas.
Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this out ; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quan- tities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line.
This blaze of benediction, this conflict
70
FRANCIS
between lights, has its place in poetry, not in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one, perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was ; we suspect that one of the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast practi- cal work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this amazingly unworldly and almost maddening simple-minded infant was one of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of
71
FRANCIS
such men is their profound belief in them- selves, and this is true, but not all the truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons. Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It was an innocent
habit, and doubtless the robbers often ' got
72
FRANCIS
round him,' as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had *got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret nobility.
Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admir- able sketch of the history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichsean ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason that not being an outsider
he does not find it a problem at all.
73
FRANCIS
To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mounte- banks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger : he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities ; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their
most congenial atmosphere in these awful
74
FRANCIS
renunciations? Why did he who loved
where all men were blind, seek to blind
himself where all men loved? Why was
he a monk, and not a troubadour ? These
questions are far too large to be answered
fully here, but in any life of Francis they
ought at least to have been asked ; we have
a suspicion that if they were answered we
should suddenly find that much of the
enigma of this sullen time of ours was
answered also. So it was with the monks.
The two great parties in human affairs are ,
only the party which sees life black against
white, and the party which sees it white
against black, the party which macerates
and blackens itself with sacrifice because
the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns
itself with flowers and lights itself with
75
FRANCIS
bridal torches because it stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were [the spend- thrifts of happiness, and we who are its misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Ad- derley's book, the clear and tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire * brother,' and the water * sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the amazingly minute and graphic dramatisa- tion of the life, disappointments and ex- cuses of any shrub or beast that he
76
FRANCIS
happened to be addressing, his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the weakness of Bums' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and more transparent life.
The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a kind of terrible common-sense. The famous re- mark of the Caterpillar in * Alice in Won- derland ' — * Why not ? ' impresses us as his general motto. He could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of that
innocent stare. His questions were blasting
77
FRANCIS
and devastating, like the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it the features of a new friend.
78
ROSTAND
When * Cyrano de Bergerac ' was published, it bore the subordinate title of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power of a man's spirit might pos- sibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; neverthe-
79
ROSTAND
less, almost all the primitive legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of the mon- ster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself with a hyper-eesthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to the in- fluence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for 'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school which
pays most attention to the technical nice-
80
ROSTAND
ties of art is a view which renders such
an idea as that of heroic comedy quite
impossible. The fundamental conception in
the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, ' par excellence,'
a fragile thing. It is conceived to be a
conventional world of the most absolutely
delicate and gimcrack description. Such
stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's * Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would
vanish or fall into utter nonsense if viewed
by one single degree too seriously. But
great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare
or Sterne, not only can be, but must be,
taken seriously. There is nothing to which
a man must give himself up with more
faith and self-abandonment than to genuine
laughter. In such comedies one laughs
with the heroes and not at them. The F 81
ROSTAND
humour which steeps the stories of Fal- stafF and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she named it, with a thinly-disguised con- tempt for her own work, 'A Sentimental Comedy.' The ground of this conception of the artificiality of comedy is a pro- found pessimism. Life in the eyes of these
82
ROSTAND
mournful buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over the eternal waters of bitterness.
* Cyrano de Bergerac ' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth, that merri- ment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant elo- quence, the Rabelaisian puns and digres- sions were seen to be once more what they had been in Rabelais, the mere out- bursts of a human sympathy and bravado as old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong and
haughty as its will. All was expressed in
83
ROSTAND
the words of Cyrano at his highest moment of happiness. 'II me faut des geants.' An essential aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the dramatic reahst as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party playing * bouts rim^s.* In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and con- venient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the fact that few
persons, if any, to-day understand what is
84
ROSTAND
meant by a poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far more con- ceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in sup-
85
ROSTAND
posing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in love they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepre- sent the speech one half so much, as the
ROSTAND
speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called ' Cyrano de Ber- gerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends with disappoint- ment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeter- linck. The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of ^L'Aiglon.' Although the hero is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a personal disillusion- ment, yet, in spite of this theme, which
87
t /
ROSTAND
might have been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable psean of the praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Ou, ou sont les aigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an in- vocation at the beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy.
