VII

The beauty was ... that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the weight of.

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National Gallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby filled to overflowing." He does, indeed, give a slender description of his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact even of this incident is that "I thrilled ... with the prodigy of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne."

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography. He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler." After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my vibration." The occasion of the message to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving at George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G.H. Lewes's sons lying in horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically describes it:—

a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably compromised.

There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out of his visits to George Eliot. The visit he paid her at Witley under the "much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no law but that of innocent and exquisite aberration," had a superb conclusion, which "left our adventure an approved ruin." As James was about to leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville, G.H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to the doorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shaking high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after his dash in quest of them":—

"Ah, those books—take them away, please, away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance.

The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own new book—a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, in turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to be read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect their young visitor with the volumes. Hence a situation so comic that even its victim could not but enjoy it:—

Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.

Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host. Tennyson had read at least one of his stories and liked it. All the same, James was disappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed and stamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson not Tennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock to his guest:—

He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.

As Tennyson readLocksley Hallto his guests, Henry James had to pinch himself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility." What a lovely touch of malice there is in his description of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs. Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:—

He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since itwasa question of his genius.

Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, even after his conversion. He was a wit as well as an enthusiast.The Middle Years, indeed, is precious in every page for its wit as well as for its confessional raptures. It may be objected that Henry James's wit is only a new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis. He might be described as the last of the periphrastic humorists. At the same time, if ever in any book there was to be found the free play of an original genius—a genius however limited and even little—it is surely in the autobiography of Henry James. Those who can read it at all will read it with shining eyes.

Browning's reputation has not yet risen again beyond a half-tide. The fact that two books about him were published during the war, however, suggests that there is a revival of interest in his work. It would have been surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets who inspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of Hell. Browning was the great challenger of the multitude of devils. He did not achieve his optimism by ignoring Satan, but by defying him. His courage was not merely of the stomach, but of the daring imagination. There is no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow and indigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, enjoyed good health. As Professor Phelps, of Yale, says in a recent book,Robert Browning: How to Know Him:—

He had a truly wonderful digestion: it was his firm belief that one should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the infallible sign that the food was healthful. "My father was a man ofbonne fourchette," said Barett Browning to me "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially with rich sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things. He would make a whole meal off mayonnaise."

Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of a kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:—

It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.

The man who does not suffer from pie will hardly suffer from pessimism; but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors than pie for breakfast, and his philosophy did not flinch. There was no other English writer of the nineteenth century who to the same degree made all human experiences his own. His is poems are not poems about little children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero who is either worse than his virtue or better than his sins. Nowhere else in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer is there such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's often quoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect and essential criticism:—

Since Chaucer was alive and hale,No man hath walked along our roads with stepSo active, so inquiring eye, or tongueSo varied in discourse.

For Browning was a portrait-painter by genius and a philosopher only by accident. He was a historian even more than a moralist. He was born with a passion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially and eagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to whether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make one believe. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder into forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, inHow it Strikes a Contemporary, to all such calumnies on poets.

Of all the fields of human experience, it was love into which the imagination of Browning most fully entered. It may seem an obvious thing to say about almost any poet, but Browning differed from other poets in being able to express, not only the love of his own heart, but the love of the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of love from the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there never was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love and so little of the obsession of sex. Love was for him the crisis and test of a man's life. The disreputable lover has his say in Browning's monologues no less than Count Gismond. Porphyria's lover, mad and a murderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic lover of Cristina.

The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that Browning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent to form has always seemed to me the extreme of stupidity. At the same time, its very newness puzzles many readers, even to-day. Some people cannot read Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throw themselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artistic sense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled by the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are reborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramatic studies. Professor Phelps's book should be of especial service to such readers, because it will train them in the right method of approach to Browning's best work. It is a very admirable essay in popular literary interpretation. One is astonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent banality. There are sentences that will make the fastidious shrink, such as:—

The commercial worth ofPaulinewas exactly zero.

And:—

Their (the Brownings') love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia.

And, again, in the story of the circumstances that led to Browning's death:—

In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him, he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice.

Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath away, as when, discussingThe Lost Mistress, Professor Phelps observes that the lover:—

instead of thinking of his own misery ... endeavours to make the awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the sparrows and the leaf-buds.

When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in existence.

Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements. One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short poems likeMeeting at Night, but long poems, such asAndrea del Sarto, Caliban on Setebos, andChilde Roland to the Dark Tower Came.This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet is allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.

At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in fullTranscendentalismandHow it Strikes a Contemporaryas Browning's confession of his aims as an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things—with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passion for the detailed and the concrete. InTranscendentalismhe bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme with his subtle meanings:—

Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.

With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things" as compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":—

He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,Over us, under, round us every side,Nay, in and out the tables and the chairsAnd musty volumes, Boehme's book and all—Buries us with a glory, young once more,Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.

