But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new.
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new.
Letters to Dead Authors - Andrew Lang
They are forgotten with last year’s snows; they have
passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of
D’Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, Athos, and
Aramis—“he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each
of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that
electric fluid which was his gift from heaven. ”
No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none
gave of it more freely to all who came—to the chance associate of the
hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked
from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the
supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the
living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so
masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the
reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could
not be “serious;” because you created with a word, you were said to scamp
your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of
greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.
A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—a generation
devoted to the “chiselled phrase,” to accumulated “documents,” to
microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records
of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and
railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of
Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To
you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the
highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return:
escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the _bouges_, from the surgeries
and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the
wearisome De Goncourt.
With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which,
if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how
healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat
over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.
The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are
clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the
clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of
adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the
Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les
Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les
Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”);
and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard
by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo. ”
In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to
that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.
You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others,
to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would
have outdone even the present _naturalistes_. From these alcoves of “Les
Dames Galantes,” and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have
spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as
Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary
uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and
tragical true love of La Mole’s, that devotion—how tender and how
pure! —of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour of
D’Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos:
Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real
people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of
“Bragelonne,” and to part with them for ever. “Suppose Porthos, Athos,
and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their
moustaches. ” How we would welcome them, forgiving D’Artagnan even his
hateful _fourberie_ in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your
dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees
glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what
duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good
fights of one against a multitude, in literature. These are the Death of
Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward
the Wake, the Death of Bussy d’Amboise. We can compare the strokes of
the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon
my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of
Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of
your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley’s Hereward.
They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew
it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas “after deceiving circle;”
for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius
in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought
with shields and axes, not with small swords. But what matters this
pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the
clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously
Homeric.
Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in
terror from the Queen’s chamber, and “find the door too narrow for their
flight:” the very words were anticipated in a line of the “Odyssey”
concerning the massacre of the Wooers. And the picture of Catherine de
Médicis, prowling “like a wolf among the bodies and the blood,” in a
passage of the Louvre—the picture is taken unwittingly from the “Iliad. ”
There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and
simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates “Monte Cristo,”
the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of
that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have
little room, and less skill, to speak. “Antony,” they tell me, was “the
greatest literary event of its time,” was a restoration of the stage.
“While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe
and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the
coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room
in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the
last degree of terror and of pity. ”
The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame—for a moment.
The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when “La Curée” and
“Pot-Bouille” are more forgotten than “Le Grand Cyrus,” men and
women—and, above all, boys—will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre
Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I
remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the “Three Musketeers”
when he should have been occupied with “Wilkins’s Latin Prose. ” “Twenty
years after” (alas! and more) he is still constant to that gallant
company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether
Grimaud will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal’s prison.
XIII.
_To Theocritus_.
“SWEET, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,” so,
Theocritus, with that sweet word ἁδύ, didst thou begin and strike the
keynote of thy songs. “Sweet,” and didst thou find aught of sweet, when
thou, like thy Daphnis, didst “go down the stream, when the whirling wave
closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the Nymphs”?
Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like thine own
Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia
with her April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell
aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields of asphodel make
thee forget thy Sicily? Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and
perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than
their dreams. It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was
well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own,
where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth, where
the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the meadows of
Anjou.
There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from sword
and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the torch,
there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their learned
ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet. But to
thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high
suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness
enough. For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium
beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien
seasons. There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be
with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is
the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things
blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn. Space is wide, and
there be many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a
care of his own. Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of
the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea.
Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant shadow of the
pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where
feathered ferns make “a couch more soft than Sleep. ” The short grass of
the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, with
the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea was broken by the burnished
sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the brine.
There the Muses met thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering
his old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once more a mortal’s flocks,
and listen and learn, Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas,
“didst sweetly sing. ”
There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, “reclined on deep beds
of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves of
the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar, many an elm-tree,
and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of the cavern of
the nymphs. ” And when night came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the
merry company and the dancing girls, from the fading crowns of roses or
white violets, from the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline
wine, from these thou wouldst slip away into the summer night. Then the
beauty of life and of the summer would keep thee from thy couch, and
wandering away from Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst
watch the low cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed
were leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her
waves, and filled the waste with sound. There didst thou see thine
ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry seaweed, and
heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and heardst them
tell their dreams.
Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that the
dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were driven
forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing dewy branch
of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou wouldst see the Dawn
awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale
against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip strangely in the
glow, on her way to the sea. Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like
thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, “Farewell, Selene, bright and
fair; farewell, ye other stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet
Night. ” Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou didst behold the
girl as she burned the laurel leaves and the barley grain, and melted the
waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her lover home. Even so, even
now, in the islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers
of maidens. ‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou
and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, saying
“Never will I leave thee. ” And lo, he hath left me as men leave a field
reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to pray, like a city
desolate. ’
So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen,
and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s
house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old
divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants. It is none of
the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our
time, “Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering
to the other world? The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by
one they perish, the petals of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed
on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach
thee at the last. ”
Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun,
where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of
he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt.
Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy
lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria.
What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away from the red
cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with
maidenhair?
The music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note
Of men contention tost, of men who groan,
Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—
It failed, and thou wast mute!
What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes
give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy
Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and
wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand. “Who
will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is
there that will not send them back again without a gift? And they with
naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me
when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom
of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly
knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return. ” How
far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar
chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of
tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!
Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the
galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones,
and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory.
Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned
write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and
Antagoras of Rhodes. So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy,
jealousy, and all unkindness.
Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all
these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie
with thee. There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied
thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup
time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the
_sow challenged Athene_. They never knew the shepherd’s life, the long
winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when
over the parched grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the
shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-heeled shoon, and
lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all
concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy
golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus! Somewhat,
Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought the
shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the
shepherds.
XIV.
_To Edgar Allan Poe_.
SIR,—Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances
than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred
which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that
certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still
harass your name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out
their incredible and unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New
York. But their persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain
the dislike with which many American critics regard the greatest poet,
perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their country. With a
commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low;
and you, I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost
without honour in his own country.
The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable
study of your career (“Edgar Allan Poe,” by George Woodberry: Houghton,
Mifflin and Co. , Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it,
and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a
Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein,
that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony
ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation
a leader of that generation should hold his peace. He should neither
praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at
the buzzing ephemeræ of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with
the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course,
there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who
have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What “irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we
may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon
comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. “The New Yorkers
never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels
at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone,
but the whole literary class that you assailed. “As a literary people,”
you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug. ” After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet
writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He
who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling
above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen,
and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of
Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that
of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.
No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—_infelix
opportunitate vitæ_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth,
applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.
Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of
letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which
would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of
Mark Twain and of “Called Back. ” It may be that your criticisms helped
to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect
for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as “objectional”
in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a
sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the
frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of
poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory,
and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent,
and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you
too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse. Even if
morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at
present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the
largest public.
“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you
wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry. ” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted
Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea. ” But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means
particularly “vague. ” So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, _vivu’ per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla
Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would
come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue
Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the
author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies. ”
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Molière. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold
water. The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to
“Undine. ” Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, “a barren rascal. ” But how can a writer’s verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . .
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind! ” Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton. ”
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all
those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston. ” On this
point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,
and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal
suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is
perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as
“Hawthorne and delirium tremens. ” I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal
of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his
command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom
America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a
certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the
workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen’s favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he
is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of “Daisy Miller. ” You would admit the unity of effect secured
in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask
of Amontillado. ”
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to
the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among
poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training,
embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.
XV.
_To Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart. _
Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:
Sept. 8, 1885.
SIR,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of
all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for
you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your
company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of
turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that
fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and
charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the
scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all
the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with
letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your
simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that
envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but
never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the
Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old
term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra. ” But perhaps we
scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare,
or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.
Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey
round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one
falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is
of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently
brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the
dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to
inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your
song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless
you.
It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is
altered!
But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the
heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen
since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir
Walter. ” We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken
away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of
Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and
many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! On
the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or
wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among
the bravest! Only he who told how
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood
could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.
Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes
may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting
men might cry, with Leyden,
My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi’ me!
Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much
remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively
black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very
flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the
cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully
Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost
buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.
All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are
filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk
man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
promised, I cannot see much change—for the better. Abbotsford, luckily,
is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,
Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your
ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is
overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels
of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky is exiled
from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John
Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote
your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, _le pauvre
homme_! ) were beginning to prevail. This pious biographer was greatly
shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the
Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers. Your Toryism also was an
offence to him.
Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us
be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border
country remains as kind and homely as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some
days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for
Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the
opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the
burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the
burn was dry. But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March
brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank. This may not interest you,
who styled yourself
No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game!
Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand
gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that
sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from
Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren
Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant
still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, _purior electro_, of
Yarrow. St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the
St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could
no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the
country people took them for herrings.
The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies,
within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the
graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and
Marjory his wife. ” Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where
they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried
him rests now with her wild lord.
Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,
When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;
Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,
When I turned about and went my way! {160}
Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow and
beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That sacredness,
that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and inextricably
blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our love of you.
Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you most for the example
you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, showing them what, by
heaven’s blessing, a Scotchman still might be.
Words, empty and unavailing—for what words of ours can speak our thoughts
or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer
with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight
errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the happiness that is in
the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are
not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our
gratitude. _Fungor inani munere_!
XVI.
_To Eusebius of Cæsarea_.
(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN. )
TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not
ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there
is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of
men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat
meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured
forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the
fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no
more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the
sweet-voiced water is silent. ” The fane is ruinous, and the images of
men’s idolatry are dust.
Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings
of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how
first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.
Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit,
there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers
believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly
persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who,
long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained,
fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the
likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set
forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am,
do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men,
chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the
whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the
Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter
darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of
thy wit.
Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods
of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the
blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time
went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer
understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled
into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of
mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an
eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.
Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue,
even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For
they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and
storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they
are nowise at one with each other in their explanations. ” For of old
some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love
of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and
others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she
was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth,
the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And
when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant
(said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of
the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.
To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera
could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of
sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions
were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why—thou
saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things
told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.
“These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would
be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the
natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves,
like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable
beasts? ” But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of
the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the
other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.
To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen
answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that
the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the
nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own
speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the
pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves. Nay,
they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and
Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear with me,
Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend
among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call
“Science”!
Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even
as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never
knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of
their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made
Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For,
when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his
name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them
according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and
Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their
turn. How saith Socrates? “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious
idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I
should be by to-morrow’s dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull
out letters at pleasure and alter the accents. ”
Even so do the learned—not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain
fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among
themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good
to be known; but, as touching the names of the Gods, their learning, as
it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the goddess Athene: taking one
example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the
most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.
Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the
ancient tongue of the Brachmanæ, _Ahanâ_, which, being interpreted, means
the Dawn. “And that the morning light,” saith he, “offers the best
starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe,
beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil. ” {169}
Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation,
the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene,
taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us
that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius “will be bound,
in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable. ” This, Father, is
“one for Benfeius,” as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that
these matters “admit of almost mathematical precision,” it would seem
that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own
language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.
Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the
facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with
Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that
she is “the feminine of the Zend _Thrâetâna athwyâna_. ” Lo, you! how
Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahanâ_ and
the old Brachmanæ, nor _athwyâna_ and the old Medes, but from “the root
_αἰθ_, whence _αἴθηρ_, the air, or _ἀθ_, whence _ἄνθος_, a flower. ” Yea,
and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter.
None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it
that Athene was, from the first, “the clear pure height of the Air, which
is exceeding pure in Attica. ”
Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with
a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for
his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus,
take Athene for “wisdom in person;” nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for
“the goddess of air;” nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical
certainty, for “the Morning-Red:” but they say that Athene is the “black
thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom”! I make no
doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot
sententiæ_.
Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἀλλήλοις σύμφωνα
φυσιολογοῦσιν_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call “Science”! But
if any man says to the learned: “Best of men, you are erudite, and
laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your
opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no
avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the Gods”—that man is
railed at for his “mean” and “weak” arguments.