ROSTAND
When an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the Emperor he replies, *La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the Great Army- rushes forward, and crying passionately, * Et nous ? ' pours out a terrible descrip- tion of the life lived by the common soldier. To-day when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might surely come a cry from the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning * et nous?' It is this potentiality for enthu- siasm among the mass of men that makes the function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's *Much Ado about Nothing * is a great comedy, because
ROSTAND
behind it is the whole pressure of that
love of love which is the youth of the
world, which is common to all the young,
especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. ' Love's Labour's
Lost' is filled with the same energy, and
there it falls even more definitely into
the scope of our subject since it is a
comedy in rhyme in which all men speak
lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in
pairing time. What the love of love is to
the Shakespearian comedies, that other and
more mysterious human passion, the love of
death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall
ever have in England a new tradition of
poetic comedy it is difficult at present to
say, but we shall assuredly never have it
until we realise that comedy is built upon
everlasting foundations in the nature of
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things, that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final word, they all cry to- gether, 'Vive TEmpereur ! ' Monsieur Ros- tand, perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing but the voices of pain ; the whole is one phono- graph of horror. It is right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them should be silenced ; but these
cries of distress are not in life as they are
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in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not the voice of man. When questioned finally and seri- ously as to their conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, *Vive TEmpereur.'
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CHARLES II
There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II., one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very satisfying ; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scep- ticism both in its advantages and disad- vantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. There is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a mistake;
the true sceptic has nothing to do with
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CHARLES II
these theories simply because they are
theories. The true sceptic is as much a
spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks
that the savage dancing round an African
idol stands quite as good a chance of being
right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism
is every bit as rational as rationalism. He
has indeed the most profound doubts as
to whether St Matthew wrote his own
gospel. But he has quite equally profound
doubts as to whether the tree he is looking
at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.
This is the real meaning of that mystery
which appears so prominently in the lives
of great sceptics, which appears with special
prominence in the life of Charles II. I
mean their constant oscillation between
atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman
Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed
94
CHARLES II
and formidable system, but so is atheism.
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all
dogmas, more daring than the vision of a
palpable day of judgment. For it is the
assertion of a universal negative; for a
man to say that there is no God in the
universe is like saying that there are no
insects in any of the stars.
Thus it was with that wholesome and
systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the
forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as
a philosopher. The wafer might not be
God ; similarly it might not be a wafer.
To the genuine and poetical sceptic the
whole world is incredible, with its bulbous
mountains and its fantastic trees. The
whole order of things is as outrageous as
95
CHARLES II
any miracle which could presume to violate
it. Transubstantiation might be a dream,
but if it was, it was assuredly a dream
within a dream. Charles II. sought to
guard himself against hell fire because he
could not think hell itself more fantastic
than the world as it was revealed by science.
The priest crept up the staircase, the doors
were closed, the few of the faithful who
were present hushed themselves respectfully,
and so, with every circumstance of secrecy
and sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the
prayers poured out, was consummated the
last great act of logical unbelief.
The problem of Charles II. consists in
this, that he has scarcely a moral virtue to
his name, and yet he attracts us morally.
We feel that some of the virtues have
been dropped out in the lists made by all
96
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the saints and sages, and that Charles II.
was pre-eminently successful in these wild
and unmentionable virtues. The real truth
of this matter and the real relation of
Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth
somewhat more exhaustive study.
It is a commonplace that the Restoration
movement can only be understood when
considered as a reaction against Puritanism.
But it is insufficiently realised that the
tyranny which half frustrated all the good
work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar
kind. It was not the fire of Puritanism,
the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of
a restraint, which passed away; that still
burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea.
But it is seldom remembered that the
Puritans were in their day emphatically G 97
CHARLES II
intellectual bullies, that they relied swagger- ingly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force ; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of * touching ' sl man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies
CHARLES II
of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire ; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.
When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost tempera- mental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which
CHARLES II
Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and nowhere de- fined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of politeness. There was some moral and social value in
his perfection in little things. He could
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CHARLES II
not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is con- nected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous poUteness, of a kind of dramatic dehcacy, which lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. * Charles II.,' said Thackeray, with un- erring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.
So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was the
revolt of something human, if only the 101
CHARLES II
debris of human nature. But more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength. That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it overstrained the soul by stretch- ing it to the height of an almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Re- storation infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been widely assumed, the most
immoral epoch of our history. Its vices
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CHARLES II
cannot compare for a moment in this re- spect with the monstrous tragedies and almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But the dram- drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolejit for great morality, it was too indolent even for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game of lawn tennis. It would
have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite 103
CHARLES II
as arduous to write ' Paradise Lost ' as to regain Paradise.
