[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthaiHypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôkaKatthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]
[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthaiHypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôkaKatthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]
[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthaiHypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôkaKatthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]
[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthai
Hypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôka
Katthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]
Let us suppose this translated by some man who would put an English word for nearly every Greek word, not considering that such mere transformation was by no means a resurrection of the dead. It is from theIliad, where the body of Sarpedon is ordered by a god to be taken to Lycia—to which place he belonged. This god orders the body of Sarpedon, fallen in battle, to be taken to his native place; and this is how the poet speaks of his transference from the place where he died to his own land, if you put word for word—
"He gave him to be borne at once by swift companions, the twins Sleep and Death, who swiftly laid him in the rich land of Lycia the full."
Now a man caring more for resurrection than for amechanical transference might put it in many ways—I suggest this—
"And he gave Sarpedon dead to be borne by swift companions, the twin-Gods Sleep and Death, who bore him to his own land of Lycia, a pleasant land."
I care not how it is translated, for whoever translates it, unless he is inspired (that is, ordered from outside mankind by a spirit), he will translate it wrong. But the nearer we get to the violent truth of those famous words the more we see what the Word is to the Soul, the more we see how the simplicity of the Word reflects and, to our eyes (and our ears), in some way enhances the simplicity of the Soul.
These toppling things which a man can neither escape nor avoid reside (it would seem from such a passage) not only in the inmost soul but also in Words. These words once written, the soul that put them forth has done its work for ever. Yet no man can say that common counters have been used, that a mere currency of expression has here done its work.
What could be more worn, what for all time more common, than these considerations, a dead man, companions, home, death, sleep and a fertile valley? But in some way it is possible to make of these things what was there made when the man who so wrote them wrote them; and there is no one who will not feel that a son of the gods, of the high gods, was taken by lesser but divine servants, Death and Sleep,who brought him back dead to where his mother had borne him, the land of Lycia, a pleasant land; and he was so borne out of battle, and he rested when the fight was done.
Now how is that purpose of words achieved? No man knows. No man can explain: it is the power of the Word, it is the magic power of the Word. There are some (poor fools!) who try to analyse the connotation of the Word; they will show how such and such a Word involving (in such and such a civilisation) such memories and such associations plays a trick with the mind and deceives it. They will show how Elizabethan English stirs us by modern experiences which the words used by the Elizabethans recall. But the whole of their philosophy is upset at once by the consideration of such a passage as this which I have quoted; for here are only the simplest of things, as simple, I say, as the human soul, and at once overwhelming.
There is more to be said than the mere praise of so amazing a success; the right choice of words in this example, or (to speak more accurately) the right acceptation of them—for poets do not choose—does much more than merelysaythat thing which such words should say. It does much more than onlytellwhat the singer was inspired to tell. It expands, and embranches and conceives. And out of the right acceptation of words there grows a sacred and a further explanation of their meaning: they illumine not only what we are but what we might be andwhat we will be. And, above all, they raise echoes: they raise echoes from beyond the world.
Thus in that little bit of Homer quoted, do you not see what it means beyond its bare poetic statement? Not only did Death and Sleep take the body of Sarpedon back to Lycia, but the bodies of all of us are in such hands: for (if you will think of it closely) in what way do men recover their innocence, their childhood and the place where they were born? In what way do they pierce through time? By sleep, in dreams, and possibly, in a more final manner, by death.
It is a commonplace, and a true one, that the modern world is full of illusions, or rather that the things which we interest ourselves about to-day are nearly all of them matters upon which we have no direct knowledge. The climate of Jamaica, a foreign trial, a war between two nations neither of which we have visited, come to entertain us far more than things upon which we have immediate and personal experience. After a little while we come also to judge these things as though we knew them.
I say that the whole modern world (with the exception of the peasants) suffers heavily from this disease, and no one more than politicians and their electorate. Of a politician upon whose judgment may depend the happiness of the country, most of those who admire or hate him have an impression drawn from caricatures. Of the electorate whom they are supposed to serve politicians have a vague conception, drawn from the hurried aspect of vast crowds of poor men seen by gaslight after dinner in huge halls, and in the course of all the distractions of a speech.
