There have been, there are, dissenters; yet
probably
they will be
less and less heard as the years go on.
less and less heard as the years go on.
Letters to Dead Authors - Andrew Lang
, Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it,
and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a
Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein,
that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony
ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation
a leader of that generation should hold his peace. He should neither
praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at
the buzzing ephemeræ of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with
the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course,
there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who
have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What “irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we
may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon
comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. “The New Yorkers
never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels
at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone,
but the whole literary class that you assailed. “As a literary people,”
you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug. ” After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet
writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He
who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling
above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen,
and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of
Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that
of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.
No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—_infelix
opportunitate vitæ_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth,
applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.
Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of
letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which
would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of
Mark Twain and of “Called Back. ” It may be that your criticisms helped
to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect
for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as “objectional”
in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a
sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the
frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of
poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory,
and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent,
and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you
too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse. Even if
morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at
present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the
largest public.
“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you
wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry. ” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted
Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea. ” But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means
particularly “vague. ” So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, _vivu’ per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla
Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would
come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue
Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the
author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies. ”
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Molière. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold
water. The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to
“Undine. ” Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, “a barren rascal. ” But how can a writer’s verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . .
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind! ” Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton. ”
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all
those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston. ” On this
point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,
and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal
suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is
perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as
“Hawthorne and delirium tremens. ” I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal
of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his
command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom
America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a
certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the
workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen’s favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he
is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of “Daisy Miller. ” You would admit the unity of effect secured
in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask
of Amontillado. ”
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to
the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among
poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training,
embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.
XV.
_To Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart. _
Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:
Sept. 8, 1885.
SIR,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of
all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for
you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your
company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of
turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that
fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and
charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the
scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all
the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with
letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your
simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that
envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but
never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the
Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old
term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra. ” But perhaps we
scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare,
or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.
Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey
round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one
falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is
of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently
brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the
dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to
inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your
song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless
you.
It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is
altered! But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the
heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen
since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir
Walter. ” We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken
away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of
Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and
many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! On
the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or
wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among
the bravest! Only he who told how
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood
could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.
Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes
may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting
men might cry, with Leyden,
My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi’ me!
Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much
remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively
black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very
flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the
cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully
Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost
buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.
All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are
filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk
man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
promised, I cannot see much change—for the better. Abbotsford, luckily,
is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,
Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your
ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is
overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels
of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky is exiled
from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John
Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote
your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, _le pauvre
homme_! ) were beginning to prevail. This pious biographer was greatly
shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the
Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers. Your Toryism also was an
offence to him.
Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us
be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border
country remains as kind and homely as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some
days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for
Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the
opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the
burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the
burn was dry. But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March
brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank. This may not interest you,
who styled yourself
No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game!
Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand
gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that
sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from
Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren
Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant
still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, _purior electro_, of
Yarrow. St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the
St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could
no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the
country people took them for herrings.
The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies,
within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the
graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and
Marjory his wife. ” Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where
they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried
him rests now with her wild lord.
Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,
When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;
Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,
When I turned about and went my way! {160}
Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow and
beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That sacredness,
that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and inextricably
blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our love of you.
Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you most for the example
you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, showing them what, by
heaven’s blessing, a Scotchman still might be.
Words, empty and unavailing—for what words of ours can speak our thoughts
or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer
with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight
errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the happiness that is in
the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are
not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our
gratitude. _Fungor inani munere_!
XVI.
_To Eusebius of Cæsarea_.
(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN. )
TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not
ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there
is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of
men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat
meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured
forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the
fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no
more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the
sweet-voiced water is silent. ” The fane is ruinous, and the images of
men’s idolatry are dust.
Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings
of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how
first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.
Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit,
there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers
believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly
persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who,
long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained,
fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the
likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set
forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am,
do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men,
chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the
whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the
Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter
darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of
thy wit.
Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods
of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the
blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time
went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer
understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled
into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of
mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an
eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.
Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue,
even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For
they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and
storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they
are nowise at one with each other in their explanations. ” For of old
some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love
of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and
others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she
was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth,
the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And
when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant
(said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of
the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.
To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera
could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of
sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions
were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why—thou
saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things
told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.
“These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would
be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the
natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves,
like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable
beasts? ” But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of
the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the
other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.
