Studies in prose and verse

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STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

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STUDIES

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PROSE AND VERSE

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

WITH PORTRAITS
IN PHOTOGRAVURE

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MCMXXII
NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON ^ CO.

All rights reserved

First Edition .... 1904
Reprinted ..... 1910, 1922

PRINTED in great BRITAIN

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^ TO MRS LUDWIG MOND

V T DEDICATE this book to you in memory of evenings^
^ now too many to county in London and in Rome^ when

. we have talked of books together. There are many things in
« /'/ with which you will not agree ; yet in you there is one
:i thing I can count on.^ a continual sympathy ; and another.^
^ rarer thing as we 11^ which does not always go with it : a
divination which can strike through the words to the
?neaning ; and deeper., to that meaning's meaning.
g If there are any names here that do not interest you.,
^ disregard them., or read other names in their places. I
am interested only in first principles., and it seems to me
that to study first principles one must wait for them till
they are made flesh and dwell among us. I have rarely
contrasted one writer with another., or compared very
carefully the various books of any writer among themselves.
Criticism is not an examination with marks and prizes.
zit IS a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their
^direction. It is concerned with them only as force., and
it is concerned with force only in its kind and degree.

As you will see in reading the book., I have a few
principles of criticism, and I apply these few principles
to every writer and on every occasion. If, as I hope,
there is any essential unity in this collection of essays on

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2'?1.G13

vi DEDICATION

contemporary writers, that unity must come wholly from
the uniformity of the tests which I have applied to all
this varying material. Others may care^ possibly .^ for my
opinion on Balzac^ my opinion on Tolstoi ; you., I know.,
will see what my real aim has been., and your interest in
the matter will be the same as mine.

ARTHUR STMONS.

Poltescoe, Cornivall,

September 17, 1904.

CONTENTS

Introduction : Fact in Literature
Balzac ....
Prosper Merimee
'I'heophile Gautier
-A Word on De Quincey
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Walter Pater
Robert Louis Stevenson
John Addington Symonds
William Morris's Prose
Guy de Maupassant
Alphonse Daudet
Hubert Crackakthorpe .

Robfrt Buchanan
An Artist in Attitldes: Oscar Wilde
Gabriele d'Annunzio
A Note on George Meredith
A Note on Zola's Method
The Russian Soul: Gorki and Tolstoi
Tolstoi on Art
A Censor ok Critics
What is Poetry ?

FACE

I

5

26

42

47

52

63

77

83

91

97

108

117

121

124

129

143

152

1 6,j

•73

'«3

192

VllI

CONTENTS

Campoamor

Robert Bridges

Austin Dobson

Mr W. B. Yeats

Mr Stephen Phillips

Ernest Dowson

Preface to the Second Edition- of Silhouettes

Preface to the Second Edition of London Nights

Conclusion : The Choice

PAGR
196

22 +
230
242
261
279
283
286

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Balzac ...... Frontispiece

From an Elding hv H. H. Crickmoke.

Walter Pater ..... facing page 63

John Addington Symonds . • » 83

Reproduced bij Lind permission of \[.x'/, Walter \^i.Ar^fri,m
a Picture in her possession.

Hubert Crackanthorpe . . . . „ 117

Cabriele d'Annuszio . . . . „ 129

From </n unpLblislied Photograph bij Count Joskph Primoli.

Robert Bridges .....,, 207

Austin Dobson . . . . . ,,224

Mk W. B. Yeats . , . . „ 230

IX

INTRODUCTION

FACT IN LITERATURE

The invention of printing helped to destroy literature. |
Scribes, and mennories not yet spoilt by over-cram-
ming, preserved all the literature that was worth
preserving. Books that had to be remembered by
heart, or copied with slow, elaborate penmanship, were
not thrown away on people who did not want them.
They remained in the hands of people of taste. The
first book pointed the way to the first newspaper, and
a newspaper is a thing meant to be not only forgotten
but destroyed. With the deliberate destruction of
print, the respect for printed literature vanished, and
a single term came to be used for the poem and for the
" news item." What had once been an art for the few
became a trade for the many, and, while in painting,
in sculpture, in music, the mere fact of production
means, for the most part, an attempt to produce
a work of art, the function of written or printed
words ceased to be necessarily more than what a
Spanish poet has called "the jabber of the human
animal." Unfortunately, words can convey facts;
unfortunately, people in general have an ill-regulated
but insatiable appetite for facts. Now music cannot
convey facts at all ; painting or sculpture can only
convey fact through a medium which necessarily trans-
forms it. But literature is tied by that which gives it
wings. It can do, in a measure, all that can be done
by the other arts, and it can speak where they can but
make beautiful and expressive gestures. But it has

2 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

this danger, that its paint, or clay, or crotchets and
quavers, may be taken for the colour, or form,
or sound, and not as the ministrants of these
things. Literature, in making its beautiful piece
of work, has to use words and facts ; these words,
these facts, are the common property of all the
world, to whom they mean no more than what
each individually says, before it has come to take on
beautiful form through its adjustment in the pattern.
So, while paints are of no use to the man who does not
understand the science of their employment, nor clay,
nor the notations of musical sound, to any but the
trained artist, words may be used at will, and no litera-
ture follow, only something which many people will
greatly prefer, and which they will all have the mis-
fortune to understand.

There exist, then, under the vague title of literature,
or without even the excuse of a stolen title, books which
are not books, printed paper which has come from the
rag-heap to return to the rag-heap, that nameless thing
the newspaper, which can be liktned only, and that at
its best, to a printed phonograph. It is assumed that
there is a reason in nature why the British shop-
keeper should sit down after business hours, and
read, for the price of a penny or a halfpenny,
that a fire broke out at the other end of London
at ten o'clock in the morning, and that a young lady
of whom he has never heard was burned to death.
But the matter is really of no importance to him, and
there is no reason in nature why he should ever know
anything at all about it. He has but put one more
obstacle between himself and any rational conception
of the meaning of his life, between himself and any
natural happiness, between himself and any possible
wisdom. Facts are difficult of digestion, and should

INTRODUCTION

be taken diluted, ut infrequent intervals. They suit
few constitutions when taken whole, and none when
taken indiscriminately. The worship of fact is a wholly
modern attitude of mind, and it comes together with a
worship of what we call science. True science is a
kind of poetry, it is a divination, an imaginative reading
of the universe. What we call science is an engine of
material progress, it teaches us how to get most quickly
to the other end of the world, and how^ to kill the
people there in the most precise and economic manner.
The function of this kind of science is to extinguish
wonder, whereas the true science deepens our sense of
wonder as it enlightens every new tract of the envelop-
ing darkness.

What royalties and religions have been, the news-
paper is. It is the idol of the hour, the principality and
power of the moment ; the average man's Bible, friend,
teacher, guide, entertainment, and opiate. Because its
power is the aggregate of separate feeblenesses, let us
not commit the error of denying that power. As well
deny the power of folly, which is the voice of the mob ;
or of the mob, which is the mouthpiece of folly. The
newspaper is the fulfilment of the prophecy that the
voice of the people shall be the voice of God. It is the
perpetual affirmation of the new law which has abolished
all other laws : the law of the greatest wisdom of the
greatest number.

The newspaper is the plague, or black death, of the
modern world. It is an open sewer, running down
each side of the street, and displaying the foulness of
every day, day by day, morning and evening. Every-
thing that, having once happened, has ceased to exist,
the newspaper sets before you, beating the bones of
the buried without pity, without shame, and without
understanding. Its pride is that it is the record of facts,

4 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

but it tells you no fact twice in the same way; for it
gorges its insatiable appetite upon rumour, which is
wind and noise. All the hypocrisies of the State, of the
Church, of the market-place, cling together for once in
brotherly love, and speak with unanimous voices.

The excuse for existence offered by the newspaper,
and by every other form of printed matter which does
not aim at some artistic end, is that it conveys fact, and
that fact is indispensable. But, after all, what is fact .''
" For poetry," says Matthew Arnold, " the idea is
everything, the rest is a world of illusion, of divine
illusion. Poetry attaches its emotions to the idea ; the
idea is the fact." Let it be granted that some kind of
fact is indispensable to every man : to one man one
kind of idea is fact, to another man another ; and there
remain those to whom fact is really the news of the
newspaper. But, even to these, it must be this fact
and not that, and certainly not a deluge of any.

Reported speech, for that is what literature is when
it is not the musical notation of song, has become more
and more a marketable product, it is not paid for, as
even the worst picture is paid for, on account of some
imagined artistic merit (a picture being always " pretty
to look at "), but because it satisfies a curiosity. If the
artist in literature chooses to throw in beauty w^hen he
is asked only to answer a question, the beauty is not
always rejected along with the answer. But the answer
will be considered, at the best, a little unsatisfactory,
because a plain man wants a plain answer.

1902.

BALZAC

I

The first man who has completely understood Balzac
is Rodin, and it has taken Rodin ten years to realise
his own conception. France has refused the statue in
which a novelist is represented as a dreamer, to whom
Paris is not so much Paris as Patmos : " the most
Parisian of our novelists," Frenchmen assure you. It
IS more than a hundred years since Balzac was born :
a hundred years is a long time in which to be mis-
understood with admiration.

In choosing the name of the "Human Comedy" for
a series of novels in which, as he says, there is at
once " the history and the criticism of society, the
analysis of its evils, and the discussion of its principles,"
Balzac proposed to do for the modern world what
Dante, in his ''Divine Comedy," had done for the world
of the Middle Ages. Condemned to write in prose, and
finding his opportunity in that restriction, he created
for himself a form which is perhaps the nearest equi-
valent for the epic or the poetic drama, and the only
form in which, at all events, the epic is now possible.
The world of Dante was materially simple compared
with the world of the nineteenth century ; the " visible
world " had not yet begun to " exist," in its tyrannical
modern sense ; the complications of the soul interested
only the Schoolmen, and were a part of theology ; poetry
could still represent an age and yet be poetry. But
to-day poetry can no longer represent more than the
soul of things ; it has taken refuge from the terrible

5

6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

improvements of civilisation in a divine seclusion, where
it sings, disregarding the many voices of" the street.
Prose comes offering its infinite capacity for detail ; and
it is by the infinity of its detail that the novel, as
Balzac created it, has become the modern epic.

There had been great novels, indeed, before Balzac,
but no great novelist ; and the novels themselves are
scarcely what we should to-day call by that name.
The interminable "Astree" and its companions form
a link between the fabliaux and the novel, and from
them developed the characteristic eighteenth-century
conte^ in narrative, letters, or dialogue, as we see it in
Marivaux, Laclos, Crebillon Jils. Crebillon's longer
works, including " Le Sopha," with their conventional
paraphernalia of Eastern fable, are extremely tedious ;
but in two short pieces, " La Nuit et le Moment " and
" Le Hasard du Coin du Feu," he created a model of
witty, naughty, deplorably natural comedy, which to
this day is one of the most characteristic French forms
of fiction. Properly, however, it is a form of the drama
rather than of the novel. Laclos, in " Les Liaisons
Dangereuses," a masterpiece which scandalised the
society that adored Crebillon, because its naked human
truth left no room for sentimental excuses, com^
much nearer to prefiguring the novel (as Stendhal,
for instance, is afterward to conceive it), but still
preserves the awkward traditional form of letters.
Marivaux had indeed already seemed to suggest the
novel of analysis, but in a style which has christened
a whole manner of writing, that precisely which is least
suited to the writing of fiction. Voltaire's contes^ " La
Religieuse " of Diderot, are tracts or satires in which
the story is only an excuse for the purpose. Rousseau,
too, has his purpose, even in "La Nouvelle Heloise,"
but it is a humanising purpose ; and with that book the

BALZAC

novel of passion comes into existence, and along with
it the descriptive novel. Yet with Rousseau this result
is an accident of genius ; we cannot call him a novelist ;
and we find him abandoning the form he has found, for
another, more closely personal, which suits him better.
Restif de la Bretonne, who followed Rousseau at a dis-
tance, not altogether wisely, developed the form of
half-imaginary autobiography in "Monsieur Nicolas," a
book of which the most significant part may be com-
pared with Hazlitt's " Liber Amoris." Morbid and even
mawkisji as it is, it has a certain uneasy, unwholesome
humanity in its confessions, which may seem to have
set a fashion only too scrupulously followed by modern
French novelists. Meanwhile, the Abbe Prevost's one
great story, "Manon Lescaut," had brought for once a
purely objective study, of an incomparable simplicity,
into the midst of these analyses of difRcuIt souls ; and
then we return to the confession, in the works of others
not novelists : Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Stael,
Chateaubriand, in "Adolphe," "Corinne," "Rene." At
once we are in the Romantic movement, a movement
which begins lyrically among poets, and at first with a
curious disregard of the more human part of humanity.

Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic
movement, but he worked outside it, and its influence
upon him is felt only in an occasional pseudo-romanticism,
like the episode of the pirate in "La Femme de Trcnte
Ans." His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic
vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts.
Knowing that, as Mme. Necker has said, "the novel
should l)c the better world," he knew also that " the
novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were
not true in details." And in the "Human Comecly " he
proposed to himself to do for society more than Bulfon
had done for the animal world.

B

8 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

" There is but one animal," he declares, in his Avant-
Propos^ with a confidence which Darwin has not yet
come to justify. But " there exists, there will always
exist, social species, as there are zoological species."
''Thus the work to be done will have a triple form:
men, women, and things ; that is to say, human beings
and the material representation which they give to
their thought ; in short, man and life." And, studying
after nature, " French society will be the historian, I
shall need to be no more than the secretary." Thus
will be written " the history forgotten by so many
historians, the history of manners." But that is not
all, for " passion is the whole of humanity." " In
realising clearly the drift of the composition, it will be
seen that I assign to facts, constant, daily, open, or
secret, to the acts of individual life, to their causes and
principles, as much importance as historians had formerly
attached to the events of the public life of nations.''
" Facts gathered together and painted as they are,
with passion for element," is one of his definitions of
the task he has undertaken. And in a letter to Mme.
de Hanska he summarises every detail of his scheme.

"The Etudes des MoBiirs will represent social effects,
without a single situation of life, or a physiognomy, or
a character of man or woman, or a manner of life, ot a
profession, or a social zone, or a district of France, or
anything pertaining to childhood, old age, or maturity,
politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten.

"That laid down, the history of the human heart
traced link by link, the history of society made in all its
details, we have the base. . . .

"Then, the second stage is the Etudes philosophiques^
for after the effects come the causes. In the £.tudes des
McEurs I shall have painted the sentiments and their
action, life and the fashion of life. In the htudes

BALZAC

pbilosophiques I shall say why the sentiments^ on what
the life. . . .

" Then, after the ejfccts and the causes^ come the
Etudes analytiques.^ to which the Physiologie du mariage
belongs, for, after the ejects and the causes^ one should
seek the principles. . . .

•'After having done the poetry, the demonstration,
of a whole system, I shall do the science in the Essai
sur les forces humaines. And, on the bases of this
palace I shall have traced the immense arabesque of the
Ceyit Contes drolatiques f "

Quite all that, as we know, was not carried out ;
but there, in its intention, is the plan ; and after twenty
years' work the main part of it, certainly, was carried
out. Stated with this precise detail, it has something
of a scientific air, as of a too deliberate attempt upon
the sources of life by one of those systematic French
minds which are so much more logical than facts.
But there is one little phrase to be noted : " La passion
est toute I'humanitc'." All Balzac is in that phrase.

Another French novelist, following, as he thought,
the example of the "Human Comedy," has endeavoured
to build up a history of his own time with even greater
minuteness. But " Les Rougon-Macquart " is no more
than system ; /oia has never understootl that detail
without life is the wardrobe without the man. Trying
to outdo Balzac on his own ground, he has made the
fatal mistake of taking him only on his systematic side,
which in Balzac is subordinate to a great creative
intellect, an incessant, burning thought al)out men and
women, a passionate human curiosity for which even
his own system has no limits. "Tlie misfortunes of
the Birottcaus., the j)riest and the perfumer," he says,
in his Avant-Propos.^ taking an example at random,
"are, for me, those of humanity." To Balzac manners

lo STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

are but the vestment of life ; it is life that he seeks ;
and life, to him (it is his own word) is but the vestment
of thought. Thought is at the root of all his work, a
whole system of thought, in which philosophy is but
another form of poetry ; and it is from this root of idea
that the " Human Comedy " springs.

II

The two books into which Balzac has put his deepest
thought, the two books which he himself cared for the
most, are " Seraphita " and " Louis Lambert." Of
"Louis Lambert" he said: "I write it for myself and
a few others " ; of " Seraphita " : " My life is in it."
" One could write ' Goriot ' any day," he adds ;
"'Seraphita' only once in a lifetime." I have never
been able to feel that "Seraphita" is altogether a
success. It lacks the breath of life ; it is glacial.
True, he aimed at producing very much such an effect ;
and it is, indeed, full of a strange, glittering beauty,
the beauty of its own snows. But I find in it at
the same time something a little factitious, a sort
of romanesque, not altogether unlike the sentimental
romanesque of Novalis ; it has not done the impossible,
in humanising abstract speculation, in fusing mysticism
and the novel. But for the student of Balzac it has
extraordinary interest ; for it is at once the base and
the summit of the "Human Comedy." In a letter to
Mme. de Hanska, written in 1837, four years after
" Seraphita " had been begun, he writes : " I am not
orthodox, and I do not believe in the Roman Church.
Swedenborgianism, which is but a repetition, in the
Christian sense, of ancient ideas, is my religion, with
this addition : that I believe in the incomprehensibility

BALZAC II

of God."' '• Seraphita " is a prose poem in which the
most abstract part of that mystical system, which
Swedenborg perhaps materialised too crudely, is pre-
sented in a white light, under a single, superhuman
image. In "Louis Lambert" the same fundamental
conceptions are worked out in the study of a perfectly
human intellect, "an intellectual gulf," as he truly calls
it ; a sober and concise history of ideas in their
devouring action upon a too feeble physical nature.
In these two books we see directly, and not through
the coloured veil of human life, the mind in the abstract
of a thinker whose power over humanity was the power
of abstract thought. They show this novelist, who has
invented the description of society, by whom the visible
world has been more powerfully felt than by any other
novelist, striving to penetrate the correspondences which
exist between the human and the celestial existence.
He would pursue the soul to its last resting-place before
it takes flight from the body ; further, on its dis-
embodied flight ; he would find out God, as he comes
nearer and nearer to finding out the secret of life. And
realising, as he does so profoundly, that there is but
one substance, but one ever-changing principle of life,
"one vegetable, one animal, but a continual inter-
course," the whole world is alive with meaning for
him, a more intimate meaning than it has for others.
"The least flower is a thought, a life which corresponds
to some lineaments of the great whole, of which he has
the constant intuition." And so, in his concerns with
the world, he will find spirit everywhere; nothing for
him will be inert matter, everything will have its particle
of the universal life. One of those divine spies, for
whom the world has no secrets, he will be neither
pessimist nor optimist , he will accept the world as a
man accepts the woman whom he loves, as much for

12 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

her defects as for her virtues. Loving the world for
its own sake, he will find it always beautiful, equally
beautiful in all its parts. Now let us look: at the pro-
gramme which he traced for the " Human Comedy,"
let us realise it in the light of this philosophy, and
we are at the beginning of a conception of what the
" Human Comedy " really is.

Itl

This visionary, then, who had apprehended for
himself an idea of God, set himself to interpret human
life more elaborately than any one else. He has been
praised for his patient observation ; people have thought
they praised him in calling him a realist ; it has been
discussed how far his imitation of life was the literal
truth of the photograph. But to Balzac the word
realism was an insult. Writing his novels at the rate of
eighteen hours a day, in a feverish solitude, he never
had the time to observe patiently. It is hunvjnity seen
in a mirror, the humanity which comes to the great
dreamers, the great poets, humanity as Shakespeare
saw it. And so in him, as in all the great artists, there
is something more than nature, a divine excess. This
something more than nature should be the aim of the
artist, not merely the accident which happens to him
against his will. We require of him a world like our
own, but a world infinitely more vigorous, interesting,
profound ; more beautiful with that kind of beauty
which nature finds of itself for art. It is the quality of
great creative art to give us so much life that we are
almost overpowered by it, as by an air almost too
vigorous to breathe : the exuberance of creation which
makes the Sibyls of Michelangelo something more

BALZAC 13

than human, which makes Lear something more than
human, in one kind or another of divinity.

Balzac's novels are full of strange problems and
great passions. He turned aside from nothing which
presented itself in nature ; and his mind was always
turbulent with the magnificent contrasts and caprices of
fate. A devouring passion of thought burned on all
the situations by which humanity expresses itself, in its
flight from the horror of immobility. To say that the
situations which he chose are often romantic is but to
say that he followed the soul and the senses faithfully
on their strangest errands. Our probable novelists of
to-day are afraid of whatever emotion might be mis-
interpreted in a gentleman. Believing, as we do now,
in nerves and a fatalistic heredity, we have left but
little room for the dignity and disturbance of violent
emotion. To Balzac, humanity had not changed since
the days when Oedipus was blind and Philoctetes cried
in the cave ; and equally great miseries were still
possible to mortals, though they were French and of
the nineteenth century.

And thus he creates, like the poets, a humanity
more logical than average life ; more typical, more sub-
divided among the passions, and having in its veins an
energy almost more than human. He realised, as the
Greeks did, that human life is made up of elemental
passions and necessity ; but he was the first to realise
that in the modern world the pseudonym of necessity
is money. Money and the i)assions rule the world of"
his "Human Comedy."

And, at the root of the passions, determining their
action, he saw "those nervous fluids, or that unknown
substance which, in default of another term, we must call
the will." No word returns oftener to his pen. For him
the problem is invariable, Man has a given quantity

14 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

of energy ; each man a diircrent quantity: how will he
spend it? A novel is the determination in action of
that problem. And he is equally interested in every
form of energy, in every egoism, so long as it is fiercely
itself. This pre-occupation with the force, rather than
with any of its manifestations, gives him his singular
impartiality, his absolute lack of prejudice ; for it gives
him the advantage of an abstract point of view, the
unchanging fulcrum for a lever which turns in every
direction ; and as nothing once set vividly in motion by
any form of human activity is without interest for him,
he makes every point of his vast chronicle of human
affairs equally interesting to his readers.

Baudelaire has observed profoundly that every
character in the "Human Comedy" has some-
thing of Balzac, has genius. To himself, his own
genius was entirely expressed in that word "will."
It recurs constantly in his letters. " Men of will
are rare ! " he cries. And, at a time when he
had turned night into day for his labour : " I rise
every night with a keener will than that of yesterday."
"Nothing wearies me," he says, " neither waiting nor
happiness." He exhausts the printers, whose fingers
can hardly keep pace with his brain ; they call him, he
reports proudly, "a man-slayer." And he tries to
express himself: " I have always had in me something,
I know not what, which made me do differently from
others; and, with me, fidelity is perhaps no more than
pride. Having only myself to rely upon, I have had to
strengthen, to build up that self." There is a scene in
" La Cousine Bette " which gives precisely Balzac's own
sentiment of the supreme value of energy. The Baron
Hulot, ruined on every side, and by his own fault, goes
to Josepha, a mistress who had cast him off in the time
of his prosperity, and asks her to lodge him for a few

BALZAC 15

days in a garret. She laughs, pities, and then questions
him.

" ' Est-ce vrai, vieux,' reprit-elle, ' que tu as tue ton
frere et ton oncle, ruine ta famille, surhypotheque la
maison de tes enfants et mange la grenouille du gouverne-
ment en Afrique avec la princesse ? '

" Le Baron inclina tristement la tete.

" 'Eh bien, j aime cela I ' s'ecria Josepha, qui se leva
pleine d'enthousiasme. ' C'est un briilage general !
c'est sardanapale ! c'est grand ! c'est complet ! On est
une canaille, mais on a du coeur.' "

The cry is Balzac's, and it is a characteristic part of
his genius to have given it that ironical force by utter-
ing it through the mouth of a Josepha. The joy of the
human organism at its highest point of activity : that is
what interests him supremely. How passionate, how
moving he becomes whenever he has to speak of a real
passion, a mania, whether of a lover for his mistress, of
a philosopher for his idea, of a miser for his gold, of a
Jew dealer for masterpieces ! His style clarifies, his
words become flesh and blood ; he is the lyric poet.
And for him every idealism is equal : the gourmandise
of Pons is not less serious, not less sympathetic, not less
perfectly realised, than the search of Claes after the
Absolute. " The great and terrible clamour of egoism "
is the voice to which he is always attentive; "those
eloquent faces, proclaiming a soul abandoned to an idea
as to a remorse," are the faces with whose history he
concerns himself He drags to light the hidden joys of
the amateur^ and with especial delight those that are
hidden deepest, under the most deceptive coverings.
He deifies them for their energy, he fashions the world
of his " Human Comedy " in their service, as the real
world exists, all but passive, to be the pasture of these
supreme egoists.

i6 STUDIES IN PROSK AND VERSE

IV

In all that he writes of life, Balzac seeks the soul,
but it is the soul as nervous fluid, the executive soul,
not the contemplative soul, that, with rare exceptions,
he seeks. He would surprise the motive force of life:
that is his recherche cle FAbsolu ; he figures it to himself
as almost a substance, and he is the alchemist on its
track. "Can man by thinking find out God?" Or
life, he would have added ; and he would have answered
the question with at least a Perhaps.

And of this visionary, this abstract thinker, it must
be said that his thought translates itself always into
terms of life. Pose before him a purely mental problem,
and he will resolve it by a scene in which the problem
literally works itself out. It is the quality proper to the
novelist, but no novelist ever employed this quality with
such persistent activity, and at the same time subordi-
nated action so constantly to the idea. With him action
has always a mental basis, is never suffered to intrude
for its own sake. He prefers that an episode should
seem in itself tedious rather than it should have an
illogical interest.

It may be, for he is a Frenchman, that his episodes
are sometimes too logical. There are moments when
he becomes unreal because he wishes to be too syste-
matic, that is, to be real by measure. He would never
have understood the method of Tolstoi, a very stealthy
method of surprising life. To Tolstoi life is always the
cunning enemy whom one must lull asleep, or noose by
an unexpected lasso. He brings in little detail after
little detail, seeming to insist on the insignificance of
each, in order that it may pass almost unobserved, and
be realised only after it has passed. It is his way of
disarming the suspiciousness of life.

BALZAC 17

But Balzac will make no circuit, aims at an open and
an unconditional triumph over nature. Thus, when he
triumphs, he triumphs signally ; and action, in his books,
is perpetually crystallising into some phrase, like the
single lines of Dante, or some brief scene, in which a
whole entanglement comes sharply and suddenly to a
luminous point. I will give no instance, for I should
have to quote from every volume. I wish rather to
remind myself that there are times when the last fine
shade of a situation seems to have escaped. Even then,
the failure is often more apparent than real, a slight
bungling in the machinery of illusion. Look through
the phrase, and you will find the truth there, perfectly
explicit on the other side of it.

For, it cannot be denied, Balzac's style, as style, is
imperfect. It has life, and it has idea, and it has
variety ; there are moments when it attains a rare and
perfectly individual beauty; as when, in " Le Cousin
Pons," we read of "cette predisposition aux recherches
qui fait faire a un savant germanique cent lieues dans
ses guetres pour trouver une verite qui le regard en
riant, assise a la marge du puits, sous le jasmin de la
cour." But I am far less sure that a student of Balzac
would recognise him in this sentence than that he would
recognise the writer of this other; " Des larmes de
pudeur, qui roulcrent entre les beaux cils de Madame
llulot, arretcrent net le garde national." It is in such
passages that the failure in style is equivalent to a failure
in psychology. That his style should lack symmetry,
subordination, the formal virtues of form, is, in my
eyes, a less serious fault. I have often considered
whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good, or even a
possible thing, if the novel is to be what Balzac made
it, history added to poetry. A novelist with style will
not look at life with an entirely naked vision. He sees

iS STUDIES IN PROSK AND VERSE

through coloured glasses. Human life and luiman
manners are too various, too moving, to be brought Into
the fixity of a quite formal order. There mW come a
moment, constantly, when style must sutfer, or the close-
ness and clearness of narration must be sacrificed, some
minute exception of action or psychology must lose its
natural place, or its full emphasis. Balzac, with his
rapid and accumulating mind, without the patience of
selection, and without the desire to select where
selection means leaving -out something good in itself,
if not good in Its place, never hesitates, and his paren-
thesis comes in. And often it is into these parentheses
that he puts the profoundest part of his thought.

Yet, ready as Balzac is to neglect the story for the
philosophy, whenever it seems to him necessary to do
so, he would never have admitted that a form of the
novel is possible in which the story shall be no more
than an excuse for the philosophy. That was because
he was a great creator, and not merely a philosophical
thinker ; because he dealt in flesh and blood, and knew
that the passions in action can teach more to the
philosopher, and can justify the artist more fully, than
all the unacting intellect in the world. He knew that
though life without thought was no more than the
portion of a dog, yet thoughtful life was more than
lifeless thought, and the dramatist more than the com-
mentator. And I cannot help feeling assured that the
latest novelists without a story, whatever other merits
they certainly have, are lacking in the power to create
characters, to express a philosophy in action ; and that
the form which they have found, however valuable it
may be. Is the result of this failure, and not either a
great refusal or a new vision.

BALZAC 19

The novel as Balzac conceived it has created the
modern novel, but no modern novelist has followed, for
none has been able to follow, Balzac on his own lines.
Even those who have tried to follow him most closely
have, sooner or later, branched off in one direction or
another, most in the direction indicated by Stendhal,
Stendhal has written one book which is a masterpiece,
unique in its kind, " Le Rouge et le Noir " ; a second,
which is full of admirable things, " La Chartreuse de
Parme " ; a book of profound criticism, " Racine et
Shakspeare " ; and a cold and penetrating study of the
physiology of love, "De 1' Amour," by the side of
which Balzac's "Physiologic du Manage" is a mere
jcu d'esprit. He discovered for himself, and for others
after him, a method of unemotional, minute, slightly
ironical analysis, which has fascinated modern minds,
partly because it has seemed to dispense with those
difficulties of creation, of creation in the block, which
the triumphs of Balzac have only accentuated. Goriot,
Valerie Marneffe, Pons, Grandet, Madame de Mortsauf
even, are called up before us after the same manner as
Othello or Don Qiiixote ; their actions express them
so significantly that they seem to be independent of
I heir creator; Balzac stakes all upon each creation, and
leaves us no choice but to accept or reject each as a
whole, precisely as we should a human being. We do
not know all the secrets of their consciousness, any more
than we know all the secrets of the consciousness of
our friends. But we have only to say " Valerie I " and
the woman is before us. Stendhal, on the contrary,
undresses Julien's soul in public with a deliberate and
fascinating efiVontery. There is not a vein of which he
does not trace the course, not a wrinkle to which he

20 STUDIES TN PROSE AND VERSE

does not point, not a nerve which he does not touch to
the quick. We know everything that passed through
his mind, to result probably in some significant inaction.
And at the end of the book we know as much about
that particular intelligence as the anatomist knows about
the body which he has dissected. But meanwhile the
life has gone out of the body ; and have we, after all,
captured a living soul ^

I should be the last to say that Julien Sorcl is not a
creation, but he is not a creation after the order of
Balzac ; it is a difference of kind ; and if we look care-
fully at Frederic Moreau, and Madame Gervaisais,
and the Abbe Mouret, we shall see that these also,
profoundly different as Flaubert and Goncourt and Zola
are from Stendhal, are yet more profoundly, more
radically, different from the creations of Balzac. Balzac
takes a primary passion, puts it into a human body, and
sets it to work itself out in visible action. But, since
Stendhal, novelists have persuaded themselves that the
primary passions are a little common, or noisy, or a little
heavy to handle, and they have concerned themselves
with passions tempered by reflection, and the sensations
of elaborate brains. It was Stendhal who substituted
the brain for the heart, as the battle-place of the novel ;
not the brain as Balzac conceived it, a motive-force of
action, the main-spring of passion, the force by which a
nature directs its accumulated energy ; but a sterile sort
of brain, set at a great distance from the heart, whose
rhythm is too faint to disturb it. We have been
intellectualising upon Stendhal ever since, until the
persons of the modern novel have come to resemble
those diaphanous jelly-fish, with balloon-like heads and
the merest tufts of bodies, which float up and down in
the Aquarium at Naples.

Thus, coming closer, as it seems, to what is called

BALZAC 21

reality, in this banishment of great emotions, and this
attention upon the sensations, modern analytic novelists
are really getting further and further from that life
which is the one certain thing in the world. Balzac
employs all his detail to call up a tangible world about
his men and women, not, perhaps, understanding the full
power of detail as psychology, as Flaubert is to under-
stand it ; but, after all, his detail is only the background
of the picture ; and there, stepping out of the canvas,
as the sombre people of Velazquez step out of their
canvases at the Prado, is the living figure, looking into
your eyes with eyes that respond to you like a mirror.

The novels of Balzac are full of electric fluid. To
take up one of them is to feel the shock of life, as one
feels it on touching certain magnetic hands. To turn
over volume after volume is like wandering through the
streets of a great city, at that hour of the night when
human activity is at its full. There is a particular kind
of excitement inherent in the very aspect of a modern
city, of London or Paris ; in the mere sensation of
being in its midst, in the sight of all those active and
fatigued faces which pass so rapidly ; of those long and
endless streets, full of houses, each of which is like the
body of a multiform soul, looking out through the eyes
of many windows. There is something intoxicating in
the lights, the movement of shadows under the lights,
the vast and billowy sound of that shadowy movement.
And there is something more than this mere unconscious
action upon the nerves. I'^very step in a great city is a
step into an luiknown world. A new future is possible
at every street corner. I never know, when I go out
into one of those crowded streets, but that the whole
course of my life may be changed before I retinii to the
house I have quitted.

I am writing these lines in Madrid, to which I have

22 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

^~^'^'— ^^^^ III. Ill m^^mmmmmt

come suddenly, after a long quiet in Andalusia ; and I
feel already a new pulse in my blood, a keener con-
sciousness of life, and a sharper human curiosity. Even
in Seville I knew that I should see to-morrow, in the
same streets, hardly changed since the Middle Ages,
the same people that I had seen to-day. But here there
are new possibilities, all the exciting accidents of the
modern world, of a population always changing, of a
city into which civilisation has brought all its unrest.
And as I walk in these broad, windy streets and see
these people, whom I hardly recognise for Spaniards, so
awake and so hybrid are they, I have felt the sense of
Balzac coming back into my veins. At Cordova he was
unthinkable ; at Cadiz I could realise only his large,
universal outlines, vague as the murmur of the sea ;
here I feel him, he speaks the language I am talking, he
sums up the life in whose midst I find myself.

For Balzac is the equivalent of great cities. He is
bad reading for solitude, for he fills the mind with the
nostalgia of cities. When a man speaks to me familiarly
of Balzac I know already something of the man with
whom I have to do. " The physiognomy of women
does not begin before the age of thirty," he has said ;
and perhaps before that age no one can really under-
stand Balzac. Few young people care for him, for
there is nothing in him that appeals to the senses except
through the intellect. Not many women care for him
supremely, for it is part of his method to express senti-
ments through facts, and not facts through sentiments.
But it is natural that he should be the favourite reading
of men of the world, of those men of the world who
have the distinction of their kind ; for he supplies the
key of the enigma which they are studying.

BALZAC 23

VI

The life of Balzac was one long labour, in which
time, money, and circumstances were all against him.
In 1835 he writes: "I have lately spent twenty-six
days in my study without leaving it. I took the air
only at that window which dominates Paris, which I
mean to dominate." And he exults in the labour: "If
there is any glory in that, I alone could accomplish such
a feat." He symbolises the course of his life in com-
paring it to the sea beating against a rock: "To-day
one flood, to-morrow another, bears me along with it.
I am dashed against a rock, I recover myself and go on
to another reef." "Sometimes it seems to me that my
brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the
intellect."

Balzac, like Scott, died under the weight of his
debts ; and it would seem, if one took him at his word,
that the whole of the " Human Comedy " was written
for money. In the modern world, as he himself realised
more clearly than any one, money is more often a symbol
than an entity, and it can be the symbol of every desire.
For Balzac money was the key of his only earthly
paradise. It meant leisure to visit the woman whom he
loved, and at the end it meant the possibility of marry-
ing her.

There were only two women in Balzac's life: one,
a woman much older than himself, of whom he wrote,
on her death, to the other : " She was a mother, a
friend, a family, a companion, a counsel, she made the
writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his
taste, she wept like a sister, she laughed, she came
every day, like a healing slumber, to put sorrow to
sleep." The other was Mme. de Ilanska, whom he
married in 1850, three months before his death, lie
c

24 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

had loved her for twenty years ; she was married, and
lived in Poland : it was only at rare intervals that he
was able to see her, and then very briefly ; but his
letters to her, published since his death, are a
simple, perfectly individual, daily record ot a great
passion. For twenty years he existed on a divine
certainty without a future, and almost without a pre-
sent. But we see the force of that sentiment passing
into his work ; " Seraphita " is its ecstasy, everywhere
is its human shadow ; it refines his strength, it gives
him surprising intuitions, it gives him all that was want-
ing to his genius. Mme. de Hanska is the heroine of
the " Human Comedy," as Beatrice is the heroine of the
"Divine Comedy."

A great lover, to whom love, as well as every other
passion and the whole visible world, was an idea, a
flaming spiritual perception, Balzac enjoyed the vast
happiness of the idealist. Contentedly, joyously, he
sacrificed every petty enjoyment to the idea of love, the
idea of fame, and to that need of the organism to
exercise its forces, which is the only definition of genius.
I do not know, among the lives of men of letters, a life
better filled, or more appropriate. A young man who,
for a short time, was his secretary, declared . " I would
not live your life for the fame of Napoleon and of
Byron combined ! " The Comte de Gramont did not
realise, as the world in general does not realise, that, to
the man of creative energy, creation is at once a neces-
sity and a joy, and, to the lover, hope in absence is the
elixir of life. Balzac tasted more than all earthly
pleasures as he sat there in his attic, creating the world
over again, that he might lay it at the feet of a woman.
Certainly to him there was no tedium in life, for there
was no hour without its vivid employment, and no
moment in which to perceive the most desolate of all

BALZAC 25

certainties, that hope is in the past. His death was as
fortunate as his Hfe ; he died at the height of his
powers, at the height of his fame, at the moment of the
fulfilment of his happiness, and perhaps of the too
sudden relief of that delicate burden.

1899.

PROSPER MERIMEE

I

Stendhal has left us a picture of Merimee as "a
young man in a grey frock-coat, very ugly, and with a
turned-up nose, . . . This young man had something
insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His
eyes, small and without expression, had always the same
look, and this look was ill-natured. . . . Such was my
first impression of the best of my present friends. I
am not too sure of his heart, but I am sure of his
talents. It is M. le Comte Gazul, now so well known ;
a letter from him, which came to me last week, made
me happy for two days. His mother has a good deal of
French wit and a superior intelligence. Like her son,
it seems to me that she might give way to emotion once
a year." There, painted by a clear-sighted and disinter-
ested friend, is a picture of Merimee almost from his
own point of view, or at least as he would himself have
painted the picture. How far is it, in its insistence on
the attendrisscment unefois par an^ on the subordination
of natural feeling to a somewhat disdainful aloofness,
the real Merimee.'*

Early in life, Merimee adopted his theory, fixed his
attitude, and to the end of his life he seemed, to those
about him, to have walked along the path he had
chosen, almost without a deviation. He went to Eng-
land at the age of twenty-three, to Spain four years
later, and might seem to have been drawn naturally to
those two countries, to which he was to return so often,

by natural affinities of temper and manner. It was the

26

PROSPER MERIMEE 27

English manner that he liked, that came naturally to
him ; the correct, unmoved exterior, which is a kind of
positive strength, not to be broken by any onslaught
of events or emotions ; and in Spain he found an equally
positive animal acceptance of things as they are, which
satisfied his profound, restrained, really Pagan sensu-
ality, Pagan in the hard, eighteenth-century sense.
From the beginning he was a student, of art, of his-
tory, of human nature, and we find him enjoying, in
his deliberate, keen way, the studied diversions of the
student ; body and soul each kept exactly in its place,
each provided for without partiality. He entered upon
literature by a mystification, " Le Theatre de Clara
Gazul," a book of plays supposed to be translated from
a living Spanish dramatist ; and he followed it by " La
Guzla," another mystification, a book of prose ballads
supposed to be translated from the Iliyrian. And these
mystifications, like the forgeries of Chatterton, contain
perhaps the most sincere, the most undisguised emotion
which he ever permitted himself to express ; so secure
did he feel of the heart behind the pearl necklace of
the dccolletee Spanish actress, who travesties his own
face in the frontispiece to the one, and so remote from
himself did he feel the bearded gentleman to be, who
sits cross-legged on the ground, holding his lyre or
:^u%la^ in the frontispiece to the other. Then came a
historical novel, the " Chronique du Regne de Charles
IX.," before he discovered, as if by accident, precisely
what it was he was meant to do : the short story. Then
he drifted into history, became Inspector of Ancient
Monuments, and heljK'd to save Vezelay, among other
gocjd deeds toward art, done in his cold, systematic,
after all satisfactory manner, lie travelled at almost
regular intervals, not only in Spain and England, but
in Corsica, in Greece and Asia Minor, in Italy, in Ilun-

28 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

gary, in Bohemia, usually with a definite, scholarly ob-
ject, and always with an alert attention to everything
that came in his way, to the manners of people, their
national characters, their differences from one another.
An intimate friend of the Countess de Montijo, the
mother of the Empress Eugenie, he was a friend, not a
courtier, at the court of the Third Empire. He was
elected to the Academy, mainly for his " Etudes sur
I'Histoire Romaine," a piece of dry history, and immedi-
ately scandalised his supporters by publishing a story,
" Arsene Guillot," which was taken for a veiled attack
on religion and on morals. Soon after, his imagination
seemed to flag ; he abandoned himself, perhaps a little
wearily, more and more to facts, to the facts of history
and learning ; learned Russian, and translated Poushkin
and Tourguenieff; and died in 1870, at Cannes,
perhaps less satisfied with himself than most men who
have done, in their lives, far less exactly what they have
intended to do.

'T have theories about the very smallest things —
gloves, boots, and the like," says Merimee in one of his
letters ; des idees tres-arretees^ as he adds with emphasis
in another. Precise opinions lead easily to prejudices,
and Merimee, who prided himself on the really very
logical quality of his mind, put himself somewhat de-
liberately into the hands of his prejudices. Thus he
hated religion, distrusted priests, would not let himself
be carried away by any instinct of admiration, would
not let himself do the things which he had the power
to do, because his other, critical self came mockingly
behind him, suggesting that very few things were alto-
gether worth doing. "There is nothing that I despise
and even detest so much as humanity in general," he
confesses in a letter ; and it is with a certain self-com-
placency that he defines the only kind of society in

PROSPER MERIMEE 29

which he found himself at home : " (i) With unpreten-
tious people whom I have known a long time ; (2) in a
Spanish venta, with muleteers and peasant women of
Andalusia." One day, as he finds himself in a pensive
mood, dreaming of a woman, he translates for her some
lines of Sophocles, into verse, "English verse, you
understand, for I abhor French verse." The carefulness
with which he avoids received opinions shows a certain
consciousness of those opinions, which in a more imagi-
natively independent mind would scarcely have found
a place. It is not only for an effect, but more and
more genuinely, that he sets his acquirements as a
scholar above his accomplishments as an artist. Clear-
ing away, as it seemed to him, every illusion from be-
fore his eyes, he forgot the last illusion of positive
people : the possibility that one's eyes may be short-
sighted.

Merimee realises a type which we are accustomed to
associate almost exclusively with the eighteenth century,
but of which our own time can offer us many obscure
examples. It is the type of the esprit fort : the learned
man, the choice, narrow artist, who is at the same time
the cultivated sensualist. To such a man the pursuit of
women is part of his constant pursuit of human experi-
ence, and of the document, which is the summing up of
human experience. To Merimee history itself was a
matter of detail. " In history I care only for anecdotes,"
he says in the preface to the " Chronique du Rcgne de
Charles IX." And he adds: ''It is not a very noble
taste; but, I confess to my shame, I would willingly
give Thucydides for the authentic memoirs of Aspasia
or of a slave of Pericles ; ior only memoirs, which are
the familiar talk of an author wiili his reader, afford
those portraits of man which amuse and interest me."
This curiosity of mankind above all things, and of man-

30 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

kind at home, or in private actions, not necessarily of
any import to the general course of the world, leads the
curious searcher naturally to the more privately inter-
esting and the less publicly important half of mankind.
Not scrupulous in arriving at any end by the most
adaptable means, not disturbed by any illusions as to
the physical facts of the universe, a sincere and grateful
lover of variety, doubtless an amusing companion with
those who amused him, Mcriinee found much of his
entertainment and instruction, at all events in his
younger years, in that "half world" which he tells us
he frequented "very much out of curiosity, living in it
always as in a foreign country." Here, as elsewhere,
Merimee played the part of the amateur. He liked
anecdotes, not great events, in his history ; and he was
careful to avoid any too serious passions in his search
for sensations. There, no doubt, for the sensualist, is
happiness, if he can resign himself to it. It is only
serious passions which make anybody unhappy ; and
Merimee was carefully on the lookout against a possible
unhappiness. I can imagine him ending every day with
satisfaction, and beginning every fresh day with just
enough expectancy to be agreeable, at that period of
his life when he was writing the finest of his stories,
and dividing the rest of his leisure between the draw-
ing-rooms and the pursuit of uneventful adventures.

Only, though we are automates autant quesprit^ as
Pascal tells us, it is useless to expect that what is auto-
matic in us should remain invariable and unconditioned.
If life could be lived on a plan, and for such men on
such a plan, if first impulses and profound passions
could be kept entirely out of one's own experience, and
studied only at a safe distance, then, no doubt, one
could go on being happy, in a not too heroic way. But,
with Merimee as witli all the rest of the world, the

PROSPER MERIMEE 31

scheme breaks down one day, just when a reasonable
solution to things seems to have been arrived at. Me'ri-
mee had already entered on a peaceable enough liaison
when the first letter came to him from the Inconnue to
whom he was to write so many letters, for nine years
without seeing her, and then for thirty years more after
he had met her, the last letter being written but two
hours before his death. These letters, which we can
now read in two volumes, have a delicately insincere
sincerity which makes every letter a work of art, not
because he tried to make it so, but because he could
not help seeing the form simultaneously with the feel-
ing, and writing genuine love-letters with an excellence
almost as impersonal as that of his stories. He begins
with curiosity, which passes with singular rapidity into
a kind of self-willed passion ; already in the eighth letter,
long before he has seen her, he is speculating which of
the two will know best how to torture the other: that
is, as he views it, love best. "We shall never love one
another really," he tells her, as he begins to hope for
the contrary. Then he discovers, for the first time,
and without practical result, " that it is better to have
illusions than to have none at all." He confesses him-
self to her, sometimes reminding her: "You will never
know either ail the good or all the evil that I have in
me. I have spent my life in being praised for qualities
which I do not possess, and calumniated for defects
which are not mine." And, with a strange, weary
humility, which is the other side of his contempt for
most things and people, he admits: "To you I am like
an old opera, which you are obliged to forget, in order
to see it again with any pleasure." He, who has always
distrusted first iin|)ulses, finds himself telling her (was
she really so like him, or was he arguing with him-
self?): "You always fear first impulses; do you not

32 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

see that they are the only ones which are worth any-
thing and which always succeed ? " Does he realise,
unable to change the temperament w^iich he has partly
made for himself, that just there has been his own
failure ?

Perhaps of all love-letters, these of Merimee show
us love triumphing over the most carefully guarded
personality. Here the obstacle is not duty, nor circum-
stance, nor a rival ; but (on her side as on his, it would
seem) a carefully trained natural coldness, in which
action, and even for the most part feeling, are relin-
quished to the control of second thoughts. A habit of
repressive irony goes deep : Merimee might well have
thought himself secure against the outbreak of an un-
conditional passion. Yet here we find passion betray-
ing itself, often only by bitterness, together with a shy,
surprising tenderness, in this curious lovers' itinerary,
marked out with all the customary sign-posts, and lead-
ing, for all its wilful deviations, along the inevitable
road.

It is commonly supposed that the artist, by the
habit of his profession, has made for himself a sort of
cuirass of phrases against the direct attack of emotion,
and so will suffer less than most people if he should fall
into love, and things should not go altogether well with
him. Rather, he is the more laid open to attack, the
more helplessly entangled when once the net has been
cast over him. He lives through every passionate
trouble, not merely with the daily emotions of the
crowd, but with the whole of his imagination. Pain is
multiplied to him l)y the force of that faculty by which
he conceives delight. What is most torturing in every
not quite fortunate love is memory, and the artist be-
comes an artist by his intensification of memory. Meri-
mee has himself defined art as exaggeration a propos.

PROSPER MERIMEE 33

Well, to the artist his own life is an exaggeration not
a propos^ and every hour dramatises for him its own pain
and pleasure, in a tragic comedy of which he is the
author and actor and spectator. The practice of art
is a sharpening of the sensations, and, the knife once
sharpened, does it cut into one's hand less deeply
because one is in the act of using it to carve
wood ?

And so we find Merimee, the most impersonal of
artists, and one of those most critical of the caprices
and violences of fate, giving in to an almost obvious
temptation, an anonymous correspondence, a mysteri-
ous unknown woman, and passing from stage to stage
of a finally very genuine love-affair, which kept him
in a fluttering agitation for more than thirty years. It
is curious to note that the little which we know of this
Inconnue seems to mark her out as the realisation of
a type which had always been Merimee's type of
woman. She has the " wicked eyes " of all his heroines,
from the Mariquita of his first attempt in literature,
who haunts the Inquisitor with "her great black eyes,
like the eyes of a young cat, soft and wicked at once."
lie finds her at the end of his life, in a novel of Tour-
guenieff, " one of those diabolical creatures whose
coquetry is the more dangerous because it is capable
of passion." Like so many artists, he has invented his
ideal before he meets it, and must have seemed almost
to have fallen in love witli his own creation. It is one
of the privileges of art to create nature, as, according to
a certain mystical doctrine, you can actualise, by sheer
fixity of contemplation, your mental image of a thing
into the thing itself. The Inconnue was one of a scries,
the rest imaginary; and her j)ower over Merimee, we
can hardly tloubt, came not only from her (jueer like-
ness of temperament to his, but from the singular,

34 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

flattering pleasure which it must have given him to find
that he had invented with so much truth to nature.

