GEORGE BORROW
Any book about George Borrow is worth reading. The two volumes by Dr. Knapp are forbiddingly dense with documentary minutiæ, yet it is a pleasure to loaf through them at least once. Borrow's burly personality makes itself felt in the driest philological note and vitalizes the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, indeed, it vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in his extraordinary books. Mr. Clement K. Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is interesting because it is about Borrow and not in the least because it is by Mr. Shorter. Mr. Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book that should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to "a wider public which knows not Borrow."
Every book about the fighting scholar, every moderately competent article about him must invite new immigrants into Borrow's kingdom. But Mr. Shorter is not an introductory critic, not one who by his own skill and charm summons strangers to make the acquaintance of a great man. He is an inept critic who thrives by attaching his name to great reputations. Fancy a man of any trifling literary experience, with the least enthusiasm for literature, writing about style in a style like this: "Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live, was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist." It is a sin so to "style" in a chapter about Edward FitzGerald, who at the sound of such sentences would have clapped his hands to his ears.
Borrow describes himself in that pugnacious defence of Lavengro which forms the appendix to "The Romany Rye." "Though he may become religious, it is hardly to be expected that he will become a very precise and straitlaced person; it is probable that he will retain, with his scholarship, something of his gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain gloves, not white kid, with any friend who may be inclined for a little old English diversion, and a readiness to take a glass of ale, with plenty of malt in it, and as little hop as may well be—ale at least two years old—with the aforesaid friend—when the diversion is over."
Is not that an irresistible man? Shouldn't you think that there would have been among his contemporaries two or three hundred thousand good sports, rooters, heelers, literary and non-literary bookmakers who would bet on him and back him in any enterprise in which his adventurous spirit elected to engage? Yet it was not so. He enjoyed only a short period of popularity after the publication of "The Bible in Spain." When he died at a ripe old age in 1881, he was not well known. During his life the only highly distinguished man of letters who knew and appreciated him was FitzGerald, the exquisite poet and critic—FitzGerald, whose literary habits were as distant as possible from Borrow's, whose fine-edged rapier seems utterly alien to Borrow's short arm jab or his overhand wallop. FitzGerald had a curious accuracy in spotting what was worth while in his time and in dodging certain celebrated things that other people thought worth while, and there is nothing inconsistent in his knowing that Borrow wrote good English. But looking over Borrow's shoulder at his contemporaries, and remembering Borrow's ungainly verses, one is amused to find that the only real literary man facing one with a wink in his eye is FitzGerald. The others have their backs turned.
Consider also Borrow's posthumous fame. His first biographer is Dr. Knapp, an American professor of philology. And the modern critics who praise him are not open-air men, but bookish, library men, whose names do not suggest the robustly adventurous, Lionel Johnson, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Seccombe.
Most literary critics praise him in terms laudatory enough to atone for the sins of their professional predecessors, whom Borrow held up to "show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws." His four important books are published in Everyman's Library; Mr. Birrell says that "we are all Borrovians now"; within twenty years have appeared three biographical studies, besides Mr. Shorter's. Yet Dr. Knapp's fundamental biography which was published in 1898 is out of print; that mysterious and reprehensible entity known as the public has not demanded a new edition. It is all consistent with the Borrovian inconsistency. Borrow was proud of being a gentleman and a scholar, and he was both in all true senses of the words; but he hated gentility and wrote a hammer-and-tongs chapter against the genteel; no revolutionist despising the "bourgeois" ever punched their smug faces with such violent verbal fisticuffs.
He boasts of his fondness for gypsies and prize-fighters and quite simply asks, "If he had not associated with prize-fighters, how could he have used his fists?" However, he is an aristocrat and has no sympathy with radical weavers. Despite his hatred of cant, some sentences in "The Bible in Spain" have a missionary twang. He drifts naturally away from the Church of England, yet when he attacks other ecclesiastical institutions he holds up the Church of England as the exemplar of religious truth. He scorns all deviation from fact, yet his biographers have not wholly succeeded in separating what he did from what he invented.
He was undoubtedly a polyglot, he made metrical translations from thirty languages, wrote a version of the Gospel of St. Luke in Spanish Gypsy (the first book ever attempted in any Gypsy dialect), supervised the printing of the Bible in Manchu-Tartar, made translations from the English into Manchu-Tartar, Russian and Turkish in good style, as any of us who has read them can testify. In the person of Lavengro he lost the stalwart Isopel Berners because he insisted on giving her lessons in Armenian! For all that, he made mistakes and so gave the scholars evidence that he was no scholar. He was not. He had an instinct for language, especially for that language which he knew, as we know it, probably better than he knew Manchu-Tartar. In his English narratives we can follow him and praise him or censure him without violating the severe rule which he laid down: "Critics, when they review books, ought to have a competent knowledge of the subjects which those books discuss."
The four books of Borrow which belong to English literature are "The Bible in Spain," "Lavengro," "The Romany Rye" and "Wild Wales." "The Bible in Spain" is one of those books that grow out of circumstances; it was to a large extent thought out and phrased on the scene, amid the adventures which it narrates; later it was cast into book form. It grew out of experience, but an artist shaped its growth. Borrow was sent by the Bible Society to distribute Spanish versions of the Bible. He encountered the opposition of allied church and government, was arrested, put in prison for three weeks, and liberated through the influence of British officials.