To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen
answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that
the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the
nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own
speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the
pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves. Nay,
they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and
Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear with me,
Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend
among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call
“Science”!
Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even
as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never
knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of
their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made
Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For,
when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his
name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them
according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and
Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their
turn. How saith Socrates? “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious
idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I
should be by to-morrow’s dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull
out letters at pleasure and alter the accents. ”
Even so do the learned—not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain
fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among
themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good
to be known; but, as touching the names of the Gods, their learning, as
it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the goddess Athene: taking one
example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the
most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.
Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the
ancient tongue of the Brachmanæ, _Ahanâ_, which, being interpreted, means
the Dawn. “And that the morning light,” saith he, “offers the best
starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe,
beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil. ” {169}
Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation,
the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene,
taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us
that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius “will be bound,
in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable. ” This, Father, is
“one for Benfeius,” as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that
these matters “admit of almost mathematical precision,” it would seem
that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own
language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.
Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the
facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with
Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that
she is “the feminine of the Zend _Thrâetâna athwyâna_. ” Lo, you! how
Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahanâ_ and
the old Brachmanæ, nor _athwyâna_ and the old Medes, but from “the root
_αἰθ_, whence _αἴθηρ_, the air, or _ἀθ_, whence _ἄνθος_, a flower. ” Yea,
and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter.
None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it
that Athene was, from the first, “the clear pure height of the Air, which
is exceeding pure in Attica. ”
Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with
a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for
his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus,
take Athene for “wisdom in person;” nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for
“the goddess of air;” nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical
certainty, for “the Morning-Red:” but they say that Athene is the “black
thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom”! I make no
doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot
sententiæ_.
Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἀλλήλοις σύμφωνα
φυσιολογοῦσιν_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call “Science”! But
if any man says to the learned: “Best of men, you are erudite, and
laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your
opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no
avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the Gods”—that man is
railed at for his “mean” and “weak” arguments.
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must
still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented
“when man’s life was yet brutish and wandering” (as is the life of many
tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour by
the later Greeks “because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his
ancestors. ” Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy
well-wisher and thy disciple.
XVII.
_To Percy Bysshe Shelley_.
SIR,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as
to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his
less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their
discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,
as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may
guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your
reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your
letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands
of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the
sentence “Death. ” Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent
in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier
flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and
a merciful. The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of
Fame.
There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be
less and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will out-live your lays. I know not
whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of
your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats)
as “a gallery of your failures. ” But the general voice does not echo
these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not
your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers. ”
Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors
who from time to time make themselves heard in your case. The “Quarterly
Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as
tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;”
and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a
Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms
where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once
guilty of similar negligence? ) are now shown to pious pilgrims.
But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and
are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and,
indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems,
like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the
mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young. ” It is in your
lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an
examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound. ” Talking of this piece,
by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering
after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from
cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a
Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L’homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your
boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free. ”
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were “the haunts meet for thee. ” Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was
the task of Shelley! “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. ” Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is
spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on
the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things
didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it. ” Kings and priests
are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails
them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never,
like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of
treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious
ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in
the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and
we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and
described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence
somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!
he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else
she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds
unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the
paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone
says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be
vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.
Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man! ) has a Bill for
extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political
happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret
to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something
for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in
the “Queen Mab” stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much
of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of
_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This
curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of
commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They
swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written
on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether
it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off
things, and sorrows long ago. ” Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley. ” The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so
prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I
wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad
old man. ” But enough of this inopportune brawler.
For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly
as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely. If this
nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the
ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of
the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest
of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone
(says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he
will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with
the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure
of the heavens. In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will
survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps
more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing
of the human spirit.
XVIII.
_To Monsieur de Molière_, _Valet de Chambre du Roi_.
MONSIEUR,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the
great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his
comb! ) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his
titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found
your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the
dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for
French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the
sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so
he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame
the Channel. If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through
you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of
Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you
lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial
business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their
large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are
diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they
borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and
imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our
_bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We
are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a
comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the
countrymen of Molière. Why this should be, and what “tenebriferous star”
(as Paracelsus, your companion in the “Dialogues des Morts,” would have
believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but
certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.
Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor “a wilderness of monkeys”
like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to
Europe.
While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that
we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with
daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you “let no
musty _bouquin_ escape you” (so your enemies declared), it was to some
purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who
came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we
turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from
Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your
creations. “Creations” one may well say, for you anticipated Nature
herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a
gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don Juan’s, the secret of the new
Religion and the watchword of Comte, _l’amour de l’humanité_.
Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour;
and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular
civilisation? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and
generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life
endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope,
or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all,
the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary
blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you,
Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found
invisible.
In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and
Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of
their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived
that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking
every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons preached to Agnès we
surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which
are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal
self-defence of superstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for
the permanent element of life—precisely where Pascal recognised all that
was most fleeting and unsubstantial—in _divertissement_; in the pleasure
of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of
the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to
regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the
tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of
tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human
as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to
leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.
Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest—our sympathy,
somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman,
despite his misadventures.
Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and
defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you
did not mean that they should win it. They go off with laughter, and
their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth,
behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your
sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can
throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught
that it is over and ended. Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy,
in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and
the husband of Célimène be untaught in that experience? ), you never sided
quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and
rank and power.
I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just
after your own death the author of “Les Dialogues des Morts” gave you
Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of “Le Jugement de Pluton” made
the “mighty warder” decide that “Molière should not talk philosophy. ”
These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the
_Contemplateur_, of the translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy of life
in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons of human experience
writ small and clear.
What comedian but Molière has combined with such depths—with the
indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of
Don Juan—such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!
Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much
water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of
contemporary mirth (_cetera fluminis ritu feruntur_), even now we never
laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the
boards in the Maison de Molière. Since those mobile dark brows of yours
ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the “demoniac”
manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player
has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of
Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comédie Française. In him you have a
successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of
your date might cry, could they see him, that Molière had come again.
But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle.
Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss
of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Célimène,
Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a _soubrette_ as Mdme. Samary, so
exquisite a Nicole?
Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago,
you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility
and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve.
Are not the Molièristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism? Any
scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely
touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15
not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians.
Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious
enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger,
and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.
It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as
the veteran and inveterate M. Arsène Houssaye, or the industrious but
puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead,
and the immortal Molière among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices. As I
regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their
trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Molière’s works to gossip
about Molière’s great-grand-mother’s second-best bed—I sometimes wish
that Molière were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, “Les
Molièristes. ” How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked
with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells
us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the
most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the
heartiest sympathy! Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in
the study, rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller’s shop,
strolling through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine’s,
dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls. Would
that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with
Boileau, and with Racine,—not yet a traitor,—laughing over Chapelain,
combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking
your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits
none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and
friendship.
XIX.
_To Robert Burns_.
SIR,—Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are some to
whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there are others
whom we admire rather than love. By some we are won with our will, by
others conquered against our desire. It has been your peculiar fortune
to capture the hearts of a whole people—a people not usually prone to
praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you and to
your reputation. In you every Scot who _is_ a Scot sees, admires, and
compliments Himself, his ideal self—independent, fond of whisky, fonder
of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation.
Next year will be the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to
light its solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore,
methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the abundance
of whisky drunk in your honour. It is a cruel thing for any of your
countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he can only admire;
where all the rest are idolators, he may not bend the knee; but stands
apart and beats upon his breast, observing, not adoring—a critic. Yet to
some of us—petty souls, perhaps, and envious—that loud indiscriminating
praise of “Robbie Burns” (for so they style you in their Change-house
familiarity) has long been ungrateful; and, among the treasures of your
songs, we venture to select and even to reject. So it must be! We
cannot all love Haggis, nor “painch, tripe, and thairm,” and all those
rural dainties which you celebrate as “warm-reekin, rich! ” “Rather too
rich,” as the Young Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam Weller.
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!
You _have_ given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, and her “gratefu’
prayer” is yours for ever. But if even an eternity of partridge may pall
on the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, cometh
satiety at last. And yet what a glorious Haggis it is—the more
emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse! We have had
many a rural bard since Theocritus “watched the visionary flocks,” but
you are the only one of them all who has spoken the sincere Doric. Yours
is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large
utterance of the early hinds. Even Theocritus minces matters, save where
Lacon and Comatas quite out-do the swains of Ayrshire. “But thee,
Theocritus, wha matches? ” you ask, and yourself out-match him in this
wide rude region, trodden only by the rural Muse. “_Thy_ rural loves are
nature’s sel’;” and the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more like a true
shepherd than the elegant Daphnis of the “Oaristys. ”
Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you,
forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other Scotch
ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present. Ettrick may still, with
Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your antithesis,
and the complement of the Scotch character) supposed; but the morals of
Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your
days. Over these matters the Kirk, with all her power, and the Free Kirk
too, have had absolutely no influence whatever. To leave so delicate a
topic, you were but as other swains, or, as “that Birkie ca’d a lord,”
Lord Byron; only you combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine
theory with your practice; you poured out in song your audacious
raptures, your half-hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn. You
spoke the truth about rural lives and loves. We may like it or dislike
it but we cannot deny the verity.
Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for
Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages
and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was
beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to
admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers
not less truly poets than yourself—though less versatile not less
passionate, though less sensuous not less simple—had been born and had
died in poor men’s cottages! There abides not even the shadow of a name
of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-makers. The authors of
“Clerk Saunders,” of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” of “Fair Annie,” and
“Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Bonny Hind,” are as unknown to us as Homer,
whom in their directness and force they resemble. They never, perhaps,
gave their poems to writing; certainly they never gave them to the press.
On the lips and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and
the singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,
are forgotten. “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his Poppy. ”
Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as these
unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan—verses retained
only by Memory. You would have been but the minstrel of your native
valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the world.
Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned in you;
indignation would not have vexed you. Society would not have given and
denied her caresses. You would have been happy. Your songs would have
lingered in all “the circle of the summer hills;” and your scorn, your
satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To
the world what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed
but a few of your lyrics, as
When o’er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O!
How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,
oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:
In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho’s flame!
But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these
strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day μετενίσσετο
βουλυτόνδε? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent
glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in
your songs reminds us of the Poet’s Corner in the “Kirkcudbright
Advertiser. ” We should not have read how
Phœbus, gilding the brow o’ morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade!
Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.
But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush
would have been untaught in “the style of the Bird of Paradise. ”
A quiet life of song, _fallentis semita vitæ_, was not to be yours. Fate
otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife with
the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and
success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the
world with “Tam o’ Shanter,” the “Jolly Beggars,” and “Holy Willie’s
Prayer. ” Who can praise them too highly—who admire in them too much the
humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage? So
powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars’ Chorus, that,
methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living
poet when he conceived the “Vision of Sin. ” You shall judge for
yourself. Recall:
Here’s to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here’s to all the wandering train!
and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a
Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein,
that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony
ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation
a leader of that generation should hold his peace. He should neither
praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at
the buzzing ephemeræ of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with
the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course,
there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who
have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What “irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we
may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon
comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. “The New Yorkers
never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels
at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone,
but the whole literary class that you assailed. “As a literary people,”
you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug. ” After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet
writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He
who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling
above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen,
and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of
Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that
of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.
No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—_infelix
opportunitate vitæ_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth,
applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.
Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of
letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which
would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of
Mark Twain and of “Called Back. ” It may be that your criticisms helped
to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect
for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as “objectional”
in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a
sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the
frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of
poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory,
and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent,
and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you
too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse. Even if
morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at
present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the
largest public.
“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you
wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry. ” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted
Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea. ” But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means
particularly “vague. ” So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, _vivu’ per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla
Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would
come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue
Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the
author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies. ”
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Molière. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold
water. The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to
“Undine. ” Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, “a barren rascal. ” But how can a writer’s verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . .
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind! ” Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton. ”
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all
those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston. ” On this
point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,
and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal
suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is
perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as
“Hawthorne and delirium tremens. ” I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal
of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his
command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom
America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a
certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the
workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen’s favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he
is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of “Daisy Miller. ” You would admit the unity of effect secured
in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask
of Amontillado. ”
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to
the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among
poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training,
embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.
XV.
_To Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart. _
Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:
Sept. 8, 1885.
SIR,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of
all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for
you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your
company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of
turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that
fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and
charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the
scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all
the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with
letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your
simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that
envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but
never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the
Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old
term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra. ” But perhaps we
scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare,
or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.
Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey
round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one
falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is
of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently
brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the
dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to
inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your
song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless
you.
It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is
altered! But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the
heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen
since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir
Walter. ” We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken
away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of
Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and
many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! On
the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or
wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among
the bravest! Only he who told how
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood
could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.
Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes
may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting
men might cry, with Leyden,
My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi’ me!
Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much
remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively
black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very
flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the
cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully
Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost
buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.