This fantastic ignorance which modern conditionshave bred in the great towns seems to some to be wholly evil in its effect. It is not so; for among its effects are to be discovered a number of joyful surprises. Many things which we had imagined to be such and such and which we had deplored, turned out upon examination to be very different, and much better than our newspaper picture had conceived. Among these joyful surprises is the discovery that the earth is not full, that travel has not overspread it, and that there is perfect loneliness within the reach of all. No popular conception of the modern world is more firmly held, especially by educated, and therefore by jaded, men. There is none which it is more useful to explode. Two things have come side by side: first, an immense increase in the ease of communications; secondly, a positive delight in the crowd to associate with the crowd; and these two facts, the one economic and the other social, have more than counteracted all the expansion in numbers of those who travel about and defile the earth with their presence. In between the tracks of their travel, a few miles upon the centres in which they herd, pig and pen, there is an isolation which our forefathers never knew. A hundred years ago the Land's End and St. Davids were both places far removed from London; to-day the end of Cornwall is familiar to many thousands of men who are not native to it, but what about St. Davids? How many men who read this can say where it is or have visited it? A hundred years ago Midhurst, Petworth,Pulborough, Horsham, East Grinstead, Crowborough Top, Haywards Heath, Heathfield, Burwash, were places upon the map of Sussex intimately known to the men of that county, and visited but rarely by men from beyond the weald. But though they were visited rarely they were visited equally, and if a man said he knew the county then he knew those places. Compare their fate to-day. Crowborough, Haywards Heath, and Heathfield are suburbs of London, and right through the heart of the county a long bridge—pure London all the way—unites London with its suburb of Brighton. Do you imagine upon that account that the isolation of Sussex is lost? Very far from it. It is considerably increased. Nay, the loneliness of that vast proportion of the county which lines of travel do not touch is, if anything, too great—it is in excess even of what the greatest lover of contemplation can desire. And you may within a mile of the Brighton road lie in a wood and watch small beasts behaving with a freedom and an ignorance of human intercourse which perhaps they never had when village life was really strong, when the great estates were not mortgaged to cosmopolitan finance, when the old families lived in their houses and made the county town five miles away their resort for purchase and even for amusement.
It is equally true of the North; the whole chain of the Pennines between the two main lines of travel to the east and to the west of them is utterly deserted. A man may walk thirty times in a yearfrom Hawes to Ribble Head and in not half those walks meet or speak to a man. This is true of the great high road across the chain, of the summits it is far truer. Go from Appleby over Cross Fell up Wild Boar Scar and down the water to Alston, and you will be as completely cut off from men the whole day long as you could be in the West of Canada. The same is true of the dales of Cheviot. From where Chevy Chase was fought all the way up Rededale is a fine great road that was once the highway to Scotland over Carter Fell. If a man goes lame upon the English side of it he cannot count upon getting a lift to Jedburgh; he must limp it all the way. And speaking of that road reminds one that not only has this novel isolation come upon a great part of Britain, but that as one watches it with a sense that is not wholly pleasurable (especially on winter evenings, after a day bereft of human intercourse) one has often around one evidences of a recent time when the activities of the country were more evenly spread. Upon this same great road from Carter Fell there is upon the Scotch side of the path a house which once paid a high rental and did great trade with the traffic. It is in ruins. Upon that same Cross Fell which is now completely alone, you come perpetually upon abandoned workings, upon bits of hardened road, now half sunk into the bog, and even upon the remains of broken bridges over streams.
In the quadrilateral which is formed by the railways in the south-west of Scotland there is a greatarea of silence, and in that belt of Wales which separates the northern from the southern dialects, a belt which is again served by a fine high road, and which has been throughout English history the scene of the western advance from across the Marches into the Principality, there is silence also. Plinlimmon, the mountain which dominates this central part, is unknown, and the reason is easy enough to discover. Plinlimmon is not an abrupt mountain, astonishing in outline or difficult of ascent. It is, upon the contrary, a great rounded hill, but there is perhaps no height in the island more solemn nor commanding a more awful and spacious scene, and those few who would still take the trouble to reach it may find the north a chasm more wonderful, I think, than any in the range of Snowdon or in the neighbourhood of Cader Idris. All this is true of that little narrow space which lies between the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and when one considers the neighbouring countries of the Continent the instances that arise are innumerable. Within two days of London, and to be reached at about an expense of £2, there is a little democracy in which no man has ever been put to death, in which no wheeled vehicles have ever been seen, of which the few laws are made, or rather the ancient and honourable customs maintained, by the heads of families meeting for discussion. You can from the little village in its centre telephone to Paris if you wish, and yet who has been to that place? Or who knows the way there from London?Probably not a dozen men. There is on one of the main railways of Europe a chain of mountains abrupt, intensely blue, comparable only to the background of certain mediæval illuminations, and, with their astonishing, unworldly aspect, making one understand how the active mediæval imagination could see, remember, and use things that we pass by. I know of no artist who has drawn that range nor of any traveller who has described it. You cannot see it from the train; it runs along a narrow and profound valley. You must leave the railway at a little roadside station, you must climb two thousand feet on to the plateau above, and from there, when you have turned a corner of the road, there breaks upon you this unearthly vision of the range.