It is not, however, the Bible or his mission that stimulates Borrow's imagination. Cities and people, meetings on the road, scraps of talk, sometimes rather long conversations, monologues by Borrow, the mischances, dangers and excitements of a country at once wild and anciently civilized, Borrow's opinions about languages, characters, landscapes and anything else under the Spanish skies—such is the substance of the book; and the substance is transmitted through a style that gives little heed to elegance, that walks along like a healthy man on a tramp. The most eccentric of men, full of strange languages and odd ideas, Borrow writes English as naturally as he drinks English ale. There is not a touch of eloquence, not a great phrase; his descriptions are rather literal records of what was in front of him and how he liked it than "word-paintings." The dominant writers of his time were super-eloquent. Borrow does not speak their language. Perhaps that is why he did not rival them in popular favor, and also why he seems to us so refreshingly downright.
Borrow, like his master Defoe, has the art of setting all things forth as if they were matters of fact. Even when his characters talk of unusual matters, nay, especially when they harangue and gossip about queer things, their conversation sounds like a transcription from life and not like invention.
"Lavengro" and its sequel, "The Romany Rye," are properly classified in Everyman's Library under fiction, and "The Bible in Spain" is classified as "Travel and Topography." In what proportion autobiography and fiction are admixed is a question which does not effect the merits of the books. They all follow about the same method, and so, too, does "Wild Wales." The episodes are inconsequential, and the looseness of organization not only permits Borrow unlimited latitude of subject, but strengthens the Defoe-like illusion of truth; he never loses the tone of the veracious chronicler who puts things down in the order of nature and not according to the design of art. Between adventures and more or less pertinently to them, Borrow becomes itinerant schoolmaster and gives us instruction in language, philology, comparative literature, ethics and religion. He is not a pedant, but a humanist: "It has been said, I believe, that the more languages a man speaks, the more a man he is; which is very true, provided he acquires languages as a medium for becoming acquainted with the thoughts and feelings of the various sections into which the human race is divided; but in that case he should rather be termed a philosopher than a philologist."
Borrow need not be read continuously; if he enters upon a discourse that promises not to interest you, you can turn the pages rapidly until the eye strikes something more attractive. In his wide variety is something for everybody. The conversations with the old apple woman who had read the story of "Blessed Mary Flanders"; the chapters on pugilism; the talks with tinkers and publicans; the old man who knew Chinese but could not tell time by the clock; the outrageous attack upon Walter Scott; the theological arguments with the man in black—these are some of the choice fragments of what Borrow was pleased to call a "dream." The general atmosphere is less that of dreamland than of the broad highway in full sunlight. Since Borrow died the cult of the open air has increased, and to that as much as to anything is due the revival of interest in him. He is a great person, a colossal egotist who in his journeyings takes up the whole road. It is healthy for a man to be an egotist—especially if he is a colossal one.
SHELLEY
In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley says that the imagination is the moral instrument. To be greatly good a man must imagine intensely and comprehensively. Poetry serves morality not by what it explicitly teaches, but by its power to awaken and enlarge the mind, to render it "the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." Since poetry strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of the moral nature of man, "a poet would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his time and place, in his poetical creations which participate in neither." A remarkable book could be made of the best things said in prose by English poets about poetry. Perhaps one book would not hold so much. A narrower yet great and imaginative book could be made of what Shelley said about poetry and what English poets have said about him. Such a book would explain and exhibit the theory of poetry and the art of criticism. The very good edition of Shelley in the Regent Library, (edited by Roger Ingpen) contains some brief "Testimonia" which invite one to the essays from which they are taken, by Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson.
It is significant that Mr. Ingpen has not quoted from Arnold. If it is the function of poetry to expand the imagination and make the mind aware of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought, how did it happen that Arnold, a genuine poet, missed Shelley utterly? Arnold was not satisfied with his essay and intended to return to the subject. That he could do a better thing is proved by his essay on Keats, which, after he has done with his droning, schoolmasterly defence of Keats's morals, is eloquent, serene and restrainedly emotional. Shelley phrased many of the revolutionary ideas that were current in his time. Arnold's timid school-bred culture was impervious to any sort of revolutionary idea. Shelley's ideas did not impress him; he thought Shelley a wonderful singer, but a singer without a solid body of thought. Now, Shelley was the most full-minded poet of his time. He knew more about what ought to be done with the world than any of his contemporaries. That he failed to free Ireland and that the French revolution was a disaster are a reflection on other people's intelligence, not on his. It is not at all derogatory to a man's ideas that for centuries and centuries after him the world fails to come up to his teachings. If an angel is ineffectual that is not the angel's fault. Indeed a too readily effectual angel would be rather a journalist than a seer.
That the bulk of mankind is ages behind the best of its poets and seers might possibly be explained by the fact that the bulk of mankind simply has not met their thoughts. But how shall one explain the fact that artistic children of culture, who have had opportunity to read, who respond to the beauty of seers and poets, remain at the tail of the intellectual procession, are not abreast of long dead poets like Shelley, and let the leaders of their own day sweep past them unapprehended, unguessed? The thing that makes one impatient of the privilege of culture is that many of those who have enjoyed it do not lead; they drag mankind back. In "Winds of Doctrine," by Mr. George Santayana, the mind of the present age is likened to "a philosopher at sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail." When you make a generality about the mind of today, you are perfectly safe, for nobody can dispute you. Nobody knows what the mind of today is doing. It is doing so many things that no one of us can keep track of it. But when a man writes himself down in a book, you can tell what his mind is doing—in that book. I should liken Mr. Santayana to a philosopher who, really wanting to sail, had forgot to cast off and was still lashed to the dock with a spanking wind blowing out to sea.