II

Merimee as a writer belongs to the race of Laclos
and of Stendhal, a race essentially French ; and we find
him representing, a little coldly, as it seemed, the claims
of mere unimpassioned intellect, at work on passionate
problems, among those people of the Romantic period
to whom emotion, evident emotion, was everything.
In his subjects he is as " Romantic " as Victor Hugo or
Gautier ; he adds, even, a peculiar flavour of cruelty to
the Romantic ingredients. But he distinguishes sharply,
as French writers before him had so well known how
to do, between the passion one is recounting and the
moved or unmoved way in which one chooses to tell
it. To Merimee art was a very formal thing, almost a
part of learning ; it was a thing to be done with a clear
head, reflectively, with a calm mastery of even the most
vivid material. While others, at that time, were in-
toxicating themselves with strange sensations, hoping
that " nature would take the pen out of their hands and
write," just at the moment when their own thoughts
became least coherent, Merimee went quietly to work
over something a little abnormal which he had found in
nature, with as disinterested, as scholarly, as mentally
reserved an interest as if it were one of those Gothic
monuments which he inspected to such good purpose,
and, as it has seemed to his biographer, with so little
sympathy. His own emotion, so far as it is roused,
seems to him an extraneous thing, a thing to be con-
cealed, if not a little ashamed of. It is the thing itself
he wishes to give you, not his feelings about itj and his

PROSPER MERIMEE ^s

theory is that if the thing itself can only be made to
stand and speak before the reader, the reader will supply
for himself all the feeling that is needed, all the feeling
that would be called out in nature by a perfectly clear
sight of just such passions in action. It seems to him
bad art to paint the picture, and to write a description
of the picture as well.

And his method serves him wonderfully up to a
certain point, and then leaves him, without his being
well aware of it, at the moment even when he has con-
vinced himself that he has realised the utmost of his
aim. At a time when he had come to consider scholarly
dexterity as the most important part of art, Merimee
tells us that " La Venus dllle " seemed to him the best
story he had ever written. He has often been taken
at his word, but to take him at his word is to do him
an injustice. "La Venus d'llle" is a modern setting of
the old story of the Ring given to Venus, and Merimee
has been praised for the ingenuity with which he has
obtained an effect of supernatural terror, while leaving
the way open for a material explanation of the super-
natural. What he has really done is to materialise a
myth, by accepting in it precisely what might be a mere
superstition, the form of the thing, and leaving out the
spiritual meaning of which that form was no more than
a temporary expression. The ring which the bridegroom
sets on the finger of Venus, and which the statue's finger
closes upon, accepting it, symbolises the pact between
love and sensuality, the lover's abdication of all but
the physical part of love ; and the statue taking its
place between husband and wife on the marriage-night,
and crushing life out of him in an inexorable embrace,
symbolises the merely natural destruction which that
granted prayer brings with it, as a merely hum;in
Messalina takes her lover on his own terms, in his

:^6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

abandonment of all to Venus. Merimee sees a cruel
and fantastic superstition, which he is afraid of seeming
to take too seriously, which he prefers to leave as a
story of ghosts or bogies, a thing at which we are to
shiver as at a mere twitch on the nerves, while our
mental confidence in the impossibility of what we can-
not explain is preserved for us by a hint at a muleteer's
vengeance. "Have I frightened you?" says the man
of the world, with a reassuring smile. "Think about
it no more; I really meant nothing.''

And yet, does he after all mean nothing.'' The devil,
the old pagan gods, the spirits of evil incarnated under
every form, fascinated him ; it gave him a malign
pleasure to set them at their evil work among men,
while, all the time, he mocks them and the men who
believed in them. He is a materialist, and yet he
believes in at least a something evil, outside the world,
or in the heart of it, which sets humanity at its strange
games, relentlessly. Even then he will not surrender
his doubts, his ironies, his negations. Is he, perhaps,
at times, the atheist who fears that, after all, God may
exist, or at least who realises how much he would fear
him if he did exist.''

Merimee had always delighted in mystifications ; he
was always on his guard against being mystified him-
self, either by nature or by his fellow-creatures. In the
early " Romantic " days he had had a genuine passion
for various things: "local colour," for instance. But
even then he had invented it by a kind of trick, and,
later on, he explains what a poor thing " local colour "
is, since it can so easily be invented without leaving
one's study. He is full of curiosity, and will go far to
satisfy it, regretting "the decadence," in our times,
"of energetic passions, in favour of tranquillity and
perhaps of happiness." These energetic passions he

PROSPER MERIMEE 37

will find, indeed, in our own times, in Corsica, in Spain,
in Lithuania, really in the midst of a very genuine
and profoundly studied "local colour," and also, under
many disguises, in Parisian drawing-rooms. Merimee
prized happiness, material comfort, the satisfaction of
one's immediate desires, very highly, and it was his
keen sense of life, of the pleasures of living, that gave
him some of his keenness in the realisation of violent
death, physical pain, whatever disturbs the equilibrium
of things with unusual emphasis. Himself really selfish,
he can distinguish the unhappiness of others with a
kind of intuition which is not sympathy, but which
selfish people often have : a dramatic consciousness of
how painful pain must be, whoever feels it. It is not
pity, though it communicates itself to us, often enough,
as pity. It is the clear-sighted sensitiveness of a man
who watches human things closely, bringing them home
to himself with the deliberate, essaying art of an
actor who has to represent a particular passion in
movement.

And always in Merimee there is this union of curiosity
with indilTerence : the curiosity of the student, the
indifference of the man of the world. Indifference, in
him, as in the man of the world, is partly an attitude,
adopted for its form, and influencing the temperament
just so much as gesture always influences emotion.
The man who forces himself to appear calm under
excitement teaches his nerves to follow instinctively the
way he has shown them. In time he will not merely
seem calm but will be calm, at the moment when he
learns that a great disaster has befallen him. But, in
Merimee, was the indifference even as external as it
must always be when there is restraint, when, therefore,
there is something to restrain .'' Was there not in him
a certain drying up of the sources of emotion, as the

;ii'7u;23

38 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

man of the world came to accept almost the point of
view of society, reading his stories to a little circle of
court ladies, when, once in a while, he permitted himself
to write a story ? And was not this increase of well-
bred indifference, now more than ever characteristic,
almost the man himself, the chief reason why he
abandoned art so early, writing only two or three short
stories during the last twenty-five years of his life, and
writing these with a labour which by no means conceals
itself?

Merimee had an abstract interest in, almost an en-
thusiasm for, facts ; facts for their meaning, the light
they throw on psychology, lie declines to consider
psychology except through its expression in facts, with
an impersonality far more real than that of Flaubert.
The document, historical or social, must translate itself
into sharp action before he can use it ; not that he does
not see, and appreciate better than most others, all
there is of significance in the document itself ; but his
theory of art is inexorable. He never allowed himself
to write as he pleased, but he wrote always as he con-
sidered the artist should write. Thus he made for
himself a kind of formula, confining himself, as some
thought, within too narrow limits, but, to himself, doing
exactly what he set himself to do, with all the satisfac-
tion of one who is convinced of the justice of his aim
and confident of his power to attain it.

Look, for instance, at his longest, far from his best
work, " La Chronique du Regne de Charles IX." Like
so much of his work, it has something of the air of a
tour de forcc^ not taken up entirely for its own sake.
Merimee drops into a fashion, half deprecatingly, as if
he sees through it, and yet, as with merely mundane
elegance, with a resolve to be more scrupulously exact
than its devotees. "Belief," says some one in this

PROSPER MERIMEE 39

book, as if speaking for Merimee, "is a precious gift
which has been denied me." Well, he will do better,
without belief, than those who believe. Written under
a title which suggests a work of actual history, it is
more than possible that the first suggestion of this
book really came, as he tells us in the preface, from the
reading of " a large number of memoirs and pamphlets
relating to the end of the sixteenth century." "I
wished to make an epitome of my reading," he tells us,
"and here is the epitome." The historical problem
attracted him, that never quite explicable Massacre
of St Bartholomew, in which there was precisely the
violence of action and uncertainty of motive which he
liked to set before him at the beginning of a task in
literature. Probable, clearly defined people, in the
dress of the period, grew up naturally about this central
motive ; humour and irony have their part ; there are
adventures, told with a sword's point of sharpness, and
in the fewest possible words ; there is one of his cruel
and loving women, in whom every sentiment becomes
action, by some twisted feminine logic of their own.
It is the most artistic, the most clean-cut, of historical
novels ; and yet this perfect neatness of method sug-
gests a certain indiiTcrence on the part of the writer,
as if he were more interested in doing the thing well
than in doing it.

And that, in all but the very best of his stories
(even, perhaps, in " Arsene Guillot," only not in such
perfect things as "Carmen," as "Mateo Falcone"), is
what Mcrimcc just lets us see, underneath an almost
faultless skill of narrative. An incident told by Mcriiiice
at his best gathers about it something of the gravity of
history, the composed way in which it is told helping
to give it the equivalent of remoteness, allowing it not
merely to be, but, what is more difficult, to seem, classic

D

40 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

in its own time. " Magnificent things, things after my
own heart — that is to say, Greek in their truth and
simpHcity," he writes in a letter, referring to the tales
of Poushkin. The phrase is scarcely too strong to
apply to what is best in his own work. Made out of
elemental passions, hard, cruel, detached as it were
from their own sentiments, the stories that he tells might
in other hands become melodramas : " Carmen," taken
thoughtlessly out of his hands, has supplied the libretto
to the most popular of modern light operas. And yet,
in his severe method of telling, mere outlines, it seems,
told with an even stricter watch over what is signifi-
cantly left out than over what is briefly allowed to be
said in words, these stories sum up little separate pieces
of the world, each a little world in itself And each is a
little world which he has made his own, with a labour at
last its own reward, and taking life partly because he has
put into it more of himself than the mere intention
of doing it well. Merimee loved Spain, and " Carmen,"
which by some caprice of popularity is the symbol
of Spain to people in general, is really, to those who
know Spain well, the most Spanish thing that has been
written since "Gil Bias." All the little parade of local
colour and philology, the appendix on the Cab of the
gipsies, done to heighten the illusion, has more sig-
nificance than people sometimes think. In this story
all the qualities of Merimee come into agreement ; the
student of human passions, the traveller, the observer,
the learned man, meet in harmony ; and, in addition,
there is the aficionado^ the true amateur^ in love with
Spain and the Spaniards.

It is significant that at the reception of Merimee at
the Academie Frangaise in 1845, ^- Etienne thought
it already needful to say: "Do not pause in the midst
of your career ; rest is not permitted to your talent."

PROSPER MERIMEE 41

Already Merimee was giving way to facts, to facts in

themselves, as they come into history, into records of

scholarship. We find him writing, a little dryly, on

Catiline, on Csesar, on Don Pedro the Cruel, learning

Russian, and translating from it (yet, while studying

the Russians before all the world, never discovering

the mystical Russian soul), writing learned articles,

writing reports. He looked around on contemporary

literature, and found nothing that he could care for.

Stendhal was gone, and who else was there to admire?

Flaubert, it seemed to him, was " wasting his talent

under the pretence of realism." Victor Hugo was "a

fellow with the most beautiful figures of speech at his

disposal," who did not take the trouble to think, but

intoxicated himself with his own words. Baudelaire

made him furious, Renan filled him with pitying scorn.

In the midst of his contempt, he may perhaps have

imagined that he was being left behind. For whatever

reason, weakness or strength, he could not persuade

himself that it was worth while to strive for anything

any more. He died probably at the moment when he

was no longer a fashion, and had not yet become a

classic.

1 90 1,

THEOPHILE GAUTIER

Gautier has spoken for himself in a famous passage
of "Mademoiselle de Maupin ": " I am a man of the
Homeric age ; the world in which I live is not my world,
and I understand nothing of the society which surrounds
me. For me Christ did not come ; I am as much a pagan
as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have never plucked on
Golgotha the flowers of the Passion, and the deep
stream that flows from the side of the Crucified, and
sets a crimson girdle about the world, has never washed
me in its flood ; my rebellious body will not acknowledge
the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh will not endure
to be mortified. I find the earth as beautiful as the sky,
and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I have no
gift for spirituality ; I prefer a statue to a ghost, full
j noon to twilight. Three things delight me : gold,
j marble, and purple ; brilliance, solidity, colour. . . .
I have looked on love in the light of antiquity, and as
a piece of sculpture more or less perfect. . . . All my
life I have been concerned with the form of the flagon,
never with the quality of its contents." That is part
of a confession of faith, and it is spoken with absolute
sincerity. Gautier knew himself, and could tell the
truth about himself as simply, as impartially, as if he
had been describing a work of art. Or is he not,
indeed, describing a work of art.'* Was not that
very state of mind, that finished and limited tem-
perament, a thing which he had collaborated with

nature in making, with an effective heightening
42

THEOPHILE GAUTIER

43

of what was most natural to him, in the spirit of

art r

Gautier saw the world as mineral, as metal, as h
pigment, as rock, tree, water, as architecture, costume, |
under sunlight, gas, in all the colours that light can
bring out of built or growing things ; he saw it as
contour, movement ; he saw all that a painter sees,
w'hen the painter sets himself to copy, not to create.
He was the finest copyist who ever used paint with a
pen. Nothing that can be expressed in technical terms
escaped him ; there were no technical terms which he
could not reduce to an orderly beauty. But he absorbed
all this visible world with the hardly discriminating
impartiality of the retina ; he had no moods, was not
to be distracted by a sentiment, heard no voices, saw
nothing; but darkness, the negation of day, in night.
He was tirelessly attentive, he had no secrets of his
own and could keep none of nature's. He could
describe every ray of the nine thousand precious stones
in the throne of Ivan the Terrible, in the Treasury of
the Kremlin ; but he could tell you nothing of one of
Maeterlinck's bees.

The five senses made Gautier for themselves, that
they might become articulate. He speaks for them
all with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are in
love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no
recollection. If the body did not dwindle and expand
to some ignoble j)liysical conclusion ; if wrinkles did
not creep yellowing up women's necks, and the fire in
a man's blood did not lose its heat; he would always
be content. Everything that he cared for in the world
was to be had, except, perhaps, rest from striving
after it ; only, everything would one day come to an
end, after a slow spoiling. Decrepit, colourless,
uneager things shocked him, and it was with an

44 STUDIKS IN PROSE AND VKRSE

acute, almost disinterested pity that he watched him-
self die.

All his life Gautier adored life, and all the processes
and forms of life. A pagan, a young Roman, hard and
delicate, with something of cruelty in his sympathy
with things that could be seen and handled, he would
have hated the soul, if he had ever really apprehended
it, for its qualifying and disturbing power upon the
body. No other modern writer, no writer perhaps,
has described nakedness with so abstract a heat of
rapture : like d'Albert when he sees Mile, de Maupin
for the first and last time, he is the artist before he is
the lover, and he is the lover while he is the artist. It
was above all things the human body whose contours
and colours he wished to fix for eternity, in the
" robust art " of " verse, marble, onyx, enamel." And
it was not the body as a frail, perishable thing, and a
thing to be pitied, that he wanted to perpetuate ; it
was the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least in its
recurrence.

He loved imperishable things : the body, as genera-
tion after generation refashions it, the world, as it is
restored and rebuilt, and then gems, and hewn stone,
and carved ivory, and woven tapestry. He loved verse
for its solid, strictly limited, resistant form, which, while
prose melts and drifts about it, remains unalterable,
indestructible. Words, he knew, can build as strongly
as stones, and not merely rise to music, like the walls of
Troy, but be themselves music as well as structure.
Yet, as in visible things he cared only for hard out-
line and rich colour, so in words too he had no love of
half-tints, and was content to do without that softening
of atmosphere which was to be prized by those who
came after him as the thing most worth seeking. Even
his verse is without mystery; if he meditates, his

THEOPHILE GAUTIER 45

meditation has all the fixity of a kind of sharp, precise
criticism.

What Gautier saw he saw with unparalleled exacti-
tude : he allows himself no poetic license or room for
fine phrases ; has his eye always on the object, and
really uses the words which best describe it, whatever
they may be. So his books of travel are guide-books,
in addition to being other things; and not by any
means " states of soul " or states of nerves. He is
willing to give you information, and able to give it to
you without deranging his periods. The little essay
on Leonardo is an admirable piece of artistic divination,
and it is also a clear, simple, sufficient account of
the man, his temperament, and his way of work. The
study of Baudelaire, reprinted in the edition definitive
of the " Fleurs du Mai," remains the one satisfactory
summing up, it is not a solution, of the enigma which \
Baudelaire personified ; and it is almost the most
coloured and perfumed thing in words which he ever
wrote. He wrote equally well about cities, poets,
novelists, painters, or sculptors ; he did not understand
one better than the other, or feel less sympathy for
one than for another. He, the " parfait magicien es
lettres fran^aises," to whom faultless words came in
faultlessly beautiful order, could realise, against Balzac
himself, that Balzac had a style : " he possesses, though
he did not think so, a style, and a very beautiful style,
the necessary, inevitable, mathematical style of his
ideas." He appreciated Ingns as justly as he appre-
ciated Fl Greco ; he went through the Louvre, room
by room, saying the right thing about each j^ainter in
turn. lie did not say the final thing; he said nothing
which we have to pause and think over before we see
the whole of its truth or apjirehend the whole of its
beauty. Truth, in him, comes to us ahnost literally

46 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

through the eyesight, and with the same beautiful
clearness as if it were one of those visible things which
delighted him most : gold, marble, and purple ; bril-
liance, solidity, colour.

1902.

A WORD ON DE QUINCEY

The work of De Quincey must be read tolerantly,
rarely, and in fragments. Not even Coleridge is so
uneven as De Quincey, for with Coleridge there is
always an alert intellectual subtlety, troubling itself
very little about the words in which it is to express
itself; an unsteady, but incessant, inner illumination.
De Quincey, always experimentalising with his form,
forgetting and remembering it with equal persistence,
has no fixed mind underneath the swaying surface of
his digressions, and holds our interest, when he has
once captured it, in a kind of unquiet expectancy.
He will write about anything, making what he chooses
of his subject, as in the fantasias around the mail-
coach ; he writes, certainly, for the sake of writing,
and also to rid himself of all the cobwebs that are
darkening his brain. His mind is subtle, yet without
direction ; his nerves are morbidly sensitive, and they
speak through all his work ; he is a scholar outside
life, to whom his own mind is interesting, not in the
least because it is his own ; and he has the scholar's
ideal of a style which is a separate thing from the
thing which it expresses.

''My mother," he says in a significant passage, "was
predisposed to think ill of all causes that required many
words : I, predisposed to subtleties of all sorts and
degrees, had naturally become ac(]uainted with cases
that could not unrobe their apparellings down to that
degree of simplicity. ... I sank away in a hopelessness
that was immeasurable from all effort at explanation."

■<7

48 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

And he defines " the one misery having no relief," as
" the burden of the incommunicable." That burden,
thus desperately realised, was always his, and the whole
of his work is a tangled attempt to communicate the
incommunicable. He has a morbid kind of conscience,
an abstract, almost literary conscience, which drives
him to the very edge and last gulf of language, in
his endeavour to express every fine shade of fact and
sensation. At times this search is rewarded with
miraculous findings, and all the colours seem to fade
down to him out of the sunset when he would
put purple into speech, words turn into solemn music
when he would have them chant, and sensations become
embodied fear or pain or wonder when he evokes them
upon the page. But, in its restlessness, its discontent
with the best service that words can render, it heaps
parenthesis on parenthesis, drags down paragraphs with
leaden foot-notes, and pulls up the reader at every
other moment to remind him of something which he has
forgotten or does not wish to know. De Quincey
never knows when to stop, because his own mind never
stops. He turns upon himself, like a nervous man
trying to get out of a room full of people ; apologises,
interrupts his own apologies, leaving you at last a
sharer of his own fluster. And in all this search for
exactitude there is a certain pedantry, and also a
certain mental haze. His imagination was pictorial,
but it was not always precise enough in its outlines.
Rhetoric comes into even the finest of his " dream-
scenery," and rhetoric, in a picture, is colour making up
for absence of form. He believed in words too much
and too little.

De Quincey's "Confessions" are among the most
fascinating of autobiographies, but they have an air of
unreality because they are written round such experi-

A WORD ON DE OUINCEY 49

ences as only a very unreal kind of man could have
known. However sincere he may mean to be, De
Quincey must always make a deliberate arrangement
of what he has to tell us ; things fall into attitudes
as he looks at them ; he hears them in long and
winding sentences. To an opium-smoker time and ;
space lose even that sort of reality which normal i
people are accustomed to assign to them. Under '
the influence of such a drug it is somewhat perilous
to cross the street, for it is impossible to realise
the distance between oneself and the hansom which
is coming towards one, or the length of time which
it will require to get from pavement to pavement.
It is this disturbed sense of proportion, this broken
equilibrium of the mind, which gave De Oiiincey
so faint and variable a hold on fact, even mental
fact. He saw everything on the same plane, one
thing not more important than another ; at the
moment when it engaged his interest anything
was of supreme importance. But interest drove
out interest, or came and went, with the disturb-
ance of an obsession. In writing he wants to tell
us everything about everything ; he takes up
first one subject, handling it elaborately; then
handles another subject elaborately ; then goes
back to the first ; and so the narrative moves on-
ward, like a worm, turning back upon itself as it
moves.

When people praise the style of De Quincey, they
praise isolated outbursts, and there are outbursts
in his work which have almost every quality of
external splendour. But it was De C^uincey's error
to seek splendour for its own sake, to cultivate
eloquence in rhetoric, to write prose loudly, as if
it were to be delivered from a pulpit. Listen to

3

o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the first sentence of his famous "dream-fugue":
" Passion of sudden death ! that once in youth I
read and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted
signs! — rapture of panic taking the shape (which
amongst tombs in churches I have seen) of woman
bursting her sepulchral bonds — of woman's Ionic
form bending forward from the ruins of her grave
with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped
adoring hands — waiting, watching, trembling, praying
for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever."
Now if prose is something said, as poetry is some-
thing sung, that is not good prose, any more
than it is even bad poetry. It is oratory, and
oratory has qualities quite different from literature ;
qualities which fit it to impress a multitude when
spoken aloud, in a voice artificially heightened in
order to be heard by that multitude. De C^uincey's
prose is artificially heightened ; it cannot be spoken
naturally, but must be spoken with an emphasis quite
unlike that of even the most emotional speech. Per-
haps the most perfect prose in the English language
is the prose of Shakespeare : take a single sentence
from "Love's Labour's Lost": "The sweet war-man is
dead and rotten ; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of
the buried : when he breathed, he was a man ! " There
you have every merit of prose, in form and substance,
and it may be spoken as easily as the expression
of one's own thought. Hamlet's " What a piece
of work is man ! " with its elaborate splendour,
can be spoken on the conversational level of the
voice. Now De Quincey thinks it a mean thing
to write as if he were but talking, and, whenever
he rises with his subject, seems to get on a plat-
form. It is a wonderful thing, undoubtedly, that
he gives us, but a thing structurally unsatisfactory.

A WORD ON DE QUINCEY 51

Carried further, used with less imagination but with
a finer sense for the colour of words, it becomes
the style of Ruskin, and is what is frankly called
prose poetry, a lucky bastard, glorying in the illegiti-
macy of its origin.

1 90 1.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

All Hawthorne's work is one form or another of
"handling sin." He had the Puritan sense of it in
the blood, and the power to use it artistically in the
brain. With Tolstoi, he is the only novelist of the
soul, and he is haunted by what is obscure, dangerous,
and on the confines of good and evil ; by what is
abnormal, indeed, if we are to accept human nature as
a thing set within responsible limits, and conscious of
social relations. Of one of his women he says that she
" was plucked up out of a mystery, and had its roots
still clinging to her." It is what is mysterious, really,
in the soul that attracts him. " When we find ourselves
fading into shadows and unrealities": that is when he
cares to concern himself with humanity. And, finding
the soul, in its essence, so intangible, so mistlike, so
unfamiliar with the earth, he lays hold of what to him
is the one great reality, sin, in order that he may find
out something definite about the soul, in its most active,
its most interesting, manifestations.

To Hawthorne what we call real life was never very
real, and he has given, as no other novelist has given, a
picture of life as a dream, in which the dreamers them-
selves are, at intervals, conscious that they are dreaming.
At a moment of spiritual crisis, as at that moment when
Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale meet in the
forest, he can render their mental state only through
one of his gho.^tly images: " It was no wonder that they
thus questioned one another's actual bodily existence, and
even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet,
in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in

5»

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 5;^

the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had
been intimately connected in their former life, but now
stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread, as not wonted
to this companionship of disembodied spirits." To
Hawthorne, by a strange caprice or farsightedness of
temperament, the supreme emotion comes only under
the aspect of an illusion, for the first time recognised as
being real, that is, really an illusion. "He himself, as
was perceptible by many symptoms," he says of Cliiford,
"lay darkly behind his pleasure and knew it to be a
baby-play, which he was to toy and trifle with, instead
of thoroughly believing.'' To Cliiford, it is mental ruin,
a kind of exquisite imbecility, which brmgs this con-
sciousness ; to Hester Prynne, to Arthur Dimmesdale,
to Donatello, to Miriam, it is sin. Each, through sin,
becomes real, and perceives something of the truth.

In this strange pilgrim's progress, the first step is a
step outside the bounds of some moral or social law, by
which the soul is isolated, for its own torture and benefit,
from the rest of the world. All Hawthorne's stories
are those of persons whom some crime, or misunderstood
virtue, or misfortune, has set by themselves, or in a
worse companionship of solitude. Hester Prynne "stood
apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, like a
ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt." The link between Hester and
Arthur Dimmesdale, between Miriam and Donatello,
was " the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he
nor she coukl break. Like all other sins, it brought
along with it its obligations " Note how curious the
obsession by which Hawthorne can express the force of
the moral law, the soul's bond with itself, only through
the consequences of the breaking of that law ! And
note, also, with how perfect a sympathy he can render
the sensation itself, what is exultant, liberating, in a

54 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

strong sin, not yet become one's companion and accuser.
"For, guilt has its rapture, too. The foremost resuk
of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom."

"I tremble at my own thoughts," he says somewhere,
" yet must needs probe them to their depths." His
people are always, like Miriam, " hinting at an intangible
confession, such as persons with overburdened hearts
often make to children and dumb animals, or to holes in
the earth, where they think their secrets may be at
once revealed and buried." All his work is such a
confession, which he seems to make shyly, and, at the
end, to have only half made. He wonders, speculates,
plays around a dreadful idea, like a moth around the
flame of a candle ; and then draws back, partly with the
artist's satisfaction, partly with a slight natural shiver. In
the preface to the "Mosses from an Old Manse" he dwells
on the story of the boy who wanders upon the battle-
field, axe in hand, out ot the woods where he has been
felling trees, and, by a sort of fierce unconscious instinct,
kills the wounded British soldier. " Oftentimes, as an
intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow
that poor youth through his subsequent career, and
observe how his soul was tortured by the bloodstain."
He is always searching for these bloodstains on the
conscience, delicately weighing the soul's burden of
sin; and it is his "intellectual and moral exercise.'"'

Though Hawthorne has said, not without truth,
" so far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I
veil my face," there never was a more sincere or a more
personal writer. Everything in his work is a growth
out of his own soil, and we must be careful not to
attribute any too deliberate intentions to what may
seem most conscious or persistent in his work. The
qualities which we prize most in it seem to have
been those against which he tried hardest to be on

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE sS

his guard. We find him wishing for some contact with
the "small, familiar, gentle interests of life," that they
may "carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous
accumulation of morbid sensibility." He is interested
only in those beings, of exceptional temperament or
destiny, who are alone in the world ; and yet what he
represents is the necessity and the awfulness, not the
pride or the choice, of isolation. "This perception of
an infinite shivering solitude, amid which we cannot
come close enough to human beings to be warmed by
them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of
mist," brings with it no sense of even consciously per-
verse pleasure. His men and women are no egoists, to
whom isolation is a delight ; they suffer from it, they
try in vain to come out of the shadow and sit down
with the rest of the world in the sunshine. Something
ghostly in their blood sets them wandering among
shadows, but they long to be merely human, they would
come back if they could, and their tragedy is to find
some invisible and impenetrable door shut against
them.

It had always been the destiny of Hawthorne to
watch life from a corner, as he watched the experi-
mental life at Brook Farm, sitting silent among the
talkers in the hall, "himself almost always holding a
book before him, but seldom turning the pages." In all
his novels, there is some such spectator of life, whom
indeed he usually represents as a cold or malevolent
person, intent for his own ends on the tragic climax
which he will not actually precipitate. Hawthorne's
attitude was rather that of a sensitive but morbidly
clear-sighted friend, or of a physician, affectionately
observant of the disease which he cannot cure. It was
his sympathy with the soul that made him so watchful
of its uneasy moods, its strange adventures, especially

£

S6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

those which remove it furthest from the daylight
and perhiips nearest to its true nature and proper
abode.

"Not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature,
and yet within it : " that is where he sets himself to
surprise the soul's last secrets. What Hawthorne aimed
at doing was to suggest that mystery, which is the most
definite thing which we know about human life. "It
annoys me very much," says Hilda, in " Transformation,"
" this inclination, which most people have, to explain
away the wonder and the mystery out of everything."
To Hawthorne it was the wonder and the mystery
which gave its meaning to life, and to paint life without
them was Hke painting nature without atmosphere.
Only, in his endeavour to evoke this atmosphere, he did
not always remember that, if it had any meaning at all,
it was itself a deeper reality. And so his weakness is
seen in a persistent desire to give an air of miracle to
ordinary things, which gain nothing by becoming im-
probable ; as in the sentence which describes Hester's
return to her cottage, at the end of "The Scarlet
Letter " : " In all these years it had never once been
unlocked ; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying
wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided
shadowlike through these impediments — and, at all
events, went in." His books are full of this futile
buzzing of fancy ; and it is not only in the matter
of style that he too often substitutes fancy for
imagination.

Hawthorne never quite fully realised the distinction
between symbol and allegory, or was never long able
to resist the allegorising temptation. Many of his
shorter stories are frankly allegories, and are among
the best of their kind, such as "Young Goodman
Brown," or " The Minister's Black Veil." But, in all

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 57

his work, there is an attempt to write two meanings at
once, to turn what should be a great spiritual reality
into a literal and barren figure of speech. He must
always broider a visible badge on every personage :
Hester's "A," Miss Hepzibah's scowl, the birthmark,
the furry ears of the Faun. In all this there is charm,
surprise, ingenuity ; but is it quite imagination, which
is truth, and not a decoration rather than a symbol ?
He passes, indeed, continually from one to the other,
and is now crude and childish, as in the prattle about
the Faun's furry ears, and now subtly creative, as in the
figure of the child Pearl, who is in the true sense a
living symbol. Nor does he insist less that every
coincidence shall be as obedient as a wizard's phantom,
nature and circumstance always in attendance to complete
the emotion or the picture. He has used the belief in
witchcraft with admirable effect, the dim mystery which
clings about haunted houses, the fantastic gambols of
the soul itself, under what seem like the devil's own
promptings. But he must direct his imps as if they
were marionettes, and, as he lets us see the wires
jerking, is often at the pains to destroy his own
illusion.

Hawthorne is the most sensitive of those novelists
who have concerned themselves with the soul's prob-
lems; and he concerns himself, though all in hints
and reticences, with the great spiritual realities. The
subject of "The Scarlet Letter" is the most poignant
in the world. In "Transformation" Hawthorne asks
himself, seriously enough: "The story of the Fall of
Man ! Is it not repeated in our romance of Monte
Bcni.'"' He is at home in all those cloudy tracts of
the soul's regions in which most other novelists go
astray ; he finds his way there, not by sight, but by
feeling, like the i)iind. He responds to every sensation

58 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

of the soul ; morbidly, as people say : that is, with a
consciousness of how little anything else matters.

Yet is there not some astringent quality lacking in
Hawthorne, the masculine counterpart of what was
sensitively feminine in him ? Is he not like one of his
characters " whose sensibility of nerves often produced
the effect of spiritual intuition ? " No one has ever
rendered subtler sensations with a more delicate pre-
cision. When he speaks of flowers, we can say of him,
as he says of Clifford: "His feeling for flowers was
very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste as an
emotion." Speaking of a rare wine he says: "The
wine demanded so deliberate a pause in order to detect
the hidden peculiarities and subtle exquisiteness of its
flavor that to drink it was really more a moral than a
physical enjoyment." Of all natural delights and
horrors, of every sensation in which the soul may be
thought to have a part, he can write as if he wrote
literally with his nerves. And he is full of wise dis-
cretion, he knows what not to say, he will never dissect,
with most surgical analysts, the corpse of a sensation.
Yet there is much in his sentiment and in his reflection
which is the more feminine part of sensitiveness, and
which is no more than a diluted and prettily coloured
commonplace. That geniality of reflection, of which
we find so much in "The House of the Seven Gables,"
is really a lack of intellectual backbone, a way of dis-
guising any too austere truth from his sensibilities.
The two chapters, in that often beautiful and delightful
book, written around Judge Pyncheon, as he sits dead
in his chair, show how lamentable a gap existed in the
intellectual taste of Hawthorne. They need only be
compared with the treatment of Maeterlinck of a not
unsimilar situation in the little dramatic masterpiece,
" Interieur," to see all the difference between the work

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 59

of the complete artist and the work of one in whom
there remained always something of the amateur.

Mr Henry James has, very unjustly, as I think,
accused Hawthorne of provincialism. There was no-
thing provincial in the temperament or intelligence ot
this shy and brooding spectator of human affairs, but
he was not without some of the graces and limitations
of the amateur. His style, at its best so delicately
woven, so subdued and harmonious in colour, has gone
threadbare in patches ; something in its gentlemanly
ease has become old-fashioned, has become genteel.
There are moments when he reminds us of Charles
Lamb, but in Lamb nothing has faded, or at most a few
too insistent pleasantries : the salt in the style has pre-
served it. There is no salt in the style of Hawthorne.
Read that charmiiig preface to the " Mosses from an
Old Manse," so full of country quiet, with a music in it
like the gentle, monotonous murmur of a country stream.
Well, at every few pages the amateur peeps out,
anxiously trying to knit together his straying substance
with a kind of arch simplicity. In the stories, there is
rarely a narrative which has not drifted somewhere a
little out of his control; and of the novels, only "The
Scarlet Letter" has any sort of firmness of texture ; and
we have only to set it beside a really well-constructed
novel, beside '' Madame Bovary," for instance, to see
how loosely, after all, it is woven. Even that taste,
which for growing things and for all the strange growths
of the soul is so fine, so sensitive, passes into a vague,
moralising sentimentality whenever he speaks, as he
does so often in "Transformation," of painting or of
sculpture. He seems incapable of looking at either
without thinking of sonu-tliing else, some fancy or moral,
which he must fit into the frame or the cube, or else
drape around it, in the form of a veil meant for orna-

6o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

ment. Yet, in all this, and sometimes by a felicity in
some actual weakness, turned, like a woman's, into a
fragile and pathetic grace, there is a continual weaving
of intricate mental cobwebs, and an actual creation of
that dim and luminous atmosphere in which they are
best seen. And, in the end, all that is finest in Haw-
thorne seems to unite in the creation of atmosphere.

In the preface to "Transformation," Hawthorne
admits that he " designed the story and the characters
to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature
and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily
removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and
proportions of their own should be implicitly and in-
sensibly acknowledged." And he defends himself, on
the ground of reality, by saying: "The actual ex-
perience of even the most ordinary life is full of events
that never explain themselves, either as regards their
origin or their tendency." Is it not the novelist's
business, it may be objected, to explain precisely what
would not, in real life, explain itself, to those most
closely concerned in it ? But to Hawthorne, perhaps
rightly, even the clearest explanation is no more than a
deepening of the illusion, as the poor ghosts, like
Feathertop in the story, see themselves for what they
are. Something unsubstantial, evasive, but also some-
thing intellectually dissatisfied, always inquiring, in his
mind, set Hawthorne spinning these arabesques of the
soul, in which the fantastic element may be taken as a
note of interrogation. Seeing always " a grim identity
between gay things and sorrowful ones," he sets a
masquerade before us, telling us many of the secrets
hidden behind the black velvet, but letting us see no
more than the glimmer of eyes, and the silent or
ambiguous lips.

Hawthorne's romances are not exactly (he never

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 6i

wished them to be) novels, but they are very nearly
poems. And they are made, for the most part, out of
material which seems to lend itself singularly ill to
poetic treatment. In the preface to "Transformation"
he says : " No author, without a trial, can be conscious
of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country
where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no
picturesque and gloomy wrong." Yet this shadow,
this antiquity, this mystery, this picturesque and gloomy
wrong, is what he has found or created in America.
Already in the " Twice-Told Tales " (" these fitful
sketches," as he called them, " with so little of external
life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose
— so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so
frank — often but half in earnest, and never, even when
most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which
they propose to image ") there is a kind of ghostly
America growing older and older as one looks at it, as
if some wizard had set ivy climbing over new walls. In
" The House of the Seven Gables," and in his master-
piece, "The Scarlet Letter," we have, without any
undue loss of reality, a more admirably prepared atmos-
phere, which I imagine to be quite recognisably
American, and which is at least as much the atmosphere
j)roper to romance as the Italian atmosphere of" Trans-
f(jrmation." Each is not so much a narrative which
advances, as a canvas which is covered; or, in his own
figure, a tapestry " into which are woven some airy and
unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others twisted
out of the commonest stulf of human existence." A
i^uritan in fancy dress, he himself passes silently through
the masquerade, as it startles some quiet street in New
England. Where what is fantastic in Poe remains geo-
metrical, in Hawthorne it is always, for good and evil,
moral. It decorates, sometimes plays pranks with, a fixed

62 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

belief, a fundamentdl^religious seriousness ; and has thus
at least an immovable centre to whirl from. And, where
fancy passes into imagination, and a world, not quite
what seems to us the real world, grows up about us
with a new, mental kind of reality, it is as if that
arrangement or transposition of actual things with
which poetry begins had taken place already. I do not
know any novelist who has brought into prose fiction
so much of the atmosphere of poetry, with so much of
the actual art of composition of the poet. It is a kind
of poetry singularly pure, delicate, and subtle, and, at
its best, it has an almost incalculable fascination, and
some not quite realised, but insensibly compelling,
white magic.

1904.

'\

\/v^a^&C^ jay^->^

WALTER PATER

Walter Pater was a man in whom fineness and
subtlety of emotion were united with an exact and
profound scholarship ; in whom a personality singu-
larly unconventional, and singularly full of charm,
found for its expression an absolutely personal and
an absolutely novel style, which was the most care-
fully and curiously beautiful of all English styles.
The man and his style, to those who knew him,
were identical; for, as his style was unlike that of
other men, concentrated upon a kind of perfection
which, for the most part, they could not even dis-
tinguish, so his inner life was peculiarly his own,
centred within a circle beyond which he refused to
wander; his mind, to quote some words of his own,
"keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a
world." And he was the most lovable of men ; to
those who rightly apprehended him, the most fasci-
nating ; the most generous and helpful of private
friends, and in literature a living counsel of perfection,
whose removal seems to leave modern English prose
without a contemporary standard of values.

" For it is with the delicacies of fine literature
especially, its gradations of expression, its fine judg-
ment, its pure sense of words, oi' vocabulary — things,
alas! dying out in the English literature of the present,
together with the appreciation of them in our literature
of the past — that his literary mission is chiefly con-
cerned." These words, applied by Pater to Charles

Lamb, might reasonably enough have been aj)plied to

63

64 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

himself ; especially in that earlier part of his work,
which remains to me, as I doubt not it remains to many
others, the most entirely delightful. As a critic, he
selected for analysis only those types of artistic character
in which delicacy, an exquisite fineness, is the principal
attraction; or if, as with Michelangelo, he was drawn
towards some more rugged personality, some more
massive, less finished art, it was not so much from
sympathy with these more obvious qualities of rugged-
ness and strength, but because he had divined the
sweetness lying at the heart of the strength: "ex forti
dulcedo." Leonardo da Vinci, Joachim du Bellay,
Coleridge, Botticelli : we find always something a little
exotic, or subtle, or sought out, a certain rarity, which
it requires an effort to disengage, and which appeals
for its perfect appreciation to a public within the
public ; those fine students of what is fine in art, who
take their artistic pleasures consciously, deliberately,
critically, with the learned love of the amateur.

And not as a critic only, judging others, but in his
own person as a writer, both of critical and of imagi-
native work, Pater showed his preoccupation with the
" delicacies of fine literature." His prose was from the
first conscious, and it was from the first perfect. That
earliest book of his, " Studies in the History of the
Renaissance," as it was then called, entirely individual,
the revelation of a rare and special temperament, though
it was, had many affinities with the poetic and pictorial
art of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Burne Jones, and
seems, on its appearance in 1873, ^^ have been taken as
the manifesto of the so-called " cesthetic " school. And,
indeed, it may well be compared, as artistic prose, with
the poetry of Rossetti ; as fine, as careful, as new a
thing as that, and with something of the same exotic
odour about it : a savour in this case of French soil, a

WALTER PATER 63

Watteau grace and delicacy. Here was criticism as a
fine art, written in prose which the reader lingered over
as over poetry ; modulated prose which made the
splendour of Ruskin seem gaudy, the neatness of
Matthew Arnold a mincing neatness, and the brass
sound strident in the orchestra of Carlyle.

That book of " Studies in the Renaissance," even
with the rest of Pater to choose from, seems to me
sometimes to be the most beautiful book of prose in
our literature. Nothing in it is left to inspiration ;
but it is all inspired. Here is a writer who, like
Baudelaire, would better nature ; and in this gold-
smith's work of his prose he too has " reve le miracle
d'une prose poetique, musicale sans rhythme et sans
rime." An almost oppressive quiet, a quiet which
seems to exhale an atmosphere heavy with the odour
of tropical flowers, broods over these pages ; a subdued
light shadows them. The most felicitous touches come
we know not whence, " a breath, a flame in the door-
way, a feather in the wind " ; here are the simplest
words, but they take colour from each other by the
cunning accident of their placing in the sentence, "the
subtle sj)iritual fire kindling from word to word."

In this book prose seemed to have conquered ajiew
province ; and further, along this direction, prose could
not go. Twelve years later, when " Marius the
Epicurean" appeared, it was in a less coloured manner
of writing that the "sensations and ideas" of that
reticent, wise, and human soul were given to the world.
Here and there, perhaps, the goldsmith, adding more
value, as he thought, for every trace of gold that he
removed, might seem to have scraped a little too assidu-
ously. But the style of " Marius," in its more arduous
self-repression, has a graver note, ;uul brings with it a
severer kind of beauty. Writers who have paid

66 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

particular attention to style have often been accused of
caring little what they say, knowing how beautifully
they can say anything. The accusation has generally
been unjust : as if any fine beauty could be but skin-
deep I The merit which, more than any other, distin-
guishes Pater's prose, though it is not the merit most on
the surface, is the attention to, the perfection of, the
ensemble. Under the soft and musical phrases an
I inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well.
Link is added silently, but faultlessly, to link ; the
argument marches, carrying you with it, while you
fancy you are only listening to the music with which it
keeps step. Take an essay to pieces, and you will find
that it is constructed with mathematical precision; every
piece can be taken out and replaced in order. I do not
know any contemporary writer who observes the logical
requirements so scrupulously, who conducts an argument
so steadily from deliberate point to point towards
a determined goal. And here, in " Marius," though
the story is indeed but a sequence of scenes, woven
around a sequence of moods, there is a scarcely less
rigorous care for the ensemble, as that had been in-
tended, the story being properly speaking no story,
but the philosophy of a soul. And thus it is mainly
by a kind of very individual atmosphere, mental and
physical, that the sense of unity is conveyed. It is a
book to read slowly, to meditate over; more than any
of Pater's books, it is a personal confession and the
scheme of a doctrine.

In this book, and in the "Imaginary Portraits" of
three years later, which seems to me to show his
imaginative and artistic faculties at their point of most
perfect fusion, Pater has not endeavoured to create
characters, in whom the flesh and blood should seem to
be that of life itself; he had not the energy of creation,

WALTER PATER ^j

and he was content with a more shadowy life than theirs
for the children of his dreams. What he has done is
to give a concrete form to abstract ideas ; to represent
certain types of character, to trace certain developments,
in the picturesque form of narrative ; to which, indeed,
the term portrait is very happily applied ; for the
method is that of a very patient and elaborate brush-
work, in which the touches that go to form the likeness
are so fine that it is difficult to see quite their individual
value, until, the end being reached, the whole picture
starts out before you. Each, with perhaps one excep-
tion, is the study of a soul, or rather of a consciousness;
such a study as might be made by simply looking within,
and projecting now this now that side of oneself on an
exterior plane. I do not mean to say that I attribute to
Pater himself the philosophical theories of Sebastian van
Storck, or the artistic ideals of Duke Carl of Rosenmold.
I mean that the attitude of mind, the outlook, in the
most general sense, is always limited and directed in a
certain way, giving one always the picture of a delicate,
subtle, aspiring, unsatisfied personality, open to all
impressions, living chiefly by sensations, little anxious to
reap any of the rich harvest of its intangible but keenly
possessed gains ; a personality withdrawn from action,
which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in
the circle of its "exquisite moments," in the Palace of
Art, where it is never quite at rest. It is somewhat
such a soul, I have thought, as that which Browning
has traced in "Sordello"; indeed, when reading for
the first time " Marius the l^picurean," I was struck by
a certain resemblance between the record of the sensa-
tions and ideas of Marius of White-Nights and ihat of
the sensations and events of Sordello of Goito.

The style of the "Imaginary Portraits" is the ripest,
the most varied and flawless, their art the most assured

68 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

and masterly, of any of Pater's books : it was the book
that he himself preferred in his work, thinking it, to
use his own phrase, more "natural" than any other.
And of the four portraits the most wonderful seems to
me the poem, for it is really a poem, named " Denys
I'Auxerrois." For once, it is not the study of a soul,
but of a myth ; a transposition (in which one hardly
knows whether to admire most the learning, the
ingenuity, or the subtle imagination) of that strangest
myth of the Greeks, the " Pagan after-thought " of
Dionysus Zagreus, into the conditions of mediaeval life.
Here is prose so coloured, so modulated, as to have
captured, along with almost every sort of poetic rich-
ness, and in a rhythm which is essentially the rhythm of
prose, even the suggestiveness of poetry, that most
volatile and unseizable property, of which prose has so
rarely been able to possess itself. The style of " Denys
I'Auxerrois " has a subdued heat, a veiled richness of
colour, which contrasts curiously with the silver-grey
coolness of "A Prince of Court Painters," the chill,
more leaden grey of "Sebastian van Storck," though it
has a certain affinity, perhaps, with the more variously-
tinted canvas of " Duke Carl of Rosenmold." Watteau,
Sebastian, Carl : unsatisfied seekers, all of them, this
after an artistic ideal of impossible perfection, that
after a chill and barren ideal of philosophical thinking
and living, that other after yet another ideal, unattain-
able to him in his period, of life " im Ganzen, Guten,
Schonen," a beautiful and effective culture. The story
of each, like that of " Marius," is a vague tragedy,
ending abruptly, after so many uncertainties, and always
with some subtly ironic effect in the accident of its
conclusion. The mirror is held up to Watteau while
he struggles desperately or hesitatingly forward, snatch-
ing from art one after another of her reticent secrets;

WALTER PATER 69

then, with a stroke, it is broken, and this artist in
immortal things sinks out of sight, into a narrow grave
of red earth. The mirror is held up to Sebastian as he
moves deliberately, coldly, onward in the midst of a
warm life which has so little attraction for him, freeing
himself one by one from all obstructions to a clear
philosophic equilibrium ; and the mirror is broken, with
a like suddenness, and the seeker disappears from our
sight, to find, perhaps, what he had sought. It is held
up to Duke Carl, the seeker after the satisfying things
of art and experience, the dilettante in material and
spiritual enjoyment, the experimenter on life ; and again
it is broken, with an almost terrifying shock, just as he
has come to a certain rash crisis : is it a step upward or
downward ? a step, certainly, towards the concrete,
towards a possible material felicity.

We see Pater as an imaginative writer, pure and
simple, only in these two books, '^Marius" and the
" Imaginary Portraits," in the unfinished romance of
" Gaston de Latour " (in which detail had already
begun to obscure the outlines of the central figure),
and in those " Imaginary Portraits " reprinted in
various volumes, but originally intended to form a
second series under that title- "liippolytus Veiled,"
"Apollo in Picardy," "Emerald Uthwart " ; and
that early first chapter of an unwritten story of
modern English life, "The Child in the House."
For the rest, he was content to be a critic : a critic
of poetry and painting in the "Studies in the
Renaissance " and the " Apjircciations," of sculpture
and the arts of life in the " Greek Studies,"' of
philosophy in the volume on " Plato and Platonism."
But he was a critic as no one else ever was a critic.
He had made a fine art of criticism. His criticism,
abounding in the close and strenuous qualities of

70 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

rciilly earnest judgment, grappling with his subject
as it' there were nothing to do but that, the " fine
writing " in it being largely mere conscientiousness
in providing a subtle and delicate thought with
words as subtle and delicate, was, in effect, written
with as scrupulous a care, with as much artistic
finish, as much artistic purpose, as any imaginative
work whatever ; being indeed, in a sense in which,
perhaps, no other critical work is, imaginative work
itself.

" The aesthetic critic," we are told in the preface
to the " Studies in the Renaissance," " regards all the
objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and
the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers
or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a
more or less peculiar and unique kind. This in-
fluence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it,
and reducing it to its elements. To him, the
picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in
life or in a book, La Gioconda^ the hills of Carrara,
Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as
we say in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem ; for
the property each has of affecting one with a special,
a unique, impression of pleasure." To this state-
ment of what was always the aim of Pater in
criticism, I would add, from the later essay on
Wordsworth, a further statement, applying it, as he
there does, to the criticism of literature. "What
special sense," he asks, " does Wordsworth exer-
cise, and what instincts does he satisfy? What
are the subjects which in him excite the imaginative
faculty ? What are the qualities in things and
persons which he values, the impression and sense
of which he can convey to others, in an extraordinary
way ? " How far is this ideal from that old theory,

WALTER PATER 71

not yet extinct, which has been briefly stated, thus,
by Edgar Poe: "While the critic is permitted to
play, at times, the part of the mere commentator —
while he is allowed^ by way of merely interesting his
readers, to put in the fairest light the merits of his
author — his legitimate task is still, in pointing out
and analysing defects, and showing how the work
might have been improved, to aid the cause of
letters, without undue heed of the individual literary
men." And Poe goes on to protest, energetically,
against the more merciful (and how infinitely more
fruitful!) principles of Goethe, who held that what
it concerns us to know about a work or a writer are
the merits, not the defects, of the writer and the
work. Pater certainly carried this theory to its
furthest possible limits, and may almost be said
never, except by implication, to condemn anything.
But then the force of this implication testifies to a
fastidiousness infinitely greater than that of the most
destructive of the destructive critics. Is it necessary
to say that one dislikes a thing ? It need but be
ignored ; and Pater ignored whatever did not come
up to his very exacting standard, finding quite
enough to write about in that small residue which
remained over.

