XI

Pope has the talent well to speak,But not to reach the ear;His loudest voice is low and weak,The Dean too deaf to hear.Awhile they on each other look,Then different studies choose;The Dean sits plodding o'er a book,Pope walks and courts the muse.

Pope has the talent well to speak,But not to reach the ear;His loudest voice is low and weak,The Dean too deaf to hear.

Awhile they on each other look,Then different studies choose;The Dean sits plodding o'er a book,Pope walks and courts the muse.

"Mr. Pope," he grumbled some years later, "can neither eat nor drink, loves to be alone, and has always some poetical scheme in his head." Swift, luckily, stayed in Dublin and remained Pope's friend. Lady Mary, Wortley Montagu went to Twickenham and became Pope's enemy. The reason seems to have been that he was more eager for an exchange of compliments than for friendship. He affected the attitude of a man in love, when Lady Mary saw in him only a monkey in love. He is even said to have thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and its three pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burst out laughing. Pope took his revenge in theEpistle to Martha Blount, where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady that her different aspects agreed as ill with each other—

As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock;Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy taskWith Sappho fragrant at an evening mask;So morning insects, that in muck begun,Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun.

His relations with his contemporaries were too often begun in compliments only to end in abuse of this kind. Even while he was on good terms with them, he was frequently doing them ill turns. Thus, he persuaded a publisher to get Dennis to write abusively of Addison'sCatoin order that he might have an excuse in his turn for writing abusively of Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly taking a revenge of his own. Addison was more embarrassed than pleased by so savage a defence, and hastened to assure Dennis that he had had nothing to do with it. Addison also gave offence to Pope by his too judicious praise ofThe Rape of the Lockand the translation of theIliad. Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which was expressed with the genius of venom in theEpistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

There was never a poet whose finest work needs such a running commentary of discredit as Pope's. He may be said, indeed, to be the only great poet in reading whom the commentary is as necessary as the text. One can enjoy Shakespeare or Shelley without a note: one is inclined even to resent the intrusion of the commentator into the upper regions of poetry. But Pope's verse is a guide to his age and the incidents of his waspish existence, lacking a key to which one misses three-fourths of the entertainment. TheDanciadwithout footnotes is one of the obscurest poems in existence: with footnotes it becomes a perfect epic of literary entomology. And it is the same with at least half of his work. Thus, in theImitations of Horace, a reference to Russell tells us little till we read in a delightful footnote:

There was a Lord Russell who, by living too luxuriously, had quite spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, but used to go out with his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite. If he felt anything of that, he would cry out, "Oh, I have found it!" turn short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of the finest chase. It was this lord who, when he met a beggar, and was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost famished with hunger, called him a "happy dog."

There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before Mr. Elwin and Mr. Courthope edited and annotated him—though he had been edited well before—but their monumental edition has made him of all English poets one of the most incessantly entertaining.

Pope, however, is a charmer in himself. His venom has graces. He is a stinging insect, but of how brilliant a hue! There are few satires in literature richer in the daintiness of malice than theEpistle to Martha Blountand theEpistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. The "characters" of women in the former are among the most precious of those railleries of sex in which mankind has always loved to indulge. The summing-up of the perfect woman:

And mistress of herself, though china fall,

is itself perfect in its wit. And the fickle lady, Narcissa, is a portrait in porcelain:

Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild,To make a wash, would hardly stew a child;Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer.And paid a tradesman once, to make him stare;...Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs,Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres;Now conscience chills her and now passion burns;And atheism and religion take their turns;A very heathen in the carnal part,Yet still a sad, good Christian at the heart.

The study of Chloe, who "wants a heart," is equally delicate and witty:

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,Content to dwell in decencies for ever—So very reasonable, so unmoved,As never yet to love, or to be loved.She, while her lover pants upon her breast,Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;And when she sees her friend in deep despair,Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!...Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead?She bids her footman put it in her head.Chloe is prudent—would you too be wise?Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.