It is no wonder that Whitman, revolutionary in substance and form, perplexes the genteel and the cloistered. But it is a wonder that Shelley, whose form is classic and whom a century has transformed from demon to angel, does not reach them. A striking example of critical and philosophic blindness is Mr. Santayana's essay on Shelley. Mr. Santayana is a poet, and in this essay he says beautiful poetic things. He is not stupid as Arnold was, for once in his life. But he misses Shelley. He understands what Shelley was related to before Shelley, for example, Plato, but he does not know the relation of Shelley to his time or to the world since Shelley. What Mr. Santayana says is lucid in phrase but quite hopelessly confused in thought. He says that Shelley was "a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history and society." That is not true of Shelley or any other human being in recorded history. It is worse biography than Dowden's, and it seems that so old a critic as Taine might have saved a man from writing such nonsense in the year 1912. Mr. Santayana says that "Shelley was not left standing aghast, like a Philistine, before the destruction of the traditional order." That is naïve. Of course Shelley was not left standing aghast; he was trying his best to destroy the traditional order; he was butting his beautiful head against it. He did not budge the traditional order. One reason is that most people have impoverished imaginations, that the world can't do what Tolstoy thought would save it, stop and think for five minutes. Another little reason is that there are too many conservatives like Mr. Santayana teaching the young men of the world. Yet Mr. Santayana says that Shelley was "unteachable"!
Shelley believed that a man would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong in his poetry. Yet every man, poet or not, who writes at all and is not a hypocrite, embodies his conceptions of right and wrong in all his utterances. Shelley was intensely personal in his poetry. His sky-larking, star-sweeping way of expressing himself takes us out of range of his individual opinions. He spoke heart-near things in splendid distances and tried to pull the far skies down into sodden British hearts. The revolt, the defeated revolt of his own times, near to him as the news of the daily papers, he allegorized as the rebellion of a mythological Islam, and he flung the stars reeling through Spenserian stanzas. No essayist has risen fully to Shelley's poetic stature and comprehended him except another great poet, Francis Thompson. Speaking his own convictions, as every man, poet, critic, or even an academic voice of reason must and should speak his convictions, Thompson begins his essay by pleading for a reunion between his church and the art of poetry. So much of his essay seems to me interesting but not closely relevant to Shelley. After this introduction Thompson soars into the greatest essay that has ever been written on an English poet by an English poet.
Most poets, with their wonderful ears, of course write good prose. Francis Thompson has a fine essay on the prose of poets. Even Browning, who wrote little prose except the extraordinary parenthetical letters, was so clarified by Shelley that in his essay he discovered a fairly fluent and readable style.
Shelley is primarily neither philosopher nor revolutionist, but lyric poet. Yet to treat him only as a lyric poet is to forget his great drama, "The Cenci," which can hold up its head undiminished beside the Elizabethans. That idiotic British officialdom does not, or did not at last accounts, allow its performance on the regular stage, is perhaps only one more proof of how little impression Shelley's austere anarchism made on practical British morality. "The Cenci" is austere; for Shelley, it is athletically economical. The last speech of Beatrice is an unexcelled emotional climax. Yet even in this play we find that "intensely personal" note of Shelley; it speaks all his heart against all injustice. The play learned many lessons from the Elizabethans. It is not far wrong to call these lines Shakespearean:
My wife and children sleep;They are now living in unmeaning dreams;But I must wake, still doubting if that deedBe just which was most necessary. O,Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fireIs shaken by the wind and on whose edgeDevouring darkness hovers!
My wife and children sleep;They are now living in unmeaning dreams;But I must wake, still doubting if that deedBe just which was most necessary. O,Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fireIs shaken by the wind and on whose edgeDevouring darkness hovers!
My wife and children sleep;
They are now living in unmeaning dreams;
But I must wake, still doubting if that deed
Be just which was most necessary. O,
Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fire
Is shaken by the wind and on whose edge
Devouring darkness hovers!
H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA
Utopias fall into two classes, the local and the chronological. That is, some are removed from present fact by geographical transition to a country apart from us in space, a magic island, a realm undiscovered until the romancer found it and assumed it to be extant in the romancer's year of grace; others are sundered from present fact by being thrown forward into the future or backward into a time that precedes recorded history. The desirable land within the limits of present time and the known surficial limits of the globe is obviously not convincing. One fears that it may be rediscovered and invaded by an imperial fleet or an inquisitive scientific expedition. Crusoe's island is no longer remote. The geographers have plotted the planet and have snared every conceivable no-man's-land in the meshes of realistic lines of latitude and longitude.
The ideal civilization which plays ducks and drakes, not with space, but with time, is safer. Nothing can dislodge it or disprove it or in any wise proceed against it—except by force of superior imagination. For nobody knows what may happen in the future. That is why all the theological heavens are sublimely ramparted against attack.
Bellamy placed his ideal civilization within the impregnable security of a time as yet unborn. His conception was original and in its way was more realistic than the timeless abstraction of Plato and More, and the Nowhere from which Morris sent news. The fundamental scheme of portraying a future upon this earth was so fascinating that Bellamy's book enjoyed a success out of all proportion to its literary skill or its sociological insight. He had a first-rate plan, but with what unfanciful and rigidly precise lines he filled it in! His style is stiff and his future is ossified.
Mr. H. G. Wells took the idea of describing an imagined tomorrow and made of it a stimulating romance. In saying that he took the idea one does not mean to imply that he borrowed the scheme of "Looking Backward" or of any other book. The notion of criticizing today from the height of a postulated tomorrow was probably born and raised before Bellamy. My bibliography is imperfect, but I seem to remember that an Assyrian conceived the notion and inscribed his reflections on a ton of brick. The important thing is the kind of future a man imagines and the way he gets there and the justice of his backlook on the world as it is. Wells's "The World Set Free" is the most vision-expanding book of its kind—if there be a kind—that I have ever quarrelled with and been delighted by. It justifies the last word of its title. It does not cramp the growth of the race between a set of rules. It spreads the lines of development out at a generously wide angle. It bids humanity spring from what it is. It makes no desperately impossible demands upon our common nature. Indeed, with a cunning hidden plea, not evident at first glance, Mr. Wells draws the world council, which gathered together the shattered nations and gave them the first good government they had ever known, as a collection of ordinary men, with only one or two inspiring geniuses. The idea—a very important idea—is that any of us duffers could do it if we had to, and if we were only jolted out of a few little private interests and superstitions.