Nor did he merely ignore what was imperfect,
he took the further step, the taking of which was
what made him a creative artist in criticism. " It
was thus," we arc told of Gaston de Latour, in one
of the chapters of the unfinished romance, "it was
thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard,
generously expanding it to the full measure of its inten-
tion'' That is precisely what Pater does in his
criticisms, in which criticism is a divining-rod over
hidden springs, lie has a unique faculty of seeing.

72 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

through every imperfection, the perfect work, the
work as the artist saw it, as he strove to make it,
as he failed, in his measure, quite adequately to
achieve it. He goes straight to what is fundamental,
to the root of the matter, leaving all the rest out
of the question. The essay on Wordsworth is per-
haps the best example of this, for it has fallen to the
lot of Wordsworth to suffer more than most at the
hands of interpreters. Here, at last, is a critic who
can see in him "a poet somewhat bolder and more
passionate than might at first sight be supposed,
but not too bold for true poetical taste ; an unim-
passioned writer, you might sometimes fancy, yet
thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be
a certain deep emotion " ; one whose " words are
themselves thought and feeling " ; " a master, an
expert, in the art of impassioned contemplation."
Reading such essays as these, it is difficult not to
feel that if Lamb and Wordsworth, if Shakespeare,
if Sir Thomas Browne, could but come to life again
for the pleasure of reading them, that pleasure
would be the sensation: "Here is some one who
understands just what I meant to do, what was
almost too deep in me for expression, and would
have, I knew, to be divined ; that something,
scarcely expressed in any of my words, without
which no word I ever wrote would have been
written."

Turning from the criticisms of literature to the
studies in painting, we see precisely the same qualities,
but not, I think, precisely the same results. In a sen-
tence of the essay on "The School of Giorglone,"
which is perhaps the most nicely balanced of all his
essays on painting, he defines, with great precision :
"In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more

WALTER PATER 73

definite message for us than an accidental play of sun-
light and shcidow for a moment on the floor : is itself
in truth a space of such fallen light, caught as the
colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined
upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than
by nature itself," But for the most part it was not in
this spirit that he wrote of pictures. His criticism of
pictures is indeed creative, in a fuller sense than his
criticism of books ; and, in the necessity of things,
dealing with an art which, as he admitted, has, in its
primary aspect, no more definite message for us than
the sunlight on the floor, he not merely divined, but
also added, out of the most sympathetic knowledge,
certainly. It is one thing to interpret the meaning of
a book ; quite another to interpret the meaning of a
picture. Take, for instance the essay on Botticelli.
That was the first sympathetic study which had
appeared in English of a painter at that time but little
known ; and it contains some of Pater's most exquisite
writing. All that he writes, of those Madonnas "who
are neither for Jehovah nor for his enemies," of that
sense in the painter of " the wistfulness of exiles,"
represents, certainly, the impression made upon his own
mind by these pictures, and, as such, has an inter-
pretative value, apart from its beauty as a piece of
writing. Ikit it is after all a speculation before a
canvas, a literary fantasy; a possible interpretation, if
you will, of one mood in the painter, a single side of
his intention ; it is not a criticism, inevital)le as that
criticism of Wordsworth's art, of the art of Botticelli.

This once understood, we must admit that Pater did
more than any one of our time to bring about a more
iiitiiTiate sympathy with some of the subtler aspects of
art; that his influence ditl much to rescue us from the
dangerous moralities, the uncritical enthusiasms and

74 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

prejudices, of Ruskin ; thiit of no other art-critic it
could be Siiid that his taste was flawless. In some of
the " Greek Studies " in the essays on " The Beginnings
of Greek Sculpture," and the rest, he has made sculp-
ture a living, intimate thing ; and, with no addition of
his fancy, but in a minute, learned, intuitive piecing
together of little fact by little fact, has shown its
growth, its relation to life, its meaning in art. I find
much of the same quality in his studies in Greek
myths: that coloured, yet so scrupulous -'Study of
Dionysus," the patient disentanglings of the myth of
Demeter and Persephone. And, in what is the latest
work, practically, that we have from his hand, the
lectures on "Plato and Platonism," we see a like
scrupulous and discriminating judgment brought to
bear, as upon an artistic problem, upon the problems
of Greek ethics, Greek philosophy.

" Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it," Pater
tells us, speaking of Plato (he might be speaking of
himself), " is but the systematic appreciation of a kind
of music in the very nature of things." And philo-
sophy, as he conceives it, is a living, dramatic thing,
among personalities, and the strife of temperaments ;
a doctrine being seen as a vivid fragment of some very
human mind, not a dry matter of words and disembodied
reason. "In the discussion even of abstract truth," he
reminds us, "it is not so much what he thinks as the
person who is thinking, that after all really tells."
Thus, the student's duty, in reading Plato, "is not to
take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's
opinions, to modify, or make apology for what may
seem erratic or impossible in him ; still less, to furnish
himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or
conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow
intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental

WALTER PATER 75

process there, as he might witness a game of skill ;
better still, as in reading Hcunlet or The Divine Comedy^
so in reading The Republic^ to watch, for its dramatic
interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign
intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of
conditions which can never in the nature oi things
occur again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into
a great literary monument." It is thus that Pater
studies his subject, with an extraordinary patience and
precision; a patience with ideas, not, at first sight, so
clear or so interesting as he induces them to become ;
a precision of thinking, on his part, in which no licence
is ever permitted to the fantastic side-issues of things.
Here again we have criticism which, in its divination,
its arrangement, its building up of many materials into
a living organism, is itself creation, becomes imaginative
work itself

We may seem to be far now, but are not in reality
so far as it may seem, from those " delicacies of fine
literature," with which I began by showing Pater to be
so greatly concerned. And, in considering the develop-
ment by which a writer who had begun with the
"Studies in the Renaissance " ended with "Plato and
Platonism." we must remember, as Mr Gosse has so
acutely pointed out in his valuable study of Pater's
personal characteristics, that, after all, it was philosophy
which attracted him before either literature or art, and
that his first published essay was an essay on Coleridge,
in which Coleridge the metai)hysician, and not Coleridge
the poet, was the interesting person to him. In his
return to an early, and one might think, in a certain
sense, immature interest, it need not surprise us to find
a developmeni, which I cannot but consider as techni-
cally something of a return to a primitive lengthiness
and involution, towards a style which came to lose

76 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

niLiny of the rarer qualities of its perfect achievement.
I remember that when he once said to me that the
"Imaginary Portraits" seemed to him the best written
of his books, he qualified that very just appreciation
by adding: "It seems to me the most natural.''' I
think he was even then beginning to forget that it
was not natural to him to be natural. There are many
kinds of beauty in the world, and of these what is
called natural beauty is but one. Pater's temperament
was at once shy and complex, languid and ascetic,
sensuous and spiritual. He did not permit life to come
to him without a certain ceremony ; he was on his
guard against the abrupt indiscretion of events ; and if
his whole life was a service of art, he arranged his life
so that, as far as possible, it might be served by that
very dedication. With this conscious ordering of
things, it became a last sophistication to aim at an
effect in style which should bring the touch of unpre-
meditation, which we seem to find in nature, into a
faultlessly combined arrangement of art. The lectures
on Plato, really spoken, show traces of their actual
delivery in certain new, vocal effects, which had begun
already to interest him as matters of style ; and which
we may find, more finely, here and there in "Gaston
de Latour." Perhaps all this was but a pausing-place
in a progress. That it would not have been the final
stage, we may be sure. But it is idle to speculate
what further development awaited, at its own leisure,
so incalculable a life.

1896

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The death of Robert Louis Stevenson deprived English
hterature of the most charming and sympathetic writer
of the present day. He was a fastidious craftsman,
caring, we might ahnost say pre-eminently, for style ;
yet he was popular. He was most widely known as the
writer of boys' books of adventure ; yet he was the
favourite reading of those who care only for the most
literary aspects of literature. Within a few days after
the news of his death reached England, English news-
papers vied with each other in comparing him with
Montaigne, with Lamb, with Scott, with Defoe ; and
he has been not merely compared, but preferred. Un-
critical praise is the most unfriendly service a man can
render to his friend ; but here, where so much praise is
due, may one not try to examine a little closely jusr
what those qualities are which call for praise, and just
what measure of praise they seem to call for .'*

Stevenson somewhere describes certain of his own
essays as being "but the readings of a literary vagrant."
And, in truth, he was always that, a literary vagrant;
it is the secret of much of his charm, and of much of
his weakness. He wandered, a literary vagrant, over
the world, across life, and across literature, an adven-
turous figure, with all the irresponsible and irresistible
charm of the vagabond. To read him is to be for ever
setting out on a fresh journey, along a white, beckon-
ing road, on a blithe spring morning. Anything may
happen, or nothing ; the air is full of the gaiety of
possible chances. And in this exhilaration of the

77

78 STUDIES IN PR0S1<: AND VERSE

blood, unreasoning, unrciisonable, as it is, all the philo-
sophies merge themselves into those two narrow lines
which the "Child's Garden of Verses " piously encloses
for us :

" The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings."

It is the holiday mood of life that Stevenson ex-
presses, and no one has ever expressed it with a
happier abandonment to the charm of natural things.
In its exquisite exaggeration, it is the optimism of the
invalid, due to his painful consciousness that health, and
the delights of health, are what really matter in life.
Most of those who have written captivatingly of the
open air, of what are called natural, healthy things,
have been invalids : Thoreau, Richard JeiFeries, Steven-
son. The strong man has leisure to occupy his thoughts
with other things ; he can indulge in abstract thinking
without a twinge of the brain, can pursue the moral
issues of conduct impersonally ; he is not condemned to
the bare elements of existence. And, in his calm
acceptance of the privileges of ordinary health, he finds
no place for that lyric rapture of thanksgiving which a
bright day, a restful night, wakens in the invalid. The
actual fever and languor in the blood : that counts for
something in Stevenson's work, and lies at the root of
some of its fascination.

His art, in all those essays and extravagant tales into
which he put his real self, is a romantic art, alike in the
essay on "Walking Tours" and in the "Story of the
Young Man with the Cream Tarts." Stevenson was
passionately interested in people ; but there was some-
thing a trifle elvish and uncanny about him, as of a
bewitched being who was not actually human, had not

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 79

actually a human soul, and whose keen interest in the
fortunes of his fellows was really a vivid curiosity, from
one not quite of the same nature as those about him.
He saw life as the most absorbing, the most amusing,
game ; or, as a masquerade, in which he liked to glance
behind a mask, now and again, on the winding and
coloured way he made for himself through the midst of
the pageant. It was only in his latest period that he
came to think about truth to human nature ; and even
then it was with the picturesqueness of character, with
its adaptability to the humorous freaks of incident, that
he was chiefly concerned.

He was never really himself except when he was in
some fantastic disguise. From " The Pavilion on the
Links" to " Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," he played with
men and women as a child plays with a kaleidoscope ;
using them freakishly, wantonly, as colours, sometimes
as symbols. In some wonderful, artificial way, like a
wizard who raises, not living men from the dead, but
the shadows of men who had once died, he calls up
certain terrifying, but not ungracious, phantoms, who
frisk it among the mere beings of flesh and blood, bring-
ing with them the strangest '^airs from heaven or
blasts from hell." No; in the phrase of Beddoes,
Stevenson was '^ tired of being merely human." Thus
there are no women in his books, no lovers ; only the
lure of hidden treasures and the passion of adventure.
It was for the accidents and curiosities of life that he
cared, for life as a strange picture, for its fortunate con-
fusions, its whimsical distresses, its unlikely strokes of
luck, its cruelties, sometimes, and the touch of madness
that comes into it at moments. For reality, for the
endeavour to see things as they are, to represent them
as they are, he hati an imj)alient disregard. These
matters did not interest him.

So STUDIES IN PROSIC AND VERSE

But it is by style, largely, we are told, that Stevenson
is to live, and the names of Lamb and of Montaigne
are called up on equal terms. Style, with Stevenson,
was certainly a constant preoccupation, and he has told
us how, as a lad, he trained himself in the use of
language; how, in his significant phrase, he "lived
with words"; by "playing the sedulous ape to Hazlitt,
to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire,
and to Obermann." He was resolved from the first to
reject the ready-made in language, to combine words
for himself, as if no one had ever used them before ;
and, with labour and luck, he formed for his use a
singularly engaging manner of writing, full of charm,
freshness, and flexibility, and with a certain human
warmth in the words. But it is impossible to consider
style in the abstract without taking into account also
what it expresses ; for true style is not the dress, but
the very flesh, of the informing thought. Stevenson's
tendency, like that of his admirers, was rather to the
forgctfulness of this plain and sometimes uncongenial
fact. But, in comparing him with the great names of
literature, we cannot but feel all the difference, and all
the meaning of the difference, between a great intellect
and a bright intelligence. The lofty and familiar
homeliness of Montaigne, the subtle and tragic humour
of Lamb, are both on a far higher plane than the
gentle and attractive and whimsical confidences of
Stevenson. And, underlying what may seem trifling in
both, there is a large intellectual force, a breadth of
wisdom, which makes these two charming writers not
merely charming, but great, Stevenson remains charm-
ing ; his personality, individual and exquisite as it was,
had not the strength and depth of greatness. And,
such as it was, it gave itself to us completely ; there

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 8i

was no sense, as there is with the really great writers,
of reserve power, of infinite riches to draw upon.
Quite by himself in a certain seductiveness of manner,
he ranks, really, with Borrow and Thoreau, with the
men of secondary order in literature, who appeal to us
with more instinctive fascination than the very greatest ;
as a certain wayward and gipsy grace in a woman
thrills to the blood, often enough, more intimately and
immediately than the august perfection of classic
beauty. He is one of those writers who speak to us on
easy terms, with whom we may exchange affections.
We cannot lose our heart to Shakespeare, to Balzac ;
nay, even to Montaigne, because of the height and
depth, the ardour and dignity, of the wisdom in his
"smiling" pages (to use Stevenson's own word). But
George Borrow makes every one who comes under his
charm a little unfit for civilisation, a little discontented
with drawing-rooms ; Thoreau leads his willing victim
into the ardent austerity of the woods ; and Stevenson
awakens something of the eternal romance in the
bosom even of the conventional. It is a surprising, a
marvellous thing to have done; and to afford such
delights, to call forth such responsive emotions, is a
boon that we accept with warmer rejoicing than many
more solid gifts. But to be wine and song to us for a
festive evening is, after all, not the highest form of
service or the noblest ministration of joy. It is needful
to discriminate in these generous and perilous en-
thusiasms, as it is in judging fairly of the character of
a friend. Let us love our friend, with all his short-
comings ; let him be the more lovable for them, if
chance wills it ; but it is better to be aware of the
truth, before we proceed to act with affectionate dis-
regard (jt it. Stevenson captivates the heart : that is
why he is in such danger of being wronged by indis-

82 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VF:RSE

crimiiKite eulogy. Let us do him justice : he would
have wished only for justice. It is a dishonour to the
dead if we strive to honour their memory with any-
thing less absolute than truth.

1894

^,v. f:,>

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Mr Horatio Brown's Life of John Addington
Symonds is composed with so careful and so suc-
cessful a reticence on the part of the author, that it
is not at first sight obvious how much its concealment
of art is a conscious subtlety in art. These two volumes,
containing, for the most part, extracts from an auto-
biography, from diaries and from letters, woven together
so as to make an almost consecutive narrative (a plan
which recalls a little the admirable and unusual method
of Mason's "Gray") present a most carefully arranged
portrait, which, in one sense, is absolutely the creation
of the biographer. All this material, ready-made as it
may seem to be, has really been fitted together, accord-
ing to a well-defined scheme, with immense ingenuity
and diligence, and with a remarkable subtlety and in-
sight into the very complex nature of the man whose
portrait is here presented to the world. It is a painful,
a tragic book, this record of what Symonds calls " my
chequered, confused, and morally perturbed existence,"
and yet at the same time an inspiring, an exhilarating
book, which quickens one with a sense of the possi-
bilities of life by its revelation of the charm, the courage,
the nobility, the fixed aim, the endlessly thwarted
and undaunted endeavour of a human spirit " to live
resolvedly in the Whole, the (iood, the Beautiful."
To those who knew and loved the man, it calls up, not
merely the blithe companion of any hour's adventure,
but the real, sufi'cring, and symi)athetic individuality
that lay deeper ; and it recalls that memory with almost
intolerable vividness.

B3

84 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

In the early part of 1889 Symonds wrote an Auto-
biography, which he himself considered the best piece
of literary work he had ever done. A good deal,
especially of the earlier part, of this Autobiography is
incorporated in Mr Brown's volumes, and I am inclined
to think that Symonds was right in his estimate of it.
It is full of subtle self-analysis of a nature which
realises itself to be "impenetrably reserved in the
depths of myself, rhetorically candid on the surface."
That, indeed, was Symonds' attitude through life ; and
(strange, contradictory, as the man was in all things)
even more so at the beginning than at the end of his
career. Early in the Autobiography we find this
curious description of a kind of trance which occurred
at intervals up to the age of twenty-eight.

"Suddenly, at church or in company, or when I was
reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at
rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it
took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed
an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensa-
tions, which resembled the awakening from ancrsthetic
influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance
was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot
even now find words to render it intelligible, though it
is probable that many readers of these pages will recog-
nise the state in question. It consisted in a gradual but
swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation,
and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem
to qualify what we are pleased to call ourself. In pro-
portion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness
were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential
consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing
remained but a pure, absolute, abstract self. The
universe became without form and void of content.
But self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness,

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 85

feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready,
as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble
round about it. And what then ? The apprehension
of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this
state was the last state of the conscious self, the sense
that I had followed the last thread of being to the
verge of the abyss, and had arrived at demonstration
of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me
up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient
existence began by my first recovering the power of
touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of
familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I
felt myself once more a human being ; and though the
riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was
thankful for this return from the abyss — this deliver-
ance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of
scepticism."

The record of th's singular experience is but one of
many revelations which we get in these pages of that
brooding meditativeness which lay at the root of
Symonds' nature; that painfully minute introspection
which finds more concrete expression in these passages
from a Diary, written at the age of twenty-one :

" I may rave, but I shall never rend the heavens : I
may sit and sing, but I shall never make earth listen.
And I am not strong enough to be good — what is left?
I do not feel strong enough to be bad. . . , The sum
of intellectual progress I hoped for has been obtained,
l)ut how much below my hopes. My character has
developed, but in what puny proportions, below my
meanest anticipations. I do not feel a man. This
book is an evidence of the yearnings without power,
and the brooding self-analysis without creation that
afilict me."

In all this there was a certain undoubted truth, and

86 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

a part of the unhappiness of Symonds' life was certainly
due to an only too precise sense of the limit of his
own capacities, and an only too acute longing for an
absolute achievement. "Women," he writes in a letter
at the age of twenty-five, "do not, need not, pose
themselves with problems about their own existence ;
but a man must do it, unless he has a fixed impulse in
one definite direction, or an external force compelling
him to take an inevitable line." Now, this was just
what Symonds, even after the awakening of his ambi-
tion, even after the moment when Plato had in a sense
revealed him to himself (" as though the voice of my
own soul spoke to me through Plato ") this was just
what Symonds never had. We find him questioning
himself:

" If I give myself to literature, and find myself
inadequate, can I be content with a fastidious silence ?
... I feel so weak, so unable to do anything, or to
take hold of any subject. In the room with me at this
moment are five men, all provided with clear brains for
business, all talking slang, and all wondering what
strange incapable animal I am who have thus come
among them."

And, again, in the Diary, we read :

"Why do I say ' Lord, Lord,' and do not? Plere is
my essential weakness. I wish and cannot will. I feel
intensely, I perceive quickly, sympathise with all I see,
or hear, or read. To emulate things nobler than myself
is my desire. But I cannot get beyond — create, ori-
ginate, win heaven by prayers and faith, have trust in
God, and concentrate myself upon an end of action."

Here, indeed, we seem to be at the root of the great
spiritual tragedy of his life, a tragedy of noble ambition,
thwarted on every side, physically, morally, mentally.
It was quite true that Symonds could create nothing,

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 87

neither a well-balanced personality nor an achieved work
of art. No one ever had a higher ideal of perfection,
or strove more earnestly to reach it. But, as he well
knew, there was something lacking, a certain disarray
of faculties, and the full achievement never came.
Those hesitations as to the path to pursue, law or
literature, and, if literature, the special form of it, are
significant. Every true artist is eternally doubtful of
himself, eternally dissatisfied with the result of his best
endeavours. But no true artist doubts in his heart of
hearts whether the art of his choice is really the art for
which he is best fitted. Himself he doubts, not his
vocation. Now with Symonds the very impulse towards
literature was a half-hearted one. He came to it as to J
a branch of culture ; he toiled at it conscientiously,
enthusiastically; but it was, in a certain sense, "work with-
out hope, "and it was also work done as a sortof gymnastic,
a way of letting oil energies. Much of Symonds' writing
(most of it being so curiously impersonal, and yet not im-
personal in the truly artistic way) was a means of escape,
escape from himself. " Neither then nor afterwards,"
he writes, near the beginning of the Autobiography,
"did 1 fear anything so much as my own self,"

Symonds' detailed estimate of his own literary capa-
cities and acquirements, in the Autobiography, is some-
what cruelly just :

" Having an active brain and a lively curiosity, I was
always accjuiring information, while the defect of my
retentive p{;v\er made mc continually lose the larger
portion of it. Yet in this way my intellectual furniture
grew to be a vague, ill-digested, inaccurate mass, rich
in possibilities, but poor in solid stuff. ... I cannot
learn anything systematically. Cirammar, logic, political
economy, the exact sciences, oirercd insuperable difli-
culties to my mind. The result is, that 1 know nothing

G

88 STUDlLvS IN PROSE AND VERSE

W^^5*'^H5^^"

thoroughly, and I do not think this is so much due to
hizincss as to cerebral incapacity. . . . Retentive recep-
tivity is the quality I claim. Combined with a moderate
estimate of my own powers and a fair share of common
sense, together with an active curiosity, this receptive
and retentive susceptibility to various objects and
emotions has given a certain breadth, a certain catho-
licity, a certain commonplaceness, to my aesthetic con-
clusions.

" My powers of expression were considerable, yet
not of first-rate quality. Vaughan, at Harrow, told me
the truth when he said that my besetting sin was ' fatal
facility.' I struggled long to conquer fluency. Still, I
have not succeeded. I find a pleasure in expression for
its own sake ; but I have not the inevitable touch of
the true poet, the unconquerable patience of the con-
scious artist. As in other matters, so here, I tried to
make the best of my defects. Concentration lies beyond
my grasp. The right words do not fall into the right
places at my bidding. I have written few good para-
graphs, and possibly no single perfect line."

Not a word need be added, nor a word altered, in
this unsparing self-criticism. In truth, Symonds was
neither a scholar nor an artist. He loved literature for
its own sake, scholarship for the sake of its gifts to
culture. Living always under sentence of death, he
filled out that '' indefinite reprieve " with the diligence
of a fixed endeavour to work while it was day. But it
was probably this sense of the shortness as well as the
relish of life, this somewhat feverish intentness upon
opportunity, which caused him to do many things hastily
that would have been done better with more leisure,
and to attempt a universal conquest of literature where
limitation would have been an act of wisdom. What
he possessed, however, was an extraordinarily interesting

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 89

and unusual personality, which, gradually outgrowing
the reserve and speculation of the earlier years, came
at last to be intensely vivid, human, and in love with
humanity. In 1877 he writes in a letter:

"I, for my part, try to live without asking many ques-
tions. I do not want to be indifferent to the great
problems of morals, immortality, and the soul ; but I
want to learn to be as happy as my health and passions
will allow me, without raising questions I am convinced
no one will ever answer from our human standpoint."

It was a sort of awakening, this more human view
of life ; and, this sense of reality once firmly appre-
hended, he could write, as he does in one of his latest
letters :

"With me life burns ever more intense as my real
strength wanes and my days decrease. It seems to me
sometimes awful — the pace at which I live in feeling —
inversely to the pace at which myself is ebbing to
annihilation."

Gradually, therefore, a new estimate of the value, not
merely of such literature as he could write, but of
literature itself, formed itself in his mind, and united
with that other feeling of powerlessness in still further
discouraging him from too keen a following of art and
the rewards of art. A passage which I may quote from
an unpublished letter gives characteristic expression to
this view of things :

" You arc quite right to reg.ud art, literature, as the
noblest function of your life. What I gently said, and
somewliat cynically, jierhaps, to the contrary, is very
much the result of a long experience in renunciation and
patience, the like of which you have not yet had to
undergo. I think it best for men to arm themselves
with Stoicism as regards success (either external, or in
proportion to their own ideals) and to maintain as a

90 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

guiding principle what is the uhimate fact — namely,
that art and literature are and never can be more than
functions of human life. Life therefore first."

" Life therefore first." Symonds was right ; and it
was the life in him, the personality, that gave the man
his real interest, his real fascination. But either he did
not realise, or realised too late, that where he might
have added something vital to literature was precisely in
the record of this passionate communion with life.
Perhaps, after all, "the right word" would never have
" fallen into the right place," But, judging by the few
personal things that he did, and by what we are allowed
to read of that Autobiography, which is not likely at
present to be published in its entirety, he might have
done much ; he would certainly have done something
more essentially valuable than the never quite satisfying
contributions to general culture, to which the main part
of his life was devoted. But, as I have said, all this
work was in part an escape, an escape from himself;
and the " life " which he placed before " literature "
was in part also an escape in another direction. Never
"truly reconciled either with life or with himself," he
chose the simpler task of writing the History of the
Renaissance, rather than the perhaps impossible one of
writing the history of his own soul.

1893.

WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE

The later work of William Morris is mostly in prose,
and it consists in a series of prose romances, "News
from Nowhere," " The Roots of the Mountains," "The
Wood beyond the World," " The Sundering Flood,"
and others, into which he put the same placid and
passionate love of beauty, the same sense of life and of
nature, as into his verse. In their simple remoteness,
their cunningly woven pattern, their open-heartedness,
so absolute that it seems to be itself the concealment of
a secret, they have commonly been taken to be not so
much romances as allegories, and many fruitless attempts
have been made to find out what meaning is hidden
away under so much mere decoration. Morris has set
this question finally at rest in a letter to the Spectator,
dated July i6, 1895, where the statement made in
reference to a single one of the prose romances holds
good in reference to them all. " I had not," he wrote,
"the least intention of thrusting an allegory into 'The
"Wood beyond the World' : it is meant for a tale pure
and simple, with nothing didactic about it. If I have
to write or speak on social problems, I always try to be
as direct as I possibly can be. On the other hand, I
should consider it bad art in any one writing an allegory
not to make it clear from the first that that was his
intention, and not to take care throughout that the
allegory and the story shouki interpenetrate, as does the
great master of allegory, liunyan."

Morris was a poet, never more truly a poet than
when he wrote in prose ; and it was because he was a

9»

92 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

poet that he resented the imputation of writing
I allegories. Allegory is the prose writer s substitute for
[ symbol ; and, in its distressing ingenuity, it resembles
what it aims at as closely as the marionette resembles
his less methodical brother, man. "Without the in-
dwelling symbol, art is no more than a beautiful body
without breath ; but this breath, this flame, this inde-
structible and fragile thing, need be no more visible in
the work of art than the actual breath of our nostrils,
which needs the frost before it shows us its essential
heat. To Morris art was a peculiar, absorbing, quite
serious kind of play, in which the stanza of a poem, an
acanthus on a wall-paper, a square of stitches in tapestry,
a paragraph of prose, were all of precisely equal import-
ance, and, in a way, equal lack of importance. He was
1 in love with the beauty of the world, and he loved the
'beauty of the world joyously, as no one of our time has
been simple enough and pure enough and strong enough
to do. And he loved all visible beauty indill'erently, as
a child does, not preferring the grass to the emerald,
nor the lake to the leaf. His many activities, in which
it seemed to some of his friends that he scattered his
energy too liberally, were but so many expressions of
his unbounded delight in beauty, in the unbounded
beauty of all the forms of life. He was not a thinker ;
the time-woven garment of the unseen was too satisfying
to him that he should ever have cared to look behind
it ; but wisdom came to him out of his love of the
earth, and a curious pathos, touching one like the sight
of wet blossoms or a child's smile, from his apprehension
of what is passing, and subject to the dishonour of age,
in earthly beauty. His work, then, is a tender re-
fashioning of his own vision of the world, of the world
as it was to him ; that is to say, as it never was, and
never will be, in any past or future golden age, to any

WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE 93

one who is not a poet, and something of a child, at
heart. He takes one " morsel of the world " after
another, and it is to him as to Birdalone, in the book,
when she awakes : " And it was an early morning of
later spring, and the sky was clear blue, and the sun
shining bright, and the birds singing in the garden of
the house, and in the street was the sound of the early
market-folk passing through the streets with their
wares ; and all was fresh and lovely." He knows that
there are "dragons" to be slain; but, knowing that
Perseus or St George is even now coming through the
woods or to the sea-shore, he is content, when it is not
his turn to strike, merely to pass on, through ways
which are none the less beautiful, weaving all these
things into pictures, whereby joy may come into the
hearts of weary people whose eyes are dim with sorrow
and much labour.

" The Water of the Wondrous Isles," like all Morris's
pros;e, is written in that elaborately simple language,
in which the Latin element of English is drawn on as
little as possible, and the Saxon element as largely as
possible, a language which it has pleased some persons
to call a bastard tongue. Artificial, indeed, to a certain
extent, it undoubtedly, and very properly, is. Every
writer of good prose is a conscious artificer ; and to
write without deliberately changing the sequence of
wfjrds as they come into the mind is to write badly.
There is no such thing, properly speaking, as a
" natural " style ; and it is merely ignorance of the
mental processes of writing which sometimes leads us
to say that the style of Swift, for instance, is more
natural than the style of Ruskiii. To write so that it
may seem as if the words were unpremeditated is at
least as artificial a process, and at least as difficult, as
to write picturesquely, allowing more liberty to words,

94 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

in their somevvli;it unreasonable desire to sparkle and
shoot many colours, and become little unruly orchestras
of their own. And so, in regard to Morris's choice of
language, it is merely to be noted that he writes a purer
English than most people, obtaining an effect of almost
unparalleled simplicity, together with a certain monotony,
perhaps even greater than that required by style, though
without monotony there can be no style. If he occa-
sionally uses a word now obsolete, such as " hight," or
a combination now unfamiliar, such as " speech-friend,"
how numberless are the words of hurried modern coin-
age from which he refrains ! seeming to have read the
dictionary, as Pater used to advise young writers to read
it, in order to find out the words not to use. It is suiH-
cient justification of his style to say that it is perfectly
suited to his own requirements, and that it could not
possibly suit the requirements of any other writer ;
being, as it is, so intimate a part of his own personality,
of his own vision of things.

And here, as elsewhere, it must be remembered that
art, to Morris, was always conventional art, in which the
external shape, so carefully seen in nature and so care-
fully copied, was realised always as line or colour in a
pattern, which it was the business of the artist to dis-
entangle from the lovely confusions of growth. Morris
was passionate only in his impersonality ; in deep passion
he was as lacking as he was lacking in profound thought.
He loved nature, as I have said, joyously ; and nature,
apprehended without passion, becomes a kind of decora-
tion. He beheld a golden and green and blue earth,
in which the fashion of the world is like that coloured,
flat-surfaced thing which the painters before perspective
made into pictures. A craftsman's term comes naturally
to him when he is speaking of " the green earth and its
well-wrought little blossoms and leaves and grass." The

WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE 95

beautiful description of Birdalone's body has almost the
reflecting coldness of a mirror, so purely is the living
beauty of woman seen as a piece of decoration, a tape-
stried figure in a " well-wrought " green wood. Here
and there, tenderness, which is never absent, rises, in
the intensity of its pity, into a kind of grave passion, as
in these words : "and tender was she of her body as of
that which should one day be so sorely loved." And
once more, in the accomplishment of love foreseen :

" And she murmured over him : O friend, my dear,
think not that I had M'ill to hide me from thee. All
that is here of me is thine, and thine, and thine.

" And she took his hand, and they arose together,
and she said : O friend, I fled from thee once and left
thee lonely of me because I deemed need drave me to
it ; and I feared the strife of friends, and confusion and
tangle. Now if thou wilt avenge thee on me thou
mayst, for I am in thy power. Yet will I ask thee
what need will drive thee to leave me lonely ?

" He said : The need of death. But she said :
Mayhappen we shall lie together then, as here to-night
we shall lie."

But, for the rest, this book, like the others, is of an
equable sweetness, a continual going on, like running
water in pale sunlight, never rising or falling, nor vary-
ing in colour, nor changing in sound. It is a story,
which takes place at a time without a date, in a country
without a name, among persons who have the simple,
elementary (jualities of humanity, the (jualities which
are older than civilisation, and yet who are shown to
us only in conventionalised attitudes and in decorative
costumes. Never was anything so close to nature and
so far from it. I liiul no notion, when I had finished
the l)0()k, whether the story had been well told, as
the phrase is, or ill told. Meeting, immediately

96 STUDIRS IN PROSE AND VERSE

iifterwards, a friend and admirer of Morris, I learnt
from him that Morris's romances were "rambling."
To me it was as if he had said that a pattern of scroll-
work was rambling. Within its limits the art of the
thing had seemed to me flawless. I was in a world
which indeed you may refuse to enter, but where,
having entered, you have no choice ; you can impose
no limit but the limits of the design. I find stories, as
a rule, difficult to read ; but I read these five hundred
pages of prose as easily as if they had been verse, and
with the same kind of pleasure. To read such a book is
to receive an actual gift of happiness, in this quickened
sense of the beauty of life and of the visible world,
without that after-sense of the worm at the fruit's
heart, which is left with us by most histories of the
doings of humanity.

1897.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

I

The first aim of art, no doubt, is the representation of
things as they are. But, then, things are as our eyes I
see them and as our minds make them, and it is thus of
primary importance for the critic to distinguish the
precise quahties of those eyes and minds which make
the world into imaginative literature. Reality may be
so definite and so false, just as it maybe so fantastic
and so true ; and, among work which we can apprehend
as dealing justly with reality, there may be quite as
much difference in all that constitutes outward form
and likeness as there is between a Dutch interior by
Peter van der Hooch, the portrait of a king by
Velazquez, and the image of a woman smiling by
Leonardo da Vinci. The soul, for instance, is as real
as the body; but, as we hear it only through the body
speaking, and see it only through bodily eyes, and
measure it, often enough, only in the insignificant
moment of its action, it may come to seem to us,
at all events, less realisable; and thus it is that
we speak of those who have vividly painted exterior
things as realists. Properly Sj)eaking, Maupassant is
no more a realist than Maeterlinck. He j)aints a I
kind of reality which it is easier for us to recognise; '
that is all.

Every artist has his own vision of the world.
Maupassant's vision was of solid superficies, of texture 1)
which his hands could touch, of action which his mind

97

98 STUDIES IN PROSK AND VERSE

could comprehend from the mere sight of its incidents.

1 He Siuv the world as the Dutch painters saw it, and he
was as great a master of form, of rich and sober colour,
of the imitation of the outward gestures of life, and
of the fashion of external things. He had the same
view of humanity, and shows us, with the same indif-
ference, the same violent ferment of life, the life of full-
blooded people who have to elbow their way through
the world. His sense of desire, of greed, of all the
baser passions, was profound ; he had the terrible
logic of animalism. Love-making, drunkenness, cheat-
ing, quarrelling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in
a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields,
civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the
seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, un-
illuminating way as the Dutch painters ; finding, indeed,
no beauty in any of these things, but getting his
beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere
act of placing them in a picture. The world existed

I for him as something formless which could be cut up
into little pictures. He saw no further than the lines
of his frame. The interest of the thing began inside
that frame, and what remained outside was merely
material.

As a writer, Maupassant was de race, as the
French say ; he was the lineal descendant of the early
contours. Trained under the severe eye of the impeccable
Flaubert, he owed infinitely, no doubt, to that training,
and much to the actual influence of the great novelist,
who, in " L'Education Sentimentale," has given us the
type of the modern novel. But his style is quite
dilferent from that of Flaubert, of which it has none of

' the splendid, subdued richness, the harmonious move-
ment ; it is clear, precise, sharply cut, without ornament
or elaboration ; with much art, certainly, in its deliberate

GUY DE MAUPASSANT 99

plainness, and with the admirable skill of an art which
conceals art. M. Halevy has aptly applied to him the
saying of Vauvenargues : " La nettetc est le vernis des 1
maitres." Not Swift himself had a surer eye or hand »
for the exact, brief, malicious notation of things and
ideas. He seems to use the first words that come to
hand, in the order in which they naturally fall; and
when he has reached this point he stops, not con-
ceiving that there is anything more to be done.
"Maupassant," writes Goncourt in his Journal, with
that acuteness which the touch of malice only
sharpened, " is a very remarkable novelliere^ a very
charming writer of short stories, but a stylist, a great
writer, no, no ! "

A story of Maupassant, more than almost anything
in the world, gives you the impression of manual
dexterity. It is adequately thought out, but it does
not impress you by its thought ; it is clearly seen, but
it does not impress you specially by the fidelity of its
detail ; it has just enough of ordinary human feeling for
the limits it has imposed on itself. What impresses you
is the extreme ingenuity of its handling ; the way in
which this juggler keeps his billiard-balls harmoniously
rising and falling in the air. Often, indeed, you
cannot help noticing the conscious smile which pre-
cedes the trick, and the confident bow which con-
cludes it. He does not let you into the secret of
the trick, but he prevents you from ignoring that
it is after all only a trick which you have been
watching.

There is a philosophy of one kind or another behind
the work of every artist. Maupassant's was a simple
one, suflicicnt for his nectls as he understood them,
though perhaps really conse(]uent upon his artistic
methods, rather than at the root of them. It was

loo STIUMES IN PROSE AND VKRSE

the philosophy of cynicism, the most eftectual means of
limiting one's outlook, of concentrating all one's energies
on the task in hand. Maupassant wrote for men of the
world, and men of the world are content with the wisdom
of their counting-houses. The man of the world is
perfectly willing to admit that he is no better than you,
because he takes it for granted that you will admit
yourself to be no better than he. It is a way of avoiding
comparisons. To Maupassant this cynical point of view
was invaluable for his purpose. He wanted to tell
stories just for the pleasure of telling them ; he wanted
to concern himself with his story simply as a story ;
incidents interested him, not ideas, nor even characters,
and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective.
Now cynicism in France supplied a sufficient basis for
all these requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular
purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England
is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the first and
perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote,
" Boule de Suif," with a story of somewhat similar
motive, Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both
stories are pathetic, but the pathos of the American
(who had formed himself upon Dickens, and in the
English tradition) becomes sentimental, and gets its
success by being sentimental ; while the pathos of
the Frenchman (who has formed himself on Flaubert,
and in the French tradition) gets its success precisely
by being cynical.

And then this particular variety of Maupassant's
cynicism was just that variation of the artistic idea
upon the temperament which puts the best finish upon
w^ork necessarily so limited, obliged to be so clenching,
as the short story. Flaubert's gigantic dissatisfaction
with life, his really philosophic sense of its vanity,
would have overweighted a writer so thoroughly

GUY DE MAUPASSANT loi

equipped for his work as the writer of " Boule de
Suif ■' and "La Maison Tellier." Maupassant had no
time, he allowed himself no space, to reason about life ;
the need was upon him to tell story after story, each
with its crisis, its thrill, the summing up of a single
existence or a single action. The sharp, telling thrust
that this conception of art demanded could be given
only by a very specious, not very profound, very
forth-right kind of cynicism, like the half-kindly,
half-contemptuous laugh of the man who tells a
good story at his club. For him it was the point of
the epigram.

II

Maupassant in his work gives us the will to live, and
with him it is the will of the body to be always happy,
always conscious of happiness, not too conscious of
itself, the body's desire of light, heat, comfort, the
pleasure of all the senses, and sound sleep without
dreams. >cHis work is the confession of the average
sensual man, in whom an extravagance of health turns
to fever, that there is something in the world, or not
in it, which sets a term to enjoyment even while one
has both will and strength to cnjoy.\ Here is one oi
the m(;st intimate of his confessions: "How gladly, at
times, I would think no more, feel no more, live the
life of a brute, in a warm, bright country, in a yellow
country, without crude and brutal verdure, in one of
those I'^astern countries in which one falls asleep with-
out sadness, awakens without concern, is active and
has no cares, loves and has no distress, and is scarcely
aware that one is going on living." It is in " Sur
I'Kau " that he says that, the book in which he has

I02 8TUDIKS IN PROSE AND VERSE

" thought simply " and written down his thoughts as
they came to him. It is love of life which drives him
to this fear even of living, this desire of a vegetable
warmth and growth, which seems to promise con-
tinuance. Goncourt notes in his "Journal," in 1889,
how JVIirbeau " speaks curiously of the fear of death
which haunts Maupassant, and which is the cause of
his life of perpetual wandering over land and sea, in
the effort to escape from that fixed idea." In " Sur
I'Eau " he speaks, in terrified words, of this fear of
death, this fear of an invisible monster, hidden in some
corner, spying on men's lives, and breathing a slow
pestilence upon them. The soul hardly comes at all
into this hatred of the earth on which men suffer so
much before dying ; it is the body which cries out
against age, wrinkles, and the sure tardiness of decay.
It is the body which will not be satisfied with what it
can gather to itself under the sun, nor with any of
the fruits of the earth into which it is to relapse, in
the end.

Maupassant loved and hated life, and he hated it
because he loved it. Tolstoi has pointed out how he
becomes unconsciously a moralist by the mere force
and clear-sightedness of his talent, his fidelity to what
he has seen and to what he has felt. Caring for
nothing in the world so much as for women, setting
the monotonous and various drama of sex in motion
through all his stories, he comes in the end to find all
this amusing and absorbing comedy turning tragic.
"He would have exalted love, but the more he knew
it the more he cursed it." He cannot endure solitude,
and he finds only a more ignoble solitude where it has
been his pleasure to seek distraction. " I was at home
and alone, and I felt that if I remained there I should
fall into a horrible fit of melancholy, the sort of

GUY DE MAUPASSANT 103

melancholy that must drive men to suicide if it returns
too often." That is how he presents to us the state
of mind of the man who is going out to " a night of
pleasure"; and, at the end of that typical story,
"L'Armoire," we see the man, overcome by horror
and pity, hurrying home in the middle of the night,
that he may escape from a more poignant sense of the
wretchedness of things.

Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected
on it in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt
animal. His observation is not, as it has been hastily
assumed to be, cold ; it is as superficially emotional as
that of the average sensual man, and its cynicism is only
another, not less superficial, kind of feeling. He saw
life in all its details, and his soul was entangled in the
details. He saw it without order, without recompense,
without pity ; he saw too clearly to be duped by ap-
pearances, and too narrowly to distinguish any light
beyond what seemed to him the enclosing bounds of
darkness. And so he settled down, with a kind of
violent indifference, which was almost despair, to live his
life and to accomplish his task. Goncourt reports a
conversation in which Ceard " declares that, in him,
literature was a matter wholly of instinct, not of
reflection ; and affirms that, of all the men whom he
has known, he was the most absolutely indifferent to
everything, and that, at tlie very moment in which he
seemed most keenly set on a thing, he was already aloof
from it." In ten years he wrote thirty volumes ; he
wrote well or ill, but he wrote always, not for love of
art nor for love of money, but out of the need of his
organism to spend its force after its kind, after all
kinds.

In that famous chapter on the novel, which Maupas-
sant i)iit as a preface tu " Pierre ct Jean," he summarises

H

104 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

for us those counsels of Flaubert under which he
worked for seven years, before the publication of
"Boule de Suif" in the " Soirees de Medan " of 1880,
presented him to the public as a finished artist. "'Talent
is a long patience.' The thing is to look at what one
wishes to express, long enough and carefully enough to
discover in it an aspect which no one has ever seen or
said. In everything there is something undiscovered,
because we are only accustomed to use our eyes with
the recollection of what people have thought before us
about the thing at which we are looking. There is a
certain unknown quantity in the smallest thing. Find
it." This unknown quantity in familiar things Maupas-
sant knew how to find. He sought for it chiefly in that
part of human nature which interested him most and
which was most familiar to him. Being professedly not
a psychologist, being content to leave the soul out of
the question, he found that the animal passions were at
the root of our nature, that they gave rise to the most
vivid and interesting kinds of action, and he persisted in
rendering mainly the animal side of life. Probably no
writer has ever done so more convincingly, with a more
thorough knowledge of his subject, and a more perfect
mastery of his knowledge. At his best he gives us, as
in "Une Vie," "the humble truth," or, in "La Petite
Roque," the horrible truth, or, in " Le Horla," the truth
which destroys. It was the fear of death that wrung
imagination out of him : " Le Horla," the invisible
spectre of the mind. "Le Horla" is the soul of the
materialist vindicating itself against the self-confidence
of the body.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT 105

III

Everything which Maupassant wrote is interesting, it
is more exckisively and merely interesting than the work
of any writer of fiction who has been called great, it is
too exclusively and merely interesting to be really great
work. Really great work, in fiction as in every other
form of art, requires too close and too constant an atten- |
tion to be quite easy reading. When we read Balzac
we seem to have been plunged suddenly into the midst
of so great a turbulence of life that the effort to absorb
this new, irresistible, hurrying, and mysterious world
makes us pause ; we try to withdraw into ourselves, as
one might step aside into a doorway out of a great
crowd, in the streets of a city. We look up from the
page, we half-close the book, that we may think a little,
that we may rest from this fatiguing demand on all our
faculties. When we read Flaubert, we are delightfully
delayed by the completeness and the beauty of every
detail ; we linger over this prose as we linger over verse.
When we read Merimee, even, in those stories which
may be so well compared with Maupassant's for their
economy and precision of effect, we are conscious of
some hard, intellectual (juality which takes hold of us,
not only through the mere events of the story. But we
read Maupassant for nothing but the story ; we read him
hurriedly, without lifting our eyes from the page ; we
are only anxious to get to the end, to see what happens.
One shouki never read stories for the story. However
absorbing may be the interest of the plot, of the work-
ing out of a given situation, the plot and the situation
should never be taken as more than the means to an
end. In great art they are never more than the means
to an end, to the interpretation, the new creation, of

io6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

life; and no great artist allows himself to become so
amusing, in his treatment of what is not essential, as to
withdraw the attention of the reader from what is essen-
tial. That is why no great writer has ever been
immediately popular. The books that pass away are
the books that have too easily, too feverishly, interested
a generation.

Maupassant is the best of the popular novelists, of
the novelists who have not had to wait for admiration.
His appeal is genuine, and his skill, of its kind, incon-
testable. He attracts, as certain men do, by a warm
and blunt plausibility. He is so frank, and seems so
broad ; and is so skilful, and seems so living. All the
exterior heat of life is in his work ; and this exterior
heat gives a more immediate illusion of what we call
real life than the profound inner vitality of, let us say,
Hawthorne. He comes to us, saying impressively :
'' Certain meetings, certain inexplicable combinations
of things, contain undoubtedly, however insignificant
they may seem to be, a larger quantity of the secret
quintessence of life than that dispersed in the ordinary
course of events." He promises us this secret quint-
essence of life, and he tells us anecdote after anecdote,
full of moving facts, and the obvious emotion of every
fact. He is eager and unabashed, and, he assures us,
this is life, and these amusing and horrible and ordinary
things are the things that really happen. He assures
us : " Blind and intoxicated with foolish pride must he
be who believes himself more than an animal a little
better than the others." And the others ? " I seem to
see in them the horror of their souls as one sees a
monstrous foetus in spirits of wine, in a glass jar." And
his scornful conclusion is: "Happy are they whom life
satisfies, who can amuse themselves, and be content. . . .
Happy are they who have not discovered, with a vast

GUY DE MAUPASSANT 107

disgust, that nothing changes, that nothing passes, and
that all things are a weariness."

Is that a philosophy or is it an outcry ? Is it not the
unprofitable anger of the craftsman with his material ?
Is it not the helpless anger of the child with the toys
which he has broken?

1899, 1903.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

The novels of Diiudet are distinguished from the
average popular novel not in kind, but in degree. The
study of manners, the novel of sensation, the pathetic
novel, the novel of satire, the novel of humour, he has
done them all, and he has done them all with an admir-
able skill, a controlling sense of art. But he has brought
nothing nevi^ into fiction, or, if he has brought anything,
it is the particular variety of his humour, a Southern
blend, which seems to unite American humour with
Irish humour. "Tartarin " should be compared with the
work of Mark Twain and with the work of Carleton,
not, certainly, with anything greater than the work of
these admirable writers. "Tartarin" is an heroical
farce, full of comic observation, of comic invention, but,
after all, how little more than the froth on the wine as
it bubbles over! Daudet is himself rash enough to
challenge comparison with "Don Qiiixote," and the
comparison has been extended to Falstaff. But here
the difference is a difference in kind. Daudet is a
genuine humourist, but he is a humourist for his time,
not for all time. He deals, not with that humour of
fundamental ideas which is one of the voices of wisdom,
but rather with a humour of shining accidents, which is
at its best but the consecration of folly. There are men
of science, men who deserve well of science, who have
spent their lives in classifying a single species of beetle.
That is what Daudet has done in "Tartarin," into
which he has packed all the exterior qualities of the

jo8

ALPHONSE DAUDET 109

South, "les gestes, frenesies et ebullitions de notre
soleil," as he says.