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must
still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented
“when man’s life was yet brutish and wandering” (as is the life of many
tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour by
the later Greeks “because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his
ancestors. ” Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy
well-wisher and thy disciple.
XVII.
_To Percy Bysshe Shelley_.
SIR,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as
to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his
less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their
discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,
as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may
guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your
reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your
letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands
of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the
sentence “Death. ” Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent
in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier
flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and
a merciful. The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of
Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be
less and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will out-live your lays. I know not
whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of
your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats)
as “a gallery of your failures. ” But the general voice does not echo
these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not
your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers. ”
Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors
who from time to time make themselves heard in your case. The “Quarterly
Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as
tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;”
and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a
Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms
where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once
guilty of similar negligence? ) are now shown to pious pilgrims.
But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and
are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and,
indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems,
like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the
mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young. ” It is in your
lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an
examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound. ” Talking of this piece,
by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering
after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from
cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a
Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L’homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your
boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free. ”
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were “the haunts meet for thee. ” Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was
the task of Shelley! “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. ” Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is
spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on
the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things
didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it. ” Kings and priests
are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails
them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never,
like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of
treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious
ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in
the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and
we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and
described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence
somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!
he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else
she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds
unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the
paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone
says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be
vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.
Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man! ) has a Bill for
extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political
happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret
to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something
for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in
the “Queen Mab” stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much
of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of
_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This
curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of
commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They
swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written
on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether
it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off
things, and sorrows long ago. ” Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley. ” The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so
prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I
wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad
old man. ” But enough of this inopportune brawler.
For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly
as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely. If this
nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the
ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of
the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest
of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone
(says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he
will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with
the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure
of the heavens. In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will
survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps
more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing
of the human spirit.
XVIII.
_To Monsieur de Molière_, _Valet de Chambre du Roi_.
MONSIEUR,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the
great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his
comb! ) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his
titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found
your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the
dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for
French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the
sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so
he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame
the Channel. If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through
you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of
Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you
lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial
business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their
large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are
diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they
borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and
imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our
_bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We
are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a
comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the
countrymen of Molière.
passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of
D’Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, Athos, and
Aramis—“he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each
of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that
electric fluid which was his gift from heaven. ”
No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none
gave of it more freely to all who came—to the chance associate of the
hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked
from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the
supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the
living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so
masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the
reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could
not be “serious;” because you created with a word, you were said to scamp
your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of
greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.
A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—a generation
devoted to the “chiselled phrase,” to accumulated “documents,” to
microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records
of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and
railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of
Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To
you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the
highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return:
escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the _bouges_, from the surgeries
and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the
wearisome De Goncourt.
With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which,
if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how
healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat
over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.
The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are
clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the
clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of
adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the
Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les
Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les
Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”);
and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard
by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo. ”
In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to
that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.
You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others,
to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would
have outdone even the present _naturalistes_. From these alcoves of “Les
Dames Galantes,” and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have
spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as
Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary
uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and
tragical true love of La Mole’s, that devotion—how tender and how
pure! —of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour of
D’Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos:
Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real
people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of
“Bragelonne,” and to part with them for ever. “Suppose Porthos, Athos,
and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their
moustaches. ” How we would welcome them, forgiving D’Artagnan even his
hateful _fourberie_ in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your
dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees
glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what
duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good
fights of one against a multitude, in literature. These are the Death of
Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward
the Wake, the Death of Bussy d’Amboise. We can compare the strokes of
the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon
my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of
Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of
your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley’s Hereward.
They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew
it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas “after deceiving circle;”
for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius
in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought
with shields and axes, not with small swords. But what matters this
pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the
clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously
Homeric.
Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in
terror from the Queen’s chamber, and “find the door too narrow for their
flight:” the very words were anticipated in a line of the “Odyssey”
concerning the massacre of the Wooers. And the picture of Catherine de
Médicis, prowling “like a wolf among the bodies and the blood,” in a
passage of the Louvre—the picture is taken unwittingly from the “Iliad. ”
There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and
simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates “Monte Cristo,”
the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of
that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have
little room, and less skill, to speak. “Antony,” they tell me, was “the
greatest literary event of its time,” was a restoration of the stage.