Now consider that example—and it will not be difficult to discover how and why these places remain, or rather increasingly become, isolated from the modern world. For what must you do to obtain a view of what I have spoken? You must abandon the express, with its speed and luxury, to which you are accustomed; you must get into a little slow and dingy local train, you must climb a high hill in spite of weather. You may do it once from curiosity, but you are not compelled to the open air and the road as were your fathers, and for one man that will rarely be at the pains to go about to visit and to understand the world there are a thousand who would rather delude themselves into asimulacrumof the emotions of travel by reading of them in some book, and thatbook will probably have been written by some one who has no more followed the road than themselves. For a man to know the world he must not sleep now and again in the open, or now and again for a freak in some dirty inn where there is bad cooking and bad wine; he must so sleep continually day after day. He must not have only an object before him in his journey, such as the visiting of a famous shrine; he must also have an object all the way along, to note whatever he may pass; and he must so draw his itinerary that it shall be something out of the common, that is, something exposing one always to discomfort and often to peril. There are few men who care to pay the price, and, after all, the effect of their hesitation is excellent, for they run off to vulgarise the New World and the Far East, and they leave England and Europe to the intimacy of those who love them best.
It is a matter for the curious to examine (but not the wisest will determine it) why people in books are so extraordinarily different from real people. You might imagine that the people in biographies at least would be more or less like human beings—but they never are. A man may say that the reason of this is that biography to-day is always a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair—that the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a puppet of his man. But there are others besides modern biographies, and it is true of them all that the people inside are not human. You have biographies of politicians acting upon principle; biographies of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their main passion; biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and force. Biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies of men long dead, biographies written by enemies, all have this in common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human being.Autobiographies give one a better chance, but even there, though you get something much more vivid, you never get a real man. It seems as though the writing of an autobiography or confession always went with a twist, either morbid or megalomaniac. Take the very best one of all, Rousseau's; it can be proved, and research has proved it, that he is perpetually maligning himself. As for St. Augustine's (oh, how dull!) he tells us so little, and his purpose is so far from being autobiographical that it does not come under the same criticism; and as for Borrow, those who have read him assure me that he is perpetually performing marvellous feats of intelligence and courage to which there is no witness at all but himself. Hagiographers are appalling. They do not attempt to present a living figure, though I will make an exception for one account of the death of St. Thomas of Canterbury; I forget which, but it is full of realities. Your stock hagiographer, as, for instance, he of the Carolingian period, postulates three things: the noble birth of his hero, his boldly standing up to somebody else (usually a layman), and his performing a number of actions precisely similar to those which others of the type have performed; it is almost mechanical; it is like the leader in a party newspaper describing a party speech by a party man.
People in histories also are not human beings. The moment you try to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes you make agreat quantity of little mistakes. For instance, you are writing about a man with one eye, and you are determined to make him human; you find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one was of glass, or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style. You get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of it. You make the man live again before you, and the moment you begin writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. It is the knowledge of this, and the fear of the powerful Demon who works it, that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full of ghosts paler than any that wander by Acheron.
This is especially true of historians of war. The people they write about occupy "strategic" points (a phrase which is blankly meaningless to the writer as to the reader), they "grasp" the situation at a glance, they "master detail," they are (when the author is against them), "in spite of all their faults, not devoid of physical courage," or (if the author is in favour of them) "acting with that quiet decision which is characteristic of them" (and of bad actors in problem plays, too, by the way), but they never live.