And so with his serious studies in life. He is a quick
observer, but never a disinterested observer, for he is
a sentimentalist among realists. All his power comes
from the immediateness of his appeal to the heart : to
the intellect he never appeals. He appeals, certainly,
to the average human sympathies, and he appeals to
them with his power of writing a story which shall
absorb the interest as an English novel absorbs the
interest, by its comedy, using that word in its broadest
sense. Even "Sapho" is essentially comedy, and
Daudet is not far from being at his best in that brief,
emphatic tale of a dull and disenchanted Bohemia.
Others before Daudet had studied the life of a woman
professionally " gay." Huysmans had studied it brutally,
with a deliberate lack of sympathy, in " Marthe." Zola
had studied it, with his exuberant method of repre-
senting, not the living woman, but the pattern of her
trade. Goncourt had studied it, delicately, but with
a subtlety which digresses into merely humanitarian con-
siderations, in " La Fille Elisa." Daudet gives us
neither vice nor romance, but the average dreariness of
le collate. Yet he is not content with painting his
picture : he must moralise, arrange, with an appeal to
the sympathies as definitely sentimental, for all its dis-
guises, as that of " La Dame aux Camcliiis." He
cannot be as indifferently just to his Sapho as Flaubert
in ^' L'Education Scntimentale " is indifferently and
supremely just to Rosanette. And, partly for this very
reason, it is only the external semljlance of life which
he gives; rarely the heart, never the soul.

In his vivid, passionate, tragically pathetic studies of
"that exciting Paris" (it is his own word), "where
the very dulls talk," I)audet is as entertaining as

no STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the writer of a fairy tale, and he writes fairy tales, in
which J. Tom Levis, the pseudo-Englishman of the
confidential agency, Jansoulet, the Nabob, Delobelle
the actor, Sidonie (a new Sidonia the Sorceress),
Bompard, Tarturin, are all inhabitants of a world cer-
tainly more amusing than real life. That they should
" o'erstep the modesty of nature" at every movement is
partly his intention, partly he is indifferent to it, and
partly unaware of it.

No gift with which a man can be cursed is more
fatal than a thin vein of poetry. Daudet had a thin
vein of poetry, not enough to make him a poet, but
enough to distort the focus of his vision of truth.
When he looked at external objects he saw something
a little different from their shape as it appeiu-s to people
in general, but he did not see them transfigured into the
celestial images of themselves, as the poet sees them.
He saw the face of Joy a little more laughing than it
is, the face of Sorrow a little more distressed, and just
that half-poetical exaggeration, missing all that is
essential in poetry, was enough to leave him somewhere
between the realists and the properly imaginative
writers, artistically insincere, though, in his intention,
of an almost touching sincerity.

He was a novelist as men are ceasing to be novelists,
a novelist for the story's sake. He professes frankly to
amuse you, and his absence of affectation in regard to
his own art is itself almost an affectation. And his
stories first of all amuse, excite, distress himself; "and
then one loves them, these books, these novels, sorrowful
fruits of your entrails, made of your very flesh and
blood ; how can one look on them disinterestedly ^ "
He never could, indeed, look on them disinterestedly,
either while they were making or when they were
made. He made them with actual tears and laughter;

ALPHONSE DAUDET iii

and they are read with actual tears and laughter by the
crowd. May it not, therefore, be said that he achieved
his end, that he gained the reward he had proposed to
himself, and that a more lofty, a more lonely, fame
would have left one who was always so eager after
present happiness, after what is companionable in praise,
a little cold and unsatisfied?

"It is all very well to put oneself outside the crowd
and above it ; it always comes, in the end, to be the
crowd for which one writes." That sentence, written
by Daudet in an article on Goncourt, does something to
show why the writer of "Sapho," " Froment Jeune et
Risler Aine," and " Les Aventures Prodigieuses de
Tartarin de Tarascon "' was a popular writer, but not a
great writer. Daudet wrote for the crowd. He wrote
also, certainly, for his own pleasure ; he wrote as he
might have talked ; and it would have been easier to
imagine Zola not writing than Daudet not writing. It
amused him supremely to tell stories ; but he had to
be listened to. Feverish as his method of writing was,
he took endless pains to write well, writing every MS.
three times over from beginning to end. But he had no
philosophy behind his fantastic and yet only too probable
creations. Caring, as he thought, supremely for life,
he cared really for that surprising, bewildering pantomime
which life seems to be to those who watch its coloured
movement, its flickering lights, its changing costumes, its
powdered faces, without looking through the eyes into
the hearts of the dancers, lie wrote from the very
midst of the human comedy ; and it is for this that he
seems at times to have caught the bodily warmth and
the taste of the tears and the very rin^^ of the laughter
of men and women. He was too much the comrade of
his own characters ; there are times when he seems
actually to judge them from their own point of view

112 STUDlFvS IN PROSE AND VERSE

to be deceived by the speciousness of their protes-
tations, to descend to their own level.

To the great artist life is indeed a comedy, but it is a
comedy in which his own part is to stand silently in the
wings, occasionally ringing down the curtain. Every
joy and sorrow which he gives to his characters he has
indeed felt, in his own heart, or in his own imagination ;
but, his characters once in motion, he surveys them with
the controlling indifference of Fate. He will render the
pity of love and death, but he will not say, with Daudet :
" Quel coup terrible pour la jeune fille! " He will feel
the whole intimacy of the contact between nature and
humanity, but he will not say with Daudet: "A
passionate sob, so profound, so rending, that it would
have touched any heart, especially in the presence of
nature, splendid and pitiless in the soft, odorous heat."
He will render the sensation of, for instance, the happi-
ness of a loving family, but he will not, with Daudet,
bless the Paris Sunday, "especially because of all the
happiness that thou givest, over and above other days,
on that day, in the large new house at the end of the
old suburb." He will write tragedy, not melodrama;
comedy, not farce.

By the very superficiality with which he has entered
into the sentiment of his creations, Daudet has obtained
an impression of life which cannot be obtained by a
more careful, a more truly successful artist. We praise
a photograph for its likeness, and we please ourselves
and the photographer if we say that if is a flattering
likeness ; that is to say, if, in the average or accidental
expression which the camera has caught for us, we have
removed precisely those lines, wrinkles, idiosyncratic
defects, which indicate character. But when we come
to look at a portrait, painted by a great painter, we
consider, indeed, the question of the likeness, and at its

ALPHONSE DAUDET 113

full value ; but we consider, besides, how many qualities,
purely of art, which have nothing to do with the
exactitude of the reflection, but whose presence or
absence gives the picture its worth or defect. Daudet
shows us, for the most part, exceptional people,
grimacing with the exterior violence of life with which
he has animated them, seeming to be wonderfully close
to us, but at the best as close to us as the people we
pass in the street, not as the friend whose soul is in
our hands. It might almost be said that his human
curiosity was as great as Balzac's ; but what a different
kind of curiosity ! It is never fundamental, it is often
for no more than the bric-a-brac of humanity. " Le
Nabab," " Les Rois en Exil " : he is as filled with wonder-
ment before these fantastic and misplaced people as any
Provencal from Avignon or Aries. " Ah ! " he cries,
'' c'etait le bon temps alors. Paris bonde d'etrangers, et
non pas d'etrangers de passage, mais une installation de
fortunes exotiques ne demandant que noces et ripailles."
Even in his satire you feel the naivete of a certain
surprise. In " Le Nabab," for instance, which is a
satire of the manifold hypocrisies of modern society,
the indignation which thrills through all the satire is
really the recoil of a shock which has come heavily
upon an ingenuous nature ; and one of the finest
chapters of that book, " Un Debut dans le Monde," a
masterpiece of the satirical observation of small mean-
nesses, has all the pungency, with all the limitation, of
the young debutant himself, to whom these things are
personally irritating. And his pathos has the same
quality as his satire.

The pathos of Daudet, a very genuine pathos, as
melting as that of Dickens or Bret Harte, is a pathos
of things which are also laughable, a grotesque, a
fantastic pathos, made of the antithesis of unhaj)piness

114 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

and its surroLiiiJings. Delobelle the actor in " Fro-
raent Jeune," the Nabob, the kings in exile, are studies
of " humours," in Ben Jonson's sense ; they are not
studies of character. And so, in their pathos, they
are either traps to catch tears, or part of the rhetoric
of situation. Daudet's pathos is the pathos of the
sentimentalist ; it dwells on grief where grief is
picturesque, touching, immediately telling ; it has no
reserve, no transfusion into other substances. The
sovereign pathos of Lear, the noble pathos of Anti-
gone, do not make you cry ; the pathos of Jack makes
you cry. And this easy tribute of tears is but the
return of sentiment to sentiment, a wholly physical
sensation, in which the intellect is for nothing. Pathos
which can touch the intellect becomes so transfigured
that its tears shine : you can see by their light. But
we cry over melodrama because a single appeal is made
to a single sense, an appeal, from the point of view of
the finest art, almost as illegitimate as the appeal of
obscenity. Pathos such as Daudet's comes from the
man to whom life is an entertainment absolutely enter-
taining : he dreads only its ending, or an accident
which may interrupt it. The supreme pathos can
come only from one to whom the very fact of life is
itself more pathetic than any sorrow ; to whom the
happiness which goes contentedly, with bandaged eyes,
through the mystery of things, is a sadder wonder than
the narrow grief which measures itself by the four
sides of a grave ; to whom love, death, joy, sorrow,
are words equally mournful in our unbounded ignorance
of them.

Daudet is really neither more nor less than " I'homme
du Midi," but the one " homme du Midi" who, feel-
ing always as a Southerner, has been able to look at
himself almost as objectively as a Parisian. In the

ALPHONSE DAUDET 115

"Souvenirs d'un Homme de Lettres," Daudet tells us
that he has a little green note-book, entitled " Le
Midi,'' in which he has noted down, for years and
years, everything that might help to sum up his
country. "All noted down in the green note-book,
from the country songs, the proverbs and phrases in
which the instinct of the people comes out, to the cries
of water-carriers, of the lollipop and fruit sellers of
our fairs, and to the very whimperings of our sick-
nesses, heightened and re-echoed by the imagination,
almost all nervous, rheumatic, caused by the sky oi
wind and flame which eats into our marrow, and sets
the whole being in fusion, like a sugar-cane ; all noted
down, to the crimes of the South, explosions of passion,
of drunken violence, drunken without drink, which
bewilder and appal the conscience of judges, who have
come from another climate, and are lost in the midst of
these exaggerations, these extravagances of witnesses,
which they do not know how to 'bring to a point.'"
From this book have come " Numa Roumestan " ("which
seems to me," he tells us, " the least incomplete of my
books, the one into which I have put the best of myself,
into which I have put the most invention, in the aristo-
cratic sense of the word '') and all the chronicles of
" Tartarin," certainly his greatest achievement as a
humourist, and containing his one type, the type of
the braggart by imagination. It is his Southern blood
which has given him that vivacity of temperament by
which a long novel, written with the most conscientious
labour, appears to be an improvisation, comes to us with
such engaging heat, such a breathing aspect. It is from
the Soutli that he has taken those honeyed and delicate
short stories, which have brought iiuo French certain
naive and subtly humorous and quaintly jioetical quali-
ties, which, to those who know Provence or can read

ii6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Proven^iil, have the very tiiste of the soil. It is directly
from the Proven9al that he has taken the vocal and
gesticulating quality of his style, in which everything
must give way to the search after the sound of the
spoken word. His epithets, when they are line, are
sudden ("le geste tutoyeur," for instance, said of
Gambeita), epithets of a good talker. In the South
every one talks, and Daudet aims always at giving you
the sensation of one who talks. When Goncourt
desires to give you the sensation of talking, with what
an elaborate, minute, almost painful effort he produces
his effects, never more artificial than in these moments ;
succeeding indeed, but with all the labour of one who
has not only an impression to convey, but an idea at
the back of the sensation. Daudet aims at the im-
mediate sensation and gets it, as if it were the easiest
thing in the world. It was, to him; and he trained a
natural aptitude to the finest uses of which it was
capable. It did not make him a great artist, but it
made him the best writer, next to Maupassant, among
the novelists who are not great artists.

1898.

C^lf- H

V

HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE

The "Last Studies" of Hubert Crackanthorpe, pub-
lished after his death, with an introduction, a little
hesitating, by Mr Henry James, contain three stories,
two of them, " Anthony Garstin's Courtship " and
"Trevor Perkins," ranking among his good, his
characteristic work. The stories, perhaps, tell us
nothing new about their author, though 1 seemed to
feel in " Anthony Garstin," when it came into my
hands in the summer of 1896, for publication in the
Savoy^ something almost like a reaching out in more or
less a new direction. In any case, they are well worth
adding to the work contained in those few, small books
which are all that a writer cut off so early had time to
leave us: "Wreckage," published in 1893; "Senti-
mental Studies," in 1895; and "Vignettes," in 1896.
A life's work so narrow in compass, so limited, indeed,
in range, may seem to require a certain explanation
from those who consider it to have been of importance.
A few dreary stories, a few pages of impressionistic
writing about moods and landscapes, that is all we have
to set over against the brilliant productiveness of such
scarcely oldt-r men as Mr Kipling. Is there a place
anywhere, we can imagine many people asking, for
even a present memory of this young man and his
depressing work ?

No one in I^ngland, with the single exception of Mr
Frank Harris, has gone further in the direction of bare,
hard, persistent realism, the deliberately unsympathetic

record of sordid things which have really ha))penetl

117

ii8 STUDIES IN PROSK AND VERSE

because they have really happened. With Crackan-
thorpe there was always a revolt, the revolt of the
impersonal artist, to whom evil things had certainly no
attraction but a cold, intellectual one, against those
English conventions which make it difficult to be quite
frank in English. His courage was absolute. Quixotic
on behalf of an idea. All his stories were written with
the one intention of being true to his artistic conception
of life, and with no more cherished hope than that of
vindicating the claims and possibilities of art, of re-
moving perhaps some restriction, of at least making
way for liberty.

And, in his measure, he succeeded. When
"Wreckage" was published, nothing so audacious had
been seen in English prose fiction for a long time. And
it must, I think, have seemed evident that this audacity
was an audacity without fever (as with George Egerton)
or special pleading (as with Sarah Grand). Probably,
indeed, the impartiality of the manner may have
seemed a very vice of vice to persons, very numerous in
England, who condone sensuality if it is sentimental,
and condemn the philosophic recognition that evil is
merely evil. But I speak of those who are really
capable of forming an honest and intelligent opinion on
these matters. To them, surely, it must have been
evident that here was a writer of proud sincerity, to
whom any baseness would have been an impossibility.
He seemed to come forward, saying: " I am going to
try to show you some of the things I have seen in life,
pitiable things, in whose sorrows I have sorrowed, out
of whose despair I see no way, but which I shall tell
you as calmly as I can, for I do not wish to prejudice
you with what may be my own prejudices, I .shall
draw no moral from what I have seen ; there may be
more morals to draw than one ; I leave you to do that,

HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE ir

each for himself. Other people have shown you what
they take to be life, and it has been for the most part
the story of courtships, ending with marriage, though
indeed marriage is properly a beginning and not an
ending. In this world of theirs there have been
heroical and pathetic adventures, villains who have
been very black, and saints who have been very white.
For myself I see another kind of world, in which no
one is quite good or quite bad, in which nothing
extraordinary happens, but which is full of mean
troubles, and sordid cares, and too heedless and too
passionate people, and in which love, and death, and
pity, and wrong-doing come and go under dim masks
and soiling disguises. Who knows if there is any such
thing as 'real life'.? To each of us there appears his
own image of the world ; art is the shadowing of that
perhaps illusory image."

Such writers as these are not popular writers ; but
they are salutary. It is well that there should be those
who have these stern things to say to us ; they save us
from the dominion of smoothness and the dominion of
untruth, and they hinder us from growing contented
with our life or with our art. For the most part, we
reward them by making them martyrs, martyrs for
art.

By a curious, yet easily explicable paradox, it is the
impersonal artist who is most commonly in revolt ; for
he has to fight for his idea. The world is lenient
towards the sinner, even if he does not repent ; for his
outcry is the subtlest of tril)utes to that morality of
which the world is the guardian, and which is the
guardian of the conventions of the world. The imper-
sonal artist, whose only duty is towards a higher law,
smites suddenly on the satisfaction of things as they
are, and with the sword of the idea. It is the world's
I

I20 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

turn to cry out, for here is a new assiiying of its ac-
cepted currency, a trying over again of its leading
cases, a judging of itself, and not by its own laws.
The world does well to hate abstract ideas, for it is
at the sound of the crying (scarce above a whisper) of
the voice of abstract ideas that the walls of its fools'
paradise come clattering about its ears.

To say that Crackanthorpe's view of life was limited,
to say that it was youthful (and both may with some
truth be said), is after all to disprove nothing that I
have said in his honour. Force, and especially directing
force, comes from limitation, and wisdom has the folly
of its courage only when it is young. There is a
certain naivete^ even, in Crackanthorpe's disregard of
the fair colours which are on the other and outer side
of the garment, just as real as the seams and the grey
lining. And the hardest thing that can be said of him
is that he misses beauty in his desire to come closer
than beauty will let men come to truth. It is possible,
indeed, to think the whole direction of his talent not
the best one ; to think that in following Maupassant
he had mistaken his leader ; that the part of life which
can be rendered by that somewhat dusty method is not
even the most interesting part of life. After all has
been said, what I call Crackanthorpe's heroism remains,
a personal quality, which, if he had lived, would have
led him to do perhaps quite different, perhaps more
lasting, things. As it is, he has done something not
inconsiderable. It is no slight thing to have merely
written the story, in " Wreckage," called " A Dead
Woman." But, above all, he was of those who fight
well, who fight unselfishly, the knights errant of the
idea.

1897.

ROBERT BUCHANAN

Robert I^uchanan was a soldier of fortune who
fought under any leader or against any cause so long
as there was heavy fighting to be done. After a battle
or two, he left the camp and enlisted elsewhere, usually
with the enemy. He was, or aimed at being, a poet, a
critic, a novelist, a playwright ; he was above all a con-
troversialist ; he also tried being his own publisher. As
a poet he wrote ballads, lyrics, epics, dramas, was realist
and transcendentalist, was idyllic, tragic, pathetic, comic,
religious, objective, subjective, descriptive, reflective,
narrative, polemic, and journalistic. He wrote rhetorical
and ''Christian " romances before Mr Hall Caine ; his
plays were done entirely for the market, some of them
in collaboration with Mr G. R. Sims; his criticism was
all a kind of fighting journalism. " Lacking the pride
of intellect," he has said of himself, "I have by super-
abundant activity tried to prove myself a man among
men, not a mere litterateur.''' And, indeed, his career
shows an activity not less surprising than superabundant.
He took himself so seriously that he considered it
legitimate to " stoop to hodman's work"; thinking, he
tells us, " no work undignified which did not convert
him into a Specialist or a IVig." He never doubted
that he might have been "sitting empty-stomached on
Parnassus," if he had cared for the position. He
defended himself, perhaps unnecessarily, for not having
done so. "I have written," he said, "for all men and
in all moods." He took the day's wages for the day's
work, but was not satisfied. From the first his books

122 STUDIICS IN PROSE AND VICRSE

were received with serious attention ; they were con-
sidered, often praised greatly, often read largely.
Whenever he had anything to say, people listened.
When he hit other men, the other men usually paid
him the compliment of hitting back. " For nearly a
generation," he lamented, ten years ago, " I have
suffered a constant literary persecution." Well, it is
difficult to do justice to one who has never done justice
to another. But persecution is hardly the word to be
used for even a hard hit, when the hit is received by a
fighter of all work.

Like most fighters, Buchanan fought because he
could not think, and his changing sides after the fight
was neither loss nor gain to either cause. It was at
most the loss or gain of a weapon, and the weapon was
often more dangerous to friends than foes. He liked
playing with big names, as childen play with dolls and
call them after their dreams. He took God and the
devil into his confidence, very publicly, and with a kind
of lofty patronage. He used the name of God to
checkmate the devil, and the devil's name to checkmate
God. "And absolutely,"' he tells us, "I don't know
whether there are gods or not. I know only that there
is Love and Lofty Hope and Divine Compassion." There
are more big names to play with, and he wrote them,
even their adjectives, in capital letters. The capital
letters were meant for emphasis, they also indicated
defiance. He gave many definitions of what he
meant by God, the devil. Love, Hope, and Compassion.
The definitions varied, and were often interchange-
able. I find some of them in a book written in
his honour, called " Robert Buchanan, the Poet
of Modern Revolt."' From this book I gather that
Buchanan was himself an example of the "divine" and
the "lofty" virtues. His weakness, he admits, was

ROBERT BUCHANAN 123

too much brotherly love. "With a heart overflowing
with love, I have gathered to myself only hate and mis-
conception." Whatever he attacked, he attacked in
all the sincerity of anger, and anger no doubt is the
beginning of all avenging justice. He has said (so Mr
Stodart- Walker's book tells me, and though I gather
that it was said in verse, I am unable to reconstruct the
lines in metrical form) " I've popt at vultures circling
skyward, I've made the carrion hawks a byword, but
never caused a sigh or sob in the breast of mavis or
cockrobin, nay, many such have fed out of my hand and
blest me." There is hardly a contemporary writer
whom he did not attack, but it is true that he recanted
with not less vehemence, and with a zest in the double
function which suggests the swinging impartiality of the
pendulum. When he insulted an idea, it was with the
best intentions and on behalf of another idea. If he
spoke blasphemously of God, it has only been, he
assures us, in his zeal for religion, and when he " lifted
his hat to the Magdalen," in a famous phrase, it was
all in the cause of chastity. With infinite poetic
ambition, he had a certain prose force, which gave his
verse, at times, the vehemence of telling oratory. He
attempted in verse many things which were not worth
attempting and some which were. In all he aimed at
effect, sometimes getting it. He was indifferent to the
quality of the effect, so long as the effect was there, and
the mere fact of his aiming at it disqualified him, at
his best, from a place among genuine, that is to say
disinterested artists.

1901.

AN ARTIST IN ATTITUDES;

OSCAR WILDE

When the " Ballad of Reading Gaol " was published,
it seemed to some people that such a return to, or so
startling a first acquaintance with, real things, was pre-
cisely what was most required to bring into relation,
both with life and art, an extraordinary talent, so little
in relation with matters of common experience, so
fantastically alone in a region of intellectual abstractions.
In this poem, where a style formed on other lines seems
startled at finding itself used for such new purposes,
we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last,
pity and terror have come in their own person, and no
longer as puppets in a play. In its sight, human life
has always been something acted on the stage ; a
comedy in which it is the wise man's part to sit aside
and laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take
part, as in a carnival, under any mask. The unbiassed,
scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a
burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh,
and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that
there is nothing left desirable in illusion. Having seen,
as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so
partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way,
it has come at length to discover morality in the only
way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those
who, having " thought themselves weary," have made

the adventure of putting thought into action, it has

124

AN ARTIST IN ATTITUDES 125

had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own incalculable
expense. And now, having become so newly acquainted
with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the
arrangement of human affairs, it has gone, not un-
naturally, to an extreme, and taken, on the one hand,
humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than
their just valuation, in matters of art. It is that odd
instinct of the intellect, the necessity of carrying things
to their furthest point of development, to be more logical
than either life or art, two very wayward and illogical
things, in which conclusions do not always follow from
premises.

Well, and nothing followed, after this turning-point,
as it seemed, in a career. "■ Whatever actually occurs
is spoiled for art," Oscar Wilde has said. One hoped,
but he had known at least himself, from the beginning.
Nothing followed. Wit remained, to the very end,
the least personal form of speech, and thus the kindest
refuge for one who had never loved facts in themselves.
" I am dying beyond my means " was the last word ot
his which was repeated to me.

His intellect was dramatic, and the whole man was
not so much a personality as an attitude. Without
being a sage, he maintained the attitude of a sage ;
without being a ])oet, he maintained the attitude of a
poet ; without being an artist, he maintained the atti-
tude of an artist. And it was precisely in his attitudes
that he was most sincere. They represented his inten-
tions ; they stood for the better, unrealised part of
himself. Thus his attitude, towards life and towards
art, was untouched by his conduct; his perfectly just
and essentially dignified assertion of the artist's place in
the world of thought and the place of beauty in the
material world being in nowise invalidated by his own
failure to create pure beauty or to become a quite

126 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

honest artist. A talent so vividly at work as to be
almost genius was incessantly urging him into action,
mental action. Just as the appropriate word always
came to his lips, so the appropriate attitude always
found him ready to step into it, as into his own shadow.
His mind was eminently reasonable, and if you look
closely into his wit, you will find that it has always a
basis of logic, though it may indeed most probably
be supported by its apex at the instant in which he
presents it to you. Of the purely poetical quality he
had almost nothing; his style, even in prose, becomes
insincere, a bewildering echo of Pater or of some
French writer, whenever he tries to write beautifully.
Such imagination as he had was like the flickering of
light along an electric wire, struck by friction out of
something direct and hard, and, after all, only on the
surface.

''But then it is only the Philistine," he has said, in
his essay on Wainewright, "who seeks to estimate a
personality by the vulgar test of production. This
young dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do
something. He recognised that Life itself is an art,
and has its modes of style no less than the arts
that seek to express it." " Art never expresses any-
thing but itself," he has said, in another essay in the
same book, so aptly called "Intentions"; and that
" principle of his new aesthetics " does but complete
his view of the function of life. Art and life are to be
two things, absolutely apart, each a thing made to a
pattern, not a natural, or, as he would take it to be, an
accidental, growth. It is the old principle of art for
art's sake, pushed to its furthest limits, where every
truth sways over into falsehood. He tells us that " the
highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and
gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than

AN ARTIST IN ATTITUDES 127

she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty
passion, or from any fresh awakening of the human
consciousness." But he forgets that he is only dis- «
cussing technique, and that faultless technique, though
art cannot exist without it, is not art.

And so with regard to life. Realising as he did that
it is possible to be very watchfully cognisant of the
"quality of our moments as they pass," and to shape
them after one's own ideal much more continuously and
consciously than most people have ever thought of try-
ing to do, he made for himself many souls, souls of
intricate pattern and elaborate colour, webbed into
infinite tiny cells, each the home of a strange perfume,
perhaps a poison. Every soul had its own secret, and
was secluded from the soul which had gone before it or
was to come after it. And this showman of souls was
not always aware that he was juggling with real things,
for to him they were no more than the coloured glass
balls which the juggler keeps in the air, catching them
one after another. For the most part the souls were
content to be playthings ; now and again they took a
malicious revenge, and became so real that even the
juggler was aware of it. But when they became too
real he had to go on throwing them into the air and
catching them, even though the skill of the game had
lost its interest for him. But as he never lost his self-
possession, his audience, the world, did not sec the
dillerencc.

Among these souls there was one after the fashion of
Flaubert, another after the fashion of Pater, others that
had known Baudelaire, and lluysmans, and De C^iincey,
and Swinburne. Each was taken up, useil, ami dr{)j-»]K'd,
as in a kind of persistent illustration of ''the truth of
masks." "A truth in art is that whose conlrailictory is
also true." Well, it was with no sense of contradiction

128 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

that the critic of beautiful things found himself appeal-
ing frankly to the public in a series of the wittiest plays
that have been seen on the modern stage. It was
another attitude, that was all ; something external, done
for its own sake, " expressing nothing but itself," and
expressing, as it happened by accident, precisely what
he himself was best able to express.

It may be, perhaps, now that the man is dead, that
those who admired him too much or too little will do
him a little justice. He was himself systematically un-
just, and was never anxious to be understood too pre-
cisely, or to be weighed in very level balances. But
he will be remembered, if not as an artist in English
literature, at all events in the traditions of our time, as
H the supreme artist in intellectual attitudes.

1901.

GjJfuj^L^ 'i\n/UllH^ur

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

Gabrirle d'Annunzio comes to remind us, very
definitely, as only an Italian can, of the reality and
the beauty of sensation, of the primary sensations ; the
sensations of pain and pleasure as these come to us
from our actual physical conditions ; the sensation of
beauty as it comes to us from the sight of our eyes and
the tasting of our several senses ; the sensation of love,
which, to the Italian, comes up from a root in Boccaccio,
through the stem of Petrarch, to the very flower of
Dante. And so he becomes the idealist of material 1
things, while seeming to materialise spiritual things.
He accepts, as no one else of our time does, the whole
physical basis of life, the spirit which can be known
only through the body, the body which is but clay in
the shaping or destroying hands of the spirit. And, in
spite of a certain affectation of ideas, not always quite
happily selected from Nietzsche and others, he takes
nature very simply, getting sheer away from civilisation
in his bodily consciousness of things, which he ap-
prehends as directly, with however much added subtlety,
as a peasant of his own Abru/zi.

For d'Anniiii/io the bcaiuy of all beautiful things is
a curiously elaborated beauty, made out of physical
p;iin or pleasure in its absorption of the visible world,
at every moment, as a part of one's breath. He seems
to feel, more passionately than otht-rs, the heat of sun-
light, the juicy softness of a ripe fruit, the texture of ll
women's hair, and also the distress of rain, of rough
garments, of the cloud that interrupts the simlight ;

ia9

I30 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

and his sense of the beauty and ugliness of these things
comes, more directly than with others, from the exact
if force of their physical action upon him. It is here that
he is so Latin, so specifically Italian ; for the Italians,
among all Latin races, are the least sophisticated in
their acceptance of physical fact. They have no
reticence in speaking of what they feel, and they have
none of those unconscious reticences in feeling which
races drawn further from nature by civilisation have
thought it needful to invent in their relations with
nature. This is one of the things which people mean
when they say that d'Annunzio's writing is immoral.
Well, nature is immoral. Birth is a grossly sexual
thing, death is a brutally physical thing, the ending,
certainly, of the animal, whatever may remain over,
inside that white forehead in which the brain has
stopped working.

This physically sincere, attentive, impressionable self,
then, which d'Annunzio finds in his own nature, and
which he lends to the scarcely differentiated heroes of
his books, is but the basis of a more extended and a
more conscious self. Beginning by that intent waiting
upon sensation in the first place, he ends by expanding
the creature of acute sensation into a kind of Renais-
sance personality, in which sensation becomes complex,
cultivated, the flower of an elaborate life. The Italy of
the Renaissance cultivated personalities as we cultivate
orchids ; and, there also, the rarest beauty came from
a heightening of nature into something not quite nature,
a perversity of beauty which might be poisonous, as well
as merely curious. The one thing M^as, that it should
be the absolute. Now, to the seeker after the absolute,
there exist in the world but two possibilities, love and
wisdom ; and of these only one is within the reach of
more than singularly few. Tlie passion for abstract

GABRIKLE D'ANNUNZIO 131

ideiis is not likely to commend itself, at all events to the
exclusion ol that other passion, to a nature so satisfied
with the very pain of pleasure. Nor is the study of the
pas.vion for abstract ideas a very fruitful or extensive
subject for the novelist. It is thus in the study of love
chiefly, in the analysis of that very mortal passion which
beats at so many of the closed doors of the universe,
that d'Annunzio has chosen to show us what he chooses
to show us of life, lie has shown us the working of
the one universal, overwhelming, and transfiguring
passion, with a vehement patience, and with a complete
disregard of consequences, of the moral prejudice. To
him, as to the men of the Renaissance, moral qualities (
are variable things, to be judged only by -xsthetic rules.
Is an action beautiful, has it that Intensity which, in the
stricter sense, is virtue? Other considerations may, if
you please, come afterwards, but these are the essential.
For to d'Annunzio life is but a segment of art, and \
rrsthetic living the most important thing for the artist »
who is not merely an artist in words, or canvas, or
marble, but an artist in life itself. These passionate
and feeble and wilful people of his are at least trying
to come near such an ideal. Not every one can become
the artist of his own life, or can have either the courage
or the consistency to go on his own way, to his own
end. It is needless to moralise against such an intention.
Few will attain it.

It is but in the natural process of a deduction from
these principles that d Aniiunzio chooses to concern
himself, in his novels, with temperament, not with cither
character or society. His novels are states of mind,
sometimes, as in " Le Vergini delle Rocce," not leading
to any conclusion ; and these states of mind interest him
supremely, for their own sake, and not for the sake of
any conclusion to which they may lead. We should not

132 STIU^IES IN PROSE AND VERSE

recognise one of his persons if we met him in the street ;
but his jealousy, or his corrupt love of art, or his self-
pity, will seem to us part of ourselves, seen in a singular
kind of mirror, if we have ever been sincere enough
with ourselves to recognise an obscure likeness when
we see it. The great exterior novels, we may well
believe, have been written ; the inter-action of man
upon man has been at least sufficiently described ; what
remains, eternally interesting, eternally new, is man, the
hidden, inner self which sits silent through all our con-
versation, and may sit blind to its own presence there,
not daring to find itself interesting.

It is this intrinsic self, the only part of our mechanism
which, if it speaks, cannot lie, that d'Annunzio tries to
find words for ; and he turns, naturally, to himself, as
at all events what he knows best in the universe. Thus
[ to say that his heroes are but images of himself,
changed a little here and there, directed along certain
roads, is but to say that he has succeeded in doing pre-
cisely what he has tried to do. Wluit he seeks are
not those superficial differences by which we distinguish
man from man, as we distinguish our friends at a dis-
tance by their clothes, but the profound similarities by
which all men are men. This aim, which has always
been the aim of poetry, has in the past been the aim of
poetry alone ; and for this very reason it has always
been difficult to take fiction quite seriously as an
imaginative art. I cannot remember a book of fiction,
except " Don Quixote," which 1 could in any sense put
on a level, as imaginative writing, with a great poem.
The novel, in the past, has appealed to an altogether
lower audience ; its fatal first aim of interesting people
having always been against it. Poetry, as Rossetti has
wisely said, must indeed be as " amusing " as prose ;
but it is not amusing first, and poetry afterwards. But

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 133

fiction, dealing with circumstance, which is the accident
of time, and character, which is the accident of tempera-
ment ; with society, which is the convention of external
intercourse ; with life seen from its own level, and
judged by its temporary laws, has been a sort of com-
posite art, working at once for two masters. It has
never freed itself from the bondage of mere " truth "
(likeness, that is, to appearances), it is only now, faintly
and hesitatingly, beginning to consider beauty as its
highest aim. No art can be supreme art if it does not
consider beauty as its highest aim. It may be asked, it
may even be doubted, whether such an aim will ever be
practically possible for the novel. But to answer in
the negative is to take away the novel's one chance of
becoming a great imaginative art.

To d'Annunzio there exist in the world only two
things, sex and art. He desires beauty with the rage
of a lover ; and, to him, sex is the supreme beauty.
The visible world " exists " for him as an entirely
satisfying thing, which the soul, or the needs of the
soul, could but trouble, to no purpose. Studious of
the origins of emotion, he finds them wholly in the
physical action of the senses, and seems to have dis-
covered nothing in human nature which cannot be
rendered to the eye by some image. A woman moves
to meet her lover, and what he notices is '•'• the cry,
the gesture, the start, the sudden stop, the vibration of
her muscles under her garments, the light in her face
extinguished like a fiame that becomes ashes, the
intensity of her look that was like a gleam of battle,
the breath which parted her lips like the heat that
breaks open the life of earth"; ami he recognises in
her " the Dionysian creature, the living material capable
of receiving the impress of the rhythm of art, of being
fashioned according to the laws of poetry." " 1 would

134 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

that I could live the whole of life, and not be only a
brain," he confesses, in his desire to fuse life, sensual
life, and art, the art of the senses. And it is in the
intensity of this twofold desire, of these two flames
that burn towards each other that they may burn the
higher together, that he obtains a kind of idealism out
of two elements, one of which might easily sink into
merely ignoble animalism, and the other deviate into a
merely trivial cestheticism. His adoration of beauty is
a continual fever, and in the intoxication of physical
desire he is conscious that passion, also, is a supreme
art. This quality comes to him because he is not so
much a novelist as a poet, a poet who writes better in
prose than in verse, but who never thinks in prose.
" Le Vergini delle Rocce " is a shadowy poem, in which
beautiful ghosts wander, " as if seen in a great mirror " ;
they are tired with waiting for life, their souls wasted
away by dreams, their bodies famished with desires too
vague to find a name. In the "Trionfo della Morte "
passion has concentrated itself within a narrow circle,
where it turns upon itself, grown deadly, exhausting
life as it seems to live with so swift a vehemence. In
its monotony we find the monotony of everything that
ebbs and flows, as the sea does, without progress.
Passion, into which the mind comes only as a reproach,
a remembrance, or a troubling anticipation, has never
been chronicled with a minuter fidelity than in this
sombre book. " II Fuoco " is a kind of symphony in
which many voices cry together out of many instru-
ments, building the elaborate structure. Here, passion
is no longer unconscious of everything but itself; it is
aware of its term, and it is able to conceive of that
term as something that need be neither death nor any
other annihilation of the future. "This thing I can do
which even love could not do," says the woman, pre-

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 135

paring herself for the sacrifice which will restore her
lover to himself and to his finer self, art. In " La
Gioconda " there is again the conflict of love and art,
and here art is in league with the passions, implacable,
a destroyer. In " La Citta Morta " the emotion is
sustained throughout on the level of poetic emotion.
There is nothing but emotion, and thus hardly what
we can call a play ; these beings whom we apprehend
so vaguely in their relations with the world about them
are electrical to each other, at a touch, a word, a
thought ; each is obsessed, as if by an actual witchcraft,
a malign influence coming out of the tombs of the dead
city ; they are already phantoms, tortured with the
desires of the living. And so, while they have passed
away from the world which alone, perhaps, can be made
actual to us on the stage, they have entered into that
imaginative world, the world of poetry, in which the
passions are known for their beauty, not for the deeds
which they have made men commit.

And so, in his novels, there are no stories, only
states of mind and pictures. On the one side it is a
going back to the origins of the novel, in such "confes-
sions " as " Adolphe," for example; the novelty lies in
the combination of what in '^ Adolphe" is a conscious-
ness vaguely placed in the world, a world absolutely
invisible to us, with an atmosphere itself as much a
" state of mind " as Amiel's, and a universe as solid and I
coloured as Gauticr's. His few personages are as little '
seen in their relation with society, as closely absorbed in
their own sensations, as the single personage of
Benjamin Constant, the man in whom one sees also the
woman, as in a mirror. But with d'Annunzio, as he
tells us in the preface to the " Trionfo della Morte,"
"the play of action and reaction l:)ctwccn the single
sensibility and exterior things is established on a precise

K

136 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

woof of direct observation." Miin, " the model of the
world," is seen living in his own universe, which
he creates continually about him ; a world as per-
sonal to himself, and, to d'Annunzio and his people, as
intimately realised, as the thought of the brain, or any
passion.

D'Annunzio is an idealist, but he is an idealist to
whom the real world is needful to the eyes, and feelings
actually experienced are needful to the memory, before
he can begin to make his art. All his work, all, at
least, of his finest work, is something remembered, by a
transfiguring act of the mind ; not something which has
come to him as vision, our of the darkness. With so
personal an apprehension of the world, it is the world,
always, that he needs, his soul being no world to him.
In a monk's cell, or with dim eyes, he would have
created nothing ; he would never have been able to
imagine beauty without a pattern.

But, to d'Annunzio, in that "seemingly exclusive
predominance in his interests, of beautiful physical
things, a kind of tyranny of the senses over him " (that
phrase of Pater seems to have been made beforehand
for his definition) things seen are already things felt ;
the lust of the eye, in him, is a kind of intellectual
energy. The soul of visible things seems to cry out to
him, entreating a voice : he hears, and is the voice. At
times, delicate human sympathies come to him, through
his mere sympathy with soulless things : the sense of
pity, which stirs in him over the fading of flowers, and
so over the ageing of human beauty. He realises
sorrow, because it is a soiling of the texture of life ;
death, because it is the end of the weaving. One
fancies, sometimes, that his very feeling for art, for the
arts of music, painting, literature even, is the feeling of
one to whom these things are of the nature of ripe

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 137

fruit, golden sunshine, a luxury of the senses, rather '
than a need of the soul.

And he is all this because, being himself a Latin, he
has known how to carry on the Latin traditions, confin-
ing himself to these for the most part, and, whenever
he ventures away from them, turning aside into direc-
tions obviously not his own. He has read Nietzsche
and Tolstoi, and can fancy himself the sopra-uomo and a
brother to peasants. Only at such moments does he
become vague, as he loses some of that sharpness of the
senses through which he apprehends the universe.
Intellect means as little to him, really, as human feeling ;
he can never think abstract thoughts, any more than he
can care nobly tor men and women. That idea of the
sopra-uomo^ which fascinates him in Nietzsche, fascinates
him because it is a deification of one's own individuality,
in the narrowest sense ; the creation of a new tyrant,
in whom intellect is no more than a means of power,
indeed, is properly no more than strength of will. The I
act of thought, with him, is a calling up of images, a
process of symbolism. And so his feeling narrows itself
down to what can be hurt or gratified in himself, or in
some one imagined atLer the pattern of himself. It is
for this reason, perhaps, that while his prose is so full
of diffused poetry, his actual poetry remains a hard,
positive thing, of which he may truly say

" le fcstc ho celcbrato
l)c' suoni, (Ic* colori c dc Ic forme,"

but in wliich there is little underneath these sounds,
colours, and forms, which exist for their own sake, and
not for the sake of what they have to express. He is
not a dreamer, and poetry is not to be spun out of any
coarser web than dreams. So, in his verse, even more
than in his prose, he is precise, clear in detail, hard in '

i3cS STUDI]'.S IN PROSE AND VERSE

outline ; often artilicial, but iirtificiiil in the direction of
fantiisticiilly defined form ; always bound to the visible
shapes of reality, even when he seems to choose and
arrange them with the most lawless freedom. Take,
for instance, a piece of pure fancy, like this sonnet, and
see how curiously knitted to fact it remains :

" Lazily pasture on the grassy walls
The Asiatic horses of the King,
Herod's swift horses ; and at intervals
Among the roses the faint lluttcring
Of their long, slumberous tails rises and falls ;
About the rocks the palms are slumbering,
And now and then a quivering sca-voicc calls,
Among things sleeping like a waking thing.

But if Jacin with a hoarse cry appear.
The scattered herd rises and runs thereto.
Looking on him with troubled fixedness.

Even so I love to image for you, dear,
My swift desires that rise and run to you
Like horses pastured upon rose-bushes."

I have translated this sonnet to show how precise in
his pictures d'Annunzio can be, especially when he is
most apparently remote from reality, as in this image of
the mind. Even more precise in its imagery, even
fainter in its suggestion of any meaning beyond the feel
of words like things, is another sonnet which I will
translate from " II Piacere " .

" I am as one who lays himself to rest
Under the shadow of a laden tree ;
Above his head hangs the ripe fruit, and he
Is weary of drawing bow or arbalest.

He shakes not the fair bough that lowliest
Droops, neither lifts he hand, nor turns to sec ;
But lies, and gathers to him indolently
The fruits tiiat drop into his very breast.

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 139

In that juiced sweetness, over-exquisite,
He bites not deep ; he fears the bitterness ;
Yet sets it to his hps that he may smell,

Sucks it with pleasure, not with greediness,
And he is neither grieved nor glad at it.
This is the ending of the parable."

That could have been written only by one to whom u
the eating of a fruit meant just as much, at all events
relatively, as the doing of a good or bad deed. Virtue
and Vice are terms that never occur in his work, as the
ideas implied by those words seem never to have occurred
to his mind. Is a thing beautiful ? he asks ; is it the
expression of an individuality? If not, then it is bad,
that is, worthless ; if so, then it is good, that is, effectual,
answering its end. And thus to gather the full enjoy-
ment which can be gathered from eating a fruit, is already
to have succeeded, so far, in filling a moment with
ecstasy, that is, in accomplishing one of the purposes of
life. Does not the word morality sound a little out of
place in dealing with so frank an acceptance of pleasure,
for its own sake, at its simplest .'' Those lovers, in his
books, to whom passion means everything, living more
and more greedily on their own sensations, and drinking
in ecstasy with so bitter a taste on the tongue, have but
gone on from the first symbolical eating of the fruit,
adding pang after pang to delight. No new element
enters into them ; they have discovered nothing new in
their souls.

To the northern temperament, built up out of un-
comfortable weather and a conscience uneasy about
sin, this attitude of mind is almost unthinkable, or to
be thought of only as a thing wholly brutal and de-
graded. Certainly it docs not tend to the strenuous
virtues, but it does not exclude much of a kind of virtue.
There is no mural value in enduring needless discomfort,

I40 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

and one wlio is not sensitive to the little daily difFerences
between the pleasant and unpleasant passing of the time,
to air, fire, light, the ministry of flowers -.md jewels, and
beautiful clothes to wear, and soft things to touch, and
low voices, and the vivid relief of rest, can have but an
imperfect sense of reality, and is lacking in one of the
main faculties of life. No beautiful thing ever grew, or
was ever woven together out of the many growths of
the world, except for the sake of those amateurs in life
who are able to accept all gifts, in all the gratitude of
enjoyment. With us, as a race, but only since Puritanism
has changed the race, moral earnestness has eaten up the
delicate, passive virtues of mere exquisite receptiveness ;
so that we cannot rest long enough to take pleasure in
what we have possessed violently. The Latin tempera-
ment, content with so much less, and so warmly happy
in contentment, accepts the world, making the world its
own, not by conquest but by enjoyment.

Yet (and here, perhaps, the northern attitude of mind
may seem to take its revenge) these books of d'Annunzio,
in which every earthly delight is so eagerly accepted,
possessed so passionately, are all tragedies, often tragedies
ending in gross material horror, and they are tragedies
because no man has yet found out a remedy against the
satiety of pleasure, except the remedies hidden away
somewhere in the soul. Youth passes, desire fades,
attainment squeezes the world into a narrow circuit ;
there is nothing left over, except dreams that turn into
nightmares, or else a great weariness. Is it that some-
thing has been left out of the world, or that something
has come disturbingly into it.'' D'Annunzio scarcely
seems to ask the question, not caring much, apparently,
to come to any conclusion.

" I must speak only of my soul under the veil of
some seductive allegory," he says in "II Fuoco " ; and,

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 141

on another page, wonders " why the poets of our day-
wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and com-
plain of having come into the world too early or too
late. I believe that every man of intellect can, to-day
as ever, create his own beautiful fiblc of life. We
should both look into life's confused whirl in the same
spirit of fancy that the disciples of Leonardo were
taught to adopt in gazing at the spots on a wall, at the
ashes of fire, at clouds, even mud and other similar
objects, in order to find there ' admirable inventions '
and ' infinite things.' The same spirit prompted Leon-
ardo to add : ' In the sound of bells you will find every
word and every name that you choose to imagine.' "
"In him," he says, speaking of the poet, "there was
ever an unlimited ardour of life"; and, defining the
poet on his other side, "he was only the means by
which beauty held out the divine gift of oblivion."
Personal ardour, then, a flaming search after every
beauty that exists in the world or in our sense of it :
that, to him, must be the foundation of art, the basis of
the artist's character. And he must render always his
own vision of things, "creating his beautiful fable,"
first out of life itself, and then, under a transformation
in which everything shall become brighter, but nothing
be changed, in the forms of his art. Symbolism, there-
fore, must come of itself, in the mere endeavour to do /
over again in another medium what our creating minds
are always doing with the world. If things are as we
see them, and if there is nothing inert or passionless to
us in the world, ivery elaborate beauty which art can
add to nature will be, at the utmost, no more than a
reflection of some beauty actually seen there. Thus
the " veil of seductive allegory " will be rather a
medium for light than a curtain darkening with shadow.
The world of the ntnelist, what we call the real world,

142 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

is a solid theft out of space ; colour and music may float
into it and wander through it, but it has not been made
with colour and music, and it is not itself a part of the
consciousness of its inhabitants. To d'Annunzio, this
"materialist" beauty is the most real thing in the
world, and our creation of beauty, in sight, touch,
hearing, in our passions and our reverences, in the
energy of our acceptance of happiness, and in the
persistence of our search after personal satisfaction, the
most important part of life. It is only at the end of a
long day fully enjoyed, that an uneasy thought comes
to him, and that he seems to say with Mallarme :

" La chair est triste, helas ! ct j'ai lu tous les livres."
1898, 1900.

A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH

George Meredith, though he has written novels, is
essentially a poet, not a novelist. lie is a poet who is
not in the English tradition ; a seeker after some
strange, obscure, perhaps impossible, intellectual beauty,
austere and fantastic. If he goes along ways that have
never been travelled in, that is because he is seeking
what no one before him has ever sought ; and, more
absolutely than most less-absorbed travellers, he carries
the world behind his eyes, seeing, wherever he goes,
only his own world, a creation less recognisable by
people in general than the creation of most image-
making brains. That is why he is so difficult to follow,
and why you will be told that his writing is unnatural
or artificial. Certainly it is artificial. " Let writers find
time to write English more as a learned language," said
Pater ; but Meredith has always written English as if
it were a learned language. Aiming, as he has done in
verse, at something which is the poetry of pure idea, in
prose, at something which is another kind of intellectual
poetry, he has invented a whole vocabulary which has
no resemblance with the spoken language, and whose
merit is that it gives sharp, sudden expression to the
aspects under which he sees things. So infused is
vision in him with intellect, that he might be said to
see things in words ; the unusual, restless, nervous
words being a part of that world which he has made
for himself out of the tangle of the universe.

The problem of Meredith is the j)r()blem of why a
poet has spent most of his life in writing novels, novels

M3

144 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

which are the most intellecluul in the language, but not
great novels ; while the comparatively small amount of
verse which he has written is even further from being-
great poetry. Probably for the reason which made
(iautier, a born painter, put down the brushes and paint
in words ; a mere question of techni(]ue, as people say ;
or, as they should say, that fundamental question. To
so deliberate an artificer as Meredith, technique must
always have been valued at by no means less than its
true worth. Having written a lovely poem in " Love in
the Valley," and a fascinating, strangely exciting, not
quite satisfying poem in "Modern Love," he must
have realised that such achievements with him were too
much of the nature of happy accidents to be very many
times repeated. It was the period, and he was the
friend, ol Rossetti, ol Morris, of Swinburne, each a
born poet, and each, in his own way, an instinctively
perfect craftsman. Conscious that he had something
new to say, and knowing that he could never say it in
verse as these poets had said what they had to say, he
turned to prose, and began by inventing "The Shaving
of Shagpat," which is like nothing that any one, least of
all an Arabian story-teller, had ever said before. English
literature has not a more vividly entertaining book, nor
has the soul of a style been lost more spectacularly.

