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.
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.
Letters to Dead Authors - Andrew Lang
Hard must have been the heart that could resist
the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de
Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a genius for
finance.
If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance, and
some critics (Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of birth and
taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a
great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and
appraising yourself at the public estimate?
It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops
especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the
testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you
listened to the plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce
judgment on contemporaries—whom Posterity has preferred to your
perfections. “Molière,” said you, “understands the genius of comedy, and
presents it in a natural style. The plot of his best pieces is borrowed,
but not without judgment; his _morale_ is fair, and he has only to avoid
scurrility. ”
Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!
Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that
your “courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not
absolutely good. ” And yet you regarded “La Pucelle” with some
complacency.
On the “Pucelle” you were occupied during a generation of mortal men. I
marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly
pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no
Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation. First you
gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for
five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but
appropriate medium? What says the Précieuse about you in Boileau’s
satire?
In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
She finds but one defect, he can’t be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden’s woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!
The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.
Yet for this precious “Pucelle,” in the age when “Paradise Lost” was sold
for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand.
Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a
wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the great
work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden
to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so
strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and
engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given to the world,
and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are figures which
fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then, alas! the
bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longueville, hearing the “Pucelle”
read aloud, murmured that it was “perfect indeed, but perfectly
wearisome. ” Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you
till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbé at Ménage’s
had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.
I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the
onslaught on your “Pucelle. ” These qualities, alas! are not strange to
literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us that “potter hates potter,
and poet hates poet”? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius.
Who suffered more than Molière from cabals? Yet neither the court nor
the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I
admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault
and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all
compared to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really
makes a man pity you. You remember M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the
fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic. “It is all very well,” said
you, “for a man to laugh who cannot even read. ” Whereon M. de Puimorin
replied: “Qu’il n’avoit que trop sû lire, depuis que Chapelain s’étoit
avisé de faire imprimer. ” A new horror had been added to the
accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published. This repartee
was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram. He
did complete the last couplet,
Hélas! pour mes péchés, je n’ai sû que trop lire
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his
epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I
almost blush to think that M. Despréaux, M. Racine, and M. de Molière,
the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor
jest, and assail you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud
that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other
poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay
put forth his hand, and “Satan Montgomery” was no more. It did not need
a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow
him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary
failures or successes I do not speak.
I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you
doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of
Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets
has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse
the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your
earliest assailant, Linière, and, by a few changes of words, turned his
epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm,
unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de
Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead,
you “conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious
veneration for yourself and your genius. ” Probably you were protected by
the invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that
mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain’s real
fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,
Qu’il soit le mieux renté de tous les beaux-esprits.
This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not
altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours,
and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal
problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry? Burns was a poet: and
popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict
of their own generations. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no
poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.
Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy
left Chimène as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that
perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes
ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the
malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who
takes? Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir,
holding that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own
nature. Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets are
successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their assailants
are merely envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that the purchasing
public is the only judge. After all, the bad poet who is popular and
“sells” is not a whit worse than the bad poets who are unpopular, and who
deride his songs.
Monsieur,
Votre très-humble serviteur, &c.
XI.
_To Sir John Maundeville_, _Kt. _
(OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE. )
SIR JOHN,—Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you
a Liar. And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of
Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes. And
there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath
been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John’s country. And he hath
been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded. Now
men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great
booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. For he saith that ye did
pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with
shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye
say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not
his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir
John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a
merry; so now, come, let me tell you of the new ways into Ynde.
In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all they
ben obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen
have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For they were right good werryoures of
old, and wyse, noble, and worthy. But of late hath risen a new sort of
Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals. And
they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets
and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers
gat them with the sword. And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean
folk and certain of the baser sort hear them gladly, and they say ever
that Englishmen should flee out of Ynde.
Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes. For Englishmen
ben very stirring and nymble. For they ben in the seventh climate, that
is of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John,
natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go diverse ways, and
see strange things, and other diversities of the Worlde. Wherefore
Englishmen be lightly moving, and far wandering. And they gon to Ynde by
the great Sea Ocean. First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point of
Spain, and builded upon a rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong
that no man may take it. Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the
Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For ye may sail all about
Africa, and past the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde
is long and the sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go by the Midland
sea, and Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.
For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein built
they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and of
Spain. And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre. And Cipre is right
a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal Cytees
within him. And at Famagost is one of the principal Havens of the sea
that is in the world, and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone won that
Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet say that sort of Englishmen where of I told
you, that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren
and of no avail, for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here. Yet
the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill is
that they may ben the more fresh.
From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night he
that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the Lond
of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of
Egypt. And when I say this, I do jape with words, and may hap ye
understond me not. Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, and
brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their soudyours warred agen the
Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is not long past since
Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the narrow spit of lond, from the
Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this is the
shortest way to Ynde there may be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon
by sea.