Now and then you get flashes; the eyes glance, the tones take on reality, there is a human voice and gesture, but it dies again. Perhaps the most vivid and most fascinating of such histories in our tongueis Napier's. You will continually find such flashes in it—but they are not permanently connected. It is odd that the most living of histories are the exceedingly simple and bald relations set down under primitive conditions of society when a man merely desired to chronicle dates and facts. How it is so no one can tell, but a plain statement of some not very interesting thing with just a verb and a substantive will do the trick. For instance, where Eginhard says of Charlemagne that everything about him was virile "except his voice, which was high," or again, where Fulcher of Chartres (I think it is) says of a spy on the crusading march that he was "short in the nose and in every virtue." But even the early historians build up no continuously living figure.
When it comes to novelists the matter is notorious. The people in novels not only do not go on like real people, but they do things sometimes physically, always morally, impossible to real people. I have often wished to know a professional novelist in order to ask him why his people went on like that. To take quite small points. A lover and his lady in a novel will often hunt the fox. So far so good. There is nothing impossible about that. When they have done running after the animal they go home together, and their horses walk side by side. How is that done? Except horses in cavalry regiments or in circuses, or horses constrained and tied by leather thongs in front of wheeled vehicles, when were two horses ever seen that walked the samepace side by side? The novelist may say that it is necessary to the convention of his novel. It would spoil a love scene if he showed one of the two horses dragging further and further behind the other (as one of them always does), and then having to canter or trot every three minutes to catch up his neighbour, and it would also spoil his love scene if he made one of the horses walking slowly and the other dancing, which in real life is one of the ways in which people attempt to keep two horses abreast. But there are many things in your novel which have no such excuse, and which are equally out of Nature. For instance, people sit down suddenly and write enormous cheques at a moment's notice. Now even the richest man cannot do that. He has his money invested, he does not waste it by letting it lie idle in gigantic balances of a current account. Then again, the things they do with their mouths. "'No,' she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say "No" at the same time it sounds like neighing—yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. Another thing that people do in novels on all sides is to make immensely long speeches. Sometimes the whole of the author's views upon some big matter, like the fate of the soul for instance, comes pouring out in a solid page and a half of spoken stuff. In real life the only people who do this are politicians, and even they only do it on stated and ritual occasions; they do not do itin private houses. Sometimes they try, but they are interrupted.
Yet again, consider the vast number of titles which people have in novels. I cannot call to mind one single novel without a title—I mean no novel of the modern kind. Of course there must be such, but they are certainly rare. Now in real life things are not thus. All the ordinary people of this country go about day after day without meeting lords and ladies, but in novels something like half the characters come in quite casually with titles, and I have been told that it is a matter of professional pride with some novelists to be able to get the complicated system of English titles exactly right, and that they will even fabricate difficult problems for the pleasure of solving them, as do men who play chess. They will take the younger son of an earl, make him a Colonial Cabinet Minister, and then triumphantly settle for you which of the two "honourables" he is; or again, they will marry the heiress of a marquisate inheritable in the female line to the eldest son of a man who comes into a barony later on in the book—and get it absolute. But people in real life do not care much about these things.
Conversely, a very large number of things thatdohappen in real life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. For instance, repetitions. Your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were aliving being. A man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner as he would if he were human: and, what is worse, a score of highly interesting real types never get between covers at all.
Take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most common of God's creatures, which I will call "the Silent Fool," the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can recollect but one Silent Fool in modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for us all. I meanThe Diary of a Nobody. In that you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says "That's right"—and nothing more.
One might go on for ever piling up instances of this divorce between the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. I will end with what is to me, perhaps, the most glaring of all: the attitude of fiction towards what is called "success." No matter who the author is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw "successful men" as they are, that is, in a diversity as great as any to be discovered in the human race. Men who have "got on," that is, who are at once well to do and well known, are as different as men with the toothache or as men with warts on their chins.Some are kind, some brutal, some clever, some stupid, some got their money by luck, some by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do something better than their fellows, but at any rate in real life, when you are about to meet someone who is known to you as "successful," you never have the slightest idea what you are going to meet, your last experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the "successful" chap may turn out to be anything at all. But in novels your wealthy and well-known man is invariably powerful in character. It never fails. He may be good or bad, English or foreign, young or old, but he always has in him something of what you see in a very good sergeant-major at a few shillings a week, an experienced head master at a few hundreds a year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. He displays qualities which have no more to do with what is called "success" now-a-days than red hair or brown boots have. In a word, your successful man is a type in the novel. In real life he is not a type at all—he is any one. And another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a bad-mannered man. I cannot recollect one character who interrupts at the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in an easy way.... But suppose one filled a novel with real people, what escape would there be from daily life?