“While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe
and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the
coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room
in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the
last degree of terror and of pity. ”
The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame—for a moment.
The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when “La Curée” and
“Pot-Bouille” are more forgotten than “Le Grand Cyrus,” men and
women—and, above all, boys—will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre
Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I
remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the “Three Musketeers”
when he should have been occupied with “Wilkins’s Latin Prose. ” “Twenty
years after” (alas! and more) he is still constant to that gallant
company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether
Grimaud will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal’s prison.
XIII.
_To Theocritus_.
“SWEET, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,” so,
Theocritus, with that sweet word ἁδύ, didst thou begin and strike the
keynote of thy songs. “Sweet,” and didst thou find aught of sweet, when
thou, like thy Daphnis, didst “go down the stream, when the whirling wave
closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the Nymphs”?
Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like thine own
Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia
with her April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell
aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields of asphodel make
thee forget thy Sicily? Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and
perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than
their dreams. It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was
well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own,
where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth, where
the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the meadows of
Anjou.
There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from sword
and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the torch,
there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their learned
ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet. But to
thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high
suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness
enough. For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium
beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien
seasons. There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be
with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is
the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things
blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn. Space is wide, and
there be many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a
care of his own. Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of
the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea.
Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant shadow of the
pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where
feathered ferns make “a couch more soft than Sleep. ” The short grass of
the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, with
the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea was broken by the burnished
sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the brine.
There the Muses met thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering
his old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once more a mortal’s flocks,
and listen and learn, Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas,
“didst sweetly sing. ”
There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, “reclined on deep beds
of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves of
the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar, many an elm-tree,
and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of the cavern of
the nymphs. ” And when night came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the
merry company and the dancing girls, from the fading crowns of roses or
white violets, from the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline
wine, from these thou wouldst slip away into the summer night. Then the
beauty of life and of the summer would keep thee from thy couch, and
wandering away from Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst
watch the low cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed
were leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her
waves, and filled the waste with sound. There didst thou see thine
ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry seaweed, and
heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and heardst them
tell their dreams.
Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that the
dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were driven
forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing dewy branch
of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou wouldst see the Dawn
awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale
against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip strangely in the
glow, on her way to the sea. Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like
thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, “Farewell, Selene, bright and
fair; farewell, ye other stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet
Night. ” Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou didst behold the
girl as she burned the laurel leaves and the barley grain, and melted the
waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her lover home. Even so, even
now, in the islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers
of maidens. ‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou
and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, saying
“Never will I leave thee. ” And lo, he hath left me as men leave a field
reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to pray, like a city
desolate. ’
So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen,
and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s
house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old
divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants. It is none of
the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our
time, “Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering
to the other world? The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by
one they perish, the petals of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed
on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach
thee at the last. ”
Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun,
where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of
he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt.
Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy
lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria.
What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away from the red
cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with
maidenhair?
The music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note
Of men contention tost, of men who groan,
Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—
It failed, and thou wast mute!
What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes
give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy
Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and
wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand. “Who
will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is
there that will not send them back again without a gift? And they with
naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me
when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom
of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly
knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return. ” How
far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar
chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of
tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!
Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the
galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones,
and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory.
Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned
write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and
Antagoras of Rhodes. So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy,
jealousy, and all unkindness.
Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all
these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie
with thee. There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied
thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup
time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the
_sow challenged Athene_. They never knew the shepherd’s life, the long
winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when
over the parched grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the
shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-heeled shoon, and
lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all
concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy
golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus! Somewhat,
Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought the
shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the
shepherds.
XIV.
_To Edgar Allan Poe_.
SIR,—Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances
than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred
which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that
certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still
harass your name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out
their incredible and unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New
York. But their persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain
the dislike with which many American critics regard the greatest poet,
perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their country. With a
commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low;
and you, I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost
without honour in his own country.