TheEpistle to Dr. Arbuthnotis still more dazzling. The venom is passionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a masterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations of Addison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus:

Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk—

Sporus, "the bug with gilded wings"—are portraits one may almost call beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, thoughThe Rape of the Lockis as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, theDunciadan amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and theEssay on Criticism—what a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one!—much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally admitted nowadays. As for theEssay on Man, one can read! it more than once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise him as the poet who makes remarks—as the poet, one might almost say, who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.

James Elroy Flecker died in January 1915, having added at least one poem to the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains a good deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at least of the permanence ofThe Old Ships. Readers coming a thousand years hence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turn eagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. This was the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and original speech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men's visions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, and he did not stop at translating their words. He translated their imagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whose genius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love of life. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of theArabian Nights.

"He began," Mr. J.C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest that this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom the visible world exists. But it existed for him less in nature than in art. He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely and delightedly as Mr. W.H. Davies observes. His was a painted world inhabited by a number of chosen and exquisite images. He found the real world by comparison disappointing. "He confessed," we are told, "that he had not greatly liked the East—always excepting, of course, Greece." This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to see how in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way back from the world of illusion to the world of real things—from Bagdad and Babylon to England. His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; but inOak and OliveandBrumanahis spectatorial sensuousness at last breaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letter from a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches to the "traitor pines" which

sang what life has foundThe falsest of fair tales;

which had murmured of—

older seasThat beat on vaster sands,

and of—

landsWhere blaze the unimaginable flowers.

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance.The Burial in Englandis perhaps too much of anad hoccall to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version ofGod Save the King.

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such asThe Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus, andBryan of Brittany. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love, as inThe Ballad of the Student of the South.His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon which Mr. Squire comments:

There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man recur frequently in his poems.

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a ship was almost an obsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver ship. In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of the future are seen sailing like ships. The keeper of the West Gate of Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

when no wind breathes or ripple stirs,And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how much in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination was haunted. His world was a world of nursery ships and nursery caravans.

"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His attitude is too impassive for that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He is occasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word "meticulously," or makes his lost mariners say:

How striking like that boat were weIn the days, sweet days, when we put to sea.

That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination also tended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-design and "the good coloured things of Earth" was tempered by a kind of infidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of a brilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart and soul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walked a golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was an artist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in theQueen's Song, he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul.

Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The classical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book, indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty,The Old Shipsis, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it is foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleepBeyond the village which men still call Tyre,With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deepFor Famagusta and the hidden sunThat rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;And all those ships were certainly so old—Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,The pirate GenoeseHell-raked them till they rolledBlood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.But now through friendly seas they softly run,Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest of his verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithful priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.

Mr. Edward Garnett has recently collected his prefaces to the novels and stories of Turgenev, and refashioned them into a book in praise of the genius of the most charming of Russian authors. I am afraid the word "charming" has lost so much of its stamp and brightness with use as to have become almost meaningless. But we apply it to Turgenev in its fullest sense. We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming. He is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some persons who, when they come into a room, immediately make us feel happier. Turgenev seems to "come into the room" in his books with just such a welcome presence. That is why I wish Mr. Garnett had made his book a biographical, as well as a critical, study.

He quotes Turgenev as saying: "All my life is in my books." Still, there are a great many facts recorded about him in the letters and reminiscences of those who knew him (and he was known in half the countries of Europe), out of which we can construct a portrait. One finds in theLife of Sir Charles Dilke, for instance, that Dilke considered Turgenev "in the front rank" as a conversationalist. This opinion interested one all the more because one had come to think of Turgenev as something of a shy giant. I remember, too, reading in some French book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in the literary circles of Paris—a large figure with a curious chastity of mind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilized men of genius.