Of all contrasts the most ironical and the most profound is the contrast between the Tag and the Truth of the Tag. A couple of lines are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet, and are usually so chosen not only because they are beautiful, but because they are true. When they have been repeated a certain number of times they become a tag. A proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely obvious, at any rate (this is quite certain) some extremely important, truth. Every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it becomes a tag.
Now note the next phase in the life of the said tag. It is criticised and it is ridiculed; it becomes a solid butt for the archery of human wit. That phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man.
Now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be learnt about mankind, and it is endless. It is the consummation of the tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. The tag is now taken for granted and is eternal, and thefollowing things happen to it: children are taught it like the alphabet; they are compelled to learn it. Hobbledehoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because it is commonplace. They can be seen waggling from one side of the road to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. The whole world knows that the tag is there. Lastly—most wonderful of all!—the tag ceases to bite: it ceases to affect men; men are saturated with it. Men are acclimatised to it. They are vaccinated with it; and the tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which is to wake in individuals, here in one man, there in another, an overwhelming sense of its truth (or beauty). It begins its career of converting individual men. Let it be mentioned where three are gathered together, and it will be fled from as an out-used thing, but two can make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a thorn or like a gem in his heart.
"Who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing" has gone through all these phases; so has "Waste not want not." So has "For who to dull forgetfulness a prey," etc. So has "Felix qui potuit," etc. And so have the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind.
All these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which most sharply tests humility and, through humility, intelligence, and as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwellingupon it. It is to this effect: "The future is veiled from man."
Good Lord! To read the Press and to hear the speeches! Why, one would think that the future had a map to it! One can hardly hear one's self think for prophecies; and, what is perhaps the most terrible thing of all, as a symptom of our modern state of mind, the prophecies have a dogmatic quality (using the word "dogmatic" as it is popularly used of transcendental affirmations), for men prophesy in great herds and all together, and to question their prophecies, simply to say that possibly "the future is veiled from man," creates something now-a-days of the astonishment, ridicule, or anger which the denial of a religious dogma does in a society with a fixed religion. Thus, men in England to-day confidently regard the future of the earth for, let us say, the next hundred years in a certain light. Certain countries (especially new countries) are to increase in a regular manner in value and population and property. Certain other countries are to continue their decline. Certain forms of mechanical perfection are to increase, certain speculations as to the nature of the soul are to decline in interest. But more than any particular set of opinions, there is a general colour stamped upon the future in the modern mind, and how securely it is stamped one can best prove by the amusement or surprise that is caused if one suggests (but does not affirm) that there may be (not that there must be) some totallynew philosophy, new religion, or new development within three generations.
A book recently published suggests to me the permanent and ironical value of that old tag "The future is veiled from man." It is a study of two somewhat obscure individuals who were members of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is a very detailed study in which one feels in every page the things that were taken for granted in that place and time—in the Paris of the Revolution. What of all that has come to pass? What of all the fixed certitudes as to the future—nay, the fixed certitudes upon the very nature of man from which, as of necessity, the future was deduced, has remained? The author has done all the better in his study of Vilate and Trinchard from the fact that his position in the Archives has permitted him to look into the ultimate details of the period. But not so much the high historical value of the work as its permanent human lesson strikes me as I read.
Vilate was twenty-four when the great war of the Revolution against the Kings was within a month of breaking out, and when he set out for Paris from the lovely rocky pasturage of his province, up beyond Limoges. And this was what he had in his mind: that the revolutionary movement, to use his own words, "must give to the whole world a spur of insurrection against the oppressors of men." This pathetic certitude was nothing peculiar to the very commonplace young fellow who was leaving hisprofessorship in the Indre for Paris. To him they then seemed as much a commonplace as would seem to some young fellow in a similar position to-day in Birmingham some phase about the development of the West of Canada, or some certain prophecy that nations would enrich themselves in proportion to the amount of coal and iron discovered upon their territories.