One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and pedestrian details with beauty.

The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as when the mourners are made to say inA Grammarian's Funeral:—

Look out if yonder be not day again.Rimming the rock-row!

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river. His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half of his poems.Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Cameis a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing—a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's genius, one has only to readChilde Rolandagain to restore one's faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of apprehension and the Tower itself appears:—

The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:—

Not see? because of night perhaps?—why, dayCame back again for that! before it left,The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:The hills, like giants at a hunting, layChin upon hand, to see the game at bay—"Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!"Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolledIncreasing like a bell. Names in my ears,Of all the lost adventurers my peers—How such a one was strong, and such was bold,And such was fortunate, yet each of oldLost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.There they stood, ranged along the hillside, metTo view the last of me, a living frameFor one more picture! in a sheet of flameI saw them and I knew them all. And yetDauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolledIncreasing like a bell. Names in my ears,Of all the lost adventurers my peers—How such a one was strong, and such was bold,And such was fortunate, yet each of oldLost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillside, metTo view the last of me, a living frameFor one more picture! in a sheet of flameI saw them and I knew them all. And yetDauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said, on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No," when in his later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians. Like the Pope inThe Ring and the Book, he loathed the association of Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides inApparent Failurethan towards the vacillating and respectable lovers inThe Statue and the Bust.There was at least a hint of heroism in the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age. Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those two great energies of the spirit—love and heroism. For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did. The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as those through which it has but recently passed.

The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries—or the choruses—as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare. So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle—a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion to prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a god, not a man—a creator of absolute beauty—and he asks us to accept the common view thatThe Playboy of the Western Worldis his masterpiece. There can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not the peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Shelley: he is the peer, say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That is why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people than among simple people.

Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the artistic formula of Tolstoi. This wasRiders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants to-day.

Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is a corpse on the stage inRiders to the Sea, and a man laid out as a corpse inIn the Shadow of the Glen, and there is a funeral party inThe Playboy of the Western World.Synge's imagination dwelt much among the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities of a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either as a tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soul of a lyric poet.

If he is at his greatest inRiders to the Sea, he is at his most personal inThe Well of the Saints, and this is essentially a tragic satire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blind beggars. Mr. Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists inThe Well of the Saints," but that is because he is anxious to prove that Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. InRiders to the Seahe wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life more and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the noble style ofRiders to the Seafor the gauded and overwrought style ofThe Playboy.

"WithThe Playboy of the Western World," says Mr. Howe, "Synge placed himself among the masters." But then Mr. Howe thinks that "Pegeen Mike is one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama," and that she "is the normal," and that

Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's, insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's blood.

The conception of ordinary life—or is it only ordinary Irish life?—in the last half-sentence leaves one meditating.

But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with Mr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of the Irish countryside is a minor one. On the other hand, it is worth noting that he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discovery of the wonders of Irish peasant speech. His first plays express, as it were, the delight of first love. He was always a shaping artist, of course, in search of figures and patterns; but he kept his passion for these things subordinate to reality in the early plays. InThe Playboyhe seemed to be determined to write riotously, like a man straining after vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild phrases—the collections of years—into the conversations of a few minutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing of tricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms—I am sure there are a hundred blank-verse lines in the play—and otiose adjectives crept in and spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful English Synge wrote in the noon of his genius.

I cannot understand the special enthusiasm forThe Playboyexcept among those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier and better work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand of genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation to those who do not knowRiders to the SeaorThe Well of the Saints.Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated form, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant but Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and originality are obvious enough.The Playboyis a marvellous confection, but it is toRiders to the Seaone turns in search of Synge the immortal poet.

It is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had ever written his essay on Villon. He explains that this was due to the fact that he "regarded Villon as a bad fellow," but one likes to think that his conscience was also a little troubled because through lack of sympathy he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius. Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience. He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out. He was, no doubt, a thief; he had killed a man; and it may even be (if we are to read autobiography into one of the most shocking portions of theGrand Testament) that he lived for a time on the earnings of "la grosse Margot." But, for all this, he was not the utterly vile person that Stevenson believed. His poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally changes its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the "crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as:

Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,

and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice,"

That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers,Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.

No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls—damned in their merry sins—at which the writer ofEcclesiastesmerely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to singCarpe diemwhen at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head—not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang translation—that theBallade de bonne Doctrine à ceux de mauvaise Viefalls, with its refrain of destiny:

Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

And theBallade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie, in which Age counsels Youth to take its pleasure and its fee before the evil days come, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallestmemento mori.