There are, indeed, as I have said, plenty of suggestions for a portrait of Turgenev, quite apart from his novels. Mr. Garnett refers to some of them in two excellent biographical chapters. He reminds us, for example, of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals, as when he introduced the work of Tolstoy to a French editor. "Listen," said Turgenev. "Here is 'copy' for your paper of an absolutely first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master—for he is arealmaster—is almost unknown in France; but I assure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes." The letter he addressed to Tolstoy from his death-bed, urging him to return from propaganda to literature, is famous, but it is a thing to which one always returns fondly as an example of the noble disinterestedness of a great man of letters. "I cannot recover," Turgenev wrote:—

That is out of the question. I am writing to you specially to say how glad I am to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think my request would have an effect on you!... I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it all! My friend—great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!... I can write no more; I am tired.

One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever have quarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev. Perhaps it was that there was something barbarous and brutal in each of them that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They were both men of action in literature, militant, and by nature propagandist. And probably Turgenev was as impatient with the faults of their strength as they were with the faults of his weakness. He was a man whom it was possible to disgust. Though he was Zola's friend, he complained thatL'Assommoirleft a bad taste in the mouth. Similarly, he discovered something almost Sadistic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let his imagination dwell on scenes of cruelty and horror. And he was as strongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by his sensationalism among horrors. One can guess exactly the frame of mind he was in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "You see, I consider myself a German." This has been quoted against Turgenev as though he meant it literally, and as though it were a confession of denationalization. His words were more subtle than that in their irony. What they meant was simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European." Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences inRudin?He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the narrowness with which it has been too often associated.

This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his lifetime. It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued with belittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death. He had that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox. This sense of truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an insult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circles of the political partisans. A great artist may be a member—and an enthusiastic member—of a political party, but in his art he cannot become a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist. In his novels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russia truthfully, not to paint and powder and "prettify" it for show purposes, and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who were asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the master-pieces of a professional flatterer. WhenFathers and Childrenwas published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemies of everything in which Turgenev believed. "I received congratulations," he wrote,

almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy.

This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he belongs, as his subject. He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he is compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way as to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of his enemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as daylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by the propagandist as worse than an enemy—a treacherous friend. Turgenev deliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead to the miseries of being misunderstood. When one thinks of the long years of denunciation and hatred he endured for the sake of his art, one cannot but regard him as one of the heroic figures of the nineteenth century. "He has," Mr. Garnett tells us, "been accused of timidity and cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries.... In an access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was comprised in one word—'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity nor cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth. His first and last advice to young writers, Mr. Garnett declares, was: "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations." And if Turgenev was remorseless in nothing else, he was remorseless in this—truth as regards both his own sensations and the sensations of his contemporaries. He seems, if we may judge from a sentence he wrote aboutFathers and Children, to have regarded himself almost as the first realist. "It was a new method," he said, "as well as a new type I introduced—that of Realizing instead of Idealizing." His claim has, at least, this truth in it: he was the first artist to apply the realistic method to a world seething with ideas and with political and philosophical unrest. His adoption of the realistic method, however, was the result of necessity no less than of choice. He "simply did not know how to work otherwise," as he said. He had not the sort of imagination that can invent men and women easily. He had always to draw from the life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom the various elements were harmonized together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly."