It is only by realising that Meredith began by a
volume of poems, continued in the Arabian entertain-
ment of " The Shaving of Shagpat " and the Teutonic
fantasy of " Farina," and only then, at the age of
thirty-one, published his first novel, " The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel," that we can hope in any measure to
understand the characteristics of so disconcerting a
mind, so apparently inexplicable a career. Remember
that he has the elliptical brain of the poet, not the
slow, cautious, logical brain of the novelist j that he has

A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH 145

his own vision of a world in which probable things do
not always happen, and that words are to him as visual
as mental images. Then consider the effect on such a
brain, from the first impatient, intolerant, indefatigable,
of a training in consciously artificial writing, on subjects
which are a kind of sublime farce, without relation
to any known or supposed realities in the universe.
Writing prose, then, as if it were poetry, with an ;
endeavour to pack every phrase wdth imaginative mean-
ing, every sentence, you realise, will be an epigram.
And as every sentence is to be an epigram, so every
chapter is to be a crisis. And every book is to be at
once a novel, realistic, a romance, a comedy of manners ;
it is to exist for its story, its characters, its philosophy,
and every interest is to be equally proininent. And all
the characters in it are to live at full speed, without a
moinent's repose ; their very languors are to be fevers.
And they will live (can you doubt ?) in a fantastic world
in which only the unexpected haj^pens ; their most
trivial moments being turned, by the manner of their
telling, into a fairy story.

All this may be equally refresiiing or exhausting,
but it is not the modesty of nature ; and as certainly
as it is not the duty of the poet, so certainly is it the
duty of the novelist, to respect the modesty of nature,
livery novel of Meredith is a series of situations,
rendered for the most part in conversation, as if it were
a play. Each situation is grouped, and shown to us as
if the light of footlights were cast upon it; between
each situation is darkness, and the drop-curtain. And
his characters have the same inconsequent vividness.
They are never types, but always individuals, in whom 1
a capricious intellectual life burns with a bright but
wavering flame. They are like people whom we meet
in drawing-rooms, to-day in London, next month in

146 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Rome, and the month iifter in Paris. They fascinate
us by their brilliance, their energy, their experience,
their conversation ; they have in their faces the dis-
tinction of birth, of thought, of cuhure ; they are
always a little ambiguous to us, and by so much the
more attractive ; they move us to a singular sympathy,
with which is mingled not a little curiosity ; we seem
to become their friends ; and it is only when we think
of them in absence that we realise how little we really
know them. Of their inner life we know nothing;
their eloquent lips have always been closed on all the
great issues of things. Of their characters we know
only what they have told us ; and they have told us
for the most part anecdotes, showing their bearing
under trying circumstances, which have proved them
triumphantly to be English gentlemen and ladies,
without, it would seem, always settling those obscurer
judgments in which the soul is its own accuser and
judge. We remember certain extraordinarily vivid
looks, words, attitudes, which they have had in our
company ; and we remember them by these, rather
than remember that these had once been a momentary
part of them.

Not such wandering friends, coming and going about
us as if we had made them, are Lear, Don Quixote,
Alceste, Manon Lescaut, Grandet, Madame Bovary,
Anna Karenina. These seem to flow into the great
rhythms of nature, as if their life was of the same
immortal substance as the life of the plants and stars.
These are organic, a part of the universe ; the others
are enchanting exceptions, breaking the rhythm, though
they may, with a new music.

And the books in which they live are at once too
narrow and too wide for them. Their histories are
allowed to develop as they will, or as the situations

A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH 147

in them become interesting to their creator. Yet,
like almost every English novehst, Meredith is the
bond-slave of " plot." Plot must be an intricate web, '
and this web must never be broken ; and the stage '
must be crowded with figures, each with his own lite
to be accounted for, and not one of them will
Meredith neglect, however long his hero or heroine
may be kept waiting on the way. But, to be quite
frank, what English novelist, from Fielding onwards,
has ever been able to resist the temptation of loitering,
especially if it is over a humorous scene ? Humour is
the curse of the English novelist. Certainly he
possesses it ; he has always possessed it ; but his
humour is not the wise laughter of Rabelais, in whom
laughter is a symbol ; and it is always a digression.
Dickens, in particular, from the very brilliance of what
is distressing in him, has left his fatal mark on the
English novel. And it is often Dickens, bespangled
with all the gems of Arabia, that I find in Meredith's
comic scenes ; never, certainly, when he is writing good
comedy. Then, as we might infer from that " Essay
on Comedy," which is his most brilliant piece of sus-
tained writing, he is intellect itself, a Congreve who is
also a poet.

"The Tragic Comedians," which is the title of one
of Meredith's novels, might well be applied to the
whole series, so picturesquely, under the light of so
sharp a parado.x, does he conceive of human existence.
But he is too impatient, too forgetful of the limits of
prose and the novel, to work out a philosophy in that
indirect, circumambient way in which alone it can
minister to fiction. Life may indeed be a tragic comedy I
at every moment, but it is not visibly and audibly at'
every moment a tragic comedy. In spite of the fact
that action, in Meredith's novels, seems often to

148 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

linger on the way, his novels are always in action.
To him and his people,

" to do nought
Is in itself almost an act "

every conversation is a hurry of mental action ; the
impressiveness with which nothing happens, when
nothing is happening, is itself a strain on the energy.
And the almost German romance which tempers in him
the French wit, adding a new whirl of colours to the
kaleidoscope, helps to withdraw this world of his
creating further and further from the daylight in
which men labour without energy, and are content
without happiness, and dream only vague dreams,
and achieve only probable ends. He conceives his
characters as pure intelligences, and then sets them
to play at hide-and-seek with life, as if England were
a treasure island in the Pacific.

Again, it is the question of technique which conies
to enlighten us. We have seen, I think, that with
Meredith the question of how to write must have
arisen before the question of what to write, certainly
before the choice of the novel. A style conceived in
verse, and brought up on Arabian extravaganzas and
German fantasies, could scarcely be expected to adapt
itself to the narration of the little, colourless facts
of modern English society. With such a style, above
all things literary, life recorded becomes, not a new life,
but literature about life ; and it is of the essence of the
novel that life should be reborn in it, in the express
image of its first shape. Where poetry, which must
keep very close to the earth, is condemned, even, to
avoid the soiling of the dust of the streets, the novel
must not, at its peril, wander far from those streets.
Before the novelist, human life is on its trial ; he must

A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH 149

see it with cold, learned eyes ; he must hear it with
undisturbed attention; he must be neither kind nor
cruel, but merely just, in his judgment. Now
Meredith's is not a style which can render facts, much
less seem to allow facts to render themselves. Like .
Carlyle, but even more than Carlyle, Meredith is in the I
true, wide sense, as no other English writer of the
present time can be said to be, a Decadent. The word 1,
Decadent has been narrowed, in France and in England, !'
to a mere label upon a particular school of very recent
writers. What Decadence, in literature, really means
is that learned corruption of language by which style
ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of
some new expressiveness or beauty, deliberately
abnormal. Meredith's style is as self-conscious as
Mallarme's. But, unlike many self-conscious styles,
it is alive in every fibre. Not since the Elizabethans
have we had so flame-like a life possessing the wanton
body of a style. And with this fantastic, poetic, learned,
passionate, intellectual style, a style which might have
lent itself so well to the making of Elizabethan drama,
Meredith has set himself to the task of writing novels
of contemporary life, in which the English society of
to-day is to be shown to us in the habit and manners
of our time.

Is it, then, to be wondered at that every novel of
Meredith breaks every rule which could possibly be laid
ilown for the writing of a novel ? I think it follows ;
but the strange thing which does not follow is that
the work thus produced should have that irresistible
fascination which for many of us it certainly has. I
And Meredith breaking every canon of what are to me
the laws of the novel ; and yet I read him in preference
to any other novelist. I say to myself: This pleasure,
which I undoubtedly get from these novels, must surely

I50 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

be un irrational kind of pleasure ; for it is against my
judgment on those principles on which my mind is made
up. Here am 1, who cannot read without the approval
of an unconscious, if not of a definitely conscious,
criticism ; I find myself reading these novels with the
tacit approval of this very difficult literary conscience of
mine : certainly it approves m.e in admiring ihem ; and
yet, when I set myself to think coldly over what I have
been reading, I am forced to disapprove. How can
these two views exist side by side in the same mind ?
How is it that that side of me which approves does not
condemn that side of me which disapproves, nor that
which disapproves condemn that which approves ?
There are some secrets which will never be told : the
secret of why beauty is beauty, of why love is love, ot
why poetry is poetry. This woman, this book, this
writer, attracts me : you they do not attract. Yet I
may admit every imperfection which you can point out
to me, and at the end of your logic meet you with
perhaps but a woman's reason. I shall never believe
that such an instinct can be false : inexplicable it
may be.

The fascination of Meredith is not, I think, quite
inexplicable. It is the unrecognised, incalculable attrac-
tion of those qualities which go to make great poetry,
coming to us in the disguise of prose and the novel,
affecting us in spite of ourselves, as if a strange and
beautiful woman suddenly took her seat among the
judges in a court of law, where they were deciding
some dusty case. Try to recall to yourself what has
most impressed you in Meredith's novels, and you will
think first, after a vague consciousness of their unusual
atmosphere, of some lyric scene, such as the scene in
" Richard Fevercl," where Richard and Lucy meet in
the wood ; and that, you will see, is properly not prose

A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH 151

at all, but a poem about first love. Then you will think
of- some passionate love-scene, one of Emilia's in "Sandra
Belloni " ; or the Venetian episode in " Beauchamp's
Career"; or the fiery race of events, where dawn and
darkness meet, in "Rhoda Fleming"; and all of them,
you will see, have more of the qualities of poetry than
of prose. The poet, struggling against the bondage of \
prose, flings himself upon every opportunity of evading '
his bondage. Even if he fails, he has made us thrill-
ingly conscious of his presence. It is thus by the very
quality which has been his distraction that Meredith
holds us, by the intensity of his vision of a world which
is not our world, by the living imagination of a language
which is not our language, by the energy of genius
which has done so much to achieve the impossible.

1897.

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD

The art of Zola is based on certain theories, on a view

of humanity which he has adopted as his formula. As

a deduction from his formula, he takes many things in

human nature for granted, he is content to observe at

second-hand ; and it is only when he comes to the

filling-up of his outlines, the mise-en-scene^ that his

observation becomes personal, minute, and persistent.

He has thus succeeded in being at once unreal where

reality is most essential, and tediously real where a

point-by-point reality is sometimes unimportant. The

contradiction is an ingenious one, which it may be

interesting to examine in a little detail, and from

several points of view.

And, first of all, take " L'Assommoir," no doubt the

most characteristic of Zola's novels, and probably the

best ; and, leaving out for the present the broader

question of his general conception of humanity, let us

look at Zola's manner of dealing with his material,

noting by the way certain differences between his

manner and that of Goncourt, of Flaubert, with both of

whom he has so often been compared, and with

whom he wishes to challenge comparison. Contrast

"L'Assommoir" with " Germinie Lacerteux," which, it

must be remembered, was written thirteen years earlier.

Goncourt, as he incessantly reminds us, was the first

novelist in France to deliberately study the life of the

people, after precise documents ; and " Germinie

Lacerteux " has this distinction, among others, that it

was a new thing. And it is done with admirable skill ;
152

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD 153

as a piece of writing, as a work of art, it is far superior

to Zola. But, certainly, Zola's work has a mass and

bulk, -.xfougue, ?i portcc^ which Goncourt's lacks; and it

has a savour of plebeian flesh which all the delicate art

of Goncourt could not evoke. Zola sickens you with

it ; but there it is. As in all his books, but more than

in most, there is something greasy, a smear of eating

and drinking ; the pages, to use his own phrase,

"grasses des lichades du lundi.'" In " Germinie Lacer-

teux " you never forget that Goncourt is an aristocrat ;

in " L'Assommoir '' you never forget that Zola is a

bourgeois. Whatever Goncourt touches becomes, by

the mer-e magic of his touch, charming, a picture;

Zola is totally destitute of charm. But how, in

"L'Assommoir," he drives home to you the horrid

realities of these narrow, uncomfortable lives ! Zola

has made up his mind that he will say everything,

without omitting a single item, whatever he has to say ;

thus, in "L'Assommoir," there is a great feast which

lasts for fifty pages, beginning with the picking of the

goose, the day before, and going on to the picking of

the goose's bones, by a stray marauding cat, the night

after. And, in a sense, he does say everything ; and

there, certainly, is his novelty, his invention. He

observes with immense persistence, but his observation,

after all, is only that of the man in the street ; it is

simply carried into detail, deliberately. And, while

(ioncourt wanders away sometimes into arabesques,

indulges in flourishes, so finely artistic is his sense of

words and of the things they represent, so perfectly

can he match a sensation or an impression by its figure

in speech, Zola, on the contrary, never finds just the

right word, and it is his j)crsistent fumbling for it

which produces these miles of dcscri))ti()n ; four pages

describing how two people went upstairs, from the

154 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

ground floor to the sixth storey, and then two pages
afterwards to describe how they came downstairs again.
Sometimes, by his prodigious diligence and minuteness,
he succeeds in giving you the impression ; often,
indeed ; but at the cost of what ennui to writer and
reader alike ! And so much of it all is purely un-
necessary, has no interest in itself and no connection
with the story : the precise details of Lorilleux's chain-
making, bristling with technical terms : it was la colonne
that he made, and only that particular kind of chain ;
Goujet's forge, and the machinery in the shed next
door ; and just how you cut out zinc with a large pair
of scissors. When Goncourt gives you a long descrip-
tion of anything, even if you do not feel that it helps on
the story very much, it is such a beautiful thing in
itself, his mere way of writing it is so enchanting, that
you find yourself wishing it longer, at its longest. But
with Zola, there is no literary interest in the writing,
apart from its clear and coherent expression of a given
thing ; and these interminable descriptions have no
extraneous, or, if you will, implicit interest, to save
them from the charge of irrelevancy ; they sink by their
own weight. Just as Zola's vision is the vision of the
('average man, so his vocabulary, with all its technicology,
remains mediocre, incapable of expressing subtleties,
incapable of a really artistic effect. To find out in a
slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by
an ingeniously filthy phrase in argot^ and to use that
phrase, is not a great feat, or, on purely artistic grounds,
altogether desirable. To go to a chainmaker and learn
the trade name of the various kinds of chain which he
manufactures, and of the instruments with which he
manufactures them, is not an elaborate process, or one
which can be said to pay you for the little trouble
which it no doubt takes. And it is not well to be too

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD 155

certain after all that Zola is always perfectly accurate in
his use of all this manifold knowledge. The slang, for
example ; he went to books for it, in books he found
it, and no one will ever find some of it but in books.
However, my main contention is that Zola's general use
of words is, to be quite frank, somewhat ineffectual.
He tries to do what Flaubert did, without Flaubert's
tools, and without the craftsman's hand at the back of
the tools. His fingers are too thick ; they leave a
blurred line. If you want merely wxMght, a certain
kind of force, you get it ; but no more.

Where a large part of Zola's merit lies, in his per-
sistent attention to detail, one finds also one of his chief
defectsr He cannot leave well alone ; he cannot omit ;
he will not take the most obvious fact for granted.
"II marcha le premier, elle le suivit"; well, of course
she followed him, if he walked first : why mention the
fact ? That beginning of a sentence is absolutely
typical ; it is impossible for him to refer, for the
twentieth time, to some unimportant character, without
giving name and profession, not one or the other, but
both, invariably both. He tells us particularly that a
room is composed of four walls, that a table stands on
its four legs. And he does not appear to see the
difference between doing that and doing as Flaubert
does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out of all
others which renders (jr consorts with the scene in
hand, and giving that detail with an ingenious exactness.
Here, for instance, in " Madame liovary," is a character-
istic detail in the manner of Flaubert: "Huit jours
aprcs, comme elle ctendait du lingc dans sa cour, elle
fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain,
tandis que Charles avait le dos tourne pour fermer le
rideau de la fenctrc, elle dit : ' Ah I mon Dicu !' poussa
un soupir ct s'evanouit. Elle etait niorte." Now that

156 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

detail, brouglit in without the sHghtest emphasis, of the
husband turning his back at the very instant that his
wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value ; it
indicates to us, at the very opening of the book, just
the character of the man about whom we are to read so
much. Zola would have taken at least two pages to
say that, and, after all, he would not have said it. He
would have told you the position of the chest of drawers
in the room, what wood the chest of drawers was made
of, and if it had a little varnish knocked ofF at the
corner of the lower cornice, just where it would natur-
ally be in the way of people's feet as they entered the
door. He would have told you how Charles leant
against the other corner of the chest of drawers, and
that the edge of the upper cornice left a slight dent in
liis black frock-coat, which remained vi^ible half an
hour afterwards. But that one little detail, which
Maubert selects from among a thousand, that, no, he
would never have given us that !

And the language in which all this is written, apart
from the consideration of language as a medium, is
really not literature at all, in any strict sense. I am
not, for the moment, complaining of the colloquialism
and the slang. Zola has told us that he has, in
I " L'Assommoir," used the language of the people in
I order to render the people with a closer truth.
Whether he has done that or not is not the question.
The question is, that he does not give one the sense of
reading good literature, whether he speaks in Delvau's
langue verie^ or according to the Academy's latest
edition of classical French. His sentences have
; no rhythm; they give no pleasure to the ear; they
carry no sensation to the eye. You hear a sentence of
Flaubert, and you see a sentence of (loncourt, like
living things, with forms and voices. But a page of

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD 157

Zola lies dull and silent before you ; it draws you by
no charm, it has no meaning until you have read the
page that goes before and the page that comes after.
It is like cabinet-makers' work, solid, well fitted
together, and essentially made to be used.

Yes, there is no doubt that Zola writes very badly,
worse than any other French writer of eminence. It is
true that Balzac, certainly one of the greatest, does, in
a sense, write badly ; but his way of writing badly is
very different from Zola's, and leaves you with the sense
of quite a different result. Balzac is too impatient with
words ; he cannot stay to get them all into proper
order, to pick and choose among them. Night, the
coffee, the wet towel, and the end of six hours' labour
are often too much for him ; and his manner of writing
his novels on the proof-sheets, altering and expanding
as fresh ideas came to him on each re-reading, was not
a way of doing things which can possibly result in
perfect writing. But Balzac sins from excess, from a
feverish haste, the very extravagance of power ; and, at
all events, he "sins strongly." Zola sins meanly, he is
penuriously careful, he does the best he possibly can ;
and he is not aware that his best does not answer all
re(|uircnicnts. So long as writing is clear and not
ungrammatical, it seems to him sufficient. He has not
realised that without charm there can be no fine
literature, as there can be no perfect flower without
fragrance.

And it is here that I would complain, not as a matter
of morals, but as a matter of art, of Zola's obsession by
what is grossly, uninterestingly filthy. There is a
certain simile in " L'Assommoir," used in the most
innocent connection, in connection with a bonnet, which
seems to me the most abjectly dirty phrase which I have
ever read. It is one thing to use dirty words to describe

ijS STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

dirty things ; that may be necessary, and thus unexcep-
tionable. It is another thing again, and this, too, may
well be defended on artistic grounds, to be ingeniously
and wittily indecent. But I do not think a real man of
letters could po.^sibly have used such an expression as
the one I am alluding to, or could so meanly succumb to
certain kinds of prurience which we find in Zola's
work. Such a scene as the one in which Gervaise
comes home with Lantier, and finds her husband lying
drunk asleep in his own vomit, might certainly be
explained and even excused, though few more dis-
agreeable things were ever written, on the ground of
the psychological importance which it undoubtedly has,
and the overwhelming way in which it drives home the
point which it is the writer's business to make. But
the worrying way in which le derriere and le ventre are
constantly kept in view, without the slightest necessity,
is quite another thing. I should not like to say how
often the phrase "sa nudite de jolie fille" occurs in
Zola. Zola's nudities always remind me of those which
you can see in the Foire au pain d'epice at Vincenncs,
by paying a penny and looking through a peep-hole.
In the laundry scenes, for instance in " L'Assommoir,"
he is always reminding you that the laundresses have
turned up their sleeves, or undone a button or two of
their bodices. His eyes seem eternally fixed on the
inch or two of bare flesh that can be seen; and he
nudges your elbow at every moment, to make sure that
you are looking too. Nothing may be more charming
than a frankly sensuous description of things which
appeal to the senses ; but can one imagine anything
less charming, less like art, than this prying eye glued
to the peep-hole in the Gingerbread Fair.''

Yet, whatever view may be taken of Zola's work in
literature, there is no doubt that the life of Zola is a

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD 159

model lesson, and might profitably be told in one of Dr
Smiles's edifying biographies. It may even be brought
as a reproach against the writer of these novels, in which
there are so many offences against the respectable
virtues, that he is too good a bourgeois, too much the
incarnation of the respectable virtues, to be a man of
genius. If the finest art conies of the intensest living,
then Zola has never had even a chance of doing the
greatest kind of work. It is his merit and his misfor-
tune to have lived entirely in and for his books, with a
heroic devotion to his ideal of literary duty which would
merit every praise if we had to consider simply the
moral side of the question. So many pages of copy a
day, so many hours of study given to mysticism, or Les
Halles ; Zola has always had his day's work marked out
before him, and he has never swerved from it. A recent
life of Zola tells us something about his way of getting
up a subject. " Immense preparation had been neces-
sary for the ' Faute de I'Abbe Mouret.' Mountains of
note-books were heaped up on his table, and for months
Zola was plunged in the study of religious works. All
the mystical part of the book, and notably the passages
having reference to the cultus of Mary, was taken from
the works of the Spanish Jesuits. The ' Imitation of
Jesus Christ ' was largely drawn upon, many passages
being copied almost word for word into the novel —
much as in ' Clarissa liarlowe,' that other great realist,
Richardson, copied whole passages from the Psalms.
The descrij)tion of life in a grand seminary was given
him by a priest who had been dismissed from ecclesias-
tical service. The little church of Sainte Marie des
Batignolles was regularly visited."

How commendable all that is, but, surely, how futile I
Can one conceive of a more hcjpeless, a more ridiculous
task, than that of setting to work on a novel oi ecclesi-

i6o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

asticiil life as if one were criimming for iin examination
in religious knowledge ? '/ola apparently imagines that
he can master mysticism in a fortnight, as he masters
the police regulations of Les lialles. It must be
admitted that he does wonders with his second-hand
information, alike in regard to mysticism and Les lialles.
But he succeeds only to a certain point, and that point
lies on the nearer side of what is really meant by
success. Is not Zola himself, at his moments, aware of
this? A letter written in 1881, and printed in Mr
Sherard's life of Zola, from which I have just quoted,
seems to me very significant.

" I continue to work in a good state of mental
equilibrium. My novel (' Pot-Bouille') is certainly only
a task requiring precision and clearness. No bravoura,
not the least lyrical treat. It does not give me any
warm satisfaction, but it amuses me like a piece of
mechanism with a thousand wheels, of which it is my
duty to regulate the movements with the most minute
care. I ask myself the question : Is it good policy,
when one feels that one has passion in one, to check it,
or even to bridle it ? If one of my books is destined to
become immortal, it will, I am sure, be the most passion-
ate one."

" Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Venus de Milo,'"'
said the Parnassians, priding themselves on their muse
with her " peplum bien sculpte." Zola will describe to
you the exact sha})e and the exact smell of the rags of
his naturalistic muse ; but has she, under the tatters,
really a human heart ? In the whole of Zola's works,
amid all his exact and impressive descriptions of misery,
all his endless annals of the poor, I know only one
episode which brings tears to the eyes, the episode of
the child-martyr Lahe in " L'Assommoir." "A piece of
mechanism with a thousand wheels," that is indeed the

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD i6i

image of" this immense and wonderful study of human
life, evolved out of the brain of a solitary .student who
knows life only by the report of his documents, his
friends, and, above all, his formula.

7,ola has defined art, very aptly, as nature seen
through a temperament. The art of 7ol:i is nature
seen through a formula. This professed realist is a
man of theories who studies life with a conviction that
he will find there such and such things which he has
read about in scientific books. He observes, indeed,
with astonishing minuteness, but he observes in support
of preconceived ideas. And so powerful is his imagina-
tion that he has created a whole world which has no
existence anywhere but in his own brain, and he has
placed there imaginary beings, so much more logical
than life, in the midst of surroundings which are them-
selves so real as to lend almost a semblance of reality to
the embodied formulas who inhabit them.

It is the boast of Zola that he has taken up art at the
point where Flaubert left it, and that he has developed
that art in its logical sequence. But the art of F'laubert,
itself a develojMTient from Balzac, had carried realism, if
not in '^ Madame Bovary," at all events in " L'Education
Scntimentale," as far as realism can well go without
ceasing to be art. In the grey and somewhat sordid
history of Frederic Moreau there is not a touch of
romanticism, not so much as a concession to style, a
momentary escape of the imprisoned lyrical tendency.
Everything is observed, everything is taken straight
from life: realism, sincere, direct, implacable, reigns
from end to end of the book. But with what con-
siuiimate art all this mass of observation is disintegrated,
arranged, com|K)sed ! with what infinite delicacy it is
nianipulatetl in the service of an unerring sense of con-
struction! And l""laubert has no theory, has no prejiuiiccs,

1 62 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

■-^— g-?

has only a certain impatience with human imbecility.
Zola, too, gathers his documents, heaps up his mass of
observation, and then, in this unhappy " development "
of the principles of art which produced " L'Education
Sentimentale," flings everything pell-mell into one over-
flowing pot-au-feu. The probabilities of nature and the
delicacies of art are alike drowned beneath a flood of
turbid observation, and in the end one does not even feel
convinced that Zola really knows his subject. I remember
once hearing M. Huysmans, with his look and tone of
subtle, ironical malice, describe how Zola, when he was
writing " La Terre," took a drive into the country in a
victoria, to see the peasants. The English papers once
reported an interview in which the author of "Nana,"
indiscreetly questioned as to the amount of personal
observation he had put into the book, replied that he
had lunched with an actress of the Varietes. The reply
was generally taken for a joke, but the lunch was a
reality, and it was assuredly a rare experience in the
life of solitary diligence to which we owe so many
impersonal studies in life. Nor did Zola, as he sat
silent by the side of Mile. X., seem to be making
much use of the opportunity. The language of the
miners in " Germinal," how much of local colour is
there in that t The interminable additions and divisions,
the extracts from a financial gazette, in "L' Argent,"
how much of the real temper and idiosyncrasy of the
financier do they give us ? In his description of places,
in his mise-en-scene^ Zola puts down what he sees with his
own eyes, and, though it is often done at utterly dispro-
portionate length, it is at all events done with exactitude.
But in the far more important observation of men and
women, he is content with second-hand knowledge, the
knowledge of a man who sees the world through a
formula. Zola sees in humanity la bete humaine. He

A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD 163

sees the beast in all its transformations, but he sees
only the beast. He has never looked at life impartially,
he has never seen it as it is. His realism is a distorted
idealism, and the man who considers himself the first to
paint humanity as it really is will be remembered in the
future as the most idealistic writer of his time.

1893.

THE RUSSIAN SOUL: GORKI
AND TOLSTOI

I

Maxim Gorki was born at Nijni-Novgorod in 1868 or
1869; he is not sure of the year of his birth. His
parents were poor people, and they died when he was
a boy, leaving him penniless. He apprenticed himself
to a shoemaker, but, tiring of the trade, ran away, and
worked with an engraver, then with a painter of icons,
then with a cook, then with a gardener, then again
with a cook, on board a steamboat. This cook was a
reader of novels, and Gorki began to read Gogol and
Dumas. He was taken, he tells us, with a " ferocious
desire " to learn, and he left the steamboat and made
his way to Kazan, thinking that a poor fellow could
be taught for nothing. He found that it was not the
custom, and he got work at a baker's, living on twelve
roubles a month. When he could endure the bakery
no longer he began to wander about, reading, learning
all that he could, living with vagabonds, sometimes
drinking, sometimes working, a sawyer, a coal-heaver,
a gatekeeper, a street seller of apples or of kvass.
He made the acquaintance of a lawyer, who helped him
and lent him books ; but he was soon wandering again,
and it was in an obscure provincial paper that he
published his first story, " Makar Tchoudra," a gipsy
narrative in which he had not yet learnt to use his
strange material simply. In 1893 he met Korolcnko,

the novelist, who interested himself in him, and helped

1C4

THE RUSSIAN SOUL 165

him to publish one of his stories, "Tchelkache." Its
success was immediate, and since then Gorki has
written many short stories, besides a novel, " Foma
Gordeiev," and several plays. "Les Vagabonds," a
volume of short stories translated by Ivan Strannik,
first introduced Gorki to France ; other volumes of
translations followed, first in French, then in English ;
the novel, " Foma Gordeiev," has been translated
into English, as well as many of the short stories.
The novel is not so good as the best of the short
stories, but it is a strange, chaotic, attractive book,
which we may read either for its story, or because
we want to find out something more about the
mysterious Russian soul.

"I was born," he tells us in one of his stories,
" outside society, and for that reason I cannot take in a
strong dose of its culture without soon feeling forced to
get outside it again, to wipe away the infinite com-
plications, the sickly refinements, of that kind of exist-
ence. I like either to go about in the meanest streets
of towns, because, though everything there is dirty, it is
all simple and sincere, or else to wander about on the
highroads and across the fields, because that is always
interesting ; it refreshes one morally, and needs no more
than a pair of good legs to carry one." It is this feel-
ing, the feeling which first made him a wanderer, that
has made him a writer, and his stories are made directly
out of the life which he has lived. In many of them
he appears under his own name, telling the story as if
it were something which had actually happened to him.
Thus the scene of " Konovalov " is the baker's shop at
Kazan, the underground kitchen with its yeasty almos-
jihcre, in which everything looked dim, and the window
high up, through which could be seen " a little scrap of
blue sky with two stars: one was large, and shone like

1 66 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

an emcnild ; the other, quite near, w<is hardly visible."
His method is simple. In a few bold strokes he brings
before us a corner of the country, a sea-beach, a quay,
a shop, a street ; then a man and a woman, two men,
some simple incident, and the men and women go out
as quietly as they had come in. But meanwhile a
strange temperament has expressed itself in a few
words, some disconcerting action, a significant silence ;
and what we have felt is just what is deepest, most un-
conscious, in that nature, to which speech is so difficult,
though so painful, and action a kind of despairing start
away from the logic of things. Along with this simple
and profound human quality there is a power of render-
ing very subtle sensation, as in this sentence: "All
about us reigned that aching quiet, from which one
seems to be awaiting something, and which, if it lasted,
would drive a man mad with its absolute peace, its utter
absence of sound, the living shadow of motion." In
" Mon Compagnon " there is a long description of a
boat in a storm, as minute as Defoe, and with an ima-
ginative quality of minuteness. When in summer, the
two vagabonds light a fire in the field, because a fire
would look beautiful ; when in the midst of a thunder-
storm on the steppe, one of the vagabonds begins to
sing with all his might, and the other attacks him in a
kind of savagery of terror ; in the Meunier-like pictures
of labour, as in the building of the embankment at
Theodocia, there is something large, lyrical, as if the
obscure forces of the earth half awakened and began
to speak. In all this Gorki does but continue, in his
own way, what other Russian novelists have done before
him ; he enters into the tradition, the youngest and
most fruitful tradition in Europe. Other races, too
long civilised, have accustomed themselves to the soul,
to mystery, to whatever is most surprising in life and

THE RUSSIAN SOUL 167

death. Russia, with centuries of savagery behind it,
still feels the earth about its roots, or the thirst in it of
the primiiive animal. It has lost none of its instincts,
and it has just discovered the soul. And it is ceaselessly-
perturbed by that strange inner companion ; it listens
to a voice which is not the voice of the blood ; it listens
to both voices, saying contrary things ; and it is
astonished, melancholy, questioning. Other novelists
tell us of society ; tell us, that is, what we are when we
are not ourselves. The Russian novelists show us the
soul when it is alone with itself, unconscious or morbidly
conscious, gay, uneasy, confident, suspicious, agonised
with duty, a tyrannous slave or a devout and humble
master.

Every Russian is born a philosopher ; he reasons as
a child might reason, an ignorant, unhappy child,
wondering why things are as they are. These vaga-
bonds of Gorki are conscious that something is wrong,
with the world or with them, and they cannot under-
stand what. " I live, and I am bored," says Konovalov.
"Why.'' I don't know at all. How shall I say it?
There's a spark wanting in my soul. Something is
wanting in me, that's all. Do you see? Well, then,

I seek, and 1 am boretl,and it all comes to 1 dont

know what." They pity themselves, with a kind of im-
personal pity, not accusing any one. " We are by
ourselves, we should be reckoned with by ourselves ;
because we are good for nothing in life, and we take
up somebody else's place, and we get in other people's
way. Whose fault is it ? It is our fault against life.
Wc haven't the joy of living, nuv any feeling for our-
selves. Our mothers gave birth to us in a bad hour,
that's all! " There is only one good thing, liberty, the
freedom at least to suffer in one's own way : " to walk
to and fro on the earth this way and that ; you walk,

M

1 68 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

and you see new things, and then you don't think."
" When one thinks, one gets disgusted with Hving,"
says Serejka ; and all these people, to whom life is
never quite mechanical, because they are living outside
the laws, and have the leisure to lie down and watch
the sea moving, or the black earth secretly alive, are all
afraid of thinking. They cannot help thinking, but it
frightens them. " You," says Vassili to Malva, " you
don't know anything of these things ; but sometimes I
can't help thinking about life, and I am afraid. Especially
at night, when I can't sleep." They know so little, and
all the problems of the universe come to them without
the intervention of books, or beliefs, or any knowledge.
They see themselves, as Vassili does, when he lies
awake at night, " so small, so small, and it seems as if
the earth moved under me, and there were nobody on
the earth but me." They move from place to place,
like consumptive people, who think, if they could but
be somewhere else, they would be quite well. But it
is always somewhere else. All the roads of the world
lead to six feet of earth, and all the way there has been
a losing of the way.

To Gorki the vagabond is the most interesting failure
in the world, where everything must be a failure. He
has affirmed his independence, he has been resolutely
himself, he has had the energy to stand up against the
inevitable, realising at least his own courage, perhaps his
own strength. Unlike most others, he knows that he
has only himself to rely on in the world, and that it is
only that self which matters.

THE RUSSIAN SOUL 169

II

The Russian novel is the novel of uncivilised people
who give us their impressions of civilisation, or who
show us how one can do without civilisation. They
try to find out the meaning of life, each for himself, as
if no one had ever thought about the matter before.
They are troubled about the soul, which they are
unable to realise, with Balzac, as "nervous fluid";
with Thackeray, as the schoolboy's response to his
master. Like Foma Gorde'iev " they bear within them
something heavy and uncomfortable, something which
they cannot comprehend." Russian novels are the only
novels in which we see people acting on their impulses,
unable to resist their impulses or to account for them.
They are never in doubt as to what they feel : it is as
simple as when one says, I am cold, I am hungry. They
say, I love this woman, I hate this man, I must go to
Sevastopol though I shall probably be killed if I go
there, I am convinced that this or that is my duty.
Sometimes they reason out their feelings, but the
reasoning never makes any difPercnce to their feelings.
The English novelist shows us an idea coming into a
man's head ; when he has got the idea he sometimes
proceeds to feel as the idea suggests to him. The
French novelist shows us a sensation, tempered or
directed by will, coming into a man's consciousness;
even his instincts wait on the instinctive criticism of the
intelligence ; so that passion, For instance, cools into
sensualiiy while it waits. Bur to the Russian there is
nothing in the world except the feeling which invades
him like an atmosphere, or grows up within him like a
plant putting out its leaves, or crushes him under It like
a great weight falling from above. lie wonders at
this strange thing which lakes possession of him so

lyo STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

easily, so uncxpectedl)'-, so irresistibly. He may fight
against it, but it will be as Jacob fights against the
angel, in Nettleship's remarkable design : he is held
in the mere hollow of a hand, while he conceives
himself to be wrestling with the whole of that unseen
force.

Tolstoi is so abnormally normal that he can express
every feeling without having to allow for any per-
sonal deviation. He feels everything, and he feels to
the roots of the emotion, and he can put one thing into
words as simply as another thing. He does not say,
this is good feeling and that bad, this is perverse, that
natural ; he says, this is the feeling. Gorki, like
Dostoieffski, often feels awry, is not content with
things as they are, or must choose to his purpose only
crooked and ugly things. He takes sides frankly with
the vagabonds, deifies them a little, turns them at times
into Uebermenschen ; he has none of the impartiality
of mere justice, "pardoning," in the expressive phrase,
only those whom he " understands." If we are
disposed to over-estimate what is remarkable in the
younger man, we have only to turn to a volume ot
Tolstoi, written at the age of twenty-seven, "Sevas-
topol," and we shall see at once all the difference
between the most brilliant fever and the unalterable
energy of health.

I have been turning over the pages of " Lavengro "
these last few days, and it has struck me that there is
something in that wonderful book more like the early
writings of Tolstoi than anything we have in English.
Borrow too writes as if civilisation did not exist, or
as if it were still quite possible to exist outside civilisa-
tion, and he obtains, in his indirect way, an extra-
ordinary effect of directness. Really the most artificial
of writers, he is always true to that " peculiar mind

THE RUSSIAN SOUL 171

aii,(J system of nerves " of which he was so well aware,
and which drove him into all sorts of cunning ways of
telling the truth, and making it at once bewilder-
ing and convincing. Take, in " Lavengro," the
chapter describing his paroxysm of fear in the dingle,
and contrast those pages with the pages in " Sevastopol "
describing Praskhoiihin's sensations before and after the
bomb strikes him. I know nothing of the kind, in any
language, equal to those pages of Borrow , they go deep
down into some "obscure night of the soul"; what
Tolstoi gives us is not even an exceptional thing, it is so
simple as to seem almost self-evident, but it is the
elementary feeling, the normal human feeling. Yes,
Tolstoi is abnormally normal, and every development
of his art, his thought, and his conduct comes from
his unquestioning obedience to impulse, in which
he carries the instinct of his race to its ultimate
limits.

Tolstoi's position of calm and dogged and well-
thought-out revolt could only have been adopted or
maintained in Russia, and in Russia it is conspicuous
only because Tolstoi is a man of genius. It is the
acting-out of an impulse, a childlike following of feeling
to its logical consequences. The same sincerity to a con-
viction, to a conviction which has become an irresistible
feeling, is seen in every Nihilist who strikes at the Tsar.
It is the sincerity of the savage, who throws off the
whole of civilisation with ease, as he would throw olf a
great-coat. The Russian has been civilised for so short
a while that he has not yet got accustomed to it.
Civilisation has no roots in him. Laws have been made
for chaining him down, as if he were a dangerous wild
beast, and the laws were made by those who knew his
nature and had determined to thwart it. If he cannot
have his way, he Is always ready to be a martyr. And

172 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Tolstoi, wlio h;is the peasant in him and the martyr,
has done just as countless fanatics have done before
him; and, being a man of genius and a great novelist,
has done it successfully, appealing to all Europe. He
strikes at civilisation, society, patrioiism, with an
infinitely greater force than the Nihilist ; but he
strikes in the same direction and from the same
impulse. ?lis convictions carry him against these bar-
riers ; he acts out his convictions : so does the Nihilist.
He is for peace and the other for destruction ; but that
is only the accident by which the same current brings
one straw to land and hurries the other straw over the
weir. And wherever we look in Russian novels we
shall see the same practical logic setting men and women
outside the laws, for good or evil, deliberately or uncon-
sciously. Foma Gordeiev, when he thrashes the man in
the club, " brimming with the ardent sensation of malice,
quivering all over with the happiness of revenge, drag-
ging him over the floor; bellowing dully, viciously, in
fierce joy," is hardly aware why he is doing what he
does; the feeling takes him, and he does it. "During
those minutes he experienced a vast sensation — the
sensation of liberation from a wearisome burden, which
had already long oppressed his breast with sadness and
impotency." He feels the need of asserting his own
nature, of expressing himself; with his fists, as it
happens : it is as if, being an artist, he had written his
sonnet or painted the sky into his picture. Well, and
to the Nihilist, that disinterested artist in life, the
killing of somebody is merely the finishing of a train
of thought, an emphatic, conclusive way of demonstrating
a problem.

1 90 1,

TOLSTOI ON ART

The theory which makes feeling the test of art, and an
ennobling influence upon the emotions the aim of art,
has never received so signal a discomfiture as in the book
by Tolstoi, called " What is Art ? " in which that theory
is put forward as the only possible one, and carried, in
the most logical way, to its final conclusions. Tolstoi,
as it seems to me, is more essentially a man of genius
than any writer now living. He has carried the methods
of the novel further into the soul of man than any
novelist who ever lived ; and he has at the same time
rendered the common details of life with a more absolute
illusion of reality than any one else. Since he has given
up writing novels, he has written a study of the Christian
religion which seems to me, from the strictly Christian
point of view, to leave nothing more to be said ; and he
has followed out his own conclusions in life with the
same logic as that with which he has carried them out
in writing. He is unique in our time in having made
every practical sacrifice to his own ideal. Everything
he writes, therefore, we are bound to receive with that
respect which is due alike to every man of genius and
to every man of unflinching sincerity. It is impossilile
that he should write anything which is without a value
of its own, not necessarily the value which he himself
attaches to it. It may scarcely seem, indeed, that
Tolstoi has much more of the necessary equipment for
writing a book on art than, let us say, Banyan would

171

174 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

have had. Yet if Bunyan had sat down to write a book
on art, in which he had given us his real opinion of
Milton in the present and Shakespeare in the past, such
a book, if it had told us nothing worth knowing about
Shakespeare and Milton, would still have been well
worth reading, for the sake of Bunyan himself and
of the better understanding of that Puritan conscience
which Bunyan embodied. In the same way this book
of Tolstoi's, trying as it is to read, and little as it
tells us about the questions it sets out to enlighten,
has an undeniable value as the utterance of Tolstoi,
and as the legitimate reductio ad absurdwn of theories
which have had so many more cautious and less honest
defenders.

Tolstoi is not an abstract thinker, a philosopher by
temperament, though he has come finally to have a
consistent philosophy of life, not, as with Nietzsche, a
mere bundle of intuitions. His mind is logical, and it
is also that of a man of action : it goes straight to
conclusions, and acts upon them, promptly and humbly.
He desires, first of all, to become clear himself, to
"save his own soul"; then he will act upon others by
the instinctive exercise of his goodness, of what he is,
not by some external reform. All his reforms would
begin with the head and with the heart; he would
"convince" the world of what to him is righteousness,
taking it for granted that men will naturally do what
they see ought to be done. Thus he has no belief in
Socialism or in Anarchism, in any mechanical readjust-
ment of things which is not the almost unconscious
result of a personal feeling or conviction. To Tolstoi
the one question is: What is the purpose of my life.''
and his answer, explains the interpreter, is this: "The
purpose of my life i? to understand, and, as far as
possible, to do, the will of that Power which has sent

TOLSTOI ON ART 175

me here, and which actuates my reason and conscience."
Preferring, as he tells us, to seek goodness "by the
head" rather than "by the heart," to begin with the
understanding, he has none of the artist's disinterested
interest in "problems," as Ibsen, for instance, has.
When Ibsen concerns himself with questions of conduct,
with the "meaning of life," he has no interest in their
solution, only in their development, caring only to track
the evil, not to cure it. They are his material, from
which he holds himself as far aloof as the algebraist
from his x. Now Tolstoi is what he is just because he
has been through all this, and has found himself com-
pelled to leave it behind. He is a personality, and the
artist in him has never been more than a part of his
personality. Tolstoi first lived, then wrote, now he
draws the moral from both careers, working upon life
itself rather than upon a painting after life. His final
attitude is the postscript adding a conclusion to his
novels. As a novelist he had kept closer to actual life,
to the dust of existence, than any other novelist ; so
that " Anna Karenina " is perhaps more painful to read
than any other novel. It gives us body and soul, and
it also gives us the clothes of life, society. There are
none of the disguises of the novelist with a style, or of
the novelist with a purpose. It is so real that it seems
to be speaking to us out of our own hearts and out of
our own experience. It is so real because it is the
work of one to whom life is more significant than it is
to any other novelist. Thus the final step, the step
which every novelist, if he goes far enough, may be
impelled, by the mere logic of things, to take, is easier,
more inevitable, for him than for any other. The
novelist, more than any other artist, is concerned
directly with life. He has to watch the passions at
work in the world, the shipwreck of ideals, the action

176 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

/

of society upon man, of man upon society. When he
is tired of considering these things with the unimpas-
sioned eyes of the artist, he begins to concern himself
about them very painfully : he becomes a moralist.
Perhaps he has been one : he becomes a reformer.

Tolstoi's theory of art, then, is this : " There is one
indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its
counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man,
without exercising elTort and without altering his stand-
point, on reading, hearing, or seemg another man's
work, experiences a mental condition which unites him
with that man, and with other people who also partake
of that work of art, then the object evoking that con-
dition is a work of art. . . . And not only is infection
a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is
also the sole measure of excellence in art." Art, thus
distinguished, is to be divided into two classes; first,
religious art, and secondly, universal art. "The first,
religious art — transmitting both positive feelings of love
to God and one's neighbour, and negative feelings of
indi<mation and horror at the violation of love — mani-
fests itself chiefly in the form of words, and to some
extent also in painting and sculpture : the second kind
(universal art), transmitting feelings accessible to all,
manifests itself in words, in painting, in sculpture, in
dances, in architecture, and, most of all, in music."

Now here is a theory which, in the cautious hands of
most critics, would produce but one result. We should
be told that, judged by such a standard, modern writers
were all wrong and older writers all right ; that Verlaine,
Huysmans, Manet, Liszt, Rodin, had departed from
the "obvious," or the "well-recognised," or the "in-
evitable," or the "classical" hnes of religious and
universal art, while Shakespeare, Goethe, Raphael,
Bach, Michelangelo, remained, perfect in their several

TOLSTOI ON ART 177

ways, to show us by their perfection the laws which our
uncouth and extravagant generation had broken. But
tliis is not at all what the theory really means, and
Tolstoi shows us what it really means. Tolstoi shows
us that on this theory we have to get rid of the "rude,
savage, and, for us, often meaningless works of the
ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, iEschylus, and es-
pecially Aristophanes ; of modern writers, Dante, Tasso,
Milton, Shakespeare " ; in painting, Michelangelo's
'•absurd Last Judgment," and " every representation of
miracles, including Raphael's ' Transfiguration ' " ; in
music, everything but "Bach's famous violin aria,
Chopin's nocturne in E flat major, and perhaps a dozen
bits (not whole pieces, but parts) selected from the
works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and
Chopin." On the other hand, we are to accept " as
examples of the highest art, flowing from love of God
and man (both of the higher, positive, and of the lower,
negative kind)," in literature: "The Robbers," by
Schiller, Victor Hugo's " Les Pauvres Gens" and " Les
Miserables," the novels and stories of Dickens, "The
Tale of Two Cities," "The Christmas Carol," "The
Chimes," and others ; " Uncle Tom's Cabin," Dos-
toiefl'ski's works, especially his " Memoirs from the
House of Death," and " Adam Bcde," by George
l'>liot ; in painting, a picture by Walter Langley, in the
Royal Academy of 1897, "a picture by the French
artist Morion," pictures by Millet, "and, particularly,
his drawing, 'The Man with the Hoe,' also pictures in
this style by Jules Breton, L'Hermitte, Drefrcgger, and
others " ; all of which Tolstoi has seen only in repro-
ductions.

Here, then, is what the theory really leads to; and it
cannot be said that Tolstoi is less emphatic in his con-
demnation of contemporary art than of that art which

lyS STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

we lire accustoiiu'i.1 to call classical. Wagner is "only
a limited, self-opiiiionatcJ German of bad taste and bad
style"; Baudelaire and Verlaine were "two versifiers,
wlio were far from skilful in form and most contemptible
and commonplace in subject matter"; some of Kipling's
short stories are "absolutely unintelligible both in form
and in substance " ; his own works are all bad art,
except two short stories, "God sees the Truth," and
"The Prisoner of the Caucasus"; and in one of his
lists of " spurious counterfeits of art," we are scornfully
told that " people of our time and of our society are
delighted with Baudelaires, Verlaines, Moreases, Ibsens,
and Maeterlincks in poetry ; with Monets, Manets,
Puvis de Chavannes, Burne-Joneses, Stucks and
B()cklins in painting; with Wagners, Liszts, Richard
Strausses, in music ; and they are no longer capable of
comprehending either the highest or the simplest art."
A good deal of this is what we have so often heard,
from such very different lips. But never before has any
one been keen-sighted enough, and honest enough, to
see and admit how logically one-half of this condemna-
tion depends on the other. Our critics have condemned
Wagner for the qualities by which they have come to
praise Beethoven ; Verlaine for the innovations which
they applaud in Hugo ; Rodin for the imagination which
they adore in Michelangelo. It is only Tolstoi who
sees that all these artists are obeying, in their various
measures, in their various ways, the same laws ; that to
condemn one is to condemn all the others as well : and
he condemns all.

II

Tolstoi's theory of art, which we have found to lead
to what is practically the entire condemnation of art,

TOLSTOI ON ART 179

with a few arbitrary exceptions, is based on a generous
social doctrine of equality, a conviction of the " brother-
hood of man,'' and a quite unjustifiable assamption that
art is no more than "an organ of progress." To Tolstoi
it seems astonishing that any one at the present day
should be found to maintain the conception of beauty
held by the Greeks; that "the very best that can be
done by the art of nations after nineteen hundred years
of Christian teaching is to choose as the ideal of their
life the ideal that was held by a small, semi-savage,
slave-holding people who lived two thousand years ago,
who imitated the nude human body extremely well, and
erected buildings pleasant to look at." Yet he himself
selects as examples of "good, supreme art" the "Iliad,"
the "Odyssey," the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph,
the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, the Gospel parables,
the story of Sakya Muni, and the hymns of the Vcdas ;
and I do not think he would contend that his list of
modern works of art (Dickens, Do.stoieiTski, George
Eliot, " Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the rest) shows any
artistic or spiritual advance upon those masterpieces of
the very earliest ages. If, then, the only modern works
which he admits to be written on sound principles
cannot for a moment be compared with the ancient
works to which he gives the same theoretic sanction,
what room is left for astonishment that an ideal of art,
divined two thousand years ago, should still remain
essentially the highest ideal of art ?