All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are
filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk
man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
promised, I cannot see much change—for the better. Abbotsford, luckily,
is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,
Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your
ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is
overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels
of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky is exiled
from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John
Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote
your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, _le pauvre
homme_! ) were beginning to prevail. This pious biographer was greatly
shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the
Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers. Your Toryism also was an
offence to him.
Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us
be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border
country remains as kind and homely as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some
days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for
Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the
opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the
burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the
burn was dry. But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March
brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank. This may not interest you,
who styled yourself
No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game!
Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand
gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that
sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from
Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren
Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant
still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, _purior electro_, of
Yarrow. St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the
St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could
no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the
country people took them for herrings.
The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies,
within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the
graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and
Marjory his wife. ” Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where
they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried
him rests now with her wild lord.
Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,
When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;
Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,
When I turned about and went my way! {160}
Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow and
beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That sacredness,
that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and inextricably
blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our love of you.
Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you most for the example
you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, showing them what, by
heaven’s blessing, a Scotchman still might be.
Words, empty and unavailing—for what words of ours can speak our thoughts
or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer
with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight
errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the happiness that is in
the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are
not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our
gratitude. _Fungor inani munere_!
XVI.
_To Eusebius of Cæsarea_.
(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN. )
TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not
ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there
is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of
men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat
meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured
forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the
fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no
more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the
sweet-voiced water is silent. ” The fane is ruinous, and the images of
men’s idolatry are dust.
Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings
of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how
first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.
Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit,
there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers
believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly
persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who,
long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained,
fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the
likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set
forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am,
do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men,
chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the
whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the
Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter
darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of
thy wit.
Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods
of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the
blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time
went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer
understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled
into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of
mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an
eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.
Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue,
even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For
they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and
storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they
are nowise at one with each other in their explanations. ” For of old
some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love
of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and
others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she
was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth,
the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And
when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant
(said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of
the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.
To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera
could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of
sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions
were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why—thou
saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things
told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.
“These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would
be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the
natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves,
like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable
beasts? ” But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of
the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the
other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.
To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen
answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that
the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the
nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own
speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the
pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves. Nay,
they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and
Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear with me,
Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend
among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call
“Science”!
Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even
as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never
knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of
their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made
Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For,
when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his
name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them
according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and
Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their
turn. How saith Socrates? “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious
idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I
should be by to-morrow’s dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull
out letters at pleasure and alter the accents. ”
Even so do the learned—not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain
fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among
themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good
to be known; but, as touching the names of the Gods, their learning, as
it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the goddess Athene: taking one
example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the
most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.
Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the
ancient tongue of the Brachmanæ, _Ahanâ_, which, being interpreted, means
the Dawn. “And that the morning light,” saith he, “offers the best
starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe,
beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil. ” {169}
Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation,
the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene,
taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us
that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius “will be bound,
in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable. ” This, Father, is
“one for Benfeius,” as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that
these matters “admit of almost mathematical precision,” it would seem
that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own
language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.
Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the
facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with
Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that
she is “the feminine of the Zend _Thrâetâna athwyâna_. ” Lo, you! how
Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahanâ_ and
the old Brachmanæ, nor _athwyâna_ and the old Medes, but from “the root
_αἰθ_, whence _αἴθηρ_, the air, or _ἀθ_, whence _ἄνθος_, a flower. ” Yea,
and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter.
None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it
that Athene was, from the first, “the clear pure height of the Air, which
is exceeding pure in Attica. ”
Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with
a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for
his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus,
take Athene for “wisdom in person;” nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for
“the goddess of air;” nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical
certainty, for “the Morning-Red:” but they say that Athene is the “black
thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom”! I make no
doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot
sententiæ_.
Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἀλλήλοις σύμφωνα
φυσιολογοῦσιν_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call “Science”! But
if any man says to the learned: “Best of men, you are erudite, and
laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your
opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no
avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the Gods”—that man is
railed at for his “mean” and “weak” arguments.
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must
still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented
“when man’s life was yet brutish and wandering” (as is the life of many
tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour by
the later Greeks “because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his
ancestors. ” Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy
well-wisher and thy disciple.
XVII.
_To Percy Bysshe Shelley_.
SIR,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as
to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his
less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their
discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,
as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may
guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your
reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your
letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands
of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the
sentence “Death. ” Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent
in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier
flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and
a merciful. The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of
Fame.