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity. The world before the war was afraid above all things of losing vitality, and so it turned to contortionists of genius such as Dostoevsky, or lesser contortionists, like some of the Futurists, for fear restfulness should lead to death. It would be foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but he has that element in him. Mr. Conrad suggests a certain vice of misshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenev in comparison with his. "All his creations, fortunate or unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors," he says in his fine tribute to Turgenev in Mr. Garnett's book, "are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie, or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions." That is well said. On the other hand, it is only right to remember that, if Turgenev's characters are human beings, they (at least the male characters) have a way of being curiously ineffectual human beings. He understood the Hamlet in man almost too well. From Rudin to the young revolutionist inVirgin Soil, who makes such a mess of his propaganda among the peasantry, how many of his characters are as remarkable for their weakness as their unsuccess! Turgenev was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination in regard to his fellow man—at least, his Russian fellow man. InOn the Eve, when he wished to create a central character that would act as an appeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weakness and apathy" (as Mr. Garnett puts it), he had to choose a Bulgarian, not a Russian, for his hero. Mr. Garnett holds that the characterization of Insarov, the Bulgarian, inOn the Eve, is a failure, and puts this down to the fact that Turgenev drew him, not from life, but from hearsay. I think Mr. Garnett is wrong. I have known the counterpart of Insarov among the members of at least one subject nation, and the portrait seems to me to be essentially true and alive. Luckily, if Turgenev could not put his trust in Russian men, he believed with all his heart in the courage and goodness of Russian women. He was one of the first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul. With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimental accidents. With Turgenev, women are equal human beings—saviours of men and saviours of the world.Virgin Soilbecomes a book of hope instead of despair as the triumphant figure of Marianna, the young girl of the Revolution, conquers the imagination. Turgenev, as a creator of noble women, ranks with Browning and Meredith. His realism was not, in the last analysis, a realism of disparagement, but a realism of affection. His farewell words, Mr. Garnett tells us, were: "Live and love others as I have always loved them."

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense—it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. Miss Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intent upon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt to analyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will be gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published in Sweden. The biography will supply the need of that part of the public which has no time to read Strindberg, but has plenty of time to read about him. It will give them a capably potted Strindberg, and will tell them quietly and briefly much that he himself has told violently and at length inThe Son of a Servant, The Confession of a Fool, and, indeed, in nearly everything he wrote. On the other hand, Miss Lind's book has little value as an interpretation. She does not do much to clear up the reasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter of interest in every civilized country in the world. She does, indeed, quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death, compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to help humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his breast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way." "Strindberg," Miss Lind declares, "patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil, the flame of his self-immolation was seen, pure and inextinguishable." This will not do. "Patiently" is impossible; so is "pure and inextinguishable." Strindberg was at once a man of genius (and therefore noble) and a creature of doom (and therefore to be pitied). But to sum him up as a spontaneous martyr in the greatest of great causes is to do injustice to language and to the lives of the saints and heroes. He was a martyr, of course, in the sense in which we call a man a martyr to toothache. He suffered; but most of his sufferings were due, not to tenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves.

Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility. Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability—even an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of man who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that the Devil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteous Job, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regarded the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil than the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies of exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you cannot do better than turn to those pages inZones of the Spirit(as the English translation of hisBlue Bookis called), in which he tells us about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals ofThe Dream Play.

My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within forty days I had six changes of servants—one worse than the other. At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove. I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.

Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with it.

Then came the dress-rehearsal ofThe Dream Play.This drama I wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days' fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.

There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part, simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations of life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesser irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them is very noticeable inThe Dream Playitself—in that scene, for instance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married, the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and the Daughter to complain of the dirt:

THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in the pot.THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat.THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage—to me it is repulsive.THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own taste.THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you—for sacrifices must be mutual.THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!THE LAWYER(kindly).Yes, you see how hard it is.

THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!

THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in the pot.

THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?

THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat.

THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage—to me it is repulsive.

THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?

THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own taste.

THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you—for sacrifices must be mutual.

THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?

THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.

THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!

THE LAWYER(kindly).Yes, you see how hard it is.

And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and cabbage is taken up again a little later:—

THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness—although it is torture to me!THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain.

THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!

THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness—although it is torture to me!

THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.

THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain.

One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope. The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame. Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy." Here, and in a score of similar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.

His attitude to women, as we find it expressed inThe Confession of a Fool, The Dance of Death, and all through his work, is that of a man overwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with lust, now with disgust—two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me." Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. Miss Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman suffrage. But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of the nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering angel or denouncing her as a ministering devil—preferably the latter. It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see at least one class of women clearly and truly. The accuracy with which he portrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quite terrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them as a better artist would have done.The Confessions of a Foolis less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane of oglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and his ears covered. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in his suspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at the mouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as something higher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was a woman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:—

I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that woman is—what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together.