When Vilate hears a speech in the Revolutionary Parliament he says: "Truth has now appeared and is fixed for ever. It can now call to its tribunal every abuse, every vice, and every crime." Has truth done that in the last hundred years? Yet to Vilate the prophecy of what the Revolution was about to do seemed—and not only to him, but to millions of his contemporaries—as simple as some prophecy of ours about the future of communications; and he was as easily persuaded that what he said was true as we are that the North temperate climate (and especially that part of Europe which is insular and lies between parallels 50 and 60) is the natural climatic seat of human energy.
Consider again this, which is not from Vilate's own pen, but which occurs in the study before me and is of the first interest: Vilate was in the jury on that day. It was the 9th of February, 1794. Seven Carmelite nuns had refused to take the civic oath to the Republic. The judge made a very commonplace and, as it seemed then, a very sensible speech, pointing out that they were perfectly free to observe thevows they had taken, that nothing had disappeared in their lives except the particular convent with which they were associated; that none of their prejudices would be offended. And he pointed out that in the society in which he believed they would have the sense to live, all men would now be permanently free. The nuns refused; they refused because the oath would involve them in schism. How many men at that time surrounding Vilate had the slightest conception of what the renascence of religion was to be in the city of Paris? These women, members or servants of the little reactionary aristocratic clique into which the monastic institution had declined, seemed mere fanatics not only to Vilate but to the whole of his society. Could you suddenly have shown Vilate how Europe would still be raging upon those ultimate questions of religion more than three generations later; could you have presented him with the sight of a whole society divided upon so simple and, as it was then thought, so irrational a point—what would he have thought? I can tell you what he would have thought. No matter what your credentials as a prophet, he would have thought your prophecy mad. Though you should have carried him into our very time and given every proof of the reality of his vision, he would have woken up to believe it an illusion and a silly dream.
The state of mind of Trinchard is even more impressive, because Trinchard was an even smaller,more commonplace, and therefore more typical, man. He sat side by side with Vilate in the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Trinchard was a carpenter. He was somewhat over thirty years of age at the period of the Revolution. His brother was a gunner, fighting against the Vendéans, just at that moment when Valenciennes had fallen, and when all seemed over with the Republic; and his brother used to write from the armies, signing "Your brother, a true Republican." Two months later he was judging Marie Antoinette. He wrote to his brother a letter immediately after the trial. M. Dunoyer publishes in his book (Deux Jurés du Tribunal Révolutionnaire) a facsimile of that letter, and wonderful reading it makes. One might put its bad spelling and street language into modern English something like this: "I'm learning you, brother, that I was one of them jurymen as judged the wilbeast what was wolfing a gurt part of the empire." And so forth. But the man is doing nothing exceptional. He no more thinks of himself as exceptional than does any leader-writer to-day writing upon the virtues or vices of a contemporary politician in more moderate language. And note you, as a hundred years can make men more temperate, so they can make men more violent, and our modern absence of emphasis may astound our great-grandchildren quite as much as that revolutionary violence astounds us.
A friend writes to him in that spring of 1794 (when Danton died, and when every man wasoccupied in the defence or in the destruction of the Republic). He is a very ordinary friend, his name is Ploton, a Southerner, as Trinchard was. He corresponds more or less in that society to, let us say, a young village shopkeeper in our own, full of a simple patriotism, and especially full of what the Press tells him. And he heads his letter thus: "Second of Germinal, the second year of the Republic—which is as imperishable as the world." What rhetoric! Nay, to us reading such stuff to-day, what lunacy! But do not be too sure. Go to the British Museum when you can find an idle afternoon and look up your newspapers of September, 1899, and you will read some amusing phrases.
The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.
All these things Dunoyer's careful book upon two men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense researchwhich dignifies the modern French School of History, has suggested to my mind.
Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.
The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the New Forest saw before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very clear line of the Island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the English sea.
For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use thismetaphor) was the landscape and the air of England—especially of South England and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern Avon of Wiltshire to the cliffs of the Island which a man surveys from the ridges of which I speak.