All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which, though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly significant as the phrase ' killing time.' It is a tremendous and poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on the earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuber- ance, fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place among the
great representatives of the joy of life, for
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CHARLES II
they belonged to those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher epicureans who make time live.
Of a people in this temper Charles II, was the natural and rightful head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless flaneur that he has been repre- sented. He was a patient and cunning politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism, it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and
the age. Despotism is the easiest of
105
CHARLES II
all governments, at any rate for the governed.
It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave. Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.
Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were, like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality broods over the period. Dis- tracted as we are with civic mysteries and problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than their laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty.
106
STEVENSON *
A RECENT incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed, from the scorn of * Ephemera Critica ' and Mr George Moore, that Stevenson had the first essential quali- fication of a great man : that of being mis- understood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto k Windus have issued, in the same binding as Steven- son's works, * Robert Louis Stevenson,' by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he
♦ * Robert Louis Stevenson : A Life Study in Criticism.* By H. Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.
107
STEVENSON
has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by his admirers. Mr Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially ' Beau Austin,' is remark- ably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame with de- cision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very thing that Stevenson nearly
killed himself to express.
108
STEVENSON
Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his * pessimism ' ; surely a strange charge against the man who has done more than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But he complains that, in * The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was one point that Stevenson more constantly and pas- sionately emphasised than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space and time. * Whatever we are intended to do,' he said, *we are not intended to succeed.' That the stars in their courses fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a
forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that
109
STEVENSON
through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old church and see none in the ruins of a man. The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood and spoil ; he appears to think that they prove Steven- son to have had (we use Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He (Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be better employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon might as well say that Dr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes,
that Mr Clark Russell is a notorious pirate,
110
STEVENSON
and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and falsifying mar- riage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this error : few people have under- stood properly the goriness of Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially the robust school- boy who draws skeletons and gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.
Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of
view. The point of view of the man 111
STEVENSON
pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly
that he understood in such stories as ' The
Master of Ballantrae' and *Weir of Her-
miston.' But there is another view of the
matter — that in which the whole act is an
abrupt and brilliant explosion of bodily
vitality, like breaking a rock with a blow
of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred
gate. This is the standpoint of romance,
and it is the soul of ' Treasure Island ' and
*The Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that
Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved
clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth,
in the devouring universalism of his soul,
a positive love for inanimate objects such
as has not been known since St Francis
called the sun brother and the well sister.
We feel that he was actully in love with
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STEVENSON
the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunhght, with the box that Billy Bones left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with the knife that Wicks drove through his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with an axe.
Stevenson's new biographer, ^ however, cannot make any allowance for this deep- rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, * The Destroying Angel,' in * The Dynamiter,' that it is ' highly fantastic and putting a strain on our credulity.' This is rather like describing the travels of Baron Munchausen as ' unconvincing.' The H 113
STEVENSON
whole story of * The Dynamiter ' is a kind
of humorous nightmare, and even in that
story *The Destroying Angel' is supposed
to be an extravagant lie made up on the
spur of the moment. It is a dream within
a dream, and to accuse it of improbability
is like accusing the sky of being blue. But
Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading
or natural difference of taste, cannot in the
least comprehend the rich and romantic
irony of Stevenson's London stories. He
actually says of that portentous monument
of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia,
that, * though evidently admired by his
creator, he is to me on the whole rather
an irritating presence.' From this we are
almost driven to believe (though desperately
and against our will) that Mr Baildon thinks
that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously,
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STEVENSON
as if he were a man in real life. For our- selves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite character in fiction ; but we willingly add the proviso that if we met him in real life we should kill him.
The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one addi- tional virtue — that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy- book hand that everyone supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well enough,
but by doing every department too well. 115
STEVENSON
As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is called an Admir- able Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has happened in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,' 'The Master of Ballantrae,' *The Child's Garden of Verses,' and * Across the Plains ' had been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by succeeding
in the proverbial miracle of being in five
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STEVENSON
places at once, he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as that of James Watt.
