Rabelais is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids—at times, indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be read without a blush and a sensation of sickness: the young giant which is the Renaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest and her most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate—is an effect of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits’ end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it might be useful: he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels itin on any and every occasion, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto that assuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive operations. In him, indeed, the humour of Old France—the broad, rank, unsavouryesprit gaulois—found its heroic expression; he made use of it because he must; and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the quality of imagination from Shakespeare’s or those of art and intellect from Ben Jonson’s. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously featured.
It is significant enough that with all this against him he should have been from the first a great moral and literary influence and the delight of the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare read him, and Jonson; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort his descendant; Swift, in Coleridge’s enlightening phrase, is ‘anima Rabelaesii habitans in sicco’; to Sterne and Balzac and Molière he was a constant inspiration; unto this day his work isstudied and his meanings are sought with almost religious devoutness; while his phrases have passed into the constitution of a dozen languages, and the great figures he scrawled across the face of the Renaissance have survived the movement that gave them being, and are ranked with the monuments of literature. Himself has given us the reasons in the prologue to the first book, where he tells of the likeness between Socrates and the boxes called Sileni, and discourses of the manifest resemblance of his own work with Socrates. ‘Opening this box,’ which is Socrates, says he, ‘you would have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that for which men cunningly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoil themselves.’ In such wise must his book be opened, and the ‘high conceptions’ with which it is stuffed will presently be apparent. Nay, more: you are to do with it even as a dog with a marrowbone. ‘If you have seen him you might have remarked with what devotion and circumspection he watches and wards it; with what care he keeps it; how fervently he holds it; how prudently he gobbets it; with what affection he breaks it; with what diligence he sucks it.’And in the same way you ‘by a sedulous lecture and frequent meditation’ shall break the bone and suck out the marrow of these books. Since the advice was proffered, generation after generation of mighty wits have taken counsel with the Master, and his wisdom has through them been passed out into the practice of life, the evolution of society, the development of humanity. But the ‘prince de toute sapience et de toute comédie’ has not yet uttered his last word. He remains in the front of time as when he lived and wrote. The Abbey of Thelema and the education of Gargantua are still unrealised ideals; the Ringing Isle and the Isle of Papimany are in their essentials pretty much as he left them; Panurge, ‘the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the reason,’ has bettered no whit for the three centuries of improvement that have passed since he was flashed into being. We—even we—have much to learn from Master Alcofribas, and until we have learned it well enough to put it into practice his work remains half done and his book still one to study.
Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion. About the English poet a literature of contention has been in process of accretion ever since he was discovered to be Shakespeare; and about the Dutch painter and etcher there has gradually accumulated a literature precisely analogous in character and for the most part of equal quality. In such an age as this, when the creative faculty of the world is mainly occupied with commentary and criticism, the reason should not be far to seek. Both were giants; both were original and individual in the highest sense of the words; both were leagues ahead of their contemporaries, not merely as regards the matter of their message but also in respect of the terms of its delivery; each, moreover—and here one comes upon a capital point of contact and resemblance—each was at times prodigiously inferior to himself. Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he veryoften writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill. There are passages in his work in which he reaches such heights of literary art as since his time no mortal has found accessible; and there are passages which few or none of us can read without a touch of that ‘burning sense of shame’ experienced in the presence of Mr. Poynter’sDiadumeneby the British Matron ofThe Timesnewspaper. Now, we have got to be so curious in ideals that we cannot away with the thought of imperfection. Our worship must have for its object something flawless, something utterly without spot or blemish. We can be satisfied with nothing less than an entire and perfect chrysolite; and we cannot taste our Shakespeare at his worst without experiencing not merely the burning sense of shame aforesaid but also a frenzy of longing to father his faults upon somebody else—Marlowe for instance, or Green, or Fletcher—and a fury of proving that our divinity was absolutely incapable of them. That Shakespeare varied—that the matchless prose and the not particularly lordly verse ofAs You Like Itare by the same hand; that the master to whom we owe our Hamlet is also responsible for Gertrude and King Claudius; that he who gave us the agony of Lear and the ruin of Othello did likewise perpetrate the scene of Hector’s murder, in manner so poor and in spirit so cynical and vile—is beyond all belief and patience;and we have argued the point to such an extent that we are all of us in Gotham, and a mooncalf like the ascription of whatever is good in Shakespeare to Lord Bacon is no prodigy but a natural birth.
Sidney’s prime faults are affectation and conceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest gold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a man’s heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckram and broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible that its pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb by throb is impossible. And if this be true of thatAstrophel and Stellaseries in which the poet outpours the melodious heyday of his youth—in which he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirred man’s blood—what shall be said of theArcadia? In that ‘cold pastoral’ he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigid a fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a great deal of himself into the result, still every one has not the true critical insight, and to mostof us, I think, those glimpses of the lofty nature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in the eyes of the few are merely invisible.
In thinking of Sidney, Ophelia’s lament for Hamlet springs to the lips, and the heart reverts to that closing scene at Zutphen with a blessed sadness of admiration and regret. But frankly, is it not a fact that that fine last speech of his has more availed to secure him immortality than all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchman need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his intellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows and abstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely nor listened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than a brilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluency and sweetness have not improved with years.