Let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to Europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. There are indeed some classics—one might count them upon the fingers of both hands—which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer. But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion—and so sincere while they remain—that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire, and with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthythings are moulded and informed by the process of time. Let us attempt then to stand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter) to be judged in general terms, but in particular—since writing is like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. A man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate hewas, what his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and oflargessewould have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness;why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed.
If we so examine Swinburne we shall, as I have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea. In this Swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even neglect his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the Eighteenth Century, for instance), in such a time the influence of Swinburne's work will weaken too.
Next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression,and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always known. But it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his Poetic Art as the chief rule to consider "Music and always Music," was, in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. Sense is not sacrificed wholly in any place, it is but rarely imperilled even by this motive in Swinburne. But one feels that reason has in the construction no divine place, but is subsidiary—as it is subsidiary in unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it is subsidiary (since one should be just even in judging extravagance) in all the major emotions of the human soul: in love, in combat, in despair. And in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to music, is to be discovered the source of another characteristic in the work: the perpetual repetition. Two men, both sedulous and scholarly admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory judgments that Swinburne was unequalled in the range of his vocabulary, and that Swinburne was, quite beyond parallel, repetitive. Each judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer as a paradox or a truism. Yet both are true, and both have an illuminating meaning when his work is considered. That vast vocabulary (and if you will be at the pains to note word upon word or to make a short concordance you will see that the word "vast" is just)—that vast vocabulary, I say,proceeded from the necessity of satisfying the ear. An exact shade of length and emphasis were needed; they must be exactly filled, and some one word out of the thousands upon thousands which the numerically richest language of our time possesses must be hit upon to do the work. This surely was the source of that wide range. So also was it the source of the repetition.
Repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. It is deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary and an odious symptom of fatigue. The repetitions of Catullus in their way, the repetitions of the Hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be; or rather (for their voluntary quality is obvious) they were exactly designed to produce a particular effect, and did produce it; the repetition of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be neglected. Swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor of the other; they were the recurrence of a set of words or of single words which suited the sound in his head. And just as to fit exactly a void of known form one word exactly fitting must be found (fitting not reason but the ear) so those which had been found to fit particular rhythms must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool and that to do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the past. The word in Swinburne was subordinate.
It is a commonplace, and a true one—to pass toanother matter—that the English writers of the later Nineteenth Century (and not the writers alone) reposed upon the Jacobean translation of the Old Testament. That unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental characters in which appear more largely with every process of retreat from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous effect. Swinburne is as full of it as Kipling; the ready-made phrases of weary political discussion are full of it. The whole national life, in so far as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it. Many of Swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the English Psaltry, and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character or even a biblical transcription. Herein, again, as in that effect of landscape and of air, he is national in every particle of his poetic being; and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him, and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics of his life and of his opinion. The man who in youth was ardent for a liberty which leant much nearer to anarchy than to the republic, who ranged, as the fashion was over all Europe, to find subjects for that mood, in age perpetually sounded a note which had in it something exaggerated of fury and of protest against whatever might be thought to be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the nationallife. Yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either field; the passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn from the untrammelled nature about him which ran through him and made him write. The convinced and extreme political insistence of his later verse was drawn from the same source. It was still the surroundings of his own land that compelled him.
There is one last thing to be said: the work has been called pagan. It is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. Those who attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan world. By pagan we mean that long, long manhood of Europe (a thousand years long to our knowledge—how much longer we know not) in which the mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the Mediterranean. Swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the North. The sea of the Atalanta in Calydon is an English sea. All that attitude in him was reaction and a protest. It was full of yearning: now pagan paganism was not full of this. The very earliest moment in which a protest of that kind is to be found is the Fourth Century. For the transformation between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our race in the first four centuries of the Roman Empire a yearning which must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted an assuagement of it or have passionately protestedagainst that assuagement, or have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than profoundly influenced by it. What is called "paganism" since that change came is not of marble and is not calm: it is a product, not of the old time, but of the new.
Years ago in the county of Kent a gentleman of means, culture and lineage begged me to make the acquaintance of a certain neighbour of his who dwelt in a little cottage called (by the wrath of God) "The Hollies"—and, indeed, a holly-tree of no small size, but one only, grew beside his door. This cottage was cubical in formation with the exception of the roof, which was a pyramid, and it was built of brick with the exception of the roof, which was of slate. Its name, "The Hollies," was painted outside upon the gate. This is all I have to say about the cottage.