The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable
study of your career (“Edgar Allan Poe,” by George Woodberry: Houghton,
Mifflin and Co. , Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it,
and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a
Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein,
that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony
ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation
a leader of that generation should hold his peace. He should neither
praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at
the buzzing ephemeræ of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with
the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course,
there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who
have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What “irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we
may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon
comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. “The New Yorkers
never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels
at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone,
but the whole literary class that you assailed. “As a literary people,”
you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug. ” After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet
writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He
who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling
above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen,
and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of
Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that
of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.
No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—_infelix
opportunitate vitæ_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth,
applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.
Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of
letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which
would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of
Mark Twain and of “Called Back. ” It may be that your criticisms helped
to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect
for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as “objectional”
in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a
sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the
frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of
poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory,
and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent,
and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you
too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse. Even if
morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at
present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the
largest public.
“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you
wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry. ” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted
Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea. ” But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means
particularly “vague. ” So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, _vivu’ per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla
Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would
come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue
Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the
author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies. ”
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Molière. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold
water. The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to
“Undine. ” Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, “a barren rascal. ” But how can a writer’s verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . .
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind! ” Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton. ”
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all
those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston. ” On this
point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,
and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal
suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is
perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as
“Hawthorne and delirium tremens. ” I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal
of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his
command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom
America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a
certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the
workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen’s favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he
is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of “Daisy Miller. ” You would admit the unity of effect secured
in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask
of Amontillado. ”
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to
the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among
poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training,
embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.
XV.
_To Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart. _
Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:
Sept. 8, 1885.
SIR,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of
all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for
you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your
company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of
turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that
fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and
charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the
scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all
the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with
letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your
simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that
envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but
never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the
Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old
term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra. ” But perhaps we
scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare,
or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.
Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey
round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one
falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is
of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently
brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the
dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to
inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your
song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless
you.
It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is
altered!
But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the
heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen
since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir
Walter. ” We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken
away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of
Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and
many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! On
the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or
wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among
the bravest! Only he who told how
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood
could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.
Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes
may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting
men might cry, with Leyden,
My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi’ me!
Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much
remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively
black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very
flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the
cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully
Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost
buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.
All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are
filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk
man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
promised, I cannot see much change—for the better. Abbotsford, luckily,
is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,
Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your
ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is
overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels
of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky is exiled
from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John
Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote
your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, _le pauvre
homme_! ) were beginning to prevail. This pious biographer was greatly
shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the
Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers. Your Toryism also was an
offence to him.
Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us
be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border
country remains as kind and homely as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some
days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for
Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the
opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the
burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the
burn was dry. But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March
brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank. This may not interest you,
who styled yourself
No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game!
Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand
gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that
sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from
Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren
Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant
still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, _purior electro_, of
Yarrow. St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the
St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could
no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the
country people took them for herrings.
The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies,
within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the
graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and
Marjory his wife. ” Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where
they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried
him rests now with her wild lord.
Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,
When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;
Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,
When I turned about and went my way! {160}
Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow and
beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That sacredness,
that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and inextricably
blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our love of you.
Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you most for the example
you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, showing them what, by
heaven’s blessing, a Scotchman still might be.
Words, empty and unavailing—for what words of ours can speak our thoughts
or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer
with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight
errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the happiness that is in
the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are
not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our
gratitude. _Fungor inani munere_!
XVI.
_To Eusebius of Cæsarea_.
(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN. )
TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not
ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there
is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of
men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat
meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured
forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the
fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no
more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the
sweet-voiced water is silent. ” The fane is ruinous, and the images of
men’s idolatry are dust.
Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings
of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how
first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.
Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit,
there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers
believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly
persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who,
long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained,
fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the
likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set
forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am,
do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men,
chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the
whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the
Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter
darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of
thy wit.
Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods
of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the
blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time
went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer
understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled
into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of
mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an
eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.
Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue,
even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For
they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and
storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they
are nowise at one with each other in their explanations. ” For of old
some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love
of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and
others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she
was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth,
the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And
when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant
(said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of
the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.
To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera
could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of
sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions
were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why—thou
saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things
told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.