Closely linked with this confusion of art with progress
is another application of Socialistic theories to questions
of art, not less demonstrably false. "A good and lohy
work of art," he tells us, "may bo incomprehensible,
but not to sitnple, unpervcried labourers (all that is
highest is understood by them)." And he; declares
that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," the liible narratives,

I So STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

including the Prophetic Books, and the other master-
pieces of ancient art of which I have given his list, are
"quite comprehensible now to us, educated or un-
educated, as they were comprehensible to the men of
those times, long ago, who were even less educated
than our labourers." But such a statement is absolutely
unjustifiable : it has no foundation in fact. The "Iliad,"
to an English labourer, would be completely unintel-
ligible. Imagine him sitting down to the simplest trans-
lation which exists in English, the prose translation of
Lang, Butcher, and Leaf; imagine him reading: " Upon
the flaming chariot set she her foot, and grasped her
heavy spear, great and stout, wherewith she vanquisheth
the ranks of men, even of heroes with whom she of the
awful sire is wroth ! " To the English labourer the
Bible comes with an authority which no other book
possesses for him ; he certainly reads it, but does he
read with an intelligeat pleasure, does he really under-
stand, large portions of the Prophetic Books ? It is as
certain that he does not as it is certain that he does
read with pleasure, and understand, the Gospel parables
and the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. But does
this fact of his understanding one, and not understand-
ing the other, set the parables higher as art than the
Prophetic Books, or the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and
Joseph higher than the " Iliad " .? On Tolstoi's own
theory it would do so, but would Tolstoi himself follow
his theory to that extremity.?

To such precipices are we led at every moment by
the theory which makes feeling the test of art. Tolstoi
tells us that he once saw a performance of "Hamlet"
by Rossi, and that he "experienced all the time that
peculiar suffering which is caused by false imitations of
works of art." He read a description of a theatrical
performance by savages, and from the mere description

TOLSTOI ON ART i8i

he " felt that this was a true \york of art." Is this
quite fair to the instincts, is it not a little deliberate, a
choice decided upon beforehand rather than a simple
record of personal feeling? Even if it is a preference
as instinctive as it is believed to be, of what value is
the mere preference of one man, even a man of genius;
and of what value in the defining of a work of art is it
for any number of people to tell me that it has caused
them a genuine emotion ? Come with me to the
Adelphi ; there, in no matter what melodrama, you
shall see a sorrowful or heroic incident, acted, as it
seems to you, so livingly before you, that it shall make
you hot or cold with suspense, or bring tears to your
eyes. Yet neither you nor I shall differ in our judg-
ment of the melodrama as a work of art ; and Tolstoi,
if he were to see it, would certainly condemn it, from
his own point of view, as strongly as you or I. Yet it
has ansv.ered, in your case or mine, to his own test of
a work of art ; and certainly, to the quite simple-minded
or uneducated people there present, it has been ac-
cepted without any critical after-thought as entirely
satisfying.

No, neither the uneducated judgment nor the instincts
of the uneducated can ever come to have more than the
very slightest value in the determination of what is true
or false in art. A genuine democracy of social condition
may or may not be practically possible; but the demo-
cracy of intellect, happily, is impossible. There, at all
events, we must always find an aristocracy ; there, at
all events, the stultifying dead-weight of ecjuality must
for ever be spared to us. In material matters, even,
in matters most within his reach, has the labourer ever
been able to understand a machine, which lie will come
in time to prize for its service, until it has been lab(5ri-
ously explained to him, and, for the most part, forced

1 82 STUDIES TN PROSE AND VERSE

upon him for his good ? How, then, is he to understand
ii poem, which must always continue to seem to him a
useless thing, useless at all events to him ? Tolstoi,
throughout the whole of this book on art, has tried to
reduce himself intellectually, as, in practice, he has
reduced himself socially, to the level of the peasant.
And, with that extraordinary power of assimilation
which the Russians possess, he has very nearly suc-
ceeded. It is a part of the Russian character to be able
to live a fictitious life, to be more western than the
Westerns, more sympathetic, out of indolence and the
dramatic faculty, than one's intimate friends. And
Tolstoi, who is in every way so typically a Russian, has
in addition the genius of the novelist. So he is now
putting himself in the place of the peasant, speaking
through the peasant's mouth, in all these doctrines and
theories, just as he used to put himself in the place of
the peasant, and speak through the peasant's mouth, in
his stories. The fatal difference is that, in the stories,
he knew that he was speaking dramatically, while, in
the doctrines and theories, he imagines that he is speak-
ing in his own person.

1898.

A CENSOR OF CRITICS

In a polemical book called " Ephemera Critica ; or,
Plain Truths about Current Literature," Mr Churton
Collins, the Timon of critics, "spoke out," with em-
phasis, on many questions. I am concerned with only
one of them, and with him only as with a voice crying,
very loudly, in the wilderness. Where I am concerned
with Mr Collins is in his examination of current criti-
cism, and in his protest against the manufacture of
cheap reputations. He points scornfully to the spectacle
of the ignorant applauding the ignorant, both comfort-
able in the ditch together. Only, he is a little apt to
see bad intentions where there are really no intentions
of any kind whatever. Mr Collins, as it seems to me,
expends a good deal of needless anger over what he
calls " the prevalence, or rather the predominance, of
mere prejudice, the prejudice of cliques in favour of
cli(]ues, the prejudice of cliques against cliques." I do
not believe much in cliques, so far as that word is used
to represent a somewhat unfair or malicious banding
together of persons professing the same loves or hates.
The wicked clique is as empty a convention as the
wicked baronet. Few baronets in real life, whatever
their intentions, have the intellectual vigour and con-
sistency attributed to them in fiction ; they remain, as a
rule, comparatively liarmless. And cliques, if cliques
exist, so far from pushing incompetence and frustrating
competence lor personal motives, or doing mischief for
mischief's sake, are usually of the most pitiable honesty,
and applaud what they really think to be good, condemn

1 84 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

what they really think to be bad. I have not the
slightest doubt that the supporters of what is, I believe,
called the Kailyard School of fiction, have supported
that school in all sincerity of admiration ; that those
persons who compare Mr Stephen Phillips with Milton,
or, as Mr Churton Collins himself does, with Leopardi,
do so in all simplicity ; that there are dramatic critics
who really consider Mr Pinero a dramatist of great
intellectual capacity, superior on many points to Ibsen ;
musical critics who really imagine themselves to be
moved by the music of Dr Parry or Sir Alexander
Mackenzie ; art critics who find it quite impossible to
find merit in the sculpture of Rodin. I am more charit-
able than Mr Collins ; where he sees perfidy and de-
pravity, "the work of deliberate fraud," I can see only
ignorance and bad taste, a helpless ignorance, a hope-
less bad taste. Now taste can neither be acquired nor
eradicated ; it is an essence, not a property ; once in
existence, it can be trained to finer and subtler percep-
tions; but it must be born, like genius, and no one is
responsible for its possession, any more than he is
responsible for the colour of his eyes or hair. Ignorance
is indeed a more remediable matter ; but even here lei
us not be unjust. Few men are ignorant by preference,
but rather by misfortune ; and against misfortune, who
is fully armed ? Probably many of the hasty gentle-
men who review books in the newspapers have a sincere
envy of Mr Collins' knowledge of many literatures ;
but circumstances have not left them the leisure to
attain that knowledge. Some of them, lacking know-
ledge, possess a certain measure of taste ; there are
others who, lacking taste, possess a certain measure of
knowledge. And I maintain that, as a rule, these
gentlemen do their best. They should be treated more
gently ; and, in particular, it should be explained to

A CENSOR OF CRITICS 185

them that enthusiasm is a good thing, but that un-
intermittent enthusiasm tends to mental exhaustion.

Or, what if after all the newspaper critics are right,
and Mr Collins and a few other people wrong? What
if English literature has never known so brilliant an
epoch as the present ; what if the poets and novelists
whom we meet or pass in the Strand or at the Authors'
Club are really the greatest we have ever had? 1 will
relate an experience which happened to me lately, just
as it happened : was I perhaps nearer the truth then, in
my ingenuous wonder, my trustful acceptance of a sur-
prising piece of good news, than I am now, when reflec-
tion has brought back the old doubts again ?

I do not often read novels, finding that the very
interesting art of the novelist requires a closer attention
in following its processes, with a more abundant leisure, 1
than I care to give or happen to possess. When I do,
however, read a novel it is generally a French one; and
I confess that, up to the other day, I was under the im-
pression that in following a natural preference I was also
on the footsteps of wisdom. But, the other day, happen-
ing to take up a novel translated from the Norwegian,
I found at the end of the volume thirty-two closely
printed pages of advertisements, giving the opinions of
the press on thirty-two Engli.sh novels. The volume
was dated a few years back, and the novels had been
published, apparently, within a year or two of that date.
I read tht'se opinions of the press with a keen interest,
which 1 hnind presently growing into something like
astonishment, and when I had come to the end of them
I began to wonder how I could possibly have overlooked
so many works of so high a genius. The newspapers
whose opinions I had been reading were the best-known
newspapers in England ; they seemed, so far as I could
judge, to represent every kind of opinion throughout

1 86 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the country. Well, according to these newspapers,
every one of these thirty-two hooks was, in its way,
something of a masterpiece. " Mr Hall Caine," I read,
" reaches heights which are attained only by the
greatest masters of fiction. ... I think of the great
French writer Stendhal, at the same moment as the
great English writer." It is Mr T. P. O'Connor who
thinks of Stendhal at the same moment as of Mr Hall
Caine ; but the Scotsman is very bold, and goes further,
finding another novel of the same writer "distinctly
ahead of all the fictional literature of our time, and fit
to rank with the most powerful fictional writing of the
past century " ; while the Christian World realises how
great is the " fascination of being present, as it were, at
the birth of a classic"; of "The Manxman" that is.
Of another book by another writer, the Daily Chronicle
assures me " It has not a dull page from first to last.
Any one with normal health and taste can read a book
like this with real pleasure"; while the Westminster
Gazette and the Speaker, referring to, I should suppose,
two singularly different books, declare, with singular
unanimity of language, of one " that there is cleverness
enough in it to furnish forth a dozen novels " ; of the
other, that the WTiter has " put enough observation,
humour, and thought into this book to furnish forth
half-a-dozen ordinary novels "' ; only half-a-dozen, it is
true, this time. Then the Globe tells me, of yet another
story, that '' this is a remarkable story — a story that
fascinates, tingling with life, steeped in sympathy with
all that is best and saddest " ; I turn the page, I see the
name of yet another story, and here it is the Standard
assuring me that this too is "a remarkable story; it
abounds with dramatic situations, the interest never for
a moment flags, and the characters are well drawn and
consistent." Robert Louis Stevenson is on the next

A CENSOR OF CRITICS 187

page, and of him I read neither more nor less than of
all the others. But on the next page I find Mr Zangwill,
and the Oiieen "has not the least doubt that 'The
Master ' will always be reckoned one of our classics."
Before a book of Mr Henry James the Manchester Guar-
diati can only gasp : " To attempt to criticise a creation
so exquisite, so instinct with the finest and purest human
feeling, so penetrated with the fastidious distinction of
a sensitive spirit, would indeed be superfluous, if not
impertinent." The Manchester Courier is more explicit,
and discovers that Mrs Lynn Linton " writes with all
the bitterness of Dean Swift"; and the Pall Mall
Gazette discovers that Mr C. F. Keary "is less witty
than Mr Meredith, but more responsible " ; and the
Times and the JVorld, in almost the same words, mention
that a novel of Mr W. E. Tirebuck is " the most re-
markable contribution made by fiction to the history of
the working classes since ' Mary Barton ' " (" since
Mrs Gaskell wrote her ' Mary Barton ' we have seen no
more interesting novel on the condition of the working-
classes "), " and it has a wider range and import of
deeper gravity." After this it cannot surprise us that
one book " must be pronounced," by the Daily Chronicle,
"an almost un(]ualified triumph"; and that the World
finds without difliculty "a work to which the much-
used adjective 'beautiful' may be applied with full
intention and strict justice."

It is doiil)tless my loss that, not being a novel reader,
I have not read more than two out of the thirty-two novels
of which, I suddenly realise, such wonderfully attractive
things have been said. One of these books I certainly
admired, the other I did not. A few of the others I
have taken up; and, it now apjiears, laid down too
hastily ; for it did not occur to nie to continue reatling
them. In the future, I fear, I shall have but little time

1 88 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

for my French novels ; for I confess that, interesting as
I found some of them in tlieir degree, I should not have
been disposed to apply anything like the same un-
qualified praise to any one of them M'hich all these
critics apply to every one of the thirty-two English
works. I therefore feel it my duty (I am sure it will
be my privilege) to turn my attention at once to con-
temporary English novels; and, these critics impress
upon me, I shall have no difficulty of choice : all are
good, almost all are supremely good. Nothing, for a
long time, has interested me so much as this sudden
renaissance of the novel in England ; or, should I say,
in all modesty, my sudden discovery of it ? During the
whole of the nineteenth century, prior to this year of
grace, there have been perhaps a dozen novelists whom
the world in general has agreed to consider more or less
novelists of the first rank. Here, in one publisher's list,
are twice that number of writers, about each of whom
our responsible critics have spoken in terms which would
only barely escape flattery if applied to all but the
greatest of the others. I repeat : all this has interested
me profoundly, for, assuming that one publisher is not
alone in publishing for men and women of genius, how
incalculable must be the number of great novelists
now writing in England, their very names, perhaps,
unknown to others as ill-informed in these matters as
myself I

Now who is right, these gentlemen with their en-
thusiasm, or Mr Collins with his little suggestion about
" hyperbole heaped on hyperbole, rhodomontade on
rhodomontade," his statement: "It is not that a good
book will not be praised, but that bad books are praised
still more"; his conclusion: "Measured and discrimi-
nating eulogy, which means precisely what it expresses,
and which is always the note of sound and just criticism,

A CENSOR OF CRITICS 189

is to the uninitiated poor recommendation compared with
that which has no limitation but extremes " ? If these
gentlemen are wrong, if they have no clearer sense of
what they are saying than the foreigner who begins his
crescendo of eulogy with "splendid," "superb," "mag-
nificent," and ends it with " nice," then may not Mr
Collins be within measurable distance of the truth in
saying of much contemporary criticism : "Without
standards, without touchstones, without principles, with-
out knowledge, it appears to be regarded as the one
calling for wdiich no equipment and no training are
needed"? "As a rule the men who write bad books
are the men who criticise bad books," he reminds us ;
and again : "The writer of a single good book is soon
forgotten by his contemporaries ; but the writer of a
series of bad books is sure of reputation and emolument."
Is or is not all this true ? Is there any remedy for it ?
Is there anv likelihood that the remedy will be found
and applied ?

Mr Collins tells us, as if he were telling us some-
thing startling, that " the sole encouragement now left
to authors to produce good books is the satisfaction of
their own conscience, and the approbation of a few dis-
cerning judges." But has not that, with a very few
exceptions, always been the case.^* Good art, except
sometimes the very greatest, so great that it possesses
every quality, even commercial value, has never been a
money-making commodity. A choice lies before the
artist, if that can be called choice where the true artist
will never know what it is to hesitate at the j)arting of
the ways. There has never been a time or a country
where the populace has wanted beauty, has wanted,
that is, any form of art. Mr Collins himself jioints out
tiiat, at the great epochs, in the Athens of Pericles, the
Rome of Augustus, the Florence of the Medici, art was

190 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

made for the few good judges, not for the judgment of
the crowd ; and it was the good fortune of the artists
that there was a Pericles, an Augustus, a Pope of the
Medici, who happened to care greatly for art. Even in
our own days there was a king who cared greatly for
art, who made it possible for Wagner to conquer the
world during his own lifetime, and on his own terms ;
who made possible the greatest achievement in art of
our times. People said he was mad : that is the
difference ; they deposed him and allowed him to drown
himself No doubt he ruled Bavaria with a certain
eccentricity ; he built many expensive palaces, and was
unconventional in his methods, and sometimes disturbed
the sleep of his people by driving noisily past their
windows at night ; but he did no great wrong to his
nation or to the world, caused no bloodshed, had none
of the typical vices and bourgeois ambitions which bring
about great calamities meanly ; and he was a prince to
art. There has been no other since Louis XIV,, and
thus the populace has never had art thrust upon it.
Why, then, should it be expected to encourage or sup-
port artists ? There was a time when it was the custom
for the impoverished man of letters to appeal to the
charity of some wealthy and instructed nobleman. The
custom has changed, and yet, still, is not a painter of
originality often obliged to depend for long periods on
the intelligent generosity of a single buyer? The public
has never known good art from bad ; it has never, of its
own accord, encouraged good art ; it is unreasonable to
expect that it ever will. The present time is not ex-
ceptional in its disregard for good art ; there it is but
repeating history. Where it is exceptional is in its
creation of a new order of merit, in its assumption that,
as Mr Collins says, "the criteria of the multitude need
be the only criteria of what is addressed to the multi-

A CENSOR OF CRITICS 191

tude," in its enfranchisement of ignorance grown restless
with new ambitions.

The world is becoming more and more democratic, and
with democracy art has nothing to do. What is written
for the crowd goes to the crowd ; it lives its bustling
day there, and is forgotten, like to-day's newspaper
to-morrow. The catalogue of novels which I chanced
to take up was some few years old ; if I turned to the
catalogue which has replaced it, I am sure that I should
see the same eulogies, but on other, newer books. For
the first time in the history of the world, as Mr Collins
points out, the crowd has found for itself a loud, multi-
tudinous voice. It has thrown oif its chains, the chains
of good taste ; it has won liberty, the liberty to mis-
behave. It is sick of enduring the sight of masterpieces ;
it is weary of waiting for some new excellence to be
discovered for its admiration. It is powerful now, it
must have its own bread and games, and the slave's
revenge on its masters. Books multiply, praise is tossed
about ; but the artist stands aside, not even hors concours^
because there are no longer any judges, or their voice
is drowned by the gabble of the jurymen, as they dis-
agree among themselves, and refer the verdict to the
bystanders.

1 90 1.

WHAT IS POETRY?

A SCHOLARLY cHtic, Mr W, J. Conrthope, wrote a
book called " Life in Poetry : Law in Taste," in which
he tried to prove that " the secret of life in poetry
lies in the power to give individual form to universal
ideas of nature adapted for expression in any of the
recognised classes of metrical composition." By
the words life in poetry, he told us, "I mean the
qualities in poetry, whatsoever they are, whence-
soever they are derived, which have the power
of producing enduring pleasure ; and I have en-
deavoured to ascertain their nature by examining the
works of poets who have been acknowledged, semper^
ubique^ ah omnlbm^ to be the living poets of the world."
Mr Courthope, who has edited Pope, naturally brings
Pope into the question, and gives away much of his
argument by doing so. He finds in Pope both his
"life "and his " universal," and he apologises for the
" limited idea of Nature, of the Universal," which he
does, in a way, acknowledge, by saying, first, that
" this restriction of knowledge to self-knowledge is
only the completion of a tendency of thought which
reveals itself in 'Paradise Lost'"; and, secondly, that
Pope's idea of Nature must be compared only with
that of " the false wits of the seventeenth century,
Phincas and Giles Fletcher, Donne, Crashaw, (^larles,
and Cowley." But the question really is, whether Pope
is, in the true sense, a poet at all ; whether the prose
force and finish of his character of Atticus, quoted else-
where in the book, are, simply as poetry, the equivalent
192

WHAT IS POETRY? 193

of the lines of Cnislidw "On a Pniyer-book sent to
Mrs R.," quoted as self-evidently ridiculous. 1 would
assert that the two last lines of this quotation,

'* Dropping with a balmy shower
A delicious dew of spices,"

represent a level of poetry to which Pope never attained,
in spite of his consummate ability. Pope is the most
finished artist in prose who ever wrote in verse. It is
impossible to read him without continuous admiration
for his cleverness, or to forget, while reading him, that
poetry cannot be clever. While Crashaw, with two
instinctively singing lines, lets us overhear that he is a
poet, Pope brilliantly convinces us of everything that
lie chooses, except of that one fact. The only moments
when he trespasses into beauty are the moments when
he mocks its affectations ; so that

•' Uie of a rose in aromatic pain "

remains his homage, unintentional under its irony,
to that " principle of beauty in all things " which he
had never seen.

In discussing the nature and function of metre, Mr
(lourthope quotes from Marlowe:

" Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the toj)Ies8 towers of Ilium I "

and tells us: "It is certain that he could only have
ventured on the sublime audacity of saying that a face
launched ships and burned towers by escaping from
the limits of ordinary language, and conveying his
metaphor through the harmonious and ecstatic move-
ments of rhythm and metre." Now, on the contrary,
any writer of elevated prose, Milton or Ruskin, could
have said in prose precisely what Marlowe said, and

194 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

made fine prose of it ; the imagination, the idea, a fine
kind of form, would have been there ; only one thing
would have been lacking, the very finest kind of form,
the form of verse. It would have been poetical
substance, not poetry ; the rhythm transforms it into
poetry, and nothing but the rhythm.

Poetry is first of all an art, and, in art, there must be
a complete marriage or interpenetration of substance
and form. The writer like Wait Whitman, who seems
' to contain so much material for poetry, which he can
never shape into anything tangibly perfect, is not less
disqualified from the name of poet than a writer like
Pope, who has the most exquisite control over an un-
poetical kind of form which exactly fits an unpoetical
kind of substance. Crashaw, who had poetical
substance of a particular kind, with only an inter-
mittent power over it, remains a genuine but imperfect
poer, whom we must sift with discrimination. Milton,
who has almost every quality of form, and many of
the finest qualities of substance, becomes the great
poet whom he is universally admitted to be, because he
is almost always successful in the fusion of substance
and form.

It is only after this intimate union has been consum-
mated that we can begin to consider relative qualities
of merit. The writer of one perfect song in one of the
Elizabethan song-books is a poet, but, if he has
written no more, or no more of such merit, he will
remain a small, a limited poet. PoUok's " Course of
Time " may be as long as " Paradise Lost," but Pollok
does not enter into the competition. In distinguishing
between poet and poet, in the somewhat fruitless task
of assigning places, Mr Courthope's rules, among
others, come fairly into use. They are useless in dis-
tinguishing what is poetry from what is not poetry.

WHAT IS POETRY? 195

and they would be useless in the presence of any new
writer claiming to be a poet.

It is less difficult to be just to Virgil and Milton |
than to be just to Verlaine or to Mr Yeats. Nor
will the mere testing of Mr Yeats or of Verlaine
by Milton or by Virgil avail to keep the critic to
the truth. Every new force has its own novel form
of beauty, and if our latest poet is not essentially
dilTerent from his predecessors, no amount of affinity
to them will save him. It is profoundly important, as
Mr Courthope asserts, to examine and to keep in mind
" the works of poets who have been acknowledged,
semper^ ubique^ ab omnibus^ to be the living poets of
the world " ; but it is not less important to be on the
watch for every stirring of new life, whether or not our
reading has prepared us for it, in the form in which we
find it.

1901.

CAMPOAMOR

Ram6n de Campoamor Y Campoosorio, who died at

Madrid on the 12th of February 1901, was born at

Navia, in the province of Asturias, on the 24th of

September 18 17. His career covers ahnost the whole

century : he was the contemporary of Quintana,

Espronceda, Zorrilla, yet absolutely untouched by the

influences which made of Quintana a lesser Cowper, of

Espronceda a lesser Byron, and of Zorrilla a lesser

Longfellow. Coming into a literature in which poetry

is generally taken to be but another name for rhetoric,

he followed, long before Verlaine, Verlaine's advice to

"take rhetoric and wring its neck." The poetry of

words, of sounds, of abstractions, that poetry which is

looked upon in Spain as the most really poetical kind of

poetry, left him untouched ; he could but apply to it

the Arab proverb: "I hear the tic-tac of the mill, but

I see no flour." In his "Poetica"' he declares, boldly:

" If we except the Romancero and the cantares, Spain

has almost no really national lyric poetry." "There

are very well-built verses, that are lads of sound body,

but without a soul. Such are those of Herrera and of

almost all his imitators, the grandiloquent poets." In

the simple masculine verse of Jorge Manrique (whose

great poem, the " Coplas por la muerte de su Padre,"

is known to most English readers in its admirable

translation by Longfellow) he saw an incomparable

model, whose grave and passionate simplicity might

well have been the basis of a national style. " Poetry,"

he declares, in what seemed to his critics an amusing
10

CAMPOAMOR 197

paradox, " is the rhythmical representation of a thought
through the medium of an image, expressed in a
language which cannot be put in prose more naturally
or with fewer words. . . . There is in poetry no
immortal expression that can be said in prose with
more simplicity or with more precision." Prose,
indeed, seemed to him not really an art at all, and
when Valera, a genuine artist in prose, defended his
own ground by asserting that "metaphysics is the one
useless science, and poetry the one useless art,"
Campoamor replied in verse, defining prose as " la
jerga animal del ser humano " (" the jabber of the
human animal"). "What are philosophical systems,"
he asks, " but poems without images ? " and, protesting
against the theory of "art for art," and suggesting
"art for ideas," or "transcendental" art, as a better
definition of what was at least his own conception, he
sums up with his customary neatness: "Metaphysics
is the science of ideas, religion is the science of ideas
converted into sentiments, and art the science of ideas
converted into images. Metaphysics is the true,
religion the good, and irsthetics the beautiful." By
calling art "transcendental" he means, not that it
should be in itself either philosophical or didactic, much
less abstract, for "art is the enemy of abstractions,
. . . and whatever becomes impersonal evaporates,"
but that it should contain in itself, as its foundation, a
"universal human truth," without which "it is no
more than the letters of tattling women." "All lyric
poetry should be a little drama." "In the drama of
the Creation everything was written by (Joil in
sympathetic ink. We have but to apply the reagent,
and hold it to the light. The best artist is the best
translator oF the works of (iod." "It has been my
constant endeavour," he tells us, "to approach art

198 STUDllvS IN PROSE AND VERSE

through ideas, and to express them in ordinary language,
thus revokitionising the substance and form of poetry,
the substance with the Doloras and the form with the
Pcqiichos Poemasy Beginning at first with fables, he
abandoned the form of the fable, because it seemed to
him that the fable could only take root in countries in
which the doctrine of the transmigration of souls was
still believed. " The Dolora, a drama taken direct from
life, without the metaphors and symbols of indirect
poetry, seemed to me a form more European, more
natural, and more human than that of the oriental
f.ible." But the Dolora was to retain thus much of the
fable, that by means of its drama it was to "solve some
universal problem," the solution growing out of the
actual structure of the story. Thus, in poetry, subject
is all-important, subject including ''the argument and
the action."' " In every pebble of the brook there is
part of an Escurial : the dilTiculty and the merit are in
building it." "Novelty of subject, regularity of plan,
the method with which that plan is carried out " : these,
together with the fundamental idea, which is to be of
universal application, " transcendental," as he calls it,
are the requisites of a work of art ; it is on these
grounds that a work of art is to be judged. "Every
work of art should be able to reply affirmatively to these
four questions :

The subject : can it be narrated?
The plan : can it be painted ?
The design : has it a purpose ?
The style : is it the man .f* "

Campoamor was no classical scholar, and it is but
hesitatingly that he suggests, on the authority of "a
French critic, who had it from Aristotle," that the
theory of the Greeks in poetry was in many points

CAMPOAMOR 199

similar to his. If we turn to Matthew Arnold's preface
to his Poems, we shall find all that is fundamental in
Campoamor's argument stated finally, and in the form
of an appeal to classical models. " The radical differ-
ence between their poetical theory " (the Greeks', that
is) "and ours consists, it appears to me, in this: that
with them the poetical character of the action in itself,
and the conduct of it, were the first consideration ; with
us attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate
thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of
an action." And, further on in that admirable preface,
Matthew Arnold assures " the individual writer " that
he " may certainly learn of the ancients, better than
anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important
for him to know : the all-importance of the choice of a
subject, the necessity of accurate construction, and the
subordinate character of expression." Is not this pre-
cisely the aim of Campoamor ? and is it not as a natural
corollary to this severe theory of poetical construction
that he tells us: "Style is not a question of figures of
speech, but of electric fluid"; "rhythm alone should
separate the language of verse from that of prose " ; yet
that language should have always an inner beauty, "the
mysterious magic of music, so that it should say, not
what the writer intends, but what the reader desires"?
And so we come, not unnaturally, to his ideal in writing :
"To write poems whose ideas and whose words had
been, or seemed to have been, thought or written by
every one."

Upon these theories, it might well seem to us, a
writer is left at all events free, and with a very reason-
able kind of liberty, to make the most of himself.
Only, after all, the question remains: What was Cam-
poamor's conception of subject and development ; how
far was his precision a poetical precision ; did he, in
o

200 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

harmonising the liinG^iiage of prose and of verse, raise the
one or lower the other ?

The twelve volumes of Campoamor's collected poems
contain "El Drama Universal," a sort of epic in eight
" days " and forty-seven scenes, written in heroic quat-
rains, and worthy, a Spanish critic assures us, of "an
Ariosto of the soul"; "Colon," a narrative poem in
sixteen cantos, written in oltava rima ; "El Licenciado
Torralba," a legendary poem in eight cantos, written in
iambic verse of varying length ; three series of " Pe-
quenos Poemas," each containing from ten to twelve
narrative poems written in a similar form of verse ; two
series of " Doloras," short lyrical poems, of which I
have already quoted his own definition ; a volume of
"Humoradas," containing some hundreds of epigrams;
and two volumes of early work, brought together under
the name of "Poesias y Fabulas." Besides these, he
wrote some plays, the admirable volume called " Poetica :
Polemicas Literarias," and a contribution to metaphysics
called " Lo Absoluto." Of his long poems, only one is
what Rossetti called "amusing," only "El Licenciado
Torralba " has that vital energy which keeps a poem
alive. With this exception we need consider only the
three collections in which a single thing, a consistent
"criticism of life," is attempted under different but
closely allied forms : the " Humoradas," which are
epigrams; the "Doloras," which he defines as "drama-
tised 'Humoradas'"; and the " Pequcnos Poemas,"
which he defines as "amplified 'Doloras.'"

Applied by a great poetical intellect, Campoamor's
theories might have resulted in the most masterly of
modern poems ; but his intellect was ingenious rather
than imaginative; his vivid human curiosity was con-
cerned with life more after the manner of the novelist
than of the poet ; his dramas are often anecdotes ; his

CAMPOAMOR 201

insight is not so much wisdom as worldly wisdom. He
"saw life steadily," but he saw it in little patches,
commenting on facts with a smiling scepticism which has
in it something of the positive spirit of the eighteenth
century. Believing, as he tells us, that "what is most
natural in the world is the supernatural," he was apt to
see the spiritual side of things, as the Spanish painters
have mostly seen it, in a palpable detachment from the
soil, garlanded in clouds. Concerned all his life with
the moods and casuistries of love, he writes of women,
not of woman, and ends, after all, in a reservation of
judgment. Poetry, to him, was a kind of psychology,
and that is why every lyric shaped itself naturally into
what he called a drama. His whole interest was in life
and the problems of life, in people and their doings, and
in the reasons for what they do. Others, he tells us,
may admire poetry which is descriptive, the delineation
of external things, or rhetorical, a sonorous meditation
over abstract things ; all that he himself cares for are
" those reverberations that light up the windings of
the human heart and the horizons that lie on the
other side of material life." Only, some imaginative
energy being lacking, all this comes, for the most
part, to be a kind of novelette in verse, in the " Pe-
quenos Poemas," a versified allegory, in the " Doloras,"
or an epigram, in the "Ilumoradas."

Can verse in which there is no ecstasy be poetry.''
There is no ecstasy in the verse of Campoamor ; at the
most a talking about ecstasy, as in some of the "Pequenos
Poemas, ' in which stories of passion are told with ex-
([uisite neatness, precision, sympathetic warmth ; but
the passion never cries out, never finds its own voice.
Once only in his work do I find something like that
cry, and it is in "El I.icenciado Torralha," the story of
a kind of Faust, who, desiring love without unrest,

202 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

makes for himself an artificial woman ("la mujer mas
mujer dc las mujeres ") Midicrcula^ to whom he gives

" el animo del bello paganismo,
que, siendo menos que alma, es mas que vida."

Torralba is arrested by the Inquisition as a necromancer,
and Muliercula is burnt at the stake. I have translated
the description of her death :

" Midmost, as if the flame of the burning were
A bed ot love to her,
Muliercula, with calm, unfrightened face,
Not without beauty stood,
And her meek attitude
Had something of the tiger's natural grace.
She suffers, yet, no less.
Dying for him she loves, broods there.
Within the burning air.
Quiet as a bird within a wilderness.
The wild beast's innocency all awake
Enraps her, and as she burns.
The intermittent flaming of the stake
To the poor fond foolish thing now turns
Into a rapture, dying for his sake ;
And then, because the instinct in her sees
This only to be had,
Nothingness and its peace.
For her last, surest end, utterly glad.
With absolute heart and whole.
That body without a soul,
As if the bright flame brings
Roses to be its bed,
Dies, and so enters, dead.
Into the august majesty of things ! "

There, in that fantastic conception of " la belleza
natural perfecta " of woman, as the thinker, above all
others, has desired to find her, I seem to discover the
one passionate exception to Campoamor's never quite
real men and women, the novelist's lay-figures of

CAMPOAMOR

203

passion, about whom we are told so many interesting
anecdotes. A witty story-teller, a sympathetic cynic,
a transcendental positivist, he found the ways of the
world the most amusing spectacle in nature, and for
the most part his poems are little reflections of life seen
as he saw it, with sharp, tolerant, worldly eyes. At
his best, certainly most characteristic, when he is
briefest, as in the "Humoradas," he has returned, in /
these polished fragments, to the lapidary style of Latin
poetry, reminding us at times of another Spaniard,
Martial. Idea, clearness, symmetry, point, give to this
kind of verse something of the hardness and glitter of a
weapon, even when the intention is not satirical. With
Campoamor the blade is tossed into the air and caught
again, harmlessly, with all the address of an accom-
plished juggler. He plays with satire as he plays with
sentiment, and, when he is most serious, will disguise
the feeling with some ironical afterthought. Here are
some of the "Humoradas," in Spanish and English. I
have translated them, as will be seen, quite literally,
and I have tried to choose them from as many moods
as I could.

" y// mover tu aban'tco con gracejo
Quitas el pol-vo al coraxon mas viejo."

"You wave your fan with such a graceful art,
You brush the dust orf from the oldest heart."

" /,<ts niflds lie las mtidres que amr tan to
Me besan ya como se besan a tin santo. '

'♦ The cliildrcn of the mothers I loved, ah see,
They kiss me as though they kissed a saint in me ! "

'* Jamas mujer alguna
Ha salulo del todo de la curia. '^

'* No woman yet, since they were made all,
Has ever got quite outside of the cradle."

204 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

" Proh'thcs ill amor con tus ilesdenes.
Sin frutos prohihiclos no hay E denes"

" Let your consent with your disdain be hidden :
No Paradise whose fruit is not forbidden. "

" No le gtista el placer sin viol e net a,
T por eso y a cree la clesgraciada
Que ni es pas'ion, n't es nada,
Kl amor que no turba la conciencia."

** She tastes not pleasure without strife,
And therefore, hapless one, she feels
That love's not good enough for life

Which hales not conscience by the heels."

" Si es fdcil una hermosa^

Voy y la dejo ;
Si es dif/cil la cosa,

Tambien me alejo^

NinaSf cuidad
De amar siempre con facil

Difuultad."

" If too easy she should be,

I, beholding, quit her ;
If the thing's too hard for me,

Trying proves too bitter.

Girls, now see.
Best it is to love with easy

Difficulty."

" Niegas que fuiste mi mejor amiga P

Bien, bien ; lo callare : noblexa obligii"

"That you were my best friend, do you ileny ?
Well, well; noblesse oblige; then so will I."

*^Te he visto no se donde, ni se cuando.
Ah ! si ; ya lo recuerdo, fue sonando.

" Have I not seen you ? Yes, but where and when ?
Ah, 1 rememlier : I was dreaming then."

CAMPOAMOR 205

"71? es itifiel ! y la quieres ? No me extraiia ;
To adoro a la esperanxa, antique me engafia."

" She's faithk-ss, and you love her ? As you will :
Hope I adore, and hope is faithless still."

" Vas camh'tando de amor todos los afios,
Mas no camb'ias jamas de deserigaf/os."

" You change your love each year ; yet Love's commandment
Is, that you never change your disenchantment."

" Por el la shnetr'ta es la bellexa^
Aunque corte a las cosas la caheza"

<* Beauty for him was symmetry, albeit
He sometimes cut the heads off things, to see it."

I will add three short pieces from the " Doloras."

" Shamed though T be, and weep for shame, 'tis true,
I loved not gf)()(l what evil I love in you."

" They part ; years pass ; they do not see
Each other : after six or seven :
' Good Heaven ! and is it really he ? '
' And is it really she ? good Heaven ! ' "

The Soul for Sale.

" One day to Satan, .lulio, Hushed with wine :

' Wilt buy my soul I ' ' Of little worth is it.'
* I do hut ask one kiss, and it is thine.'

' Old sinner, hast tliou ])art('d with thy wit ? '
' Wilt buy hi' 'No.' ' liut whcrclore ? ' ' It is mine.

» >>

In such work as tliis tlicre is nuicli of what the
Spaniards call "salt"; it stings healthily, it is sane,
temperate, above all, ingenious ; and the question as to
whether or not it is poetry resolves itself into a (juestion

2o6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

iis to wliethcr or uol the verse of Martial, indeed Latin
epigrammiitic verse in general, is poetry. To the
/ modern mind, brought up on romantic models, only
^ Catullus is quite certainly or quite obviously a poet in
his epigrams ; and his appeal to us is as personal as the
appeal of Villon. He does not generalise, he does not
smile while he stabs ; the passion of love or hate burns
in him like a flame, setting the verse on fire. Martial
w rites for men of the world ; he writes in order to
comment on things; his form has the finish of a thing
made to fulfil a purpose. Campoamor also writes out of
a fruitful experience, not transfiguring life where he
reflects it. If what he writes is not poetry, in our
modern conception of the word, it has at least the
beauty of adjustment to an end, of perfect fitness ; and
it reflects a temperament, not a great poetical tempera-
ment, but one to which human affairs were infinitely
interesting, and their expression in art the one business
of life.

1901.

^4(ft fUi-fjA

ROBERT BRIDGES

Mr Bridges appears tome, in his "Shorter Poems,"
to be alone in our time as a writer of purely lyric
poetry, poetry which aims at being an "embodied joy,"
a calm rapture. Others have concerned themselves
with passions more vehement, with thoughts more
profound, with a wilder music, a more variable colour ;
others have been romantic, realistic, classical, and
tumultuous ; have brought a remote magic into verse,
and have made verse out of sorrowful things close at
hand. But while all these men have been singing
themselves, and what they have counted most individual
in themselves, this man has put into his verse only
what remains over when all the others have finished.
It is a kind of essence ; it is what is imperishable in
perfume ; it is what is nearest in words to silence.
Of the writer of "Will love again awake," or "I
love all beauteous things," you know no more than
you know of the writer of "Kind are her answers," or
of " O Love, they wrong thee much," in the Eliza-
bethan song-books. You know only that joy has come
harmoniously into a soul, which, for the moment at
least, has been purged of everything less absolute
than the sheer res})onsiveness of song. And so, better
than the subtlest dramatist, the lyric poet, in his fine,
self-sacrificing simplicity, can speak for all the world,
scarcely even knowing that he is speaking for himself
at all. And in this poetry, it should be noted, nothing
is allowed for its own sake, not even the most seductive

virtue, as pathos, the ecstasy of love or of religion ; but

•.'07

2o8 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

everything for the sake of poetry. Here is an artist
so scrupulous that beauty itself must come only in sober
apparel, joy only walking temperately, sorrow without
the private disfiguring of tears. Made, as it is, out
of what might be the commonplace, if it were not the
most select thing in the world; written, as it is, with
a deliberatcness which might be cold if it were not
at that quiet heat in which rapture is no longer
astonished at itself; realising, as it does, Coleridge's
requirement that "poetry in its higher and purer
sense " should demand " continuous admiration, not
regular recurrence of conscious surprise " ; this poetry,
more than almost any in English, is art for art's sake;
and it shows, better certainly than any other, how that
formula saves from excess, rather than induces to it.
So evenly are form and substance set over against one
another that it might be said, with as much or as little
justice, that everything exists for form, or that nothing
is sacrificed to it.

Listen, for instance, to a song which gives us Mr
Bridges at his best :

** I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unniemoried scents.
A honeymoon delight, —
A joy of love at sight,
That ages in an hour : —
My song be like a flower !

I have loved airs, that die
Before their charm is writ
Along a liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it.
Notes, that with pulse of fire
Proclaim the spirit's desire.
Then die, and are nowhere : —
My song be like an air!

ROBERT BRIDGES 209

Die, song, die like a breath,
And wither as a bloom :
Fear not a flowery death.
Dread not an airy tomb !
Fly with delight, fly htnce !
'Twas thine love's tender sense
To feast ; now on thy bier
Beauty shall shed a tear."

Technique in the writing of a song which shall be
simply a song, and in the purity and subtlety of style,
can go no further ; every word seems to be chosen for
its beauty, and yet, if we look into it, is chosen equally
for its precision ; every word sings, and yet says what
it means, as clearly as if it had no musical notes to
attend to. And here, as elsewhere in Mr Bridges'
work, every epithet has at once originality and dis-
tinction, a gentlemanly air of ease at finding itself where
it is, though in a society wholly new to it. "Magic
tents," for the enveloping petals of a flower; the word
" unmemoried," used of scents, to which it is common
to attribute the memories they awaken or recall in
human minds ; " faint attire of frightened fire," used
of the palm willow in spring; the vision of " un-
canopied sleep flying from field and tree " at dawn ;
the "astonisht" Saracen, whom the Crusader, before

" His hands by death were charm'd
To leave his sword at rest,"

crossed the sea to send into hell ; the " soft unchrisren'd
smile" of Eros: all these unusual and inevitable
epithets, each an act of the imagination, sharp, un-
erring, but never surprising, seem to unite in themselves
just those contrary qualities which should combine to
make perfect style in verse. Mr Meredith, caring
mostly for originality, invents for every noun an adjec-
tive which has never run in harness with it, and which

2IO STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

cli;imps and rears intractably at its side. Mr Swinburne,
preferring what goes smoothly to what comes startlingly
from a distance, chooses his epithets for their sound
and for their traditional significance, their immediate
appeal, sensuous or intellectual. Mr Bridges obtains
his delicate, evasively simple effects by coaxing
beautiful, alien words to come together willingly,
and take service with him, as if they had been born
under his care.

Unlike most poets, Mr Bridges is a cultivated musician,
and has, indeed, twice written the "book of words"
for music : once for Sir Villiers Stanford's oratorio,
"Eden," and once, in the form of a Purcell Ode, for
the setting of Sir Hubert Parry. Neither experiment
is altogether fortunate, but the study of music has
taught Mr Bridges what the daily practice of it taught
the song-writers of the age of Elizabeth : a delicate,
and in time instinctive, sense of the musical value of
words and syllables, the precise singing quality of
rhythms, with all kinds of dainty tricks, which, if they
come at all, can come only by some rare accident to the
song- writer who is not a musician. To Mr Bridges it
is part of his science, of his equipment as an artist. I
doubt if many of his effects, irresponsible as they often
come to seem, have come to him in his sleep ; it is
almost a point of honour with him, the artist's
scrupulous honour, to know beforehand what he is
going to do, and to do it precisely as he decides upon
doing it.

Mr Bridges' style in verse has been said to lack
originality, and it is true that his finest lyrics might
have found their place among the lyrics in an Eliza-
bethan song-book. And yet they are not archaic, a
going back to the external qualities of style, but a
thinking back, as of one who really, in thought, lives

ROBERT BRIDGES 211

in another age, to which his temper of mind is more
iikin. They are very personal, but personal in a way
so abstract, so little dependent on the accidents of what
we call personality, that it seems the most natural thing
in the world for him to turn to a style which comes to
him with a great, anonymous tradition. He has never
had that somewhat prosaic desire to paint himself
"with all the warts," and he is quite indilferent to the
self-consciousness which goes by the name of originality.
Just as, in his plays, he borrows frankly from any one
who deals in his own merchandise, so in his lyrics he
tries to write only what might have been written in any
time or in any country. In the note to "Achilles in
Scyros " we read: "One passage in my play (I. 518
and foil.) is an imitation of Calderon ; but this is after
Muley's well-known speech in the Principe Const ant e^
which is quoted in most books on Calderon." He
seems almost impersonal in his work, inditlerent whose
it is, his own or another's, as if only its excellence
interested him. And this work, when it is most
narrowly personal, does not so much render moods of
a temperament as aspects of a character. Nobility of
character, a moral largeness, which becomes one with
an intellectual breadth, a certain gravity, simplicity,
sincerity : these count for so much in his work, which
indeed they seem to make. Here is a poem, strangely
named "The Aflliction of Richard," which gives us,
with spare dignity, all this side of Mr Bridges' work :

'• Love not too inucli. But how,
When thou hast made nic sucli,
And dost tliy gifts bestow,
How can T love too much ?

Though I must fear to lose,
And drown my joy in care,
With all its thorns I choose
The path of love and prayer.

212 STITDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Though thou, I know not why,
Didst kill my cliildisli trust,
That breach with toil did I
Repair, because I must :

And spite of frighting schemes,
With which the fiends of Hell
Blaspheme thee in my dreams,
So far I have hoped well.

But what the heavenly key.
What marvel in me wrought
Shall quite exculpate thee,
I have no shadow of thought.

What am I that complain ?
The love, from which began
My question sad and vain.
Justifies thee to man."

There are no heats of passion, no outcries, but an
equable sensitiveness to fine emotions ; a kind of brood-
ing, ahnost continual ecstasy, the quietest ecstasy known
to me in poetry. He demands, and seems to attain,

'* Simple enjoyment calm in its excess,
With not a grief to cloud, and not a ray
Of passion overhot my peace to oppress ;
With no ambition to reproach delay.
Nor rapture to disturb my happiness."

But, among all these suave negatives, he finds or makes
for himself an astringent quality of austere self-control.
It is with a kind of religious fervour, as of one ex-
pressing an old, settled belief, that he says, in perhaps
his best-known lyric :

"I love all beauteous thinj-s,
I seek and adore them ;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his liabty days
Is honoured for tliem.

ROBERT BRIDGES 213

1 too will something make

And joy in the making ;
Altho' to-morrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered on waking."

Made, as it is, on so firm a basis of a character, his art
is concerned with results rather than (as with most
lyric poets) with processes. How many of his poems
seem to lead from meditation straight to action ; to be
expressing something more definite, more formed and
settled, than a feeling divorced from consequences !
"When, as so often, he finds words for an almost
inarticulate delight, it is, for the most part, no
accidental but rather an organic delight to which he
gives utterance : the response of nature to his nature,
of his nature to nature.

Mr Bridges' art is made for simple thoughts, and
direct, though delicate, emotions ; these it renders with
a kind of luminous transparency ; when the thought or
emotion becomes complex the form becomes com-
plicated, and all the subtlety of its simplicity goes out
of it, as a new kind of subtlety endeavours to come in.
Mr Bridges' poetic heat is intermittent, and thus his
felicity ; for all charm in verse, however " frail and
careful," is born of some energy at white heat. At
rare times, even in the short poems, and not only in so
long a poem as, for instance, " Prometheus the Fire-
giver," one feels that the wave of thought or emotion
does not flow broadly and strongly to the end, but
breaks on the way. And so the plays, with all their
meditative and lyrical beauty, their quaint, delicate
dialogue, a grave j^laying with love and Hie, a serious
trifling, bookish and made for an artist's pleasure,
remain, for the most part, interesting experiments, not
achievements. Singularly insubstantial things, spun out

214 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

of gossamer, a web of dainty thoughts and song-like
meditations about passion, with a somewhat uncertain
humour spinning it, they seem to have been made for
the sake of making them, as a poet might write Latin
verses.

By the way one finds all manner of delightful things,
unsubstantial things, things which seem unessential,
but which, all the same, have an enchantment and a
wisdom of their own. There is always delight in
reading any verse which Mr Bridges writes, however he
writes it ; it will have something at least of the un-
seizable form of poetry; that is to say, of the true
spirit of poetry. He thinks in verse ; he writes verse
learnedly and instinctively. Ordinary things when he
says them take on a gravity which is not the gravity of
even the best prose ; they have air about them, and
they sing out of the air. The words in these plays are
for the most part very simple, the things said are very
simple ; but beauty is rarely absent from them. Often
enough it is a beauty of mere adjustment ; the ordinary
appropriate thing is said fittingly. Only occasionally
does any exceptional beauty come into the work, from
which, indeed, it seems to be deliberately excluded.
Parr of the charming, disconcerting manner of the
plays consists in precisely this ordinary unemphatic
manner of writing, this poetry which would be so very
near prose if it were not something wholly different.
Mr Bridges will not indulge himself or you ; there are
no baits for attention, no splendours or violences, not
much passion, not much emotion, not a very vivid or
active life. You are to resign yourself to a somewhat
lulling spell ; you must dream to the end, otherwise the
entertainment is closed to you.

The fact is that Mr Bridges can only reach his
highest point of intensity in the lyric, not in the play.

ROBERT BRIDGES 215

These twilight characters who take distracting events
gently, and can moralise on them as bookish people
would at the moment of their happening (sometimes
condensing the essence of the situation into a few
lovely undramatic lines), have in them but little of the
life-blood which went to the making of the best of the
"Shorter Poems." The genius of Mr Bridges is reti-
cent, exquisitely unemphatic. Drama is all emphasis,
of a kind ; emphasis which it is, indeed, the dramatist's
art to suspend, not to exclude. Mr Bridges has no
emphasis in his dramas ; he writes them as he writes
his lyrics, treating the stage much as he has treated
metre. He has turned metre into his own ways ; he
has drawn out of it his own music, which comes to us
through the plays like violin music written out for a full
orchestra.

In the two parts of "Nero," not intended for the
stage, as most of the other plays are, we find, perhaps,
the nearest approach to what is essentially drama, in
characters and subject-matter. In " The Return of
Ulysses," where the framework and part of the
substance are ready made in Homer, and in " Achilles
in Scyros," which is full of happy poetry, not twisted
into some childish shape for the mere ingenuity of the
twisting, we find a more continuous quality of charm
than in the other plays, with merits less purely technical.
But even in these it is beauty of detail, rather than
structural beauty, which appeals to us ; and, in these as
in the other plays, we remember single lines and
passages rather than cither characters or situations.