One must admit, of course, that the obsession of vice is strong in Villon's work. In this he is prophetic of much of the greatest French literature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminals beyond most poets. It is not only that he indulged in the sins of the flesh. It is difficult to imagine that there exists any sin of which he and his companions were not capable. He was apparently a member of the famous band of thieves called the Coquillards, the sign of which was a cockle-shell in the cap, "which was the sign of the Pilgrim." "It was a large business," Mr. Stacpoole says of this organization in his popular life of Villon, "with as many departments as a New York store, and, to extend the simile, its chief aim and object was to make money. Coining, burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery, card-sharping, and dice-playing with loaded dice, were chief among its industries." Mr. Stacpoole goes on to tone down this catalogue of iniquity with the explanation that the Coquillards were, after all, not nearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweaters of women. He is inclined to think they may have been good fellows, like Robin Hood and his men or the gentlemen of the road in a later century. This may well be, but a gang of Robin Hoods, infesting a hundred taverns in the town and quarrelling in the streets over loose women, is dangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never been taught the Shorter Catechism. Paris, even in the twentieth century, is alleged to be a city of temptation. Paris, in the fifteenth century, must have been as tumultuous with the seven deadly sins as the world before the Flood. Joan of Arc had been burned in the year in which Villon was born, but her death had not made saints of the students of Paris. Living more or less beyond the reach of the civil law, they made a duty of riot, and counted insolence and wine to themselves for righteousness. Villon, we are reminded, had good influences in his life, which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness and folly. He had his dear, illiterate mother, for whom, and at whose request, he wrote that unexpected ballade of prayer to the Mother of God. He had, too, that good man who adopted him, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoist—

mon plus que pèreMaistre Guillaume de Villon,Qui m'a esté plus doux que mère;

and who gave him the name that he has made immortal. That he was not altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his references to them in hisGrand Testament, though Stevenson was inclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind of mockery and derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it will be remembered, was theRommant du Pet au Diable, which Stevenson refers to again and again as an "improper romance." Mr. Stacpoole has done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that theRommantwas nothing of the sort, but was a little epic—possibly witty enough—on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians of Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendency to justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's only known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he must have been acting on the defensive, because, "since the earliest times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack—chiefly the attack of wolves and dogs"—one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile. I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse Villon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence that acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well as a dagger. Nor does it seem to, me quite fair to blame, as Mr. Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de Vaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles—what a poem her very name is!-may, for all one knows, have had the best of reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet "like dirty linen on the washing-board." We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:—

Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December.

All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her absence Villon and a member of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark of one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the College de Navarre. This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote hisPetit Testament, and skipped from Paris.

We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we know whether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in reputable idleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to Charles of Orléans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this period. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, for some cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he "could not even see the lightning of a thunderstorm," and kept him there for three months with "neither stool to sit nor bed to lie on, and nothing to eat but bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers." Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes hisGrand Testamenta "De Profundis" without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and old.

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint against the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. But to recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. He knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomes the servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of "la belle Heaulmière" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to hideousness—her once fair limbs become "speckled like sausages"? "La Grosse Margot" alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her name with Villon's:—

Ordure amons, ordure nous affuyt;Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt,En ce bordeau, où tenons nostre estat.

But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these amazing ballads of which theGrand Testamentis full. Villon was by nature a worshipper of beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream of fair lords and ladies by the reality of a withered and dissatisfying world runs like a torment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable passing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon has done in theBallade des Dames du Temps Jadis.I have heard it maintained that Rossetti has translated the radiant beauty of this ballade into hisBallad of Dead Ladies.I cannot agree. Even his beautiful translation of the refrain,

But where are the snows of yesteryear,

seems to me to injure simplicity with an ornament, and to turn natural into artificial music. Compare the opening lines in the original and in the translation, and you will see the difference between the sincere expression of a vision and the beautiful writing of an exercise. Here is Villon's beginning:—

Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays,Est Flora, la belle Romaine?Archipiade, ne Thaïs,Qui fut sa cousine germaine?

And here is Rossetti's jaunty English:—

Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora, the lovely Roman?Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thaïs,Neither of them the fairer woman?

One sees how Rossetti is inclined to romanticize that which is already romantic beyond one's dreams in its naked and golden simplicity. I would not quarrel with Rossetti's version, however, if it had not been often put forward as an example of a translation which was equal to the original. It is certainly a wonderful version if we compare it with most of those that have been made from Villon. Mr. Stacpoole's, I fear, have no rivulets of music running through them to make up for their want of prose exactitude. Admittedly, however, translation of Villon is difficult. Some of his most beautiful poems are simple as catalogues of names, and the secret of their beauty is a secret elusive as a fragrance borne on the wind. Mr. Stacpoole may be congratulated on his courage in undertaking an impossible task—a task, moreover, in which he challenges comparison with Rossetti, Swinburne, and Andrew Lang. His book, however, is meant for the general public rather than for poets and scholars—at least, for that intelligent portion of the general public which is interested in literature without being over-critical. For its purpose it may be recommended as an interesting, picturesque, and judicious book. The Villon of Stevenson is little better than a criminal monkey of genius. The Villon of Mr. Stacpoole is at least the makings of a man.