The value of a Utopia is not so much the description of a desirable and convincingly attainable state as in the reflex description of an undesirable state—the state in which we live. To show how the "new civilization" was unhampered by political intrigue and financial considerations is to show how obstructive is the present system of politics and ownership. "Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure." In "those" times, that is the present seen from the year 2000, many of the homes were entirely "horrible, uniform, square, squat, ugly, hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy; only people in complete despair of anything better could have lived in them." In "our" time, that is about 2000, the last stupid capitalist who wanted millions for an invention he had stolen was laughed out of court. People do not struggle to get, because they do not run the risk of starvation and wage slavery; they produce as artists, because man likes to do things with his head and his hands. In our times we understand that Bismarck, to take a salient example, was not an admirable man but a gross person, and that the age that produced him, made him a ruler, and paid him respect, was a dull, stupefied, vicious age. The time when people were taking pills for all kinds of ailments, were being killed by the slow process of the slum or the swift process of the ill-managed railroads, is past the imagination of "our" time to conceive.
From such a past the world is set free. The people of that past day might have set themselves free, but they were too stupid; the workmen were debased, timid and without imagination, the capitalists had to be intent on property and dividends lest they fall to the unpropertied condition of workmen; lawyers, clergymen, popular novelists like Mr. Wells, editors, journalists, and other professional parasites did not dare utter even such vision as they had, or did it for money under convenient restrictions. It was an unthinkably rotten period in the history of the world. Only a few kickers knew how rotten it was, or had courage to express their sense of the prevalent putrescence.
The account of what used to be is just enough, and the account of what "is" does not strain the intelligence even of one who sees things from the point of view of 1914. The only unconvincing part of Mr. Wells's history is that which narrates how we ceased to be what we were and became what we are. He wipes the old world out with an atomic bomb, so destructive that it annihilates all the capitals of the earth, makes war impossible and compels mankind to federate. Mr. Wells has a penchant for "fishy" science. He knows a good deal about chemistry, biology, mechanics, and he knows that novel readers know less, as a rule, than he knows. So with the finest air of conviction he shatters the world with a new explosive, which has a kind of laboratory-veracity not claimed for the comet whose tail brushed us to revolution in an earlier of his engaging romances. The clever man secures plausibility by rather cheekily dedicating the book to "Frederick Soddy's interpretation of radium," to which this story "owes long passages." Neat, isn't it? It inspires in the ignorant reader a confidence that those atomic bombs are approved by the most advanced science—though, of course, Mr. Wells does not say so. The cataclysmic revolution is splendidly narrated, and is even better than Mr. Wells's earlier mechanical and astronomical romances. The trouble with it is that it is not a fitting transition from a state of society which is seriously conceived to a better state of society which is described with all the earnestness of a sociologist. The two things are discordant. If we are to be taken from one civilization to another we must move along a social highway. The atomic bombs are out of key with the prelude and the last two chapters.
Mr. Wells is fond of mixing fake chemistry and social reality. He has succeeded in two kinds of fiction, which he should keep distinct, the Jules Verne romance and the novel of present-day life. He persists in putting the two in the same book, and they simply will not blend even under his skilful stirring-spoon. In "Tono-Bungay" he gave us a good picture of a quack millionaire, full of the spirit of the living age. It was set in a realistic scene and was true to life. Then for no reason at all he sent his hero in search of a mysterious metal called "quap," which does not exist and so never burnt the bottom out of the ship. "Quap" destroys the illusion of the book. About the time that quap begins to do its work, the book ceases to be a novel. "Marriage" almost ceases to be a novel when the couple go to Labrador. The introduction of love business into the comet story is an impertinence, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has complained. Mr. Wells's incurable taste for romantic adventure on a plane removed from life—usually an aeroplane that does what no aeroplane has done yet—vitiates his realism; and his concessions to the "love interest" do not help his experiments in scientific "futurism." He is best when he keeps separate the two sides of his genius.
On the other hand, his extraordinary skill in feathering social truth with romance, and his equally extraordinary skill in making a monster of romance eat real hay are the virtues of his vices. His tracts read like novels, and his novels often carry shrewdly concealed tracts. He is, next to Bernard Shaw, the most irritating and the most widely read revolutionary economist who writes our language. Like Mr. Shaw, he is a rather tame revolutionist; he has never got free from the middle-class, emancipated clerk view of life, and his romantic sense sometimes corrupts his sense of social fact as it does his sense of scientific fact. But he always thinks in ambush behind his most trivial narrative. And when he comes forth avowedly as a thinker and theorist, he has the vivacity of phrase, the sparkle of manner which serve him when he is making fiction. Moreover, in spite of his intense modernity and his contempt for ancient elegancies and traditional beauties, he can write fine, rhythmic, luminously visual prose; like all imaginative men who deal in words, he is a bit of a poet. His account of "the last war" has in it something of the quality of the epic: "Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?"
JOHN MASEFIELD
The first version of Mr. Masefield's "Pompey the Great" was published before "The Everlasting Mercy" and "The Widow of the Bye Street," those virile narratives that made us wake to find him famous. "Pompey" is vigorous and dramatic, yet it lacks the note that announces a new poet. The earlier poems, "Salt Water Ballads" are good, but do not rise above the chorus of minor lyrists. The short stories in "A Mainsail Haul" do not distinguish Masefield from a score of sturdy spinners of sea yarns. It was "The Widow in the Bye Street" that told us that a great new ship was in port. After that splendid arrival came "The Daffodil Fields" and "Dauber." Meanwhile the man who had found, if not created, a form of poetry so individual as to invite the final tribute of parody, showed himself in "The Tragedy of Nan," master of dramatic realism.