The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important than mere occur- rences: that one was the soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may
know as a mere fact that no one has been 117
STEVENSON
through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adven- tures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this is the reason for his wide diversities of nar- rative: he had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge *The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr George Moore by 118
STEVENSON
* Esther Waters.' These novels were only the two or three of his souFs adventures that he happened to tell. But he died with a thousand stories in his heart.
119
THOMAS CARLYLE
There are two main moral necessities for
the work of a great man: the first is that
he should believe in the truth of his
message ; the second is that he should
believe in the acceptability of his message.
It was the whole tragedy of Carlyle that
he had the first and not the second.
The ordinary capital, however, which is
made out of Carlyle's alleged gloom is a
very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults,
both as a man and as a writer, but the
attempt to explain his gospel in terms of
his ' liver ' is merely pitiful. If indigestion
120
THOMAS CARLYLE
invariably resulted in a 'Sartor Resartus,'
it would be a vastly more tolerable thing
than it is. Diseases do not turn into
poems ; even the decadent really writes
with the healthy part of his organism.
If Carlyle's private faults and literary
virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he
is only in the situation of every man ; for
every one of us it is surely very difficult
to say precisely where our honest opinions
end and our personal predilections begin.
But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as
a mere savage egotist cannot arise from
anything but a pure inabiUty to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. *Ruskin,' says a critic,
' did, all the same, verily believe in God ;
Carlyle believed only in himself.' This
is certainly a distinction between the author
he has understood and the author he has
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THOMAS CARLYLE
not understood. Carlyle believed in him self, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did ; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves ; they failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his message ; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis, Bunyan, Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear and without condescension. It was this sim- plicity of confidence, not only in God,
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THOMAS CARLYLE
but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.
But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos is Uke that of a Hebrew prophet ; and it has the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets — humour. A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggest- ing a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half- converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mam- moth, that the irony of its contact with
trivial and fleeting matters struck them
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THOMAS CARLYLE
like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His
supreme contribution, both to philosophy
and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm
of eternity. Other writers had seen the
hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone
saw the humour of them. Other writers
had seen that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a song or statute,
he alone saw that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a joke. No one
who ever read it will forget the passage,
full of dark and agnostic gratification, in
which he narrates that some Court chronicler
described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in
the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did
fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night,
under what keeping we ask not, he at
least will never, through unending ages,
insult the face of the sun any more . . .
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THOMAS CARLYLE
and we go on, if not to better forms of
beastliness, at least to fresher ones.'
The supreme value of Carlyle to English
literature was that he was the founder of
modern irrationalism ; a movement fully
as important as modern rationalism. A
great deal is said in these days about
the value or valuelessness of logic. In
the main, indeed, logic is not a productive
tool so much as a weapon for defence. A
man building up an intellectual system has
to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in
one hand and the trowel in the other. The
imagination, the constructive quality, is the
trowel, and argument is the sword. A
wide experience of actual intellectual affairs
will lead most people to the conclusion
that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon
wherewith to exterminate logicians. 125
THOMAS CARLYLE
But though this may be true enough in
practice, it scarcely clears up the position
of logic in human affairs. Logic is a
machine of the mind, and if it is used
honestly it ought to bring out an honest
conclusion. When people say that you
can prove anything by logic, they are not
using words in a fair sense. What they
mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude
of the soul of man there is an extraordinary
tendency to use the name for an organ,
when what is meant is the abuse or decay
of that organ. Thus we speak of a man
suffering from 'nerves,' which is about as
sensible as talking about a man suffering
from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver'
and 'digestion' when we mean the failure
of liver and the absence of digestion. And
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THOMAS CARLYLE
in the same manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the danger of fallacy.
But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and some- what different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all. Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to forget that there are two parts of a logical process — the first the choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it ; and humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound assumption. It is
astonishing how constantly one may hear 127
THOMAS CARLYLE
from rational and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as *He did not prove the very thing with which he started,' or ' The whole of his case rested upon a pure assumption/ two peculiarities which may be found by the curious in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how con- stantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without troub- ling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a man's assump- tion. For instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies
and no prejudices, while the nationalist
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THOMAS CARLYLE
denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has prefer- ences, as a bird has feathers.
Thus it was with Carlyle : he startled men by attacking not arguments but as- sumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the nine- teenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the age
of reason based itself. He denied the I 129
THOMAS CARLYLE
theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century according to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to be.