Pope is a poet whose very admirers belittle him. Mr. Saintsbury, for instance, even in the moment of inciting us to read him, observes that "it would be scarcely rash to say that there is not an original thought, sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poetic substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope." And he has still less to say in favour of Pope as a man. He denounces him for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility to suggest that "perhaps ... there is a natural connection between the two kinds of this dexterity of fingering—that of the artist in words, and that of the pickpocket or the forger." If Pope had been a contemporary, Mr. Saintsbury, I imagine, would have stunned him with a huge mattock of adjectives. As it is, he seems to be in two minds whether to bury or to praise him. Luckily, he has tempered his moral sense with his sense of humour, and so comes to the happy conclusion that as a matter of fact, when we read or read about Pope, "some of the proofs which are most damning morally, positively increase one's aesthetic delight."

One is interested in Pope's virtues as a poet and his vices as a man almost equally. It is his virtues as a man and his vices as a poet that are depressing. He is usually at his worst artistically when he is at his best morally. He achieves wit through malice: he achieves only rhetoric through virtue. It is not that one wishes he had been a bad son or a Uriah Heep in his friendships. It is pleasant to remember the pleasure he gave his mother by allowing her to copy out parts of his translation of theIliad, and one respects him for refusing a pension of £300 a year out of the secret service money from his friend Craggs. But one wishes that he had put neither his filial piety nor his friendship into writing. Mr. Saintsbury, I see, admires "the masterly and delightful craftsmanship in words" of the tribute to Craggs; but then Mr. Saintsbury also admires theElegy on an Unfortunate Lady—a mere attitude in verse, as chill as a weeping angel in a graveyard.

Pope's attractiveness is less that of a real man than of an inhabitant of Lilliput, where it is a matter of no importance whether or not one lives in obedience to the Ten Commandments. We can regard him with amusement as a liar, a forger, a glutton, and a slanderer of his kind. If his letters are the dullest letters ever written by a wit, it is because he reveals in them not his real vices but his imaginary virtues. They only become interesting when we know the secret history of his life and read them as the moralizings of a doll Pecksniff. Historians of literature often assert—mistakenly, I think—that Pliny's letters are dull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a man over-conscious of his virtues. But Pliny's virtues, however tip-tilted, were at least real. Pope's letters are the literary exercises of a man platitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have an impersonality, like that of the leading articles inThe Times. They have all the qualities of the essay except intimate confession. They are irrelevant scrawls which might as readily have been addressed to one correspondent as another. So much so is this, that when Pope published them, he altered the names of the recipients of some of them so as to make it appear that they were written to famous persons when, as a matter of fact, they were written to private and little-known friends.

The story of the way in which he tampered with his letters and arranged for their "unauthorized" publication by a pirate publisher is one of the most amazing in the history of forgery. It was in reference to this that Whitwell Elwin declared that Pope "displayed a complication of imposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paralleled in the lives of professional forgers and swindlers." When he published his correspondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that the boyish Pope should have written with such an air of patronage to the aged Wycherley and that Wycherley should have suffered it. We know, now, however, that the correspondence is only in part genuine, and that Pope used portions of his correspondence with Caryll and published them as though they had been addressed to Wycherley. Wycherley had remonstrated with Pope on the extravagant compliments he paid him: Pope had remonstrated with Caryll on similar grounds. In the Wycherley correspondence, Pope omits Wycherley's remonstrance to him and publishes his own remonstrance to Caryll as a letter from himself to Wycherley.

From that time onwards Pope spared no effort in getting his correspondence "surreptitiously" published. He engaged a go-between, a disreputable actor disguised as a clergyman, to approach Curll, the publisher, with an offer of a stolen collection of letters, and, when the book was announced, he attacked Curll as a villain, and procured a friend in the House of Lords to move a resolution that Curll should be brought before the House on a charge of breach of privilege, one of the letters (it was stated) having been written to Pope by a peer. Curll took a number of copies of the book with him to the Lords, and it was discovered that no such letter was included. But the advertisement was a noble one. Unfortunately, even a man of genius could not devise elaborate schemes of this kind without ultimately falling under suspicion, and Curll wrote a narrative of the events which resulted in seriously discrediting Pope.

Pope was surely one of the least enviable authors who ever lived. He had fame and fortune and friends. But he had not the constitution to enjoy his fortune, and in friendship he had not the gift of fidelity. He secretly published his correspondence with Swift and then set up a pretence that Swift had been the culprit. He earned from Bolingbroke in the end a hatred that pursued him in the grave. He was always begging Swift to go and live with him at Twickenham. But Swift found even a short visit trying. "Two sick friends never did well together," he wrote in 1727, and he has left us verses descriptive of the miseries of great wits in each other's company:—

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