It is likely and logical, even if the dates do not fall into line, that "Pompey" is the work of a young ambitious literary man who in the hour of conceiving the work had not yet discovered his course. He had to a large extent discovered his style and his attitude toward life and the speech of men. He makes the Romans talk in a sharp bold staccato, which is good English and excellent Masefield; as for its Latinity, well, the Romans are dead and we do not know just how they talked. Pompey says: "We were happy there, that year." Cornelia answers: "Very happy. And that day the doves came, picking the spilled grain. And at night there was a moon." Pompey's next speech is: "All the quiet valley. And the owls were calling. Those little grey owls. Make eight bells, captain."
It is a question whether a modern dramatist is not misdirecting his genius when he makes plays of Greek or Roman legends and characters. To be sure, a man of genius is not to be limited in his subjects or his style. He is free by virtue of his genius. He may make an Iliad if it pleases him to try it. Mr. Bernard Shaw put a new wrinkle in the stiffened parchment of Caesar's biography. Ibsen at the age of 43, after he had hit upon his "later" manner, that is after he had made the simple discovery that universal tragedy grins in the small houses of small people in small Norwegian towns, produced his "Julian the Apostate." Poets of all nations during the last three hundred years have retold Greek and Roman stories and made new poetry of them. But on the whole the Greeks and Romans handled their own subjects, their own lives and legends fairly well. The task of the modern is to render our times or to interpret timeless and spaceless subjects from our point of view. The widow who lived in the bye street and the painter who was killed at sea are not as important persons as the Hon. Cneius Pompeius Magnus, but Mr. Masefield's poems about living (or recently killed) obscure folk are more important than his drama about the ancient illustrious dead.
"Pompey" is a good play, that is, it is good to read; I do not know whether it has been acted. It has one characteristic of Mr. Masefield's other work, a direct incisive speech, poetry of the naked fact, the brief metaphor which might come out in any man's talk and which has the "unliterary" flavor of reality—a cunningly literary mode of writing. Mr. Masefield makes Pompey say: "Five minutes ago I had Rome's future in my hand. She was wax to my seal. I was going to free her. Now is the time to free her. You can tear the scales and the chains from her." Did the Romans talk in this clipped hurried fashion? Probably they did when they were excited, for it is human to talk in short sentences; even Germans do it.
The business of the dramatist is to make you believe, with an arrested compelled attention, in the speech and action of persons in clearly defined circumstances. It makes no great difference whether the scene is in a Norwegian house or on the necromantic island of Shakespeare's "Tempest." Sometimes it seems a more wonderful achievement to make the Norwegian house interesting because it is so terribly like the one we live in. Mr. Masefield's Nan seems to me worth ten of Mr. Masefield's Cornelias, and the peculiar style and habit of thought of Mr. Masefield seem more fitted to the modern subject. One of his metrically ingenious stanzas, with all the artifice of meter and rhyme, is nearer to life than his vivaciously realistic sentences put into the mouth of a Roman. "Back your port oars. Shove off. Give way together. Go on there. Man your halliards. Take the turns off. Stretch it along. Softly now. Stand by." Was such the dialect of Roman sea captains? Nobody knows. All that I argue is that Mr. Masefield's punching abruptness is more wonderfully real, more effective on the lips of modern people whom we do know.
O God, O God, what pretty ways she had.He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white.She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad.Like rutting rattens in the apple loft.She held that light she carried high aloftFull in my eyes for him to hit me by,I had the light all dazzling in my eye.
O God, O God, what pretty ways she had.He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white.She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad.Like rutting rattens in the apple loft.She held that light she carried high aloftFull in my eyes for him to hit me by,I had the light all dazzling in my eye.
O God, O God, what pretty ways she had.
He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white.
She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad.
Like rutting rattens in the apple loft.
She held that light she carried high aloft
Full in my eyes for him to hit me by,
I had the light all dazzling in my eye.
Every poet is limited to his idiom, and though he may make broad differentiations, may change his structural form from sonnet to ode, from ode to dramatic scene, may adapt his style to a character to the extent of making clown and king unlike in their turn of phrase, yet when he is earnestly poetic he writes his own kind of poetry. Mr. Masefield vocalizes Masefield sentences with the breath of Romans. So Browning's characters all have the Browning abundance of telescoped metaphor. Shakespeare's English kings and Italian dukes trumpet Elizabethan blank verse. The identity of flavor and idiom and of metaphor between Shakespeare's English characters and Roman characters and Italian characters will never be perceived by the male and female Mrs. Jamesons, who write essays about Shakespeare's "characters," but cannot hear verse. To be sure, Shakespeare and all other great dramatists make the persons of the play adapt their substance to the situation; naturally Othello in a jealous fit does not talk about having lost his ducats and his daughter or order a cup of sack. But within the specific situation and the rather loose limits of character Shakespeare equips his person with a style of blank verse that is primarily Elizabethan, secondarily Shakespearean, and only in a tertiary and wholly subordinate sense Caesarean or Macbethean. D'Annunzio writes magnificent D'Annunzio, with a recognizable fondness for certain words and sonorities, no matter who is alleged to be talking. A poet is at his best when his singular power of phrase and his substance are most happily fused.
Masefield's instrument plays best upon modern themes, upon the tragedy of obscure people in English fields or upon the seven seas. It is his distinction to have taken the lives of the humble and to have involved those lives in the revolution of the stars and the expanses of sea. He has lifted coarse words into literature (the Elizabethans did that, too); he has related the large elements to little elemental lives; he has elevated obvious simplicities to grand complexities.