There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be
less and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will out-live your lays. I know not
whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of
your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats)
as “a gallery of your failures. ” But the general voice does not echo
these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not
your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers. ”
Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors
who from time to time make themselves heard in your case. The “Quarterly
Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as
tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;”
and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a
Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms
where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once
guilty of similar negligence? ) are now shown to pious pilgrims.
But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and
are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and,
indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems,
like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the
mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young. ” It is in your
lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an
examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound. ” Talking of this piece,
by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering
after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from
cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a
Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L’homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your
boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free. ”
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were “the haunts meet for thee. ” Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was
the task of Shelley! “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. ” Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is
spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on
the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things
didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it. ” Kings and priests
are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails
them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never,
like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of
treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious
ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in
the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and
we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and
described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence
somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!
he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else
she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds
unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the
paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone
says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be
vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.
Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man! ) has a Bill for
extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political
happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret
to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something
for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in
the “Queen Mab” stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much
of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of
_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This
curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of
commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They
swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written
on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether
it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off
things, and sorrows long ago. ” Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley. ” The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so
prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I
wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad
old man. ” But enough of this inopportune brawler.
For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly
as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely. If this
nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the
ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of
the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest
of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone
(says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he
will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with
the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure
of the heavens. In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will
survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps
more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing
of the human spirit.
XVIII.
_To Monsieur de Molière_, _Valet de Chambre du Roi_.
MONSIEUR,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the
great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his
comb! ) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his
titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found
your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the
dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for
French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the
sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so
he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame
the Channel. If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through
you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of
Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you
lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial
business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their
large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are
diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they
borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.
But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and
imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our
_bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We
are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a
comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the
countrymen of Molière. Why this should be, and what “tenebriferous star”
(as Paracelsus, your companion in the “Dialogues des Morts,” would have
believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but
certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.
Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor “a wilderness of monkeys”
like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to
Europe.
While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that
we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with
daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you “let no
musty _bouquin_ escape you” (so your enemies declared), it was to some
purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who
came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we
turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from
Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your
creations. “Creations” one may well say, for you anticipated Nature
herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a
gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don Juan’s, the secret of the new
Religion and the watchword of Comte, _l’amour de l’humanité_.
Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour;
and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular
civilisation? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and
generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life
endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope,
or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all,
the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary
blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you,
Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found
invisible.
In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and
Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of
their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived
that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking
every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons preached to Agnès we
surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which
are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal
self-defence of superstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for
the permanent element of life—precisely where Pascal recognised all that
was most fleeting and unsubstantial—in _divertissement_; in the pleasure
of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of
the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to
regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the
tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of
tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human
as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to
leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.
Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest—our sympathy,
somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman,
despite his misadventures.
Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and
defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you
did not mean that they should win it. They go off with laughter, and
their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth,
behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your
sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can
throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught
that it is over and ended. Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy,
in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and
the husband of Célimène be untaught in that experience? ), you never sided
quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and
rank and power.
I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just
after your own death the author of “Les Dialogues des Morts” gave you
Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of “Le Jugement de Pluton” made
the “mighty warder” decide that “Molière should not talk philosophy. ”
These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the
_Contemplateur_, of the translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy of life
in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons of human experience
writ small and clear.
What comedian but Molière has combined with such depths—with the
indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of
Don Juan—such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!
Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much
water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of
contemporary mirth (_cetera fluminis ritu feruntur_), even now we never
laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the
boards in the Maison de Molière. Since those mobile dark brows of yours
ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the “demoniac”
manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player
has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of
Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comédie Française. In him you have a
successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of
your date might cry, could they see him, that Molière had come again.
But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle.
Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss
of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Célimène,
Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a _soubrette_ as Mdme. Samary, so
exquisite a Nicole?
Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago,
you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility
and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve.
Are not the Molièristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism? Any
scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely
touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15
not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians.
Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious
enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger,
and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.
It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as
the veteran and inveterate M. Arsène Houssaye, or the industrious but
puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead,
and the immortal Molière among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices. As I
regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their
trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Molière’s works to gossip
about Molière’s great-grand-mother’s second-best bed—I sometimes wish
that Molière were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, “Les
Molièristes. ” How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked
with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells
us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the
most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the
heartiest sympathy! Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in
the study, rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller’s shop,
strolling through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine’s,
dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls. Would
that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with
Boileau, and with Racine,—not yet a traitor,—laughing over Chapelain,
combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking
your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits
none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and
friendship.