The man who dwelt within it came that very evening to dine at the Squire's, and was what you will call obviously a gentleman. He was not a gentleman in any cryptic or mystical sense; he was not the Adumbration of a gentleman; he was not the Platonic Idea of a gentleman; he was not the Gentleman used loosely as a term for a good man; he was not rich; he spoke perfectly; he was very stupid. Much more than this, he was a Prophet.
The learned have observed (or at least the onlyones among them who count have persistently observed) that it is in the nature of barbaric peoples to accept whatever is told them with sufficient assurance, conviction and simplicity, but especially if it regard the future. On this account (the learned say) he who will prophesy with flame shall certainly among barbarians become a founder. Now it is sufficiently certain that this type of man, so successful among the primitive, and perhaps also among the decayed, continues through all ages and in all societies, though varying perhaps in proportion, and certainly varying enormously in the source of his information according to the generation in which he lives, is here to-day; and this man was one of him.
At first I did not know in what a Presence I stood—or rather sat—for he was very modest, if indeed it be modest to make no noise in the eating of soup, to frown heavily, and never to speak a word. There were but three of us there, the Squire, myself,et Rex Meusthe Prophet. Having seen little of the world I much desired to hear what he would say; although he was still what politicians call young he seemed old to me, because he had a full beard, and because life had already wearied him, a thing incomprehensible to boys. The Squire watched him with a good deal of admiration and of fear, until at last he said, "There won't be any war." Here let me tell you that these words were pronounced in the year 1888, and a little before the bursting of the spring upon the Kentish Weald.
Nor was there one. There was no war about that time.
Those who read these lines, I am quite certain, will find them a shock. We live in a time when war is so struck with doom that it is putting on speed, as it were, to make a fine ending. War is out of our manners; we can tolerate it no more. Every year is a new reconciliation, and a new treaty in the federation of all mankind except those who have neglected their armament, and in general we are forgetting war. But there have been wars, and of some calibre—hefty and noisy wars since you and I were boys. Now in 1888 there was no war. So the Prophet was right.
The Squire was interested and humble, and being a plain man he asked why there would be no war, for it was imagined at that moment by eight or nine newspaper men that some war or other was going to break out; but what war I forget after such a lapse of time. The Prophet was a true prophet, by which I do not mean that he prophesied truth, but only that he was in keeping with all that I have ever read of his breed; he shook his doormat of a head and wagged his beard, smiling, as bearded men do, with the eyes only, and would give no reasons; and, indeed, there was no war. But as the dinner went on he talked of other things; he prophesied a Parliament in Dublin "within ten years," and, new as I was to the world, I could but note how much of his conversation worked within fixed frames and limits,as should beseem a prophet. Some things were going to happen "within five years," some "within twenty years," some—and the leap was indeed splendid—"within fifty years." Among these last I dimly remember was the spread of a universal language, which I think he called "Anglo-Saxon"; and there was something or other about the birth-rate which escapes me now, but which I can remember to have appalled me at the time, for it was a destruction of all I loved and revered in Europe.
The dinner went on, and as he got more food and wine into him he prophesied less—for fasting is the mother of prophecy. He was still assertive, he was still sure; his talk was still of public men, of continents, of armies, of battle and of sudden death, but the future entered less into it, and the present more. He became not so much a prophet, but, if I may use the word quite gently, more of a liar. I can remember vividly now, after so many years, how he stood in the hall of that great house, all wrapped up to go through the park to "The Hollies." I looked at his large frame and masterful demeanour. I remembered all that he had said, both of things distant from me and of things to come, and I admired such eyes in the brain.
It was ten years before I met him again. I am wrong—it was nine. I met him upon a steamboat in the North Sea, and he remembered me. We looked over the side of the ship and talked aboutAmerica and Spain. As to the chance of war he waved it all away with his hand. It might come or it might not [the truth was, it was too near for his type of vision], but what would comeafter, whether the war was fought or not, was quite clear. "America," he said, "would learn that she could fight a European Power." It seems that having learnt this, all sorts of things would happen, and there would be banging and bingeing to some tune. The earning of one's living, the weight and dullness which come upon the mind from seeing too many places and knowing too many men, left my impression less vivid. For, as it says in the song—