The resemblance between the austerely tender pathos of "The Daffodil Fields" and Wordsworth's "Michael" is a genuine resemblance honorable to the younger poet; and the pointing to the resemblance is not, I trust, an example of the critic's weak habit of referring one poet back to another. Mr. Quiller-Couch has said that "neither in the telling did, or could, 'Enoch Arden' come near the artistic truth of 'The Daffodil Fields'." Now, if one is to compare poets, for the sake of praising them or for the better understanding of them, it is well to make comparisons that refer the new and unknown to the known in illuminating conjunction. To say that "Enoch Arden" does not approach the artistic truth of "The Daffodil Fields" is to make an inept comparison, to associate the weak with the strong, even though the comparison is negative. "Enoch Arden" is the flimsiest kind of romantic fraud in Tennyson's worst manner. It is a sob poem that sends only the tiniest lace handkerchiefs to the laundry. "The Daffodil Fields," for all its conscious artistry and the adroit manipulation of the verses, is terrifically sincere. If its substance has any allegiance to another English poet, we must look for a poet who had a realistic sense of the furrowed field and a visionary sense of the stars, that is Wordsworth. And if one's odious liking for comparison is not satisfied with that, one may ask readers of poetry to compare the opening stanza of "The Widow in the Bye Street" with Chaucer, and think of such merits as plainness of phrase, simplicity and ease of narrative, and soundness of verse structure.
Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town,There lived a widow with her only son:She had no wealth nor title to renown,Nor any joyous hours, never one.
Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town,There lived a widow with her only son:She had no wealth nor title to renown,Nor any joyous hours, never one.
Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
Is there not here a note that suggests the opening of "The Nonne Preestes Tale," even though the story which follows is quite unlike Chaucer's? Or is it only the "widow" that makes me associate the two? At any rate it is pleasant to think that Mr. Masefield in a strong, not an imitative or servile, sense, is heir to the oldest master of English narrative verse.
Then if our habit of judging new poets by old ones still dominates us, let us take any passage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it beside any of the thousand years of English sea poetry.
Denser it grew, until the ship was lost.The elemental hid her: she was mergedIn mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost,New to the change of death, yet hither urged.Then from the hidden waters something surged—Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech,A noise like one slow wave on a still beach.
Denser it grew, until the ship was lost.The elemental hid her: she was mergedIn mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost,New to the change of death, yet hither urged.Then from the hidden waters something surged—Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech,A noise like one slow wave on a still beach.
Denser it grew, until the ship was lost.
The elemental hid her: she was merged
In mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost,
New to the change of death, yet hither urged.
Then from the hidden waters something surged—
Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech,
A noise like one slow wave on a still beach.
After that, if only for the pleasure of quoting them, recall Swinburne's lines:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote sea-gates,Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote sea-gates,Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.
The wonder of our English tongue is never more resounding than when English poets echo the tumult of the sea. Mr. Masefield is not so much an innovator as an initiate into a great poetic tradition, the tradition of a race of sailors and chantey-makers who began with "The Seafarer" or long before that, and shall not end with "Dauber." The sea is in Masefield's blood and in his personal experience. Who but an English poet would have ended "The Tragedy of Pompey the Great" with a chantey to the tune of "Hanging Johnny"?
SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES
In his sensible little book, "Literary Taste: How to Form It," Mr. Arnold Bennett says: "In attending a university extension lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for."
Of the vast library of scholarly research, the most fatuous section, if one is to judge from the few specimens one happens to have seen, is that which deals with the most important division of literature—poetry; and probably the poet who has suffered the most voluminous maltreatment from two centuries of English, German and American scholarship is Shakespeare. I have been going in an idle way over the notes in "The Tragedie of Jvlivs Caesar," edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr., and "The Tragedie of Cymbeline," edited by the elder Dr. Furness. And I have looked into other volumes of this laborious work, "A New Varorium Edition of Shakespeare." From an enormous mass of commentary, criticism, word-worrying, text-marring and learned guesswork, the editor has chosen what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of his introductions and the good sense of some of his own notes lead one to suppose that he has selected with discrimination from the notes of others. His work is a model of patience, industry and judgment. He plays well in this game of scholarship. But what is the game worth? What is the result?
Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages containing only one play! The text is a literal reprint of the first folio, or whatever is supposed to be the earliest printed version. The clear stream of poetry runs along the tops of the pages. Under that is a deposit of textual emendations full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans. Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. It consists of (a) what scholars said Shakespeare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare meant; (c) what scholars said about what other scholars said; (d) what scholars said about the morality and character of the personages, as (1) they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they are in other historical and fictitious writings; (e) what scholars said about how other people used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what scholars said could be done to Shakespeare's text to make him a better poet. I have not read all these notes and I never shall read them. Life is too short and too interesting.
All the time that I was trying to read the notes, so that I could know enough about them to write this article, my mind kept swimming up out of the mud into that clear river of text. It is an almost perfectly clear river. Some of the obscurities that scholars say are there are simply not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a kind of obscurity in some turbulent passages. Many of the obscurities the scholars put there in their innocence and stupidity, and those obscurities you can eliminate by ignoring them.