He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.
Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a
mystic, and mysticism was with him, as
with all its genuine professors, only a tran-
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scendent form of common-sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally de- monstrated or even formally named. Mys- ticism and common-sense are alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in breaking through formulae, old and new, to these old and silent and ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times over, he maintained/ they could not alter the fact that every man and woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness, it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. 131
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About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some questions, but he is never in- humane about hero worship. His view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided and driven ; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the mean- est have it in them to love a leader more 132
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than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Chris- tianity. Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emo- tional worship of valour and success ; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of all healthy children. Where Carlyle
really did harm was in the fact that he,
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THOMAS CARLYLE
more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that modern habit of what is vulgarly called * Going the whole hog.* Often in matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse
134:
THOMAS CARLYLE
him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of the wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donny- brook Fair. It was this species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle's defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing in the world to do with aris- tocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and
all its thoughtful defenders have made for 135
THOMAS CARLYLE
aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak ; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly beUeved he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a child — for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contra- diction to that human spirituality in which Carlyle believed, that a man should be
owned like a tool for someone else's good, as
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if he had no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, *the whole hog/ more than once led him. In this respect Carlyle has had unques- tionably long and an unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example. Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern times the supreme maniac of this moon- struck consistency. Though Nietzsche and
Carlyle were in reality profoundly different,
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Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces im- morality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience ; he struggles as a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at last.
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TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution, who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peas- antry for the enormous expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the necessary out- come of all our systems and speculations
and of our deep and continuous contem-
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plation of things. For the universe is like everything in it ; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things : it is as if we gazed long at a design full of dis- connected objects, and, suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and staring face.
Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are upon this road towards simplification. Each
system seeks to be more fundamental than
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the other ; each seeks, in the literal sense, to undermine the other. In art, for ex- ample, the old conception of man, classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist, who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more
roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return 141
TOLSTOY AND THE
to nature. Some think that the return to nature consists in drinking no wine ; some think that it consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into ploughshares ; some think it is achieved by turning plough- shares into very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is interesting
when we consider that they require huge 142
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
volumes of paradoxical argument to per- suade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he can reject. Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but character- istic qualities of a tail that it should hang 143
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behind. It is impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if attached to any other part of the ana- tomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature, especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a blas- phemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search of nature when seen from the outside looks Very like the gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, ex- hibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think that she is heeding us least. *Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,' said the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a man's back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a cer- tain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on com- plexity ; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal
of the pomp and sumptuousness of the K 145
TOLSTOY AND THE
world's history was simple in the truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness ; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.
*King Solomon brought merchant men Because of his desire With peacocks, apes and ivory, From Tarshish unto Tyre.'
But this proceeding was not a part of the
wisdom of Solomon ; it was a part of his
folly — I had almost said of his innocence,
Tolstoy, we feel, would not be content
with hurling satire and denunciation at
'Solomon in all his glory.' With fierce
and unimpeachable logic he would go a
step further. He would spend days and
nights in the meadows stripping the shame-
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CULT OF SIMPLICITY
less crimson coronals off the lilies of the
field.
The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy/
translated and edited by Mr R. Nisbet Bain,
is calculated to draw particular attention
to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's
work. In one sense, and that the deepest
sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a
genuine and noble appeal to simplicity.
The narrow notion that an artist may not
teach is pretty well exploded by now. But
the truth of the matter is, that an artist
teaches far more by his mere background
and properties, his landscape, his costume,
his idiom and technique — all the part of
his work, in short, of which he is probably
entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate
and pompous moral dicta which he fondly
imagines to be his opinions. The real 147
TOLSTOY AND THE
distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably uncon- scious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all the tales, the folklore sim- plicity with which ' a man or a woman ' are spoken of without further identification, the love — one might almost say the lust — for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient
kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of
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the race of man — these influences are truly- moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, com- bining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult
to believe that a man who draws in such 149
TOLSTOY AND THE
noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth- born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poig- nantly the detestable insolence of oppression
would not actually, if he had the chance,
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lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be con- tent to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.