But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man may
do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, and
therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the sepulchre of
reputations. And men say there that is one of the entrees of Helle. In
that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and Silver, for many misbelieving
men, and many Christian men also, have gone often time for to take of the
Thresoure that there was of old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore
there is none left. And Englishmen have let carry thither great store of
our Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it
agen I misdoubt me. For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes
that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the Lond of
Bondage. And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls of
Bondholders grabben the same. Natheless by that Vale do Englishmen go
unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the mouth of the
Flood of Ynde. Thereby they send their souldyours, when they are adread
of them of Muscovy.
For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men of
Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not. That way
cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept Caspian,
even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar and Penjdeh,
and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde. Then ye
win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and
he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains
wearen, than any other man on earth.
For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he
keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel. For his lond lieth
between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both Englishmen and men
of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and independent. Wherefore
they of both parties give him clocks, and watches, and stars, and
crosses, and culverins, and now and again they let cut the throats of his
men some deal, and pill his country. Thereby they both set up their rest
that the Emir will be independent, yea, and friendly. But his men love
him not, neither love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for they
are worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men. And they love
not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.
Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they ben subtle for to make a thing
seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind. Wherefore Englishmen
putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the Englishmen clept
Radicals, for they make as if they loved these Develes, out of the fear
and dread of war wherein they go, and would be slaves sooner than fight.
But the folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor whether they of
Muscovy will take the Lond, or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their
hearts may not enduren for drede. And methinks that soon shall
Englishmen and Muscovy folk put their bodies in adventure, and war one
with another, and all for the way to Ynde.
But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the Seyntes
hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee tormenten. But
to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.
XII.
_To Alexandre Dumas_.
SIR,—There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as
yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most
intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days,
you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, “I seem to see myself set on a
pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands. ” These
sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation
more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the
authors of the “Arabian Nights,” or the first inventors of the stories of
Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed,
have perished), as the creator of “Les Trois Mousquetaires” alarm himself
with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.
Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force
in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your
genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish?
Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super-human burden; but your
imaginative strength never found a task too great for it. What an
extraordinary vigour, what health, what an overflow of force was yours!
It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the
free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas’s men—so
gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen.
Like M. de Rochefort in “Vingt Ans Après,” like that prisoner of the
Bastille, your genius “n’est que d’un parti, c’est du parti du grand
air. ”
There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment;
in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic,
kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the
virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary
charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in
England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas
that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the “sculptor’s
ghost” is fabled to afford.
Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and
impotent as “the strengthless tribes of the dead” in Homer’s Hades,
before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary
valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these
collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they
parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are
the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their
own strength? 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.
the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de
Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a genius for
finance.
If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance, and
some critics (Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of birth and
taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a
great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and
appraising yourself at the public estimate?
It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops
especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the
testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you
listened to the plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce
judgment on contemporaries—whom Posterity has preferred to your
perfections. “Molière,” said you, “understands the genius of comedy, and
presents it in a natural style. The plot of his best pieces is borrowed,
but not without judgment; his _morale_ is fair, and he has only to avoid
scurrility. ”
Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!
Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that
your “courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not
absolutely good. ” And yet you regarded “La Pucelle” with some
complacency.
On the “Pucelle” you were occupied during a generation of mortal men. I
marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly
pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no
Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation. First you
gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for
five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but
appropriate medium? What says the Précieuse about you in Boileau’s
satire?
In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
She finds but one defect, he can’t be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden’s woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!
The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.
Yet for this precious “Pucelle,” in the age when “Paradise Lost” was sold
for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand.
Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a
wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the great
work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden
to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so
strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and
engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given to the world,
and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are figures which
fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then, alas! the
bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longueville, hearing the “Pucelle”
read aloud, murmured that it was “perfect indeed, but perfectly
wearisome. ” Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you
till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbé at Ménage’s
had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.
I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the
onslaught on your “Pucelle. ” These qualities, alas! are not strange to
literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us that “potter hates potter,
and poet hates poet”? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius.
Who suffered more than Molière from cabals? Yet neither the court nor
the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I
admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault
and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all
compared to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really
makes a man pity you. You remember M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the
fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic. “It is all very well,” said
you, “for a man to laugh who cannot even read. ” Whereon M. de Puimorin
replied: “Qu’il n’avoit que trop sû lire, depuis que Chapelain s’étoit
avisé de faire imprimer. ” A new horror had been added to the
accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published. This repartee
was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram. He
did complete the last couplet,
Hélas! pour mes péchés, je n’ai sû que trop lire
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his
epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I
almost blush to think that M. Despréaux, M. Racine, and M. de Molière,
the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor
jest, and assail you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud
that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other
poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay
put forth his hand, and “Satan Montgomery” was no more. It did not need
a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow
him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary
failures or successes I do not speak.
I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you
doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of
Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets
has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse
the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your
earliest assailant, Linière, and, by a few changes of words, turned his
epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm,
unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de
Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead,
you “conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious
veneration for yourself and your genius. ” Probably you were protected by
the invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that
mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain’s real
fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,
Qu’il soit le mieux renté de tous les beaux-esprits.