The really valuable note is the etymological. Etymology reveals the essential metaphors of words. The modern reader will find that beyond his intellectual front door stand three or four wire entanglements of connotation; by the time a word gets to him it is bruised and ragged. The etymologist clears all those fences for you and delivers a word fresh into your hands. He shows you how other poets have used it. He enriches it with other connotations. He shows it to be even wealthier than it was in the mind of the man who wrote the Shakespearian line. One of the most exciting and poetic books is the Oxford Dictionary. The dated illustrative history of a word, past milestone after milestone of use, is an intellectual epic. The word is root-deep and branch-high with poetry, with the imaginative habits of the race. The etymological note not only clarifies Shakespeare, but spreads behind him (and other poets) a sort of verbal-cosmic background. Etymology brightens the color of words, deepens their significance. That the etymologist is often a duffer, who, in the very act of resolving a word into new chords, writes stiff and stodgy prose, is a perplexing thing in human nature and a very perplexing problem in that appalling institution, Scholarship.
It is impossible for even a vivacious, humorous man like Dr. Furness, an enthusiastic amateur in love with his task, to live in a library of Shakespearian scholarship and not be infected by its diseases. Dr. Furness knows, for example, precisely when "Cymbeline" was written. Shakespeare was forty-six years old. Now, "Cymbeline" is a foolish play; Dr. Johnson said so. And there must be a reason for Shakespeare's deterioration, for Shakespeare, unlike other poets, is not to be allowed to write bad plays and bad lines without a satisfactory explanation. He did not explain himself, but the scholars come to his rescue. Dr. Furness fancies that, though forty-six is not an advanced age, Shakespeare was tired and disillusioned. "There may have crept into Shakespeare's study of imagination a certain weariness of soul in contemplating in review the vast throng of his dream children…. A sufficing harvest of fame is his and honest wealth, accompanied by honor, love, obedience and troops of friends." "I can most reverently fancy that he is once more allured by the joy of creation when by chance there falls in his way the old, old story of a husband convinced, through villany, of his wife's infidelity."
And there you are. Shakespeare at the age of forty-six is lured by the restless joy of creation into writing "Cymbeline," which is a poor play. It is not up to the mark which Shakespeare's previous masterpieces have set. There is something a little wobbly about this conjunction of surmises. But the scholar is never at a loss. He can deliver immortal Will from his own errors, shield him from the consequences of being at once a god in art and a human man, prone to literary lapses and slovenly work. The masque in the fifth act "is regarded by a large majority of editors and critics as an intrusive insertion by some hand not Shakespeare's." When a large majority of scholars and critics regard a thing as so, it is so. It gets into the books that you have to read to pass college examinations. And if you say that many of the scholars and critics whom you happen to have read or listened to are chumps, when they deal with Shakespeare or any other poet, you are a lost soul.
Some of the notes of the various commentators are suggestive. But many of the notes are sheer impertinences, especially those that attempt to mend the lines.
I would haue left it on the Boord, so sooneAs I had made my Meale; and partedWith Pray'rs for the Prouider.
I would haue left it on the Boord, so sooneAs I had made my Meale; and partedWith Pray'rs for the Prouider.
I would haue left it on the Boord, so soone
As I had made my Meale; and parted
With Pray'rs for the Prouider.
There is nothing the matter with that. It sounds all right. But the editors have to fill out the short second line, to make it scan. Dr. Furness thinks, justly, that the line needs only "a very timid pause after 'Meale.'" Of course, any reader, any good actor, with an ear on the side of his head, reads all lines with pauses timid or bold as the case requires, and does not make a fuss about it. It is only the scholars that fuss, or poets like Pope, who are entirely out of touch with Shakespeare's free metrical habits.
It is almost inconceivable that grown men with enough interest in poetry to spend their whole lives in Shakespeare's company could have daubed him with such muddy nonsense as one finds in these notes, which are not the worst of scholarly comment but the best, selected by a discriminating man. What a colossal sham it all is!—erected not by charlatans but by men working in good faith and with disinterested devotion to their task.
It is not merely the ignorant idler and the superficial player among books who has got tired of the institution of Shakespeare Improved: Fourteen Thousand Doctors of Philosophy in Session Day and Night, Searching for a Serum to Prevent Spinal Meningitis in the Lines of Shakespeare. Millions Needed to Continue This Humanitarian Work: Fifty Thousand Students Under Instruction in the Art of How Not to Be Poets. Against this amazing institution some of the more independent surgeons have protested. One was the late John Churton Collins, a physician who discovered that the Shakespearean metaphor was not a locally British infection rising from the Avon river, but was brought by the verbal mosquito from Rome and Greece. Collins had a vivid and audacious mind that made him one of the most readable of modern Shakespeareans, and he had, I assume, considerable learning. He says: "Dozens of impertinent emendations have been introduced into Shakespeare's text, because editors have not been aware that the custom of using the same word in different senses in one line, or even twice in contiguous lines, was deliberately affected by the Elizabethan poets." Deliberately affected? Yes, and it came natural to them in a time when language was a little looser and freer than it is after three centuries of increased use and hardened definition both in prose and poetry.
One trouble with much Shakespearean scholarship lies in the assumption that everything that left Shakespeare's hand must have been perfect. Why, he probably used words carelessly and did all kinds of tricks with them, as other geniuses do. Why should we assume that he always wrote a good line? Some of his lines are bad, and it is not necessary for Dr. Pumpernickell to knock out a couple of words or add a couple just to make a line go metrically. These scholars have a split vision. In one note they treat Shakespeare like a god who could not go wrong. In the next note they treat him like a sophomore versifier whose lines have to be corrected. Dr. Furness says that the earliest known text of "Julius Caesar"—that of the First Folio, "is markedly free from corruptions." What corruptions? The printers' or Shakespeare's? Dr. Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a playhouse copy. "Our only recourse is to accept the explanation given by Resch, viz., that these words between Brutus and Messala are an interpolation from a MS. addition which appeared first in a playhouse copy, and which, by mistake, became incorporated in the text." Now, is not that a "soft, downy, pink-cheeked peach of an idea" (Jonson's "Sejanus," act IV., sc. 13, I, 23. Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 1913)? Resch be hanged! What playhouse copy? When? Whose mistake? How incorporated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page are devoted to explaining a difficulty which does not exist.