The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense which characterised the most extreme utter- ances of Christ. It is true that we cannot turn the cheek to the smiter ; it is true that
we cannot give our cloak to the robber; 151
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civilisation is too complicated, too vain- glorious, too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush ; in other words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane ; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his fol- lowers have shown that they have the pluck,
and even if we think they are mistaken,
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by this sign they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent thing. It represents that doctrine of mild- ness and non-resistance which is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are conquered without humiUation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer
by persuasion. In their mythology St 153
TOLSTOY AND THE
George did not conquer the dragon : he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed up in the celebrated verse of Mr Edward Lear:
* There was an old man who said, " How Shall I flee from this terrible cow ? I will sit on a stile and continue to smile, Till I soften the heart of this cow." '
Their confidence in human nature is
really honourable and magnificent ; it takes
the form of refusing to believe the over-
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whelming majority of mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to consider this new sect of Christians as little less out- rageous than some brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.
From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irra- tional by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe
topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially pos- 155
TOLSTOY AND THE
sible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this phenomenon as it really is.
The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and supremely striking embodi- ment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to triumph over many kings, and civilise many continents. We all agree that these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we all believe naturally
and inevitably that the negation of our
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own day is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century, like a school- boy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been out- stripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They have
arraigned civilisation as openly as the 157
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materialists have arraigned theology ; they
have damned all the philosophers even
lower than they have damned the saints.
Thousands of modern men move quietly
and conventionally among their fellows
while holding views of national limitation
or landed property that would have made
Voltaire shudder like a nun listening to
blasphemies. And the last and wildest
phase of this saturnalia of scepticism, the
school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the
moral validity of those ideals of courage or
obedience which are recognised even among
pirates, this school bases itself upon the
literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts or
Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the
whole history of the world was such a
tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of
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an ancient creed. Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand still at mid-day. We are faced with the phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it some- thing stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence sud- denly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmo- gonies of this age as dreams going the way 159
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of a thousand forgotten heresies, and be- lieves for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.
This value which we have above sug- gested, unquestionably belongs to the Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It can- not but be remarkable to watch a revolu- tion in which both the rulers and the rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think, characterised by that intellectual
160
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obviousness and necessity which its sup- porters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary number of statements about the New Testament, of which the accuracy is by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and answer :
Q. *How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words ? '
A. *Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even
as your Father; your Father in the spirit
world is merciful, is perfect.'
There is nothing in this, perhaps, which L 161
TOLSTOY AND THE
Christ might not have said except the abominable metaphysical modernism of •the spirit world'; but to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and unadul- terated untruth. The author should know that these words have meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with flatly
denying : ' The fifth rule of our Lord is
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that we should take special pains to culti- vate the same kind of regard for people of foreign countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have an antipathy to us, which we already enter- tain towards our own people, and those who are in sympathy with us/ I should very much like to know where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural, and immoral pro- position. Christ did not have the same kind of regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest compliment He
paid was, 'Behold an Israelite indeed.'
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The author has simply confused two en- tirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he pro- duces on us must be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity: He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love hu- manity; it is like loving a gigantic centi- pede. And the reason that the Tolstoians
can even endure to think of an equally 164
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distributed affection is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.
But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching — its absolute spontaneity. The abyss be- tween Christ and all His modern inter- preters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it before these Tolstoian rules were
made, and thousands will be deduced 165
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afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the sun was darkened at noonday.
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Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisa- tion. This we shall not know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may never understand Savonarola.
The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calami- ties which are the ancient enemies of humanity. The great law - givers saved
us from anarchy: the great physicians 167
SAVONAROLA
saved us from pestilence : the great re- formers saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil com- pared with which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating curse that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name, except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order; not from pestilence, but from paralysis ; not from starvation, but from luxury. Men like Savonarola are the wit- nesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of man.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his day went
far deeper than the mere question of
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sin. The modern rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot down- wards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant char- acter of the crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins ; and that is precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist. He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils ; that stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures
were merely the symptoms; that the dis- 169
SAVONAROLA
ease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceed- ingly enlightened hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.
Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fell. He was preach- ing that severity which is the sign-manual
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of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as to gain holiness, as indis- pensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally anti- aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anjrthing else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.