XIX.
_To Robert Burns_.
SIR,—Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are some to
whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there are others
whom we admire rather than love. By some we are won with our will, by
others conquered against our desire. It has been your peculiar fortune
to capture the hearts of a whole people—a people not usually prone to
praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you and to
your reputation. In you every Scot who _is_ a Scot sees, admires, and
compliments Himself, his ideal self—independent, fond of whisky, fonder
of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation.
Next year will be the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to
light its solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore,
methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the abundance
of whisky drunk in your honour. It is a cruel thing for any of your
countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he can only admire;
where all the rest are idolators, he may not bend the knee; but stands
apart and beats upon his breast, observing, not adoring—a critic. Yet to
some of us—petty souls, perhaps, and envious—that loud indiscriminating
praise of “Robbie Burns” (for so they style you in their Change-house
familiarity) has long been ungrateful; and, among the treasures of your
songs, we venture to select and even to reject. So it must be! We
cannot all love Haggis, nor “painch, tripe, and thairm,” and all those
rural dainties which you celebrate as “warm-reekin, rich! ” “Rather too
rich,” as the Young Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam Weller.
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!
You _have_ given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, and her “gratefu’
prayer” is yours for ever. But if even an eternity of partridge may pall
on the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, cometh
satiety at last. And yet what a glorious Haggis it is—the more
emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse! We have had
many a rural bard since Theocritus “watched the visionary flocks,” but
you are the only one of them all who has spoken the sincere Doric. Yours
is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large
utterance of the early hinds. Even Theocritus minces matters, save where
Lacon and Comatas quite out-do the swains of Ayrshire. “But thee,
Theocritus, wha matches? ” you ask, and yourself out-match him in this
wide rude region, trodden only by the rural Muse. “_Thy_ rural loves are
nature’s sel’;” and the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more like a true
shepherd than the elegant Daphnis of the “Oaristys. ”
Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you,
forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other Scotch
ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present. Ettrick may still, with
Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your antithesis,
and the complement of the Scotch character) supposed; but the morals of
Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your
days. Over these matters the Kirk, with all her power, and the Free Kirk
too, have had absolutely no influence whatever. To leave so delicate a
topic, you were but as other swains, or, as “that Birkie ca’d a lord,”
Lord Byron; only you combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine
theory with your practice; you poured out in song your audacious
raptures, your half-hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn. You
spoke the truth about rural lives and loves. We may like it or dislike
it but we cannot deny the verity.
Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for
Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages
and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was
beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to
admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers
not less truly poets than yourself—though less versatile not less
passionate, though less sensuous not less simple—had been born and had
died in poor men’s cottages! There abides not even the shadow of a name
of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-makers. The authors of
“Clerk Saunders,” of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” of “Fair Annie,” and
“Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Bonny Hind,” are as unknown to us as Homer,
whom in their directness and force they resemble. They never, perhaps,
gave their poems to writing; certainly they never gave them to the press.
On the lips and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and
the singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,
are forgotten. “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his Poppy. ”
Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as these
unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan—verses retained
only by Memory. You would have been but the minstrel of your native
valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the world.
Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned in you;
indignation would not have vexed you. Society would not have given and
denied her caresses. You would have been happy. Your songs would have
lingered in all “the circle of the summer hills;” and your scorn, your
satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To
the world what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed
but a few of your lyrics, as
When o’er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O!
How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,
oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:
In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho’s flame!
But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these
strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day μετενίσσετο
βουλυτόνδε? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent
glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in
your songs reminds us of the Poet’s Corner in the “Kirkcudbright
Advertiser. ” We should not have read how
Phœbus, gilding the brow o’ morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade!
Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.
But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush
would have been untaught in “the style of the Bird of Paradise. ”
A quiet life of song, _fallentis semita vitæ_, was not to be yours. Fate
otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife with
the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and
success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the
world with “Tam o’ Shanter,” the “Jolly Beggars,” and “Holy Willie’s
Prayer. ” Who can praise them too highly—who admire in them too much the
humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage? So
powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars’ Chorus, that,
methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living
poet when he conceived the “Vision of Sin. ” You shall judge for
yourself. Recall:
Here’s to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here’s to all the wandering train!