“These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would
be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the
natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves,
like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable
beasts? ” But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of
the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the
other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.
To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen
answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that
the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the
nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own
speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the
pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves. Nay,
they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and
Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear with me,
Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend
among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call
“Science”!
Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even
as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never
knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of
their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made
Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For,
when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his
name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them
according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and
Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their
turn. How saith Socrates? “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious
idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I
should be by to-morrow’s dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull
out letters at pleasure and alter the accents. ”
Even so do the learned—not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain
fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among
themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good
to be known; but, as touching the names of the Gods, their learning, as
it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the goddess Athene: taking one
example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the
most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.
Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the
ancient tongue of the Brachmanæ, _Ahanâ_, which, being interpreted, means
the Dawn. “And that the morning light,” saith he, “offers the best
starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe,
beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil. ” {169}
Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation,
the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene,
taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us
that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius “will be bound,
in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable. ” This, Father, is
“one for Benfeius,” as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that
these matters “admit of almost mathematical precision,” it would seem
that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own
language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.
Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the
facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with
Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that
she is “the feminine of the Zend _Thrâetâna athwyâna_. ” Lo, you! how
Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahanâ_ and
the old Brachmanæ, nor _athwyâna_ and the old Medes, but from “the root
_αἰθ_, whence _αἴθηρ_, the air, or _ἀθ_, whence _ἄνθος_, a flower. ” Yea,
and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter.
None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it
that Athene was, from the first, “the clear pure height of the Air, which
is exceeding pure in Attica. ”
Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with
a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for
his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus,
take Athene for “wisdom in person;” nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for
“the goddess of air;” nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical
certainty, for “the Morning-Red:” but they say that Athene is the “black
thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom”! I make no
doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot
sententiæ_.
Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἀλλήλοις σύμφωνα
φυσιολογοῦσιν_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call “Science”! But
if any man says to the learned: “Best of men, you are erudite, and
laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your
opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no
avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the Gods”—that man is
railed at for his “mean” and “weak” arguments.
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must
still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented
“when man’s life was yet brutish and wandering” (as is the life of many
tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour by
the later Greeks “because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his
ancestors. ” Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy
well-wisher and thy disciple.
XVII.
_To Percy Bysshe Shelley_.
SIR,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as
to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his
less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their
discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,
as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may
guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your
reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your
letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands
of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the
sentence “Death. ” Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent
in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier
flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and
a merciful. The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of
Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be
less and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will out-live your lays. I know not
whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of
your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats)
as “a gallery of your failures. ” But the general voice does not echo
these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not
your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers. ”
Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors
who from time to time make themselves heard in your case. The “Quarterly
Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as
tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;”
and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a
Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms
where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once
guilty of similar negligence? ) are now shown to pious pilgrims.
But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and
are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and,
indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems,
like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the
mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young. ” It is in your
lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an
examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound. ” Talking of this piece,
by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering
after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from
cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a
Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L’homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your
boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free. ”
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were “the haunts meet for thee. ” Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was
the task of Shelley! “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. ” Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is
spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on
the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things
didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it. ” Kings and priests
are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails
them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never,
like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of
treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious
ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in
the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and
we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and
described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence
somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!
he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else
she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds
unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the
paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone
says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be
vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.
Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man! ) has a Bill for
extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political
happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret
to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something
for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in
the “Queen Mab” stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much
of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of
_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This
curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of
commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They
swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written
on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether
it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off
things, and sorrows long ago. ” Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley. ” The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so
prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I
wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad
old man. ” But enough of this inopportune brawler.
For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly
as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely. If this
nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the
ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of
the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest
of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone
(says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he
will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with
the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure
of the heavens. In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will
survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps
more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing
of the human spirit.
XVIII.
_To Monsieur de Molière_, _Valet de Chambre du Roi_.
MONSIEUR,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the
great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his
comb! ) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his
titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found
your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the
dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for
French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the
sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so
he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame
the Channel. If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through
you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of
Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you
lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial
business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their
large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are
diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they
borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and
imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our
_bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We
are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a
comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the
countrymen of Molière.