" Prometheus " returns to me in these lines :

" I sec the cones
And needles of the fir, wliich by the wind
In melancholy places ceaselessly
Sighing are strewn upon tiic tufted floor ; "

P

2i6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

•'Achilles" in such lines as

" that old god
Whose wisdom buried in the deep hath made
The unfathomcd water solemn,"

or

" questioning the high decrees
By which the sweetly tyrannous stars allot
Their lives and deaths to men ; "

and " The Humours of the Court " characterises itself
in the wholly undramatic picture-making of this beauti-
ful speech :

" All this hour
I have seemed in Paradise : and the fair prospect
Hath quieted my spirit : I think I sail
Into the windless haven of my life
To-day with happy omens : as the stir
And sleep-forbidding rattle of the journey
Was like my life till now. Here all is peace :
The still fresh air of this October morning,
With its resigning odours ; the rich hues
Wherein the gay leaves revel to their fall ;
The deep blue sky ; the misty distances,
And splashing fountains ; and I thought I heard
A magic service of meandering music
Threading the glades and stealing on the lawns."

"Eros and Psyche," a narrative after Apuleius, has the
coldness of work done, however sympathetically, as task-
work, and is but half alive. Like the plays, it is an
experiment, one of the learned, laborious diversions of
the scholar who is part of this poet.

In the sixty-nine sonnets, called " The Growth of
Love," we find another kind of experiment. Here Mr
Bridges plays solemn variations on the theme which is,
he tells us,

" My contemplation and perpetual thought."

ROBERT BRIDGES 217

Every sonnet has a calm, temperate skill of its own ;
some of the sonnets come to us with precisely the accent
of the lyrics ; some might be belated Elizabethan
sonnets ; others translations from early Italian poetry ;
others, as here, have almost the note of Milton :

" The dark and serious angel, who so long
V'ex'd his immortal strength in charge of me,
Hath smiled for joy and tied in liberty
To t;ike his pastime with the peerless throng.
Oft had I done his noble keeping wrong,
Wounding his heart to wonder what might be
God's purpose in a soul of such degree ;
And there he had left me but for mandate strong.

But seeing thee with me now, his task at close
He knoweth, and wherefore he was bid to stay.
And work confusion of so many foes :
The thanks that he doth look for, here I pay,
Yet fear some heavenly envy, as he goes
Unto what great reward I can not say."

But with all this fine skill, this serious and interesting
substance, even these sonnets are work which is not Mr
Bridges' real work. They are written around a subject,
they do not give inevitable words to that love to which
they are consecrated. As we read each sonnet we say :
How fine this is ! and when we have read them all we
say : How fine they all are I The poet who, in his
lyrics, seems to speak for all the world, telling every
one some intimate secret which has never whispered
itself before, speaks now for himself, and finds himself
unconsciously generalising. He seems to rc])eat only
what others have said before him ; admirable things, to
which he adds the belief of experience, but with no
quickening of the pulses.

The exact filling of a given form has always been one
of the main preoccup;itions of this artist, as it should be
of every artist. And it is not necessary to read Mr

2i8 8TIU)IES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Bridges' treatise on the prosody of Milton to realise how
completely he has apprehended everything that is to his
pnrpose in the science of verse. Limiting himself,
indeed, far less than Coventry Patmore, Mr Bridges has
somewhat the same resoluteness in subordinating tech-
ni(]ue to style. His verse has a unity of elFect, so care-
fully prolonged that only by reading attentively do you
discover the elaboration of this severe, simple, unem-
phatic verse, in which a most learned and complex
variety of cadence is used to support, with adornment,
indeed, but with no weak or distracting adornment, the
single structure. Where many artists have the air of
olTcring you their choicest things with a certain (what
shall 1 say .^) emphasis, as if calling your attention to
what you might possibly overlook, Mr Bridges, when he
is most lavish, uses the most disguise, and would gladly
pass oiF upon you his gold coin as if it were a counter.
It is all the modesty of his pride: be assured that he
knows the worth of his gold far better than you do.

In one of his sonnets Mr Bridges has told us very
clearly what it is that he aims at, and what he refrains
from, in his work. Let us take him at his word ;

" I live on hope and that I think do all
Who come into this world, and since I see
Myself in swim with such good comp;my,
I take my comfort whatsoe'er befall.
I abide and abide, as if more stout and tall
My spirit would grow by waiting like a tree ;
And, clear of others' toil, it ])leaseth me
In dreams their quick ambition to forestall.

And if thro' careless eagerness I slide
To some accomplishment, I give my voice
Still to desire, and in desire abide.
I have no stake abroad ; if I rejoice
In what is done or doing, I confide
Neither to friend nor foe my secret choice."

ROBERT BRIDGES 21.

" The art that most I loved, but httle used," he says,
speaking of poetry, and contrasts himself with those of
his friends who have sought positive attainments,

" While I love beauty, and was born to rhyme."

He wraps a haughty indifference round him like a mantle,
not without some of that sensitiveness which resents
praise no less than censure, because it demands accept-
ance, unquestioning homage, rather than even so much
equality as the man who praises must claim towards the
man whose worth he has weighed before praising. Mr
Bridges takes some pains to impress upon us that he is
something more than a poet, and that, even in so far as
he is a poet, he is not wholly at our service. In another
sonnet he tells us what select kind of immortality he
chooses to desire for himself:

0 my uncared-for songs, what are ye worth,
That in my secret book with so much care

1 write you, this one here and that one there.
Marking the time and order of your birth ?
How, wuh a fancy so unkind to mirth,

A sense so hard, a style so worn and hare,

Look ye for any welcome anywhere

From any shelf or heart-home on the earth ?

Should others ask you this, say then I yearn'd
To write you such as once, wlx'n I was young,
Finding I should have loved and thereto turn'd.
' Twere something yet to live again among
The gentle youth beloved, and where 1 learn'd
My art, be there remembered for my song."

Even this reward, he seems to say to us, hv can do
withcnit, reserving w himself his "joy in the making."

To Mr Ijiidges, undoubtedly, ihcrc is something of
an actual "joy" in making poetry, in tlie mere writing
of verse. No one in our time has written verse more

220 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

consciously and more learnedly, with a more thorough
realisation of all those effects which are commonly
supposed to come to poets by some divine accident.
Moreover, he has thought out the question of English
prosody in a way of his own, correcting, as it seems to
me, certain errors of theorists, and correcting them upon
a principle which has consciously or unconsciously been
present to the best writers of English verse in all ages.
I will quote from his book on Milton's prosody what
seems to be the essential part of his theory :

" Immediately English verse is written free irom a numeration of
syllables, it falls back on the number of stresses as its determining law:
that is its governing power, and constitutes its form; and this is a
perfectly different system from that which counts the syllables. It
seems also the most natural to our language; and I think that the
confusion which exists with regard to it is due to the fact that stress
cannot be excluded from consideration even in verse that depends
primarily on the number of syllables. The two systems are mixed in
our tradition, and they must be separated before a prosody of stress can
arise. But if once the notion be got rid of that you must iiave so many
syllables in a line to make a verse, or must account lor the supernumerary
ones in some such manner as the Greeks or Latins would have done,
then the stress will declare its supremacy, which, as may be seen ir
Shakespeare and Milton, it is burning to do. Now the primary law of
pure stressed verse is, that there shall never be a conventional or
imaginary stress : tliat is, the verse cannot make the stress, because it is the
stress that makes the verse. . . . If the number of stresses in each line
be fixed, and such a fixation would be the metre, and if the stresses be
determined only by the language and its sense, and if the syllables
wliich thc'v have to carry do not overburden them, then every Ime may
have a different rhythm ; tliough so much variety is not of necessity.
... 1 will only add that when English poets will write verse governed
honestly by natural speech-stress, they will discover the laws for them-
selves, and will find open to them an infinite field of rhythm as yet
untouched. There is nothing which may not be done in it, and it is
perhaps not the least of its advantages that it is most difficult to do
well."

All Mr Bridges' work in verse is an illustration of
this theory, and it is because this theory is, as he

ROBERT BRIDGES 221

says, " too simple to be understood," that he has been
accused of writing verse which is difficuh to scan.
Read verse for the sense (that is what he really says
to us), and if the verse is correctly written the natural
speech-emphasis will show you the rhythm. Take,
for instance, the last of the "Shorter Poems." The
last stanza reads :

" Fight, to be found fighting : nor far away
Deem, nor strange thy doom.
Like this sorrow 'twill come,
And the day will be to-day."

The first line of the poem reads :

(( Weep not to-day : why should this sadness be ? "

a line which appears quite normal, from the conventional
standpoint of syllables and according to a conventional
accent. Yet what a surprising and altogether admir-
able variety is introduced into this metre by the first
line which I have quoted from the last stanza I Read
it according to the rules by which, we are commonly
taught, Knghsh verse is governed, and it is incorrect,
scarcely a verse at all. Read for the sense, say it as
you would say it if it were prose, and you were speak-
ing it without thinking about accents or syllables, and
its correct ease, its legitimate beauty, its unforced
expressiveness, reveal themselves to you at once. At
times Mr liridgcs does not trust his own words enough,
and puts needless accents on them, as in the poem
which begins with the wavering and delicate line:

" I'hc storm is over, the land hushes to rest,"

where he prints the last line but one in this barbarous
way :

"See! slcc|) liatli fallen: the trees are asleep."

222 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

Th;it line needs but to be read, like all the others, for
its sense, with the natural pauses of the voice, and it
cannot be read wrongly. It is only in one point that
Mr Bridges seems to me inconsistent with his own
theory, in which natural speech is so rightly accepted
as the test and standard of verse. He admits, as in
the lines I have quoted, inversions which would be
impossible in natural speech :

" nor far away
Deem, nor strange thy doom."

Now an inversion for the sake of rhyme or rhythm is
as bad as a conventional accent, is indeed an inexcusable
blemish in a poem written frankly in the language of
to-day, and presenting itself to us with so familiar a
simplicity. It is a "poetic licence," and for poetic
licences poetry, at all events modern poetry, has no
room.

If the quality of Mr Bridges' poetry, apart from its
many qualities as an art, were to be summed up in a
word, there is but one word, I think, which we could
use, and that word is wisdom; and for the quality of
his wisdom there is again but one word, the word
temperance. This poet, collectedly living apart, to
whom the common rewards of life are not so much
as a temptation, has meditated deeply on the conduct
of life, in the freest, most universal sense ; and he has
attained a philosophy of austere, not unsmiling content,
in which something of the cheerfulness of the Stoic
unites with the more melancholy resignation of the
Christian; and, limiting himself so resolutely to this
sober outlook upon life, though with a sense of the
whole wisdom of the ages :

" Then oft I turn the page
In which our country's name,

ROBERT BRIDGES 223

Spoiling the Greek of fame,
Shall sound in every age :
Or some Terentian play
Renew, whose excellent
Adjusted folds betray
How once Menander went :

>>

limiting himself, as in his verse, to a moderation which
is an infinite series of rejections, he becomes the wisest
of living poets, as he is artistically the most faultless.
He has left by the way all the fine and coloured and
fantastic and splendid things which others have done
their utmost to attain, and he has put into his poetry the
peace and not the energies of life, the wisdom and not
the fever of love, the silences rather than the voices
of nature. His whole work is a telling of secrets, and
they are told so subtly that you too must listen to
overhear them, as he has been listening, all his life,
to the almost inaudible voices of those " flames of the
soul " which are the desire and the promise of eternal
beauty.

19

01,

AUSTIN DOBSON

The qualities of Mr Austin Dobson's work are known,
for, by an accident which sometimes comes to surprise
even the most disinterested of workers, his work is
popular. Many have even paid him the compliment,
from their own point of view, of ranking him, as a poet,
with those amiable, intelligent, often scholarly persons,
such as Mr Locker-Lampson, who have made facile verses
about books and wines on the afternoons when they
were at leisure. He has written, it is true, a good deal
of vers de societe, some of which he frankly acknow-
ledges on the head-lines ; and to distinguish between
light verse, which is poetry, and vers de societe^ which
is what it calls itself, will certainly not be easy for the
casual reader, especially as Mr Dobson is continually
bridging the distance with flying pontons. It is re-
assuring to think that he is probably best known by
his least valuable work, by what is sentimental in it, or
merely amusing. But, in a certain sense, he is genuinely
popular for many genuine qualities of his art, only these
qualities mean something much more, sometiiing often
different, to the careful student of his poetry. Who,
then, does not know

*' The song where not one of the graces
Tight-laces " ;

the verse which trips on daintier feet than any verse of

our time; well-bred verse which dresses in quite the

most severe French taste, wears no rouge except with

fancy dress, and can sing with as fresh a voice as if it
224

AUSTIN DOBSON 225

were not singing in a drawing-room ? His eighteenth-
century muse passes easily from Enghmd to France,
and it is not fanciful to note the partly French origin
of this after all so English writer coming into evidence
in a score of little ways, ways as minute as the prefer-
ence for single and double rhymes intermingled, after
the manner of French masculine and feminine rhyming.
The scholarship turned courtly (as of some abbe who
writes madrigals for the Marquise), the ease of fasti-
dious wit, the tancy brought back from her far voyages,
and at home, by preference, in a garden, all these,
these unique qualities, it is impossible not to see in the
poems of Mr Dobson. He paints, of course, genre
pictures, brings the whole apparatus of the connoisseur
daintily into verse, writes in imitation of Pope, of Prior,
and with a worthy flattery in the action ; renders Horace
in triolets, and Holbein in a chant royal. His wit and
significance in the use of proper names, allusions, the
French language ; his wit and delicacy in rhyme, the
rare discretion of his epithets, are all evident, and not
likely to be overlooked. And when he chooses to be
entirely serious, as in perhaps his finest poem, "The
Sick Man and tlie Birds," how natural it seems to him,
after all his evasions, to speak, as it is most natural to
the poet to speak, directly!

Most of his poetry is an evasion ; and it becomes, in
its very frivolity, j^oetry, because it is an evasion. In
its indirect, smiling, deliberate way of dealing with life,
(hoosing those hours of carnival, when for our allotted
time we put on masks, and coloured dresses, and dance
a mea.sure or two with strangers, it is an escape, an
escape from life felt to be about to become over-
jiowering. Do we not, among ourselves, avoitl tlic
expression of a dec'|)ly-felt emotion, in order i]i;it we
inay not intensify the emotion itself by giving it words.'*

2 26 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

.^^W— ■ ■■ I ■ — ■ __ _ I ■ ■■—■—I ■■■ III ■■— Hff|MggMMW<Mi—l^ W

This light poetry, seeming to be occupied so largely
with the things thiit miitter least to us in the world, is
human in a most closely human way ; and by its very-
evasion it confesses the power and oppression of those
deep emotions which it is like us in trying to escape.

The quality which I find, even in those which seem
least likely to occasion it of these transparent ''Proverbs
in Porcelain," these lilting old French forms, these trot-
ting ballads of the time of the Georges, is the quality of
pathos. It is that pathos of things fugitive, flowers,
beauty, the bloom on any fruit, sunshine in winter. It
is what touches us, what we feel, without our quite
realising the paradox of its appeal to us, not only in
the frail, rose-leaf art of Watteau (where it is no doubt
part of the intention), but in the certainly unintended
suggestion of those eighteenth-century fans painted
with gallant devices, those seventeenth-century gavottes
written for courtly measures ; and is there not perhaps
something of the same reason for the melancholy so
strangely islanded in the heart of whirling gaiety of the
German dance-rhythms of to-day? In the Capitoline
Museum at Rome, in a room filled with busts of the
emperors, there is one bust, that of Julia, the daughter
of Titus, which has for me precisely the charm and
pathos of those fragile things to which this kind of art
gives something of the consecration of time. The little
fashionable head, so small, eager, curled so elaborately
for its life of one fashionable day, and seeming to be so
little at home in the unexpected, perpetuating coldness
of marble : what has such as this to do with the dignity
of death?

"But where is the Pompadour, too? "

asks Mr Dobson :

" This was the Pompadour's Fan ! "

AUSTIN DOBSON 227

And it is because he has apprehended so deeply the
carnival hours of Hfe, with all that they have of the
very unconsciousness of flight ; because he has shown
us youth, fashion, careless joy, in their unconcern of
to-morrow, when youth will be one step further into
the shadow it casts before it, and fashion will retire
before other plumes, and careless joy sadden at a mere
change of the wind ; it is because he has these " artless,
ageless things to say," with so vivid, and so reluctant,
a sense of what can be said lightly, daintily, with sulli-
cient sincerity, during that bright hour's "indeflnite
reprieve," that he is a poet, where most writers of
light verse (to whom the moment is seen but from the
moment's point of view) are but rhymers for drawing-
rooms. Writing as he does of the matters, and appa-
rently in the tone, which are sufficient for the day to
most worldly-wise people, his point of view is never
that of the worldly-wise gentleman of the clubs, who is
often to be found admiring him for what he thinks is
a similarity of tastes. It is always the point of view of
the poet, and of a poet to whom no sensation comes
without its delicate after-thought of wisdom.

I do not say that the whole of his work is of this
value which I find typical of it. And, in particular, I
do not say that this implicit quality of pathos is not
sometimes, to its peril, explicit. Such popular pieces
as '''J'he Clhild-Musician," in which the pathos is said
instead of seen, drop at once into a different order of
work. A direct appeal to the sentiment of tears, a
demand on one"s sympathy : any of our Adelphi arti-
ficers can move us with that, and leave us ashamed of
our emotion afterwards. A newspaper paragraph will
do as much ; the sight, in the street, of a woman
sobbing in a doorway. That pathos, ethereal and yet
enduring as the little life of roses living on in the

228 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

immort'ality of the vinaigrette, which I find in wluitevcr
IS good of Mr Dobson's work, is entirely a pathos of
second thoughts; something which is not in the picture,
but without which the picture would not be what it is,
a picture of %om.e fete gciLinte, seeming to exist for itself,
in so fragile a moment's happiness, that it appeals to
our pity as irony does, touching the artistic sense in us
of the paradox of life.

In Mr Dobson's work, as I have said, we get, frankly,
vers de societe as well as poetry ; and it might be
interesting to discriminate between whatever, in his
work, belongs to the one or the other order. It is
unsafe to neglect so much as a single piece in his
collection, for you are never safe from a surprise, and
you will find touches of genuine poetry in the most
unexpected places. But for the most part he is at his
best when he is furthest away from our time ; and for
an obvious enough reason. It is only past fashions that
can appeal to us as being in themselves poetical. When
they are of our time they are, in themselves, but so
much decoration ; they have even a touch of comedy in
their nearness to us. That is why Mr Dobson's poems
of the present day, in which he deals with manners as
manners, are with difficulty accepted as poetry; and
why the verse-writers of " tea-cup times," who in those
times wrote of their tea-cups, scarcely seem to us poets.
While the fan was still between the ringed fingers of
the Pompadour, it was but a pretty piece of decoration ;
it is only now that the

" Chicken-skin, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Vanloo,"

becomes stuff for poetry, becoming a symbol of those
silken ways by which the fates of nations went, when
the fan was of equal weight with the sceptre. But Mr

AUSTIN DOBSON 229

Dobson, who has the true artist's love of difficulties to
conquer, has done that most difficult of things, making
poetry out of the ribbons of to-day, and for the wearer
of those ribbons. Well, let the " English girl, divine,
demure," for whom he has told us he sings, take the
pretty compliment, as the probably not more compre-
hensive Marquise of Moiiere took the compliments of
her "last poet " : who should quarrel with the flattering
tongue of a dedication ? Mr Dobson knows well
enough that he has not written his poems for young
ladies, nor for to-day's homage. He has done his day's
work for the work's sake, and he has finished perfectly
a small, beautiful thing : a miniature, a bust, a coin.

" All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us ;
The Bust outlasts the throne — ■
The Coin, Tiberius."

1897.

MR W. B. YEATS

I

Mr Yeats is the only one among the younger English
poets who has the whole poetical temperament, and
nothing but the poetical temperament. He hves on one
plane, and you will find in the whole of his work, with
its varying degrees of artistic achievement, no unworthy
or trivial mood, no occasional concession to the fatigue
of high thinking. It is this continuously poetical
quality of mind that seems to me to distinguish Mr
Yeats from the many men of talent, and to place him
among the few men of genius. A man may indeed be
a poet because he has written a single perfect lyric.
He will not be a poet of high order, he will not be a
poet in the full sense, unless his work, however unequal
it may be in actual literary skill, presents this un-
deviating aspect, as of one to whom the act of writing
is no more than the occasional flowering of a mood into
speech. And that, certainly, is the impression which
remains with one after a careful reading of the revised
edition of Mr Yeats' collected poems and of his later
volume of lyrics, "The Wind among the Reeds." The
big book, now reissued with a cover by a young artist
of subtle and delicate talent. Miss Althea Gyles, con-
tains work of many kinds ; and, among mainly lyrical
poems, there are two plays, "The Countess Cathleen "
and "The Land of Heart's Desire." "The Countess
Cathleen" is certainly the largest and finest piece of
work which Mr Yeats has yet done. Its visionary

ecstasy is firmly embodied in persons whose action is

230

hjJL^L.^ ll^^ l^tf^-^

MR W. B. YEATS 231

indeed largely a spiritual action, but action which has
the lyrical movement of great drama. Here is poetry
which is not only heard, but seen; forming a picture,
not less than moving to music. And here it is the
poetry which makes the drama, or I might say equally
the drama which makes the poetry ; for the finest
writing is always part of the dramatic action, not a
hindrance to it, as it is in almost all the poetical plays
of this century. In the long narrative poem contained
in the same volume, "The Wanderings of Oisin," an
early work, much rewritten, a far less mature skill has
squandered lyrical poetry with a romantic prodigality.
Among the lyrics in other parts of the book there are
a few which Mr Yeats has never excelled in a felicity
which seems almost a matter of mere luck ; there is not
a lyric which has not some personal quality of beauty ;
but we must turn to the later volume to find the full
extent of his capacity as a lyric poet.

In the later volume, "The Wind among the Reeds,"
in which symbolism extends to the cover, where reeds
are woven into a net to catch the wandering sounds, Mr
Yeats becomes completely master of himself and of his
own resources. Technically the verse is far in advance
of anything he has ever done, and if a certain youthful
freshness, as of one to whom the woods were still the
only talkers upon earth, has gone inevitably, its place
has been taken by a deeper, more passionate, and wiser
sense of the " everlasting voices " which he has come to
apprehend, no longer {]uite joyously, in the crying of
birds, the tongues of flame, and the silence of the heart.
It is only gradually that Mr Yeats has learn i to become
quite human. Life is the last thing he has learnt, and
it is life, an extraordinarily intense inner life, that I find
in this book of lyrics, which may seem also to be one
long "hymn to intellectual beauty."

Q

232 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

The poems which make up a volume apparently dis-
connected are subdivided dramatically among certain
symbolical persons, familiar to the readers of " The
Secret Rose," Aedh, Hanrahan, Robartes, each of whom,
as indeed Mr Yeats is at the trouble to explain in his
notes, is but the pseudonym of a particular outlook of
the consciousness, in its passionate, or dreaming, or
intellectual moments. It is by means of these dramatic
symbols, refining still further upon the large mytho-
logical symbolism which he has built up into almost a
system, that Mr Yeats weaves about the simplicity of
moods that elaborate web of atmosphere in which the
illusion of love, and the cruelty of pain, and the gross
ecstasy of hope, became changed into beauty. Here is
a poet who has realised, as no one else, just now, seems
to realise, that the only excuse for writing a poem is the
making of a beautiful thing. But he has come finally
to realise that, among all kinds of beaut)'-, the beauty
which rises out of human passion is the one most proper
to the lyric ; and in this volume, so full of a remote
beauty of atmosphere, of a strange beauty of figure and
allusion, there is a " lyrical cry " which has never before,
in his pages, made itself heard with so penetrating a
monotony.

There are love-poems in this book which almost give
a voice to that silence in which the lover forgets even
the terrible egoism of love. Love, in its state of desire,
can be expressed in verse very directly ; but that " love
which moves the sun and the other stars," love to
which the imagination has given infinity, can but be
suggested, as it is suggested in these poems, by some
image, in which for a moment it is reflected, as a flame
is reflected in trembling water. " Aedh hears the cry
of the sedge," for instance ; and this is how the sedge
speaks to him :

MR W. B. YEATS 233

" I wander by the edge
Oi this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge :
Uniii the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and IVest
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Tour head luill not lie on the breast
Of your beloved in sleep."

By such little, unheard voices the great secret is
whispered, the secret, too, which the whole world is
busy with.

" O sweet everlasting Voices be still ;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander obeying your will
Flame under ilame, till Time be no more;
Have you not heard that our hearts are old,
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill.
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?
O sweet everlasting Voices be still."

To a poet who is also a mystic ilicre is a great
simplicity in things, beauty being really one of the
foundations of the world, woman a symbol of beauty,
and the visible moment, in which to love or to write
love songs is an identical act, really as long and short
as eternity. Never, in these love songs, concrete as
they become through the precision of their imagery,
does an earthly circumstance divorce ecstasy from the
impersonality of vision. This poet cannot see love
under the form of time, cannot see beauty except as
the absolute beauty, cannot distinguish between the
mortal person and tiie eternal idea. Hvery rapture
hurries him beyond the edge of the world and beyond
the end of time.

The conception of lyric poetry which Mr Yeats has
perfected in this volume, in which every poem is so

234 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

nearly achieved to the full extent of its intention, may
be clearly defined ; for Mr Yeats is not a poet who
writes by caprice. A lyric, then, is an embodied ecstasy,
and an ecstasy so profoundly personal that it loses the
accidental qualities of personality, and becomes a part of
the universal consciousness. Itself, in its first, merely
personal stage, a symbol, it can be expressed only
by symbol ; and Mr Yeats has chosen his symbolism
out of Irish mythology, which gives him the advantage
of an elaborate poetic background, new to modern
poetry. I am not sure that he does not assume in his
readers too ready an acquaintance with Irish tradition,
and I am not sure that his notes, whose delightfully
unscientific vagueness renders them by no means out of
place in a book of poems, will do quite all that is needed
in familiarising people's minds with that tradition. But
after all, though Mr Yeats will probably regret it,
almost everything in his book can be perfectly under-
stood by any poetically sensitive reader who has never
heard of a single Irish legend, and who does not even
glance at his notes. P'or he has made for himself a
poetical style which is much more simple, as it is much
more concise, than any prose style ; and, in the final
perfecting of his form, he has made for himself a rhythm
which is more natural, more precise in its slow and
wandering cadence, than any prose rhythm. It is a
common mistake to suppose that poetry should be
ornate and prose simple. It is prose that may often
allow itself the relief of ornament ; poetry, if it is to be
of the finest quality, is bound to be simple, a mere
breathing, in which individual words almost disappear
into mu^ic. Probably, to many people, accustomed to
the artificiality which they mistake for poetical style,
and to the sing-song which they mistake for poetical
rhythm, Mr Yeats' style, at its best, will seem a little

MR W. B. YEATS 235

bare, and his rhythm, at its best, a httle uncertain.
They will be astonished, perhaps not altogether pleased,
at finding a poet who uses no inversions, who says in
one line, as straightforward as prose, what most poets
would dilute into a stanza, and who, in his music,
replaces the aria by the recitative. How few, it annoys
me to think, as I read over this simple and learned
poetry, will realise the extraordinary art which has
worked these tiny poems, which seem as free as waves,
into a form at once so monumental and so alive ! Here,
at last, is poetry which has found for itself a new form,
a form really modern, in its rejection of every artifice,
its return to the natural chant out of which verse was
evolved ; and it expresses, with a passionate quietude,
the elemental desires of humanity, the desire of love,
the desire of wisdom, the desire of beauty.

n

I have said that Mr Yeats is the only one among the
younger English poets who has the whole poetical
temperament, and nothing hut the poetical tempera-
ment. He is also the only one who combines a
continuously poetical substance with continuous ex-
cellence of poetical technique. Celtic, if you will, in
the (|uality of his imagination, he has trained that
imaginati(jn to obey him, as the Celtic imagination
rarely obeys those who are for the most part possessed
by it. Seeming to many to be the most spontaneous of
writers, he is really the most painstaking, the most
laboriously conscientious. He makes his visible pictures
out of what has come to liini invisibly, in dreams, in the
energetic abandonment of meditation ; but he rarely
falls into the error of most mystical poets, who render

236 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

1(1 1 I -^'L

their visions literally into that other language of
ordinary life, instead of translating them freely, idiom
for idiom. His verse, lyric and dramatic, has an ecstasy
which is never allowed to pass into extravagance, into
rhetoric, or into vagueness. Though he has doubtless
lost some of the freshness, the fairy quality, of his early
work, that freshness and that fairy quality have been
replaced by an elaborately simple art, which becomes
more and more accomplished, and, in the best sense,
precise. The grace of youth is bound to fade out of
poetry as it fades out of faces ; and all we can hope is
that, as in life, the first grey hairs may bring with them
some of the grey wisdom of experience, so, in art,
time may strengthen what is strong and bring conscious
mastery instead of the unconsciousness of early vigour.
Mr Yeats could not again become so simple, so joyous,
so untouched by human things, as to write another
such poem as "The Lake-Isle of Innisfree " ; but he
can write now with a deeper and more passionate sense
of beauty, more gravely, with a more remote and yet
essentially more human wisdom. And his verse, though
he has come to play more learned variations upon its
rhythms, has become more elaborately simple, more
condensed, nearer in form to what is most like poetry
in being most like prose. It is the mistake of most
writers in verse to form for themselves a purely arti-
ficial kind of rhythm, in which it is impossible to speak
straight. Open " Herod," for instance, at random, and
read :

" Herod shall famous be o'er all the world,
But he shall kill that thing which most he loves."

Now there, in a purely prosaic statement, are two
inversions, which turn what might have been at all
events the equivalent of good prose into what is only

MR W. B. YEATS 237

the parody of poetry. Take one of the most beautiful
and imaginative passages out of " The Shadowy
Waters," and read :

*' The love of all under the light of the sun
Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope,
And bodily tenderness ; but love is made
Imperishable fire under the boughs
Of chrysoberyl and beryl and chrysolite
And chrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx."

Is there a word or a cadence in these lines which
could not have been used equally well in prose, or in
conversation ; and yet, can it be denied that those
lines are exquisite verse, moving finely to their own
music ? To get as far from prose, or from conversation,
as possible : that is the aim of most writers of verse.
But really, the finest verse is that verse which, in
outward form and vocal quality, is nearest to dignified
prose or serious conversation. Turn to some passage
in Shakespeare in which poetical subtlety seems to
refine upon speech to its last possibility of expression ;
the words of Troilus, for instance, as he waits for
Cressida in the orchard :

" I am giddy ; expectation whirls mc round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense : what will it be
When that the watery palate tastes indeed
Love's thrice repured nectar ? Dcatli, 1 fear me,
Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness.
For the capacity of my ruder powers '
I fear it much ; and I do fear besides,
That I siiall lose distinction in my joys;
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying."

In all Shakespeare there is not a passage fuller of

238 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the substance of poetry or finer in the technique of
verse ; yet might not every word have been said in
prose, word for word, cadence for cadence, with the
mere emphasis of ordinary conversation ? And Mr
Yeats has never failed to realise, not only that verse
must be as simple and straightforward as prose, but
that every line must be packed with poetical substance,
must be able to stand alone, as a fine line of verse,
all the more because it challenges at once the standards
of prose and of poetry. It it has so simple a thing to
say as this :

" No, no, be silent,
For I am certain somebody is dead" :

it must say it with the same weight, the same gravity,
as if it had to say : —

" Her eyelids tremble and the white foam fades ;
The stars would hurl their crowns among the foam
Were they but lifted up."

It was the error of Browning, it is the error of many
who have learnt of him everything but his genius, to
realise only that verse must be like speech, without
realising that it must be like dignified speech. Browning
has written the most natural, the most vocal, verse of
any modern poet ; but he has, only too often, chosen
the speech of the clubs and of the streets, rather than
the speech of those who, even in conversation, use
words reverently.

Whether or not Mr Yeats is, or may become, a great
dramatist, one thing is certain : he, and he alone among
English poets since Shelley, has the dramatic sense and
the speech of the dramatist. His plays may seem to
lack something of the warmth of life; but they are
splendidly centred upon ideas of life, and they speak, at

MR \V. B. YEATS 239

their best, an heroic language which is the intimate
language of the soul. When Seanchan, in " The
King's Threshold," dying of hunger, says to the
Chamberlain :

*' You must needs keep your patience yet awhile,
For I have some few mouthfuls of sweet air
To swallow before I am grown to be as civil
As any other dust ; "

when he says to the cripples:

" What bad poet did your mothers listen to
That you were born so crooked ? "

we hear the note of great dramatic speech, in which
poetry is content to seem simpler than prose. We hear
the same speech, not more imaginative, but more
elaborate, in "On Baile's Strand," when Cuchullain
speaks to his sword, and calls it

" This mutterer, this old whistler, this sand-piper.
This edge that's grayer than the tide, this mouse
That's gnawing at the timbers of the world ; "

and, more elaborately yet, but speech always, when he
says:

" I think that all deep passion is but a kiss
In the mid battle, and a difficult peace
'Twixt oil and water, candles and dark night,
Hill-side and hollow, the hot-looted sun
And the cold sliding slippery-footed moon,
A brief forgiveness between op])Osites
That have been hatreds for three times the age
Of this long 'stablished ground."

We feel the instinct or sure science of the dramatist,
his essential proj)crty, more than words, in the- great
discovery of Cuchullain that the man he has killed is
his own son. Cuchullain is sitting on a bench beside a

240 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

blind man and a fool, and the blind man cries out to
the fool : " Somebody is trembling-. Why are you
trembling, fool ? the bench is shaking, why are you
trembling? Is CuchuUain going to hurt us? It was
not I who told you, CuchuUain." And the blind man
says : " It is CuchuUain who is trembling. He is
shaking the bench with his knees." As a stage effect,
and an effect which is greater drama than any words
could be, greater than the fine words which follow, it
would be hard to invent anything more direct, poignant,
and inevitable.

We have often to complain, in reading poetical
plays, that so far as there is poetry and so far as there
is drama, the poetry at the best is but an ornament to
the drama, no structural part of it. Here, on the other
hand, both grow together, like bones and flesh. And,
while it has usually to be said that the characters of
poetical drama speak too much, here condensation is
carried as far as it can be carried without becoming
mere baldness. Each thing said is a thing which had
to be said, and it is said as if the words flowered up
out of a deep and obscure soil, where they had been
germinating for a long time in the darkness. The
silences of these plays are like the pauses in music ; we
have the consciousness, under all the beauty and clear-
ness and precision of the words we hear, of something
unsaid, something which the soul broods over in silence.
The people who speak seem to think or dream long
before speaking and after speaking ; and though they
have legendary names, and meet fantastically on a
remoter sea than that which the Flying Dutchman sails
over, or starve on the threshold of king's palaces that
poetry may be honoured, or fight and die ignorantly
and passionately among disasters which it is their fate
to bring upon themselves, they are human as a dis-

MR W. B. YEATS 241

embodied passion is human, before it has made a home
or a prison for itself among circumstances and within
time. Their words are all sighs, they come out of

" that sleep
That comes with love,"

and out of

"the dreams the drowsy gods
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh."

They are full of weariness and of ecstasy, remember-
ing human things, and mortality, and that dreams are
certainly immortal, and that perhaps there may be a
love which is also immortal. They speak to one
another not out of the heart or out of the mind, but
out of a deeper consciousness than either heart or
mind, which is perhaps what we call the soul. There is
wisdom in these plays as well as beauty ; but indeed
beauty is but half beauty when it is not the cloak of
wisdom, and wisdom, if it is not beautiful, is but a dusty
sign-post, pointing the way ungraciously.

1900, 1904.

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS

The principle of destruction is the principle of life. It
is your business, if you are bringing a new force into the
world, to begin by killing, or at least wounding, a tradi-
tion, even if the tradition once had all the virtues. There
was never a dragon that Perseus or St George killed who
had not been a centre of conservatism and a moral
support. Perseus or St George, it has never thoroughly
been understood, was only able to kill him because his
day was over, and he was getting behind the times.
Dragons in their old age grow weak, and their teeth
drop out before the spear strikes through the roofs of
their mouths. It is not always even so hard and heroic
to put them to death as is generally supposed. But it
is essential.

In poetry there is, indeed, the great unformulated
tradition by which all poetry may be recognised, in
virtue of which all poets are of the same race, as all
well-bred persons are akin. But in exact opposition to
this tradition, which cannot be dated, there is a literary
tradition, new in every age, and at the most of only
temporary value. The writers who found traditions are
mostly good writers ; but the greatest writers inspire
poets without founding traditions. When Wordsworth
destroyed the tradition of Pope he founded a new tradi-
tion of his own which has been fatal to every disciple.
Keats and Shelley made no schools ; we feel their
influence to-day in every writer of fine English verse.
Tennyson founded a tradition of his own, which has
helped more indilferent and uninspired poets to pass
242

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 243

themselves off as excellent and inspired poets than almost
any other tradition in poetry. Tennyson's work seems
to be the kind of work which one can do if one takes
trouble enough. Sometimes it is ; but, after all, has
any one done it quite so well? is there not always some
essential thing left out? Nothing was ever so easy to
copy, and to copy well, well enough to take in the
ignorant. Now the appeal of poetry must always be
chiefly to the ignorant, for in no age have there been
enough discriminating people to make what is called a
public ; that is, if we are speaking of the appeal of the
work of any single generation to that generation.
People to-day have Keats on their table instead of
Robert Montgomery, and some of them are even
beginning to have Mr Bridges instead of Robert Lord
Lytton, because they have been told what to read by
the people whose judgments really matter, and whose
judgments only wait for a little of the corroboration of
time. But the popular poet of a generation, or of a
given moment of that generation, is never chosen because
of his merit ; if he happens to have merit, as in the
case of Tennyson, or as in the case of Victor Hugo,
that is a matter largely beside the question. The mob
is not logical enough or thorough-going enough to
choose always the worst. On the contrary, the mob
frequently chooses a writer of merit, a writer who
deserves tempered praise as well as not unmeasured
reproof.

It is a common mistake to suppose that originality,
perhaps a trifle meretricious, is likely to succeed where
quiet merit passes unobserved. In verse, at all events,
quiet merit (not perhaps so entirely admirable a thing in
an art justly called "inspired") has every chance of
success, where true originality will but disconcert the
student of poetry who has come to love certain formulas.

244 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the formuliis of his masters, which seem to him, as every
form of truth must seem to " young ignorance and old
custom," a form immortal in itself. That there is an
eternal but certainly invisible beauty, it is the joy of the
artist to believe. It is often well for him to believe also
that the ray by which he apprehends infinite light is
itself the essential light. But a limitation, which in the
artist is often strength, shutting him in the more securely
on his own path, in the critic is mere weakness of sight,
an unpardonable blindness. In no two ages of the
world has the eternal beauty manifested itself under the
same form. A classic beauty of order to Sophocles, a
Gothic beauty of exuberant and elaborate life to Shake-
speare, perfume to Hafiz, a self-consuming flame to
Catullus, it has revealed itself to every lover under a
new disguise. We cannot study old masters too much,
for they, by their surprising divergence from one
another, teach us to express ourselves in a way as novel
as their own. They ask for our homage in passing,
then to be forgotten in a new life which has no leisure
for looking back. They say to us : worship your idol,
and then turn your back on your idol ; we also burned
the idols of our fathers, that we might warm ourselves
at a fire, and put heat into our blood, and be ready for
the next stage of the journey.

Now the merit by which Mr Stephen Phillips has
attracted attention is not the merit by which a new force
reveals itself It is not a new revelation of beauty ; it
is the tribute to an already worshipped beauty by
which a delicate and sensitive nature, too reverent
to be a lover, proclaims the platonic limitations of his
affection.

The problem of Mr Stephen Phillips lies in the
answer to two questions : what constitutes original
poetry ? and what constitutes dramatic poetry ? It is to

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 245

the bar of these two questions that I propose to summon
Mr Phillips.

First, let me state the case for the defence. Turning
to the press-notices at the end of Mr Phillips' various
volumes, I learn that, to the Daily Chronicle^ " Christ in
Hades," " has the Sophoclean simplicity so full of subtle
suggestion, and the Lucretian solemnity so full of
sudden loveliness ; and the result is Virgilian." Mr
Churton Collins, in the Pall Mall Gazette^ is sure that
" it may be safely said that no poet has made his debut
with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary
merit and so rich in promise " as the "Poems." The
Times finds in it " the indefinable quality which makes
for permanence"; the Globe^ "an almost Shakespearean
tenderness and beauty." "Here is real poetic achieve-
ment— the veritable gold of song," cries the Spectator ;
and Literature asserts that " no man in our generation,
and few in any generation, have written better than
this." The famous names brought in for incidental
comparison, on hardly less than terms of equality, are,
not only, as we have seen, Shakespeare, Sophocles,
Lucretius, and Virgil, but also Dante, Milton, Landor,
and Rossetti. Of " Paolo and Francesca" we are told
by Mr William Archer in the Daily Chronicle that here
" Mr Phillips has achieved the impossible. Sardou could
not have ordered the action more skilfully, Tenny-
son could not have clothed the passion in words of purer
loveliness." In the Mornin\r Post, Mr Owen Seaman tells
us that " Mr Phillips has written a great dramatic poem
which happens also to be a groat poetic drama. We are
justified in speaking of Mr Phillips' achievement as some-
thing without p.irallel in our age." Mr Churton Collins,
in the Saturday Review, says that, "magnificent as was
the promise of the earlier j)oems, he " was not prepared
for such an achievement as the present work." lie finds

246 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

that " it unquestionably places Mr Phillips in the first
rank ot modern dramatists and of modern poetry. It
does more, it claims his kinship with the aristocrats of
his art, with Sophocles and with Dante." Mr Sidney
Colvin, in the Nineteenth Cetitury^ tells us that "to the
rich poetical production of the nineteenth century it
seems " to him " that Mr Phillips has added that which
was hitherto lacking — notwithstanding so many attempts
made by famous men — namely, a poetical play of the
highest quality, strictly designed for, and expressly
suited to, the stage." Mr William Archer, in the World,
discovers in "Herod" "the elder Dumas speaking with
the voice of Milton " ; while the Daily Graphic, the
Globe, and the Athencsum, as with one voice, announce
in it "an intensity which entitles it to rank with the
works of Webster and Chapman," and assert that "its
grim imagination and fantasy may be compared with that
of Webster," and that " it is not unworthy of the
author of 'The Duchess of Malfi.' " To the Morning
Leader it is " splendidly opulent in conception ; perfect
in construction ; far beyond all contemporary English
effort in the aptitude of its verse to the subject and to
the stage." Of "Ulysses" I have no press notices at
hand, but I see from an advertisement in the Westminster
Gazette, entitled, "Is modern poetry read?" that one
London bookseller is said to have ordered three times as
many copies as he " would have taken of a new poem by
Tennyson, four times as many as for one by Swinburne,
six times as many as for one by Browning." Let this
end the case for the defence.

Poetry is an act of creation which the poet shares with
God, and with none of his creatures. Poetical feeling is
a sensibility which the poet may share with the green-
grocer walking arm-in-arm with his wife, in Hyde Park,
at twilight on Sunday. To express poetical feeling in

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 247

verse is not to make poetry. Poetical feeling can be
rendered with varying success ; it can be trained, im-
proved, made the most of: poetry exists. But as there
is nothing that has not been finely done that cannot be
tamely copied, so in poetry we have continually before
us copies or paraphrases which are often more successful
in their appeal to the public than the originals which
have inspired them. And, as all but the best judges
in painting can be imposed upon by a finely executed
copy of a masterpiece, so in poetry all but the best
judges are often imposed upon by work done con-
scientiously and tastefully after good models. We can
imagine the reader of Mr Phillips' " Poems " pausing
before a line or a passage, and saying. That has almost
the ring of Landor. Another reader will go a step
further and say, It follows Landor so closely that it is as
good as Landor. The third reader will content himself
with saying, It is as good as Landor. And as he says it,
you will not suspect what really lies at the root of the com-
pliment ; you will imagine to yourself something different
from Landor, but as good as Landor in a diiferent way.
Now Mr Phillips' poetry is of the kind that seems,
when we hear it for the first time, to be vaguely familiar.
We cannot remember where we have heard it ; we
cannot remember if we have heard it just as it is, or if
it merely recalls something else. But we are at once
disposed to say. It is poetry, because it reminds us of
other poetry that we have read. There is a profound
sense in which all pc^etry is alike; in which Villon may
be recognised by his inner likeness, as well as by his
outer unlikeness, to Homer, while Scott shall be dis-
credited by his outer likeness, as well as by his inner
unlikeness, to Homer. l^ut the poetry that is at once
recognised by its resemblance to other poetry must
always be second-rate work, because it is work done at
s

24S STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

second-hand, work which has come into the world a
foundhng, and has had to adopt another man's house
for its maintenance.

The most conspicuous influence on Mr Stephen
Phillips in his " Poems " is Tennyson, and not the
mature Tennyson, but the Tennyson of " Oenone,"
Tennyson at twenty-three. Take these lines, which
represent the low average, hardly that, of " Oenone,"
and read them carefully, weighing all their cadences :

*' O mother, hear me yet before I die.
Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times,
In this green valley, under this green hill,
Even on this hand, and sitting on this stone ?
Seal'd it with kisses, water'd it with tears ?
O happy tears, and how unlike to these !
O happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face ?
O happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight ?

0 death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud,
There are enough unhappy on this earth.

Pass by the happy souls, that love to live :

1 pray thee pass before my light of life,
And shadow all my soul, that I may die.
Thou weighest heavy on the heart within,
Weigh heavy on my eyelids : let me die."

Now read carefully these lines from " Marpessa," and
weigh every cadence, comparing it with the cadences of
Tennyson :

" I should expect thee by the Western ray.
Faded, not sure of thee, with desperate smiles,
And pitiful devices of my dress
Or fashion of my hair : thou wouldst grow kind ;
Most bitter to a woman that was loved. !

I must ensnare thee to my arms, and touch
Thy pity, to but hold thee to my heart.
But if I live with Idas, then we two
On the low earth shall prosper hand in hand
In odours of the open field, and live
In peaceful noises of the farm, and watch

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 249

The pastoral fields burned by the setting sun.
And he shall give me passionate children, not
Some radiant god that shall despise me quite,
But clambering limbs and little hearts that err. "

But for the awkward line ending with the word
"quite," it would be possible to read out those two
passages and to puzzle the hearer as to which was
Tennyson and which Mr Phillips. It may be said that
we are paying Mr Phillips a high compliment by saying
that his verse might be mistaken for the verse of
Tennyson. Is it, after all, a compliment? Would it
be a true compliment if we were able to quote from
Mr Phillips lines resembling these lines, which we take
from one of the finer parts of " Oenone," lines which
appear only in a later edition ?

" Then to the bower they came,
Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower,
And at their feet the crocus brake like fire,
Violet, amaracus, and asphodel.
Lotos and lilies : and a wind arose."

Or, to take Tennyson in a severer mood, read the con-
cluding lines of " Ulysses " :

" We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are we arc ;
One equal temper of heroic hearts.
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Even if, anywhere in Mr Phillips' work, we could find
lines of that calibre exactly, so that they could be mis-
taken for those lines, would it be possil)le to commend
Mr Phillips for any much greater achievement, because
he had been able to do over again what Tennyson did
well, than because he had been able to do over again

250 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

what Tennyson did only moderately well ? That is not
the question. The question is, has this new poet killed
the dragon of a literary tradition ? has he brought the
new life of a personal energy ?

Poetry, I have said, is an act of creation ; poetical
feeling is a form of sensibility. Now in all Mr Phillips'
verse we find poetical feeling ; never the instant, in-
evitable, unmistakable thrill and onslaught of poetry.
When Dante writes .

" Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona " ;

when Shakespeare writes:

" O thou weed,
Who art 80 lovely fair and smcll'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born ! "

when Coleridge writes :

" She, she herself, and only she
Shone through her body visibly " ;

when Blake writes :

" When the stars threw down their spears.
And watered heaven with their tears.
Did He smile His work to see ?
Did He who made the lamb make thee " ?

we are convinced at once, we accept without question ;
there is nothing to argue about. A flower has come
up out of the soil of the earth ; it has all the age of the
earth in its roots, and the novelty of the instant in its
fragrant life. Turn to Mr Phillips, and to an admired
passage :

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 251

" So bare her soul that Beauty like a lance
Pureed her, and odour full of arrows was."

One hesitates ; one says, is that really good, or only
apparently good ? There is something in the idea, but
has the idea found its "minutely appropriate words"?
Change a word or two, turn it into prose, say it without
inversion : " Her soul was so naked that Beauty pierced
her like a spear, and odour was full of arrows to her."
Is not that, in prose, finer than it was in verse ? The
verse, in Mr Phillips, reaches a high general level, but
never the absolute. Now a high general level, without
the absolute, means infinitely less than a general level,
imperfect either in substance or in workmanship, with
here and there the absolute. It is the difference between
the "bounding line" of life and the more or less dis-
cernible outline of a shadow. In real poems, slight or
brief though they may be, we have the single ima-
ginative act ; something has been done which has
never been done before, and which will never be done
again. Until that has been done it is of slight interest
to consider how many other excellent qualities a work
may contain. Mr Phillips has laid the paper, the sticks,
and the coals neatly in the grate, where they remain, in
undisturbed order, awaiting the flame that never wakens
them into light or heat.

But we have as yet considered only one of the two
questions I proposed to consider, the (juestion : what
constitutes origiiral poetry ? A second (juesiion remains :
what constitutes dramatic poetry ."*

The essential thing in drama is that the drama shouKl
be based upcjn character, that the action should be made
by the characters. Every speech which is not a new
rcvelatiofi of character is an intrusive speech, whatever
irrelcv;int merit it may have as verse, bi the poetic
drama it is imjH)ssible to disentangle j-ioetry fioni ch.irac-

252 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

ter, or character from poetry. If the two are not one,
neither is satisfactorily present. Coleridge jots down, in
one of his priceless notes : "Item, that dramatic poetry
must be poetry hid in thought and passion — not thought
or passion disguised in the dress of poetry." In the
poetic drama every line of verse must come out of the
heart of the man or woman who speaks it, and as
straight from the heart as if it were in prose. Verse
throws off none of the responsibilities of the playwright,
but rather adds to them, though with its own com-
pensations. Even a prose speech on the stage is not a
precise verbal imitation of the words which people would
probably use under given circumstances. It is permitted
to the dramatist, by the very convention which makes
drama, to express what his characters would like to
express, in a more precise and a more profound way than
that in which they would express themselves if they
were real people. He must do so within the limits of
plausibility ; that is part of his art as a dramatist. But
he must do so, or he will not convey to his audience
what the imperfect stammerings of ordinary conversation
convey to those who know already what to read into
the words and how to interpret the pauses and the
gestures.