Sex, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. He reveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. He flies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places—drink and lust and piano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy and poison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to for a living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows the restlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to be regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of pleasure even out of his acutest pain. "I find the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles," he tells us in the preface toMiss Julia, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning something." He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge—a phase of his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn his inferno into a purgatory.

In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the sufferings of life cleanse and ennoble. By tortuous ways of sin he at last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels that, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easily have passed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It is significant that we find him inThe Confession of a Foolreciting Longfellow'sExcelsiorto the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg may have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play the part of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to the Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of fables,In Midsummer Days, we see how essentially good and simple were his ideas when he could rid himself of sex mania and persecution mania. Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains to virtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, but to the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On his death-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: "This alone is right." Through his works, however, he serves virtue best, not by directly praising it, but by his eagerly earnest account of the madness of the seven deadly sins, as well as of the seventy-seven deadly irritations. He has not the originality of fancy or imagination to paint virtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructive criticism. His work is a jumble of ideas and an autobiography of raw nerves rather than a revelation of the emotions of men and women. His great claim on our attention, however, is that his autobiography is true as far as the power of truth was in him. His pilgrim's progress through madness to salvation is neither a pretty nor a sensational lie. It is a genuine document. That is why, badly constructed though his plays and novels are, some of them have a fair chance of being read a hundred years hence. As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the bold and original men of his time.

It is difficult nowadays to conceive that, within half a century of his death, Ronsard's fame suffered so dark an eclipse that no new edition of his works was called for between 1629 and 1857. When he died, he was, as M. Jusserand reminds us, the most illustrious man of letters in Europe. He seemed, too, to have all those gifts of charm—charm of mood and music—which make immortality certain. And yet, in the rule-of-thumb ages that were to follow, he sank into such disesteem in his own country that Boileau had not a good word for him, and Voltaire roundly said of him that he "spoiled the language." Later, we have Arnauld asserting that France had only done herself dishonour by her enthusiasm for "the wretched poetry of Ronsard." Fénelon, as M. Jusserand tells us, discusses Ronsard as a linguist, and ignores him as a poet.

It was the romantic; revival of the nineteenth century that placed Ronsard on a throne again. Even to-day, however, there are pessimistic Frenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a great poet. Mr. Bennet has told us of one who, on being asked who was the greatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" And in the days when Hugo was still but a youth the doubt must have been still more painful. So keenly was the want of a national poet felt that, if one could not have been discovered, the French would have had to invent him. It was necessary for the enthusiastic young romanticists to possess a great indigenous figure to stand beside those imported idols —Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Dante. Sainte-Beuve, who brought out a Ronsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where to look. After that, it was as though French literature had begun with Ronsard. He was the "ideal ancestor." He was, as it were, a re-discovered fatherland. But his praise since then has been no mere task of patriotism. It has been a deep enthusiasm for literature. "You cannot imagine," wrote Flaubert, in 1852, "what a poet Ronsard is. What a poet! What a poet! What wings!... This morning, at half-past twelve, I read a poem aloud which almost upset my nerves, it gave me so much pleasure." That may be taken as the characteristic French view of Ronsard. It may be an exaggerated view. It may be fading to some extent before modern influences. But it is unlikely that Ronsard's reputation in his own country will ever again be other than that of a great poet.