The civilisation which surrounded Savon- arola on every side was a civilisation which
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had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The mon- strosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of imagination ; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they
had learnt to ignore. It is strange that
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the most unpopular of all doctrines is the
doctrine which declares the common life
divine. Democracy, of which Savonarola
was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of
gospels ; there is nothing that so terrifies
men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical
with democracy, is the hardest of gospels ;
there is nothing that so strikes men with
fear as the saying that they are all the sons
of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The
drug of despotism was administered to the
people, and they forgot what they had
been. There are some at the present day
who have so strange a respect for art and
letters, and for mere men of genius, that
they conceive the reign of the Medici to
be an improvement on that of the great 173
SAVONAROLA
Florentine republican. It is such men as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear. We are sur- rounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the un- quenchable wrath of Savonarola — a hedon- ism that is more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, and poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger
for the strong man which is unknown
174.
SAVONAROLA
among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the * Bow Bells Novelettes,' and for the same reason — a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to de- volve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or em- perors. Against all this the great clerical repubHcan stands in everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for whom
even nations and empires only exist to 175
SAVONAROLA
satisfy the moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which are all alike valued for their im- mediate effect upon the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their cam- paigns and battles are always called trium- phant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely
a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
176
SAVONAROLA
This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course. Few men understood his object ; some called him a madman, some a charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them from a calamity of con- tentment which should be the end of joys and sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.
Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savon- arola, that the number of fine works of
art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities M 177
SAVONAROLA
has been much exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.
178
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now dwindling, schools of severely technical and sesthetic criticism have been uiifavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there is one thing in which artists have im- proved since his time, it is in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be un- kind to inquire whether the level of the
modern man of letters, as compared with 179
THE POSITION OF
Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers ; if so, the matter could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are neglected by Provi- dence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too large, or a host impugned be- cause he is too generous. If romance be 180
SIR WALTER SCOTT
really a pleasure, it is difficult to under- stand the modern reader's consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is not be- cause they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very- far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on which his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He arranged his endless prefaces, and his colossal introductions just as an architect plans great gates and long approaches to a really large house. He
did not share the latter-day desire to get 181
THE POSITION OF
quickly through a story. He enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a story like a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He de- sired to taste it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time. The reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dfckens. We should not be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without either beginning or close.
Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never be under- stood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when Time, Man, and
Eternity are understood. To say that Scott 182
SIR WALTER SCOTT
had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake — the idea that ro- mance is in some viray a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, dis- ease, insanity, are merely material acci- dents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel. The boast of
the realist (applying what the reviewers 183
THE POSITION OF
call his scalpel) is that he cuts into the heart of life ; but he makes a very shallow incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins. Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of him- self, as swaggering and sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of can- dour unearths innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called romance. It perceives superificial habits like murder and dipsomania, but it does not perceive the deepest of sins — the sin of vanity — vanity which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that is not shared with any boon com- panion, or whispered to any priest.
In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance we must
absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that 184
SIR WALTER SCOTT
romance or adventure are merely material- istic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked in us by the sight of cer- tain places or the contemplation of certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His finest scenes eflfect us like fragments of a hilari- ous dream. They have the same quality
which is often possessed by those nocturnal 185
THE POSITION OF
comedies — that of seeming more human than our waking life — even while they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sun- set. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance which is an almost equal betting upon man
and destiny. Perhaps the most profoundly 186
SIR WALTER SCOTT
thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that here the wind blows strong.
It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the contemporary crop of roman- cers who have followed the leadership of Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great
and inspiriting revival of romance in our 187
THE POSITION OF
time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every ease by this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast multiplication of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of their hands ; the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the sword is at the hip ready for innumerable adven- tures too terrible to be pictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper except in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is employed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as their disposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the
Clerk of Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, 188
SIR WALTER SCOTT
and the thoroughly solid things they are described as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the con- viction that the sole essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment of * Oh 1 still delay, thou art so fair ' ; more of a certain patriarchal enjoyment of things as they are — of the sword by the side and the wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How little the actual boy cares for incidents in compari- son to tools and weapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story
of adventure is concerned with a man who 189
THE POSITION OF
lived for years on a desert island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.
Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought against Scott, particularly in his own day — the charge of a fanciful and monotonous in- sistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic in the ' Edinburgh Re- view ' said indignantly that he could toler- ate a somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of
Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being 190
SIR WALTER SCOTT
himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love, as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the profound philo- sophical truths which are almost confined to infants is this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the only characters. A battle-axe was a per- son of importance, a castle had a character 191
THE POSITION OF
and ways of its own. A church bell had
a word to say in the matter. Like a true
child, he almost ignored the distinction
between the animate and inanimate. A
two-handed sword might be carried only
by a menial in a procession, but it was
something important and immeasurably
fascinating — it was a two-handed sword.