This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not
altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours,
and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal
problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry? Burns was a poet: and
popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict
of their own generations. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no
poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.
Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy
left Chimène as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that
perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes
ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the
malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who
takes? Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir,
holding that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own
nature. Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets are
successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their assailants
are merely envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that the purchasing
public is the only judge. After all, the bad poet who is popular and
“sells” is not a whit worse than the bad poets who are unpopular, and who
deride his songs.
Monsieur,
Votre très-humble serviteur, &c.
XI.
_To Sir John Maundeville_, _Kt. _
(OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE. )
SIR JOHN,—Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you
a Liar. And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of
Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes. And
there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath
been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John’s country. And he hath
been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded. Now
men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great
booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. For he saith that ye did
pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with
shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye
say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not
his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir
John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a
merry; so now, come, let me tell you of the new ways into Ynde.
In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all they
ben obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen
have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For they were right good werryoures of
old, and wyse, noble, and worthy. But of late hath risen a new sort of
Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals. And
they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets
and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers
gat them with the sword. And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean
folk and certain of the baser sort hear them gladly, and they say ever
that Englishmen should flee out of Ynde.
Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes. For Englishmen
ben very stirring and nymble. For they ben in the seventh climate, that
is of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John,
natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go diverse ways, and
see strange things, and other diversities of the Worlde. Wherefore
Englishmen be lightly moving, and far wandering. And they gon to Ynde by
the great Sea Ocean. First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point of
Spain, and builded upon a rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong
that no man may take it. Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the
Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For ye may sail all about
Africa, and past the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde
is long and the sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go by the Midland
sea, and Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.
For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein built
they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and of
Spain. And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre. And Cipre is right
a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal Cytees
within him. And at Famagost is one of the principal Havens of the sea
that is in the world, and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone won that
Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet say that sort of Englishmen where of I told
you, that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren
and of no avail, for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here. Yet
the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill is
that they may ben the more fresh.
From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night he
that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the Lond
of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of
Egypt. And when I say this, I do jape with words, and may hap ye
understond me not. Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, and
brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their soudyours warred agen the
Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is not long past since
Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the narrow spit of lond, from the
Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this is the
shortest way to Ynde there may be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon
by sea.
But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man may
do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, and
therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the sepulchre of
reputations. And men say there that is one of the entrees of Helle. In
that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and Silver, for many misbelieving
men, and many Christian men also, have gone often time for to take of the
Thresoure that there was of old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore
there is none left. And Englishmen have let carry thither great store of
our Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it
agen I misdoubt me. For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes
that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the Lond of
Bondage. And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls of
Bondholders grabben the same. Natheless by that Vale do Englishmen go
unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the mouth of the
Flood of Ynde. Thereby they send their souldyours, when they are adread
of them of Muscovy.
For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men of
Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not. That way
cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept Caspian,
even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar and Penjdeh,
and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde. Then ye
win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and
he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains
wearen, than any other man on earth.
For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he
keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel. For his lond lieth
between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both Englishmen and men
of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and independent. Wherefore
they of both parties give him clocks, and watches, and stars, and
crosses, and culverins, and now and again they let cut the throats of his
men some deal, and pill his country. Thereby they both set up their rest
that the Emir will be independent, yea, and friendly. But his men love
him not, neither love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for they
are worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men. And they love
not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.
Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they ben subtle for to make a thing
seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind. Wherefore Englishmen
putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the Englishmen clept
Radicals, for they make as if they loved these Develes, out of the fear
and dread of war wherein they go, and would be slaves sooner than fight.
But the folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor whether they of
Muscovy will take the Lond, or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their
hearts may not enduren for drede. And methinks that soon shall
Englishmen and Muscovy folk put their bodies in adventure, and war one
with another, and all for the way to Ynde.
But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the Seyntes
hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee tormenten. But
to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.
XII.
_To Alexandre Dumas_.
SIR,—There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as
yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most
intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days,
you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, “I seem to see myself set on a
pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands. ” These
sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation
more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the
authors of the “Arabian Nights,” or the first inventors of the stories of
Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed,
have perished), as the creator of “Les Trois Mousquetaires” alarm himself
with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.
Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force
in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your
genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish?
Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super-human burden; but your
imaginative strength never found a task too great for it. What an
extraordinary vigour, what health, what an overflow of force was yours!
It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the
free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas’s men—so
gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen.
Like M. de Rochefort in “Vingt Ans Après,” like that prisoner of the
Bastille, your genius “n’est que d’un parti, c’est du parti du grand
air. ”
There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment;
in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic,
kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the
virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary
charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in
England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas
that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the “sculptor’s
ghost” is fabled to afford.
Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and
impotent as “the strengthless tribes of the dead” in Homer’s Hades,
before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary
valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these
collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they
parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are
the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their
own strength? 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.