In the poetic drama, which, by the mere fact of the
language in which it is written, takes us still further
from the external realities of ordinary conversation,
speech may be, indeed, must be, still further lifted, its
meaning still further deepened. All speech is an
attempt, an admittedly imperfect attempt, to express
the mind's conception of itself, of the universe, and of
its relation to the universe. The best words that have
yet been invented go only a little way into that
mysterious inner world of which the outer world is but
a shadow. Who can say that the first words which come

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 253

to my lips when I am trying to tell some intimate secret
of myself, a secret which I have only half understood,
are nearer to the innermost meaning of that secret than
the carefully chosen and, in some strange way, illu-
minated words by which, if I am a poet, I can hint at
what no human tongue can wholly tell ? When we talk
with one another in any grave moment, we are like
children who talk loudly in the dark to give themselves
courage. We speak out of the midst of an enveloping
darkness ; we understand only a part of what we are
saying, and only partly why we are saying it. The
words are most often false to their real meaning ; they
are nothing. To imitate them precisely would be to
come no nearer to your heart and to mine who have
spoken them. The dramatist must bring speech nearer
to that obscure thing of which speech is but a sug-
gestion ; the poetic dramatist, who speaks in a fmer,
more expressive, and therefore truer, language, may
come much nearer to the truth, to the real meanino- of
words, than the dramatist who writes in prose can ever
come.

Speech, then, in the poetic drama, is not the imitation
of ordinary conversation, it is not the mere turning of
ordinary conversation into verse ; it is a beautiful and
expressive saying aloud of what people have only
thought, or meant, or felt, without being able to put
those thoughts, or intentions, or emotions, into words.
It comes nearer to humanity as it goes further from a
merely literal turning into verse of people's failure to
express themselves. It must carry always the illusion
of words actually spoken ; it must seem to us as if such
or such a person of the drama might have said just those
words if poetry had really been his native language, as
it might be the language native to his soul ; we must
be tricked and led into believing some more subtle truth

254 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

than that which our ears hear and our eyes see. But
let us remember at what distance we are from the
market-place.

Now in all Mr Phillips' plays the action is conceived
first, the characters are fitted into it afterwards, and the
verse is embroidered upon a stilf and empty canvas, with
a merely decorative intention. Mr Phillips has attempted,
to some extent, to copy the form of the Greek, rather
than of the Ehzabethan play, to follow Sophocles rather
than Shakespeare. The attempt is interesting ; it might
have resulted in the creation of a new and wholly
modern thing. The only dramatist since Sophocles in
whom the essential qualities of Sophocles, as a dramatist,
are to be seen, is Ibsen. Ibsen has invented for himself
a form which seems to us absolutely new, and, above all
things, modern. It is new, it is modern, but it is new
and modern in a fine sense because it goes back to the
moment when the drama was most faultlessly conceived
and developed, and finds there, not a thing to copy, but
a principle of life to which its own principle of life cor-
responds. Mr Phillips has tried to copy an outline, but
the outline, drawn, as it is, with skill, remains empty, is
neither filled nor finished, and, at the best, remains
academic, not vital, the outline of Bouguereau, not of
Ingres or of Degas, in whom a similar purity of drawing
achieves such different ends.

Mr Phillips has written for the stage with a certain
kind of success, and he has been praised, as we have
seen, for having "written a great dramatic poem which
happens also to be a great poetic drama." But this
praise loses sight of the difference which exists between
what is dramatic and what is theatrically effective. In
"Paolo and Francesca," in "Herod," and in "Ulysses,"
there are many scenes which, taken in themselves, are
theatrically effective; and it is through this quality,

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 255

which is the quality most prized on the modern EngHsh
stage, that these plays have found their way to Her
Majesty's theatre and to St James's. But take any one
of these scenes, consider it in relation to the play as a
whole, think of it as a revelation of the character of each
person who takes part in it, examine its probability as a
natural human action, and you will find that the people
do, not what they would be most likely to do, but what
the author wishes them to do, and that they say, not
what they would be most likely to say, but what the
author thinks it would be convenient or impressive for
them to say.

What Mr Phillips lacks is sincerity ; and without
sincerity there can be no art, though art has not yet
begun when sincerity has finished laying the foundations.
One is not sincere by wishing to be so, any more than
one is wise or fortunate. Infinite skill goes to the
making of sincerity. Mr Phillips, who has so much
skill, devotes it all to producing effects by means of
action, and to describing those eilects by means of verse.
Paolo and Francesca say gracious things to one another,
gracious idyllic things, which one hears the poet prompt-
ing them to say ; but they always say things, they do
not speak straight out. Nothing that is said by Herod
might not as well be said by Mariamne ; nothing that
is said by either Mariamne or Herod might not better be
said by a third person. When Calypso and Ulysses
talk for the last time on the i^sland, we feel neither the
goddess nor the hero ; but the obvious thought, the
expected emotion, is always exact to its minute. The
people of a great dramatist seem to break away from
their creator ; having set them in motion, he is not
resjionsible for the course they take; he is the auto-
maton, not they. But Mr Phillips' people do but
decorate liis stage, on which they ])rofess to hve and

256 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

move and have their being. They pass, and the scenery-
is changed, and they pass again, or others like them pass ;
and they have said graceful verse, u'ith literary inten-
tions, and they have committed violent actions, with
theatrical intentions ; and nothing that they have done
has moved us, and nothing that they have said has
moved us, and we can always discuss the acting and
the staging.

The characters of a great drama are not limited for
their existence to the three hours during which they
move before our eyes on the other side of a luminous
gulf. Their first words seem to echo back into a past
in which they have already lived intensely ; when they
have left the stage at the end of the play they have all
eternity before them in which to go on living. The
first words of Cleopatra to Antony,

'♦ If it be love indeed, tell me how much,"

have told us already, before she begins to live her pas-
sionate, luxurious, and treacherous life before us, all that
Shakespeare intends us to know of her secret. When
she says proudly, at the moment of death,

" I am fire and air ; my other elements
I give to baser life,"

she is but accepting her rank among the immortal forces.
The mind cannot limit her to the frame of five acts ; the
five acts have existed in order to set her for ever outside
them.

This, then, is the effect of great drama, we might say,
of all genuine drama. With the end of "Ulysses " the
masque is overj of "Herod," the melodrama; of
" Paolo and Francesca," the idyl. What remains with
us? First, the tumult and glitter of the spectacle;

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 257

next, the qualities of the acting ; lastly, a few separate
lines, not essential to the play as a whole, or to the
revelation of any one of the characters, but interesting
in themselves for their idea or for their expression.
The canvas is stretched and threadbare, the pattern
indistinct ; here and there a colour asserts itself, coming
self-consciously out oF the pattern.

I have now examined Mr Phillips' work from the
point of view of poetry, and from the point of view of
drama ; I have indicated why it seems to me that this
work is neither original as poetry nor genuine as drama.
I have indicated why the poetry has been praised by
the critics ; it remains to consider why the drama has
been accepted by the public.

First of all, the public wants, or has been trained to
want, spectacle at the theatre ; and Mr Phillips provides
them with spectacle, on which they can repose their
eyes without troubling their minds by any further con-
siderations. An enthusiastic admirer of " Ulysses,"
advising a friend to go and see the most beautiful play
he had ever seen, and being answered, "But I have
read the play, and do not care for it," exclaimed with
conviction, " Oh, you won't hear the words ! " Yet
there are those who wish to hear the words, and to
whom the words seem full of beauty. These are the
people into whose hands modern education has put all
the great books of the world, all the treasures of all the
arts, and whom it has not taught to discriminate between
what is good and what is second-rate. Ignorance has
its felicities ; the peasant who has read nothing but his
Bible has at least not been trained in the wrong
direction. But there is one thing more fatal than most
other things in the world : the education which gives
facts without reasons, opinions without thoughts, mental
results without the long meditation through which they

258 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

should have come into the mind. There is something
which education, as we see it in our time, violently and
ignorantly at work upon ignorance, can do ; it can
persuade the public that the middle class in literature is
a fine form of intellectual democracy ; it can change the
patterns of our wall-papers into less aggressive patterns;
it can exclude the antimacassar from the back of the
chair on which we rest our head, and the mental image
of the antimacassar from the head which rests on the
back of the chair. But the change in the furniture, the
vague consciousness that a certain piece of furniture is
ugly or unseemly, has not turned an inartistic mind into
an artistic mind ; it has merely changed the model on
the blackboard for a slightly better model. The taste
for melodrama stark naked has faded a little in the
public favour ; we must have our melodrama clothed,
and clothed elegantly. The verse which seemed good
enough for poetical plays ten years ago is not good
enough for us any longer ; we were in the " third
standard " then, we are in the " fourth standard " now.
In an essay on popular poetry Mr Yeats has pointed
out, with unquestionable truth, that "what we call
popular poetry never came from the people at all.
Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs Hemans, and
Macaulay in his Lays, and Scott in his longer poems,
are the poets of the middle class, of people who have
unlearned the unwritten tradition which binds the un-
lettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to
the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
world, and who have not learned the written tradition
which has been established upon the unwritten."
"There is only one good kind of poetry," he reminds
us ; " for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes
the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the
true poetry of the people, which presupposes the un-

MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS 259

written tradition." We live in a time when the middle
class rules ; when the middle class will have its say,
even in art. The judgments of the crowd are accepted
by the crowd ; there are, alas, no longer tyrants. No
man any longer admits that he is ignorant of anything ;
the gentleman who has made his money in South Africa
talks art with the gentleman who has made his money
on the Stock Exchange. Once he was content to buy ;
now he must criticise as well. The gambler from
abroad takes the opinion of the gambler at home ;
between them they make opinion for their fellows.
And they will have their popular poetry, their popular
drama. They, and the shopkeeper, and the young man
brought up at the board school, form a solid phalanx.
They hold together, they thrust in the same direction.
The theatres exist for them ; they have made the
theatres what they are. They will pay their money for
nothing on which money has not been squandered. A
poetical play must not be given unless it can be mounted
at a cost of at least ^2000 ; so much money cannot be
risked unless there is a probability that the play will
draw the crowd : is it not inevitable that the taste of
the crowd should be consulted humbly, should be
followed blindly ^ Commercialism rules the theatre, as
it rules elsewhere than in the theatre. It is all a simple
business matter, a question of demand and supply. A
particular kind of article is in denrand at the theatre:
who will meet that demand .'' Mr Phillips comes forward
with plays which seem to have been made expressly for
the purpose. Their defects help them hard I v more
than their merits. They have just enough poetical
feeling, just enough action, just enough spectacle; they
give to the middle-class mind the illusion of an art
" dealing greatly with great passions " ; they give to
that mind the illusion of being for once in touch with

26o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

an art dealing greatly with great passions. They rouse
no disquieting rellections ; they challenge no accepted
beliefs. They seem to make the art of the drama easy,
and to reduce poetry at last to the general level.

1902.

ERNEST DOWSON

I

The death of Ernest Dowson "will mean very little to
the world at large, but it will mean a great deal to the
few people who care passionately for poetry. A little
book of verses, the manuscript of another, a one-act
play in verse, a few short stories, two novels written in
collaboration, some translations from the French, done
for money ; that is all that was left by a man who was
undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but ii
poet, one of the very few writers of our generation to
whom that name can be applied in its most intimate
sense. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of
what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the
factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare
moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They
will see only a literary alTectation, where in truth there
is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the more
explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets.
Yes, in these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song,
I find, implied for the most part, hidden away like a
secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained
dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift,
disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius.

Ernest Christopher Dowscju was born at The Grove,
Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent, on August 2nd, 1867; he
died at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Clatford, S.K., on Friday
morning, February 23rd, 1 900, and was buried in the
Roman Catholic part of tiic Lewisham Cemetery on

262 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

February 27th. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett,
Browning's "Waring," at one time Prime Minister of
New Zealand, and author of " Ranolf and Amohia,"
and other poems. His father, who had himself a taste
for literature, lived a good deal in France and on the
Riviera, on account of the delicacy of his health, and
Ernest had a somewhat irregular education, chiefly out
of England, before he entered Queen's College, Oxford.
He left in 1887 without taking a degree, and came to
London, where he lived for several years, often revisit-
ing France, which was always his favourite country.
Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived almost
entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never
robust, and always reckless with himself, his health had
been steadily getting worse for some years, and when he
came back to London he looked, as indeed he was,
a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive inde-
pendence which shrank from any sort of obligation,
he would not communicate with his relatives, who
would gladly have helped him, or with any of the
really large number of attached friends whom he had
in London ; and, as his disease weakened him more and
more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings,
refused to see a doctor, let himself half starve, and was
found one day in a Bodega with only a few shillings in
his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to walk,
by a friend, himself in some difHculties, who immediately
took him back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy
outskirt of Catford, where he was himself living, and
there generously looked after him for the last six weeks
of his life.

He did not realise that he was going to die, and was
full of projects for the future, when the £600 which
was to come to him from the sale of some property
should have given him a fresh chance in the world j

ERNEST DOWSON 263

began to read Dickens, whom he had never read before,
with singular zest ; and, on the last day of his life, sat
up talking eagerly till five in the morning. At the very
moment of his death he did not know that he was dying.
He tried to cough, could not cough, and the heart
quietly stopped.

II

I cannot remember my first meeting with Ernest
Dowson. It may have been in 1891, at one of the
meetings of the Rhymers' Club, in an upper room at
the Cheshire Cheese, where long clay pipes lay in slim
heaps on the wooden tables, between tankards of ale ; \

and young poets, then very young, recited their own
verses to one another with a desperate and ineffectual
attempt to get into key with the Latin Quarter.
Though few of us were, as a matter of fact, Anglo-
Saxon, we could not help feeling that we were in
London, and the atmosphere of London is not the
atmosphere of movements or of societies. In Paris it is
the most natural thing in the world to meet and discuss
literature, ideas, one's own and one another's work ;
and it can be done without pretentiousness or constraint,
because, to the Latin mind, art, ideas, one's work and
the work of one's friends, arc definite and important
things, which it would never occur to any one to take
anything but seriously. In England art has to be pro-
tected, not only against the world, but against oneself
and one's fellow-artist, by a kind of affected modesty
which is the Englishman's natural pose, half pride and
half self-distrust. So this brave venture of the Rhymers'
Club, though it lasted for two or three years, and pro-
duced two little books of verse which will some day be
s

264 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

liteniry curiosities, was not quite a satisfactory kind of
ccnaclc. Dowson, who enjoyed the real thing so much
in Paris, did not, I think, go very often ; but his con-
tributions to the first book of the club were at once the
most delicate and the most distinguished poems which
it contained. Was it, after all, at one of these meetings
that I first saw him, or was it, perhaps, at another haunt
of some of us at that time, a semi-literary tavern near
Leicester Square, chosen for its convenient position
between two stage-doors ? It was at the time when
one or two of us sincerely worshipped the ballet ;
Dowson, alas, never. I could never get him to see
that charm in harmonious and coloured movement, like
bright shadows seen through the floating gauze of the
music, which held me night after night at the two
theatres which alone seemed to me to give an amusing
colour to one's dreams. Neither the stage nor the
stage-door had any attraction for him ; but he came to
the tavern because it was a tavern, and because he
could meet his friends there. Even before that time I
have a vague impression of having met him, I forget
where, certainly at night ; and of having been struck,
even then, by a look and manner of pathetic charm, a
sort of Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats,
and by something curious in the contrast of a manner
exquisitely refined, with an appearance generally some-
what dilapidated. That impression was only accentuated
later on, when I came to know him, and the manner of
his life, much more intimately.

I think I may date my first impression of what one
calls " the real man " (as if it were more real than the
poet of the disembodied verses !) from an evening in
which he first introduced me to those charming supper-
houses, open all night through, the cabmen's shelters,
I had been talking over another vagabond poet. Lord

ERNEST DOWSON 265

Rochester, with a charming and sympathetic descendant
of that poet, and somewhat late at night we had come
upon Dowson and another man wandering aimlessly and
excitedly about the streets. He invited us to supper,
we did not quite realise where, and the cabman came
in with us, as we were welcomed, cordially and without
comment, at a little place near the Langham ; and, I
recollect, very hospitably entertained. The cooking
differs, as I found in time, in these supper houses, but
there the rasher was excellent and the cups admirably
clean. Dowson was known there, and I used to think he
was always at his best in a cabmen's shelter. Without
a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never
quite comfortable, never quite himself ; and at those
places you are obliged to drink nothing stronger than
colfee or tea. I liked to see him occasionally, for a
change, drinking nothing stronger than coffee or tea.
At Oxford, I believe, his favourite form of intoxication
ha_d _be.cn haschisch ; afterwards he gave up this some-
what elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for
readier means of oblivion ; but he returned to it, I
remember, for at least one afternoon, in a company of
which I had been the gatherer and of which I was the
host. I remember him sitting, a little anxiously, with
his chin on his breast, awaiting the magic, half-shy in
the midst of a bright company of young people whom
he had only seen across the footlights. The experience
was not a very successful one; it ended in what should
have been its first symptom, immoderate laughter.

Always, perhaps, a little consciously, but at least
always sincerely, in search of new sensations, my frientl
found what was for him the supreme sensation in a very
passionate and tender adoration of the most escaping of
all ideals, the ideal of youth. Cherished, as I imagine,
first only in the abstract, this search after the immature.

266 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

the ripening graces which time can only spoil in the
ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some of
his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never
of their opinion. I only saw twice, and for a few
moments only, the young girl to whom most of his
verses were to be written, and whose presence in his
life may be held to account for much of that astonishing
contrast between the broad outlines of his life and work.
The situation seemed to me of the most exquisite and
appropriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee,
I believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble
restaurant in a foreign quarter of London, she listened
to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her mother's
eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two
years married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise
more than the obvious part of what was being offered
to her, in this shy and eager devotion ? Did it ever
mean very much to her to have made and to have killed
a poet ? She had, at all events, the gift of evoking,
and, in its way, of retaining, all that was most delicate,
sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I can
only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down
by many feet, but with one small, carefully tended flower-
bed, luminous with lilies. I used to think, sometimes,
j of Verlaine and his " girl-wife," the one really profound
passion, certainly, of that passionate career ; the charm-
ing, child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the
end of his life, with an unchanged tenderness and dis-
appointment: " Vous n'avez rien compris a ma simplicite,"
as he lamented. In the case of Dowson, however, there
was a sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna ; and I
think had things gone happily, to a conventionally happy
ending, he would have felt (dare I say ?) that his ideal
had been spoilt.

But, for the good fortune of poets, things rarely do

ERNEST DOWSON 267

go happily with them, or to conventionally happy end-
ings. He used to dine every night at the little
restaurant, and I can always see the picture, which I
have so often seen through the window in passing : the
narrow room with the rough tables, for the raost part
empty, except in the innermost corner, where Dowson
would sit with that singularly sweet and singularly
pathetic smile on his lips (a smile which seemed afraid
of its right to be there, as if always dreading a re-
buff), playing his invariable after-dinner game of cards.
Friends would come in, during the hour before closing
time ; and the girl, her game of cards finished, would
quietly disappear, leaving him with hardly more than
the desire to kill another night as swiftly as possible.

Meanwhile she and the mother knew that the fragile
young man who dined there so quietly every day was
apt to be quite another sort of person after he had
been three hours outside. It was only when his life
seemed to have been irretrievably ruined that Dowson .
quite deliberately abandoned himself to that craving for \
drink, which was doubtless lying in wait for him in his !
blood, as consumption was also ; it was only latterly, /
when he had no longer any interest in life, that he
really wished to die. But I have never known him \
when he could resist either the desire or the conse- )
quences of drink. Sober, he was the most gentle, in J
manner the most gentlemanly, of men; unselfish to a
fault, to the extent of weakness ; a delightful com-
panion, charm itself Under the influence of drink, he
became almost literally insane, certainly quite irrespon-
sible, lie fell into furious and unreasoning passions;
a vocabulary unknown lu him at other times sprang up
like a whirlwind ; he seemed always about to commit some
act of absurd violence. Along with that forgetfulness
came other memories. As long as he was conscious of

268 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

himself, there was but one woman for him in the world,
and for her he had an infinite tenderness and an infinite
respect. When that face faded from him, he saw all
the other faces, and he saw no more difference than
between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of
the sordid, so common an afi'ectation of the modern
decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him,
and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of
a life which was never exactly " gay " to him. His
father, when he died, left him in possession of an old
dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house,
in that squalid part of the East End which he came to
know so well, and to feel so strangely at home in. He
drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses which
swarm about the docks ; he drifted about in whatever
company came in his way ; he let heedlessness develop
into a curious disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris,
Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe,
where I saw so much of him one summer, he discovered
strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he
made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into
rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after
midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at
the time of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that
riotous Flemish life, with a zest for what was most
sordidly riotous in it. It was his own way of escape
from life.

To Dowson, as to all those who have not been
"content to ask unlikely gifts in vain," nature, life,
destiny, whatever one chooses to call it, that power
which is strength to the strong, presented itself as a
barrier against which all one's strength only served to
dash one to more hopeless ruin. He was not a dreamer ;
destiny passes by the dreamer, sparing him because he
clamours for nothing. He was a child, clamouring for

ERNEST DOWSON 269

so many things, all impossible. With a body too weak
for ordinary existence, he desired all the enchantments
of all the senses. With a soul too shy to tell its own
secret, except in exquisite evasions, he desired the
boundless confidence of love. He sang one tune, over
and over, and no one listened to him. He had only to
form the most simple wish, and it was denied him. He
gave way to ill-luck, not knowing that he was giving
way to his own weakness, and he tried to escape from
the consciousness of things as they were at the best,
by voluntarily choosing to accept them at their worst.
For with him it was always voluntary. He was never
quite without money ; he had a little money of his
own, and he had for many years a weekly allowance
from a publisher, in return for translations from the
French, or, if he chose to do it, original work. He
was unhappy, and he dared not think. To unhappy
men, thought, if it can be set at work on abstract
questions, is the only substitute for happiness ; if it
has not strength to overleap the barrier which shuts one
in upon oneself, it is the one unwearying torture.
Dowson had exquisite sensibility, he vibrated in har-
mony with every delicate emotion ; but he had no
outlook, he had not the escape of intellect. His only
escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd, to fancy
that he lost sight of himself as he disappeared from
the sight of others. The more he soiled himself at that
gross contact, the further would he seem to be from
what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after another
vain illusion, in the delicate places of the world. Seeing
himself moving to the sound of lutes, in some courtly
disguise, down an alley of Watteau's Versailles, while
he touched finger-tips with a divine creature in rose-leaf
silks, what was there left for him, as the dream
obstinately refused to realise itself, but a blind flight

270 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

into some Teniers kitchen, where boors are making merry,
without thought of yesterday or to-morrow? There,
perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could forget
life as he dreamed it, with too faint hold upon his dreams
to make dreams come true.

For, there is not a dream which may not come true,
if we have the energy which makes, or chooses, our
own fate. We can always, in this world, get what we
want, if we will it intensely and persistently enough.
Whether we shall get it sooner or later is the concern
of fate; but we shall get it. It may come when we
have no longer any use for it, when we have gone on
willing it out of habit, or so as not to confess that we
have failed. But it will come. So few people succeed
greatly because so few people can conceive a great end,
and work towards that end without deviating and with-
out tiring. But we all know that the man who works
for money day and night gets rich ; and the man who
works day and night for no matter what kind of material
power, gets the power. It is the same with the deeper,
more spiritual, as it seems vaguer issues, which make
for happiness and every intangible success. It is only
the dreams of those light sleepers who dream faintly
that do not come true.

We get out of life, all of us, what we bring to it ;
that, and that only, is what it can teach us. There are
men whom Dowson's experiences would have made
great men, or great writers ; for him they did very
little. Love and regret, with here and there the sug-
gestion of an uncomforting pleasure snatched by the
way, are all that he has to sing of; and he could have
sung of them at much less " expense of spirit," and, one
fancies, without the " waste of shame " at all. Think
what Villon got directly out of his own life, what
Verlaine, what Musset, what Byron, got directly out of

ERNEST DOWSON 271

their own lives ! It requires a strong man to " sin
strongly "' and profit by it. To Dowson the tragedy of
his own life could only have resulted in an elegy. '' I
have flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng," he
confesses, in his most beautiful poem ; but it was as one
who flings roses in a dream, as he passes with shut eyes
through an unsubstantial throng. The depths into
which he plunged were always waters of oblivion, and
he returned forgetting them. He is always a very
ghostly lover, wandering in a land of perpetual twilight,
as he holds a whispered colloque se?itinie?ita/ with the
ghost of an old love :

" Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glace,
Deux spectres ont evoque le passe."

It was, indeed, almost a literal unconsciousness, as of
one who leads two lives, severed from one another as
completely as sleep is from waking. Thus we get in
his work very little of the personal appeal of those to
whom riotous living, misery, a cross destiny, have been
of so real a value. And it is important to draw this dis-
tinction, if only for the benefit of those young men who
are convinced that the first step towards genius is dis-
order. Dowson is precisely one of the people who are
pointed out as confirming this theory. And yet Dowson
was precisely one of those who owed least to circum-
stances ; and, in succumbing to them, he did no more
than succumb to the destructive forces which, shut up
within him, pulled down the house of life upon his own
head.

A soul " unspotted from the world," in a body which
one sees visibly soiling under one's eyes ; that impro-
bability is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as
his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and
the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged.

272 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

There never was a simpler or more attaching charm,
because there never was a sweeter or more honest
nature. It was not because he ever said anything
particularly clever or particularly interesting, it was not
because he gave you ideas, or impressed you by any
strength or originality, that you liked to be with him ;
but because of a certain engaging quality, which seemed
unconscious of itself, which was never anxious to be or
to do anything, which simply existed, as perfume exists
in a flower. Drink was like a heavy curtain, blotting
out everything of a sudden ; when the curtain lifted,
nothing had changed. Living always that double life,
he had his true and his false aspect, and the true life
was the expression of that fresh, delicate, and uncon-
taminated nature which some of us knew in him, and
which remains for us, untouched by the other, in every
line that he wrote.

Ill

Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared
more for his prose than for his verse ; but he was
wrong, and it is not by his prose that he will live, ex-
quisite as that prose was at its best. He wrote two
novels in collaboration with Mr Arthur Moore : " A
Comedy of Masks," in 1893, and "Adrian Rome," in
1899, both done under the influence of Mr Henry
James, both interesting because they were personal
studies, and studies of known surroundings, rather than
for their actual value as novels. A volume of " Stories
and Studies in Sentiment," called " Dilemmas," in which
the influence of Mr Wedmore was felt in addition to
the influence of Mr James, appeared in 1895. Several
other short stories, among his best work in prose, have

ERNEST DOWSON 273

not yet been reprinted from the Savoy. Some trans-
lations from the French, done as hack work, need not
be mentioned here, though they were never without
some traces of his peculiar quality of charm in language.
The short stories were indeed rather " studies in senti-
ment " than stories ; studies of singular delicacy, but
with only a faint hold on life, so that perhaps the best
of them was not unnaturally a study in the approaches
of death: "The Dying of Francis Donne." For the
most part they dealt with the same motives as the
poems, hopeless and reverent love, the ethics of re-
nunciation, the disappointment of those who are too
weak or too unlucky to take what they desire. They
have a sad and quiet beauty of their own, the beauty
of second thoughts and subdued emotions, of choice
and scholarly English, moving in the more fluid and
reticent harmonies of prose almost as daintily as if it
were moving to the measure of verse. Dowson's care
over English prose was like that of a Frenchman writing
his own language with the respect which Frenchmen
pay to French. Even English things had to come
to him through France, if he was to prize them very
highly ; and there is a passage in " Dilemmas" which 1
have always thought very characteristic of his own
tastes, as it refers to an " infinitesimal library, a few
French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed
volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar
edition of Tiuchiiitz." He was Latin by all his aflinities,
and that very quality of slightness, of parsimony almost,
in his dealings with life and the substance of art, con-
nects him with the artists of l>atin races, who have
always been so fastidious in their rejection of mere nature,
when it comes too nakedly or too clamorously into sight
and hearing, and so gratefully content with a few choice
things faultlessly done.

274 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

And Dowson in his verse (the "Verses" of 1896,
"The Pierrot of the Minute, a dramatic phantasy in one
act," of 1897, the posthumous volume, " Decorations ")
was the same scrupulous artist as in his prose, and more
felicitously at home there. He was quite Latin in his
feeling for youth, and death, and " the old age of roses,"
and the pathos of our little hour in which to live and
love ; Latin in his elegance, reticence, and simple grace
in the treatment of these motives ; Latin, finally, in his
sense of their sufficiency for the whole of one's mental
attitude. He used the commonplaces of poetry frankly,
making them his own by his belief in them : the Hora-
tian Cynara or Neobule was still the natural symbol for
him when he wished to be most personal. I remember
his saying to me that his ideal of a line of verse was the
line of Poe :

" The viol, the violet, and the vine " ;

and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which
clings about such words and such images as these, was
always to him the true poetical beauty. There never
was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for the
song's sake ; his theories were all cesthetic, almost
technical ones, such as a theory, indicated by his prefer-
ence for the line of Poe, that the letter " v " was the
most beautiful of the letters, and could never be brought
into verse too often. For any more abstract theories
he had neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philo-
sophy did not exist for him ; it existed solely as the
loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of Horace,
all that was most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most
bird-like in the human melodies of Verlaine. He had
the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any
other quality of mind or emotion ; and a song, for him,
was music first, and then whatever you please after-

ERNEST DOWSON 275

wards, so long as it suggested, never told, some delicate
sentiment, a sigh or a caress ; finding words, at times,
as perfect as these words of a poem headed, " O Mors !
quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in
substantiis suis " :

" Exceeding sorrow

Consumeth my sad heart !
Because to-morrow

We must depart,
Now is exceeding sorrow

All my part !

Give over playing,

Cast thy viol away :
Merely laying

Thine head my way :
Prithee, give over playing,

Grave or gay.

Be no word spoken ;

Weep nothing : let a pale
Silence, unbroken

Silence prevail !
Prithee, be no word spoken,

Lest I fail !

Forget to-morrow !

Weep nothing : only lay
In silent sorrow

Thine head my way :
Let us forget to-morrow,

This one day ! "

There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it
has ever spoken. The words seem to tremble back into
the silence which their whisper has interrupted, but not
before they have created for us a mood, such a mood as
the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting.
Languid, half inarticulate, coming from the heart of a
drowsy sorrow very conscious ol itself, and not less

276 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

sorrowful because it sees its own face looking mournfully
back out of the water, the song seems to have been
made by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all
the sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a
faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise in
which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty
w^hich is the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet
"To One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more
poignant mood, with this fine subtlety :

" With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars.
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine ;
Those scentless wisps of straw, that miserably line
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares,
Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
Wiih their stupidity ! Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine.
And make his melancholy germane to the stars' ?

O lamentable brother ! if those pity thee,

Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me ;

Haifa fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap,

All their days, vanity ? Better than mortal flowers,

Thy moon-kissed roses seem : better than love or sleep.

The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours ! "

Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship
with madness, observe how beautiful the whole thing
becomes ; how instinctively the imagination of the poet
turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars and flowers
and the divine part of forgetfulness ! It is a symbol of"
the two sides of his own life : the side open to the street,
and the side turned away from it, where he could " hush
and bless himself with silence." No one ever wor-
shipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him
here transfiguring a dreadful thing with beauty, so we
shall see, everywhere in his work, that he never ad-
mitted an emotion which he could not so transfigure.

ERNEST DOWSON 277

He knew his limits only too well ; he knew that the
deeper and graver things of life were for the most part
outside the circle of his magic ; he passed them by,
leaving much of himself unexpressed, because he would
permit himself to express nothing imperfectly, or accord-
ing to anything but his own conception of the dignity
of poetry. In the lyric in which he has epitomised
himself and his whole life, a lyric which is certainly one
of the greatest lyrical poems of our time, "Non sum
qualis cram bons sub regno Cynara?," he has for once
said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and
perhaps immortal music :

" Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine,
There fell thy shadow, Cynara ! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine ;
And I was desolate and sick, of an old passion.

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head :
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat.
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay ;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet ;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was grey :
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara ! gone with the wind.
Flung roses, roses riotously with the tlirong,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind ;
But 1 was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But wlicn tlic feast is finished and the lam])s expire,
Then falls tiiy shadow, Cynara ! the night is thine ;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the li])s of my desire :
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion."

278 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

-B^P~»5— — B5F—

Here, perpetu;ited by some unique energy of a
temperament rarely so much the master of itself, is the
song of passion and the passions, at their eternal war
in the soul which they quicken or deaden, and in the
body which they break down between them. In the
second book, the book of "Decorations," there are a
few pieces which repeat, only more faintly, this very
personal note. Dowson could never have developed ;
he had already said, in his first book of verse, all that
he had to say. Had he lived, had he gone on writing,
he could only have echoed himself; and probably it
would have been the less essential part of himself; his
obligation to Swinburne, always evident, increasing as
his own inspiration failed him. He was always without
ambition, writing to please his own fastidious taste,
with a kind of proud humility in his attitude towards
the public, not expecting or requiring recognition. He
died obscure, having ceased to care even for the de-
lightful labour of writing. He died young, worn out
by what was never really life to him, leaving a little
verse which has the pathos of things too young and too
frail ever to grow old.

1900.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
OF SILHOUETTES:

BEING A WORD ON BEHALF OF PATCHOULI

An ingenious reviewer once described some verses of
mine as " unvi'holesome," because, he said, they had " a
faint smell of Patchouli about them." I am a little
sorry he chose Patchouli, for that is not a particularly
favourite scent with me. If he had only chosen Peau
d'Espagne, which has a subtle meaning, or Lily of the
Valley, with which I have associations ! But Patchouli
will serve. Let me ask, then, in republishing, with
additions, a collection of little pieces, many of which
have been objected to, at one time or another, as being
somewhat deliberately frivolous, why art should not, if
it please, concern itself with the artificially charming,
which, I suppose, is what my critic means by Patchouli?
All art, surely, is a form of artifice, and thus, to the
truly devout mind, condenmed already, if not as actively
noxious, at all events as needless. That is a point of
view which I quite understand, and its conclusion I hold
to be absolutely logical. I have the utmost respect for
the people who refuse to read a novel, to go to the
theatre, or to learn dancing. That is to have con-
victions and to live up to them. I understand also the
point of view from which a work of art is tolerated in
so far as it is actually militant on behalf of a religious
or moral idea. But what I fail to understand are those
delicate, invisible degrees by which a distinction is drawn

28o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

between this form of art and that ; the hesitations, and
compromises, and timorous advances, and shocked re-
treats, of the Puritan conscience once emancipated and
yet afraid of liberty. However you may try to convince
yourself to the contrary, a work of art can be judged
only from two standpoints : the standpoint from which
its art is measured entirely by its morality, and the
standpoint from which its morality is measured entirely
by its art.

Here, for once, in connection with these "Silhouettes,"
I have not, if my recollection serves me, been accused
of actual immorality. I am but a fair way along the
"primrose path," not yet within singeing distance of
the "everlasting bonfire." In other words, I have not
yet written "London Nights," which, it appears (I can
scarcely realise it, in my innocent abstraction in a['sthetical
matters), has no very salutary reputation among the
blameless moralists of the press. 1 need not, therefore,
on this occasion, concern myself with more than the
curious fallacy by which there is supposed to be some-
thing inherently wrong in artistic work which deals
frankly and lightly with the very real charm of the
lighter emotions and the more fleeting sensations.

I do not wish to assert that the kind of verse which
happened to reflect certain moods of mine at a certain
period of my life is the best kind of verse in itself, or is
likely to seem to me, in other years, when other moods
may have made me their own, the best kind of verse for
my own expression of myself. Nor do I affect to doubt
that the creation of the supreme emotion is a higher
form of art than the reflection of the most exquisite
sensation, the evocation of the most magical impression.
I claim only an equal liberty for the rendering ot
every mood of that variable and iirexplicable and con-
tradictory creature which we call ourselves, of every

PREFACE TO SILHOUETTES 281

aspect under which we are gifted or condemned to
apprehend the beauty and strangeness and curiosity of
the visible world.

Patchouli ! Well, why not Patchouli ? Is there any
" reason in nature " why we should write exclusively
about the natural blush, if the delicately acquired blush
of rouge has any attraction for us ? Both exist ; both,
I think, are charming in their way ; and the latter, as a
subject, has, at all events, more novelty. If you prefer
your "new-mown hay" in the hayfield, and I, it may
be, in a scent-bottle, why may not my individual caprice
be allowed to find expression as well as yours ? Probably
I enjoy the hayfield as much as you do; but I enjoy
quite other scents and sensations as well, and I take the
former for granted, and write my poem, for a change,
about the latter. There is no necessary diiference in
artistic value between a good poem about a flower in
the hedge and a good poem about the scent in a sachet.
I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about
nature in the country. Only, personally, I prefer town
to country ; and in the town we have to find for our-
selves, as best we may, the decor which is the town
equivalent of the great natural decor of fields and hills.
Here it is that artificiality comes in ; and \i any one sees
no beauty in the effects of artificial light, in all the
variable, most human, and yet most factitious town
landscape, I can only pity him, and go on my own
way.

That is, if he will let me. But he tells me that one
thing is right and the other is wrong ; that one is good
art and the other is bad ; and I listen in amazement,
sometimes not without impatience, wondering why an
estimable personal prejudice should be thus exalted into
a dogma, and uttered in the name of art. For in art
there can be no prejudices, only results. If we arc to

282 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

save people's souls by the writing of verses, well and
good. But if not, there is no choice but to admit
absolute freedom of choice. And if Patchouli pleases
one, why not Patchouli ?

London, February 1896.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
OF LONDON NIGHTS

The publication of this book was received by the
English press with a singular unanimity of abuse. In
some cases the abuse was ignoble ; for the most part,
it was no more than unintelligent. Scarcely any critic
did himself the credit of considering with any care the
intention or the execution of what offended him by its
substance or its subject. I had expected opposition, I
was prepared for a reasonable amount of prejudice ; but
I must confess to some surprise at the nature of the
opposition, the extent of the prejudice, which it was my
fortune to encounter. Happening to be in France at
the time, I reflected, with scarcely the natural satisfac-
tion of the Englishman, that such a reception of a work
of art would have been possible in no country but
England.

And now, in bringing out a new edition of these
poems, which I have neither taken from nor added to,
and in which I have found it needful to make but little
revision, it is with no hope of persuading any one not
already aware of what I have to say that I make this
statement on behalf of general principles and my own
application of them, but rather on Blake's theory, that
you should tell the truth, not to convince those who do
not l)elieve, but to confirm those who do.

I have been attacked, then, on the ground of morality,

and by people who, in condemning my book, not because

it is bad art, but because they think it bad morality,

forget that they are confusing moral and artistic judg-

283

284 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

ments, and limiting art without aiding morality. I
contend on behalf of the liberty of art, and I deny that
morals have any right of jurisdiction over it. Art may
be served by morality ; it can never be its servant.
For the principles of art are eternal, while the principles
of morality fluctuate with the spiritual ebb and flow of
the ages. Show me any commandment of the tradi-
tional code of morals which you are at present obeying,
and I will show you its opposite among the command-
ments of some other code of morals which your fore-
fathers once obeyed ; or, if you prefer, some righteous
instance of its breaking, which you will commend in
spite of yourself. Is it for such a shifting guide that I
am to forsake the sure and constant leading of art,
which tells me that whatever I find in humanity
(passion, desire, the spirit or the senses, the hell or
heaven of man's heart) is part of the eternal substance
which nature weaves in the rough for art to combine
cunningly into beautiful patterns ? The whole visible
world itself, we are told, is but a symbol, made visible
in order that we may apprehend ourselves, and not be
blown hither and thither like a flame in the night.
How laughable is it, then, that we should busy our-
selves, with such serious faces, in the commending or
condemning, the permission or the exemption, of this
accident or that, this or the other passing caprice of our
wisdom or our folly, as a due or improper subject for
the " moment's monument " of a poem ! It is as if you
were to say to me, here on these weedy rocks of Rosses
Point, where the grey sea passes me continually, flinging
a little foam at my feet, that I may write of one rather
than another of these waves, which are not more infinite
than the moods of men.

The moods of men ! There T find my subject, there
the region over which art rules ; and whatever has

PREFACE TO LONDON NIGHTS 285

once been a mood of mine, though it has been no more
than a ripple on the sea, and had no longer than that
ripple's dm-ation, I claim the right to render, if I can, in
verse ; and I claim, from my critics and my readers, the
primary understanding, that a mood is after all but a
mood, a ripple on the sea, and perhaps with no longer
than that ripple's duration. I do not profess that any
poem in this book is the record of actual fact ; I declare
that every poem is the sincere attempt to render a
particular mood which has once been mine, and to
render it as if, for the moment, there were no other
mood for me in the world. I have rendered, well or
ill, many moods, and without disguise or preference.
If it be objected to me that some of them were moods
I had better never have felt, I am ready to answer,
Possibly ; but I must add. What of that .'' They have
existed ; and whatever has existed has achieved the
right of artistic existence.

Rosses Point, Sligo, September 2, 1896.

CONCLUSION

THE CHOICE

With the publication of " Pages Catholiques," a
volume of selections from " En Route " and " La
Cathedrale," edited with a preface by the Abbe
Mugnier, Huysmans may be said to have received
the imprimatur of the Church. Among many respon-
sible Catholic testimonies, the Abbe Mugnier quotes an
emphatic phrase of Dom Augustin, the Abbe of La
Trappe d'Igny, the monastery described in "En
Route," who rejoices that "the book will do good to
those who do not usually read good books." And
he himself affirms, as he presents to the world the
book into which he has put so much of what is
finest in Huysmans' two novels, that to receive these
pages with faith is to be faithful to the spirit of
Christ.

Such affirmations are of almost equal interest to
those who are preoccupied with questions of religion
and to those who are preoccupied with questions of art.
For, after all, does not the larger part of the value of
conduct, and the larger part of the value of art
come from the amount of sincerity which has been
put into living and working? The question itself of
sincerity is certainly the most complicated question in
the world ; for one is not sincere, in life or in art, by
intending to be. Our intentions should indeed count
for very little, for an intention is not so much as the

2S6

CONCLUSION 287

paralytic's dream of movement ; it is a whisper of the
reason, which may not even be heard by that deeper
self, soul or instinct, which is at once what gives us
our identity, and is prepared to scatter that identity
into the general consciousness of the universe. I may
say to myself: I will believe in such a dogma of
religion, I will believe in such a theory of art. But all
my saying and meaning and trying will avail me
nothing if the dogma or the theory has not struck
sudden fire into light, as it came startlingly upon itself,
there in the darkness. Then, and then only, I shall be
sincere, as I seem to discover for the first time some-
thing which I had known always. And it is this kind
of sincerity, this illumination, which means so much to
the man who wishes to live well and to the artist who
wishes to work well.

"There are states of soul which are not to be in-
vented," said Monseigneur d'Hulst, in reply to some
doubts about the literal truth to conviction of "En
Route " ; and it is on this question of sincerity that the
whole artistic merit of Huysmans' later work seems to
me to depend. The faculty of invention, which can
do so much that it seems to us sometimes as if, with
Shakespeare or with Michelangelo, it could do every-
thing, is after all never quite an absolute thing,
never without its lineage, never the first word of
creation. Invention is a happy way of arranging the '
bonfire, so that a single spark sets it all alight. That
single spark is no doubt the incalculable element,
which lurks everywhere in the world, but, all the same,
the spark is nothing, would llicker out in an instant, if
its fiery way is not prepared for it. And, when we set
invention to work upon the soul, upon what is deepest
in us, we must feed it with all our substance, keeping
nothing back, if it is to do its work there. A man who

288 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

has never been in love will never write ii good love-
poem ; nor, if he has only loved ignobly, will he write
nobly of love. And so a man who has never had the
great awakening, which may bring him, in Barbey
d'Aurevilly's phrase, used of Huysmans himself as long
ago as 18S4, " to the mouth of the pistol or to the foot
of the Cross," will never be able to do what Huysmans
has done : trace the itinerary of the soul, milestone by
milestone, along the road of its penitence.

The conversion of Huysmans, unlike the conversion
of Fran9ois Coppee for instance, is a matter of some
significance, apart even from the question of the influ-
ence of that change upon his work as an artist. Coppee,
an amiable and charming man of letters, became ill, it
appears, and fell back upon the consolations of religion,
as dying men, and men who suppose themselves to be
dying, often do, as after all the only consolations left.
He has recovered, and he retains his piety, as we keep
souvenirs, doubtless from a real sense of fidelity to an
experience which has really moved us. But the ex-
perience is not everything : much depends on the man.
Coppee is a sentimentalist who has written innumerable
verses about the sorrows of the poor, and he has never
moved us with a great emotion, or convinced us of any
passionate sympathy in himself for what he is writing
about. His religion leaves us equally unmoved, for it
comes to us as a voice, no more ; the voice of one whose
opinions have no meaning for us, because they have had
no deep meaning for him. But, with Huysmans, the
matter is diiFerent. " His sincerity is the very form of
his talent," says the Abbe Mugnier, in his excellent
preface : " he owes to it his qualities and his defects,
his admirers and his enemies. . . . Rarely have the man
and the writer been more closely identified." And
Huysmans, as we have always seen him in his books,

CONCLUSION 289

has been an idealist a rebours^ one so discontented with
the world as it is, with what is ugly and evil in it, that
he has exalted his discontent into a kind of martyr-
dom ; and all his earlier books have been one long
narrative of his martyrdom. He has avenged himself
upon ugliness and evil by painting them with the ex-
asperation of a monk of the Middle Ages, or with the
angry satire of the stone-carvers who set obscene devils
crawling over the devout and aspiring walls of the great
cathedrals. While he has seemed to be grovelling
deeper than others in the trough of Realism, he has
been like a man who does penance in a devouring rage,
against himself and against sin. He has seen the
external world Avith such extraordinary vividness because
he has seen it with hatred ; and if love may at times
blind with the shadow of too great a light, hatred is
always open-eyed, with a kind of intoxication of vision.
Not Swift hated the world as Huysmans has hated it.
Well, he has found peace, he has become reconciled
with the world, he has found his own way of living
apart in it, not, as yet, in an acceptance of monastic life,
but in a little hermitage of his own, "between a monas-
tery and a wood."

That a man like Huysmans should have accepted the
Church, should have found the most closely formulated
theory of religion still possible, and more than a mere
refuge, is certainly significant. It is significant, among
other things, as a confession on the part of a great artist,
that art alone, as he has conceived it, is not finally
satisfying without some further defence against the
world. In "A Rcbours " he showed us the sterilising
influence of a narrow and selfish conception of art, as
he represented a particular paradise of art for art's
sake turning inevitably into its corresponding hell.
Des Esseintes is the symbol of all those who have tried

290 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE

to shut themselves in from the natural world, upon an
artificial beauty which has no root there. Worshipping
colour, sound, perfume, for their own sakes, and not
for their ministrations to a more divine beauty, he
stupefies himself on the threshold of ecstasy. And
Huysmans, we can scarcely doubt, has passed through
the particular kind of haschish dream which this
experience really is. He has realised that the great
choice, the choice between the world and something
which is not visible in the world, but out of which the
visible world has been made, does not lie in the mere
contrast of the subtler and grosser senses. He has
come to realise what the choice really is, and he has
chosen. Yet perhaps the choice is not quite so
narrow as Barbey d'Aure'villy thought ; perhaps it is a
choice between actualising this dream or actualising
that dream. In his escape from the world, one man
chooses religion, and seems to find himself; another,
choosing love, may seem also to find himself; and may
not another, coming to art as to a religion and as to a
woman, seem to find himself not less effectually,'' The
one certainty is, that society is the enemy of man,
and that formal art is the enemy of the artist. We
shall not find ourselves in drawing-rooms or in
museums. A man who goes through a day without
some fine emotion has wasted his day, whatever he
has gained in it. And it is so easy to go through
day after day, busily and agreeably, without ever really
living for a single instant. Art begins when a man
wishes to immortalise the most vivid moment he has
ever lived. Life has already, to one not an artist,
become art in that moment. And the making of one's
life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of
every man. It is to escape from material reality into
whatever form of ecstasy is our own form of spiritual

CONCLUSION 291

existence. There is the choice ; and our happiness,
our "success in life," will depend on our choosing
lightly, each for himself, among the forms in which
that choice will come to us.

1900.

Of the essays contained in this volume, those on Walter
Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Addington Symonds,
and the Note on Zola's Method are reprinted from my " Studies
in Two Literatures" (1897), which has long since been out of
print, and which I do not intend to reissue as a volume. Two
prefaces are reprinted from the second editions of two volumes
of verse now included in my collected "Poems" of 1902.
The essay on Maupassant was published in two halves, one half
by Mr Heinemann as a preface to an illustrated translation of
" Boule de Suif," the other half by Messrs. G. P. Putnam's
Sons as a preface to a translation of some of Maupassant's
stories in their series of " Little French Masterpieces." Part
of the essay on Gabriele d'Annunzio is taken from my preface
to the English translation of " II Piacere," published by Mr
Heinemann ; and the essay on Mcrimee was originally published
as a preface to the translation of "Carmen" and "Colomba"
in the same publisher's " Century of French Romance." The
main part of the other essays appeared in the Quarterly Review^
the Fortnightly Review, the Monthly Revieiu, Harper's Maga-
zine, the Lamp, the Bookman, the Saturday Revieiv, and the
Athcnamm. I have to thank Count Joseph Primoli for allowing
me to reproduce his unpublished photograph of d'Annunzio.

BY THE SAME WRITER

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF
BROWNING. 1886, 1906.

DAYS AND NIGHTS. 18S9.

SILHOUETTES. 1892.

LONDON NIGHTS. 1895.

AMORIS VICTIM A. 1897.

STUDIES IN TWO LITERATURES. 1897.

AUBREY BEARDSLEY. i8g8, 1905.

THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERA-
TURE. 1900.

IMAGES OF GOOD AND EVIL. 1900.

COLLECTED POEMS. 1901.

PLAYS, ACTING, AND MUSIC. 1903.

CITIES. 1903.

SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES. 1905.

A BOOK OF TWENTY SONGS. 1905.

THE FOOL OF THE WORLD, AND OTHER
POEMS. 1906.

STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS. 1906.

WILLIAM BLAKE. 1907.

CITIES OF ITALY. 1907.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH
POETRY. 1909.

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