There is one quality which is supreme
and continuous in Scott which is little
appreciated at present. One of the values
we have really lost in recent fiction is the
value of eloquence. The modern literary
artist is compounded of almost every man
except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they
could both, if literature had failed, have
earned a living as professional demagogues.
The feudal heroes in the ' Waverley Novels ' 192
SIR WALTER SCOTT
retort upon each other with a passionate
dignity, haughty and yet singularly human,
which can hardly be paralleled in political
eloquence except in * Julius Cagsar.* With
a certain fiery impartiality which stirs the
blood, Scott distributes his noble orations
equally among saints and villains. He may
deny a villain every virtue or triumph, but
he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word ; he will ruin a man, but he will
not silence him. In truth, one of Scott's
most splendid traits is his difficulty, or
rather incapacity, for despising any of his
characters. He did not scorn the most
revolting miscreant as the realist of to-day
commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of
Scott can speak like a king.
This quality, as I have said, is sadly to N 193
THE POSITION OF
seek in the fiction of the passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself, or Athelstane's de- fiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating ourselves
because we can see the mud and the 194
SIR WALTER SCOTT
monsters at the bottom. In politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence in the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus con- ductor. In discussing questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war uses his material as Burke or Grat- tan (perhaps exaggeratively) would have used it — the speaker is content with facts and expositions of facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees hurled at EUangowan, at the rulers of Britain : ' Ride your ways, Laird of EUan- gowan ; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram — this day have ye quenched seven smok- ing hearths. See if the fire in your ain 195
THE POSITION OF
parlour burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-eleugh. See that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane of EUangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram.'
The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls, to fall just within the natural com- prehension, it cannot obviously have any chance with a literary ambition which aims
at falling just outside it. It is quite right 196
SIR WALTER SCOTT
to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with roars of popu- lar applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting any central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect of greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to call it merely superficial ; here there is no question of superficiality ; we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial. The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impres- sion of the world is by far the deepest. 197
THE POSITION OF
What we really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.
Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child. We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring melo- dramas and adventure stories^ and Punch and Judy, if he would admit that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibili- ties. Beyond all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to simplify one's mind at the first signal of the ad- vance of romance. 'You do me wrong,' said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca.
* Many a law, many a commandment have I 198
Sm WALTER SCOTT
broken, but my word, never.' *Die,' cries Balfour of Burley to the villain in * Old Mortality.' *Die, hoping nothing, believ- ing nothing ' 'And fearing nothing,'
replies the other. This is the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with children or a brass band. They are afraid of mak- ing fools of themselves, and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of the modern novelist (such
as the work of Mr Henry James) is prim- 199
THE POSITION OF
arily concerned with that dehcate and fas- cinating speech which burrows deeper and deeper Uke a mole ; but we have wholly for- gotten that speech which mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration. Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of ' Candida ' it is clearly a part of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent, but he is not elo- quent, because the whole ' G. B. S.' con- dition of mind renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires. Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the way that heroes and villains take themselves — especially villains. It is the custom to call these old romantic poses
artificial ; but the word artificial is the last 200
SIR WALTER SCOTT
and silliest evasion of criticism. There was never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some motive or ideal be- hind it, and generally a much better one than we think.
Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak, for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have com- piled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish neglected and name- less. It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as
to most men of his time, woman was not 201
THE POSITION OF
an individual, but an institution — a toast
that was drunk some time after that of
Church and King. But it is far better to
consider the difference rather as a special
merit, in that he stood for all those clean
and bracing shocks of incident which are
untouched by passion or weakness, for a
certain breezy bachelorhood, which is almost
essential to the literature of adventure.
With all his faults, and all his triumphs,
he stands for the great mass of natural
manliness which must be absorbed into art
unless art is to be a mere luxury and
freak. An appreciation of Scott might be
made almost a test of decadence. If ever
we lose touch with this one most reckless
and defective writer, it will be a proof to
us that we have erected round ourselves a
false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible 202
SIR WALTER SCOTT
perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that strange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and as in- spiring and as healthy as he.
203
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