This is the true history of the passage in question. Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of Stratford got roaring full. He went home on foot to Stratford, a long journey, and found Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom was the poet Davenant. This was very disturbing to Will. He did not know until after his death which twin was Davenant. He was then in that fateful year, 1599-1600, writing his play, "Julius Caesar", and making extensive use of Suetonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. Furness thinks this doubtful, but if you are going to guess, why not guess good and plenty?). Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad morning head. That is why he made that slightly confused passage, which has bothered the scholars ever since.
The following example of how Shakespeare's biography is written is not a parody. It appears in the New YorkNationof November 27, 1913, page 513, in a review of Arthur S. Pier's "Story of Harvard."
"Every good story has a prologue, and the story of Harvard has one which by no means should be left out. In Stratford-on-Avon stands the 'Old House in the High Street,' identified by the most eminent of our antiquaries, the late H. F. G. Waters, by certain documentary evidence, as the early home of Katharine Rogers, mother of John Harvard, from whom proceeded the little inheritance that first kindled in the western hemisphere the torch of a liberal culture. For this we have distinct contemporaneous chapter and verse.
"At circumstantial evidence we look askance, but without pressing the matter unduly this may be said—that the families of Rogers and Shakespeare lived in close neighborhood and intimacy at Stratford during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; that the poet knew Katharine Rogers well, as, on the other hand, he knew well Robert Harvard, at length her husband, in his shop at Southwark, in London, hard by the Globe Theatre. So far the conjunction would seem to be inevitable.
"Then looms up a possibility amounting perhaps to a likelihood, that no other than Shakespeare was the intermediary who brought together the Londoner and the fair, well-dowered maid in the remote midlands, that he was a familiar guest in the home in Southwark which he had helped to establish, and that he, the genial family friend, held on his knee the little John Harvard, the first-born in the household.
"Could this touch of their foster-father with the most illustrious name in literature be fairly established (and who can say after the feats of Mr. Waters what scraps may yet be found in the dust-heaps?), Harvard men would indeed have a tradition to prize."
Why not get down to brass tacks? We do not know much about Shakespeare's life. We do not know anything about his manuscripts, or the playhouse versions. We cannot even rely on the printed date of a quarto. We do not know whether a corrupt line was corrupted by Shakespeare or the printer or somebody else. Many emendations consist largely in a kind of scholarly punning. For example: Shakespeare wrote a line that every scholar remembers, for it is a causer of gray hairs and a prodigal spender of the midnight taper: "The blind Rush hath proclaimed his Bowells search." Johnson conjectures that four lines have been omitted. Steev. conj.: For "blind rush," read "mind rush." That is, the impetuousness of his thought makes one aware of how his instinct is struggling for the solution of his difficulties. Malone conj.: "Bowells lurch." Evidently referring to the sea-sickness of Antony after the battle of Actium. Craik conj.: "Rowell's search, meaning that his blind rush, that is headlong rush, is caused or indicated by the speed of his horse into which he has thrust his rowels." Cf. B. Jonson, "Every man out of His Humor"; "One of the rowels catched hold of the ruffle of my boot." Oechelhauser (Einleitung, p. 1185): But this must refer to the speed of the intellect going through purely idealistic experiences. There is no question here of either sea or land. Macbeth has not been near the sea and Henry V. has not yet set sail for France. As for horses, it is now well established that there were no horses in England; otherwise why should Richard have cried, "My kingdom for a horse"? If there had been horses, one could surely have bought one, especially a King, for 80 marks, the then ruling price in Schleswig-Holstein; and even the ecstasies of expression would not have made appropriate the offer of an entire kingdom.
So they go "conjing" and "conjing" through desolate miles of notes. In spite of the fact that now and again a genuine bit of historic information, a light of interpretative intuition flashing from a scholar's note, does vivify and elucidate a puzzling line, or a line that you might pass over in an oblivious mood, nevertheless, is it not true that this whole institution of literary theology is a stupid superstition? There are plenty of unsolved problems in Shakespeare, fascinating questions of biography and interpretation to which conjectural answers are legitimate. But for illuminating answers, or partial answers, one has to go outside orthodox scholarship, to Walter Begley, to "The Shakespeare Problem Restated," by George C. Greenwood, to "Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest" by Colin Still, and to other heretical inquirers whom the pundits dismiss as cranks.
The scholars do not confine their thick-headed learning to old poets whose language is strange and who are made clearer by a note here and there. For some stranger reason scholars are hired to edit the modern poets in the popular series, those valuable and inexpensive reprints which help to spread poetry over the face of the earth and make it accessible to increasing numbers of readers. I pick up the "Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with introduction and notes by Charles Bell Burke, Ph.D., professor of English in the University of Tennessee. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Classics. I come upon "A Green Cornfield," a lovely lyric that must have made Shelley look down with interest "from the abode where the eternal are." There is reference to a note. I turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile? Consult Genung's 'Working Principles of Rhetoric,' p. 79, 2, example." I will not consult Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my school never to consult Genung while they are reading poetry.
I commend to those hard-working young men and women in the universities who are now studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sentences from Mr. Max Eastman's "Enjoyment of Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all education is the fact that those who elect to be teachers are scholars. They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other values, but as a value in itself; and hence they put an undue emphasis upon what is formal and nice about it, leaving out what is less pleasing to the instinct for classification but more needful to the art of life. This misfortune is especially heavy in the study of literature. Indeed the very rare separation of the study of literature from that of the subjects it deals with suggests the barren and formal character of it. As usually taught for three years to postgraduates in our universities, it is not worth spending three weeks upon."