At the same time, it is not easy, on literary grounds, to acquiesce in all the praises that have been heaped upon him. One would imagine from Flaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's, whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalier poets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a profession rather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in his moods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely a variation oncarpe diem.On the other hand, though he never went very deep or very high, he did express real sentiments and emotions in poetry. Few poets have sung the regret for youth more sincerely and more beautifully, and, with Ronsard, regret for the lost wonder of his own youth was perhaps the acutest emotion he ever knew. He was himself, in his early years, one of those glorious youths who have the genius of charm and comeliness, of grace and strength and the arts. He excelled at football as in lute-playing. He danced, fenced, and rode better than the best; and, with his noble countenance, his strong limbs, his fair beard, and his "eyes full of gentle gravity," he must have been the picture of the perfect courtier and soldier. Above all, we are told, his conversation was delightful. He had "the gift of pleasing." When he went to Scotland in 1537 with Madeleine, the King's daughter, to attend as page her tragic marriage with James V, James was so attracted by him that he did not allow him to leave the country for two years. With every gift of popularity and success, with the world apparently already at his feet, Ronsard was suddenly struck down by an illness that crippled his whole life. He became deaf, or half-deaf. His body was tortured with arthritis and recurrent attacks of gout. His career as a courtier lay in ruins before him.

Possibly, had it not been so, his genius as a poet would have spent itself in mere politeness. The loss of his physical splendour and the death of more than one of his companions, however, filled him with an extreme sense of the transitoriness of the beauty of the world—of youth and fame and flowers—and turned him both to serious epicureanism and to serious writing. By the year 1550 he was leading the young men of France in a great literary renaissance—a reaction against the lifeless jingle of ballades and punning rhymes. Like du Bellay, he asked himself and his contemporaries: "Are we, then, less than the Greeks and Romans?" And he set out to lay the foundations in France of a literature as individual in its genius as the ancient classics. M. Jusserand, in a most interesting chapter, relates the story of the battles over form and language which were fought by French men of letters in the days of La Pléiade. In an age of awakenings, of conquests, of philosophies, of discussions on everything under the sun, the literature of tricksters was ultimately bound to give way before the bold originality and the sincerities of the new school. But Ronsard had to endure a whole parliament of mockery before the day of victory.

Of his life, apart from his work in literature, there is little to tell. For a man who lived in France in days when Protestantism and Catholicism were murderously at one another's throats, he had a peculiarly uneventful career. This, too, though he threw himself earnestly into the battle against the heretics. He had begun by sympathizing with Protestantism, because it promised much-needed reforms in the Church; but the sympathy was short-lived. In 1553, though a layman, he was himself filling various ecclesiastical offices. He drew the salaries of several priories during his life, more lowly paid priests apparently doing the work. Though an earnest Catholic, however, Ronsard was never faithless to friends who took the other side. He published his kindly feelings towards Odet de Coligny, the Admiral's cardinal brother, for instance, who had adopted Protestantism and married, and, though he could write bloodily enough against his sectarian enemies, the cry for tolerance, for pity, for peace, seems continually to force itself to his lips amid the wars of the time. M. Jusserand lays great stress on the plain-spokenness of Ronsard. He praises especially the courage with which the poet often spoke out his mind to kings and churchmen, though no man could write odes fuller of exaggerated adulation when they were wanted. He sometimes counselled kings, we are told, "in a tone that, after all our revolutions, no writer would dare to employ to-day." Perhaps M. Jusserand over-estimates the boldness with which his hero could remind kings that they, like common mortals, were made of mud. He has done so, I imagine, largely in order to clear him from the charge of being a flatterer. It is interesting to be reminded, by the way, that one of his essays in flattery was an edition of his works dedicated, by order of Catherine de Medicis, to Elizabeth of England, whom he compared to all the incomparables, adding a eulogy of "Mylord Robert Du-Dlé comte de l'Encestre" as the ornament of the English, the wonder of the world. Elizabeth was delighted, and gave the poet a diamond for his pretty book.

But Ronsard does not live in literature mainly as a flatterer. Nor is he remembered as a keeper of the conscience of princes, or as a religious controversialist. If nothing but his love-poems had survived, we should have almost all his work that is of literary importance. He fell in love in the grand manner three times, and from these three passions most of his good poetry flowed. First there was Cassandre, the beautiful girl of Florentine extraction, whom he saw singing to her lute, when he was only twenty-two, and loved to distraction. She married another and became the star of Ronsard's song. She was the irruptive heroine of that witty and delightful sonnet on theIliad:—

Back to Index Next