Tourneur was a fierce and bitter spirit. The words in which he unpacked his heart are vitalised with passion. He felt so keenly that oftentimes his phrase is the offspring of the emotion, so terse and vigorous and apt, so vivid and so potent and eager, it appears. As an instance of this avidity of wrath and scorn finding expression in words the fittest and most forcible, leaving the well-known scenes embalmed in Elia’s praise, one might take the three or four single words in which Vindici (The Revenger’s Tragedy), on as many several occasions, refers to the caresses of Spurio and the wanton Duchess. Each is of such amazing propriety, is so keenly discriminated, is so obviously the product of an imagination burning with rage and hate, that it strikes you like an affront: each is an incest taken in the fact and branded there and then. And this quality of verbal fitness, this power of so charging a phrase with energy and colour as to make it convey the emotion of the writer at the instant of inspiration, is perhaps the master quality of Tourneur’s work.
They that would have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few. For in the minor artist the passionate—the elemental quality—is not often found: he being of his essence the ape or zany of his betters. Tourneur is not a great tragic.The Atheist’s Tragedyis but grotesquely and extravagantly horrible; its personages are caricatures of passion; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid; its incidents are absurd when they are not simply abominable. But it is written in excellent dramatic verse and in a rich and brilliant diction, and it contains a number of pregnant epithets and ringing lines and violent phrases. And if you halve the blame and double the praise you will do something less than justice to thatRevenger’s Tragedywhich is Tourneur’s immortality. After all its companion is but a bastard of the loud, malignant, antic muse of Marston; the elegies are cold, elaborate, and very tedious; theTransformed Metamorphosisis better verse but harder reading thanSordelloitself. But theRevenger’s Tragedyhas merit as a piece of art and therewith a rare interest as a window on the artist’s mind. The effect is as of a volcanic landscape. An earthquake has passed, and among grisly shapes and blasted aspects here lurks and wanders the genius of ruin.
I am told that it is generally though silently admitted that, while Charles Cotton came of a school of fishermen renowned for accomplishment even now, his master and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sense a fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of the philosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of the artist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockney sportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill; his prey was commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for he knew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such base creatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace; and that part of his treatise which has still a certain authority—which may be said, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something of a scientific basis—was not his work but that of ‘my most honoured friend, Charles Cotton, Esq.’ Again, it is a characteristic of your true as opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto by hunger, he does not eat what he has killed; andit is a characteristic of Walton—who in this particular at least may stand for the authentic type of the cockney sportsman as opposed to the true one—that he delighted not much less in dining or supping on his catch than he did in the act of making it: as witness some of the most charming parts in a book that from one end to the other is charm and little besides. Indeed the truth—(with reverence be it spoken)—appears to be that theCompleat Angleris an expression in the terms of art of the cit’s enjoyment of the country.
What Walton saw in angling was not that delight in the consciousness of accomplishment and intelligence which sends the true fisherman to the river and keeps him there, rejoicing in his strength, whether he kill or go empty away. It was rather the pretext—with a worm and perhaps a good supper at one end and a contemplative man at the other—of a day in the fields: where the skylark soared, and the earth smelled sweet, and the water flashed and tinkled as it ran, while hard by some milk-maid, courteous yet innocent, sang as she plied her nimble fingers, and not very far away the casement of the inn-parlour gleamed comfortablepromises of talk and food and rest. That was the Master Piscator who, being an excellent man of letters, went out to ‘stretch his legs up Tottenham Hill’ in search of fish, and came home with immortal copy; and that was the Izaak Walton who ‘ventured to fill a part’ of Cotton’s ‘margin’ with remarks not upon his theory of how to angle for trout or grayling in a clear stream but ‘by way of paraphrase for your reader’s clearer understanding both of the situation of your fishing house, and the pleasantness of that you dwell in.’ He had the purest and the most innocent of minds, he was the master of a style as bright, as sweet, as refreshing and delightful, as fine clean home-spun some time in lavender; he called himself an angler, and he believed in the description with a cordial simplicity whose appeal is more persuasive now than ever. But he was nothing if not the citizen afield—the cockney aweary of Bow Bells and rejoicing in ‘the sights and sounds of the open landscape.’ After all it is only your town-bred poet who knows anything of the country, or is moved to concern himself in anywise for the sensations and experiences it yields. Milton was born in Bread Street, and Herrick in Cheapside. Yet Milton gave us theAllegroand thePenserosoand the scenery inComusand the epic; while as for Herrick—theNight-Piece, the lovely and immortal versesTo Meadows, the fresh yet sumptuous and nobleTo Corinna Going a-Maying,these and a hundred more are there to answer forhim. Here Walton is with Herrick and Milton and many ‘dear sons of Memory’ besides; and that is why he not only loved the country but was moved to make art of it as well.
In Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay; there is a morning light upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on the eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes; and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. As you walk you are conscious of ‘the grace that morning meadows wear,’ and mayhap you meet Amaryllis going home to the farm with an apronful of flowers. Rounded is she and buxom, cool-cheeked and vigorous and trim, smelling of rosemary and thyme, with an appetite for curds and cream and a tongue of ‘cleanly wantonness.’ For her singer has an eye in his head, and exquisite as are his fancies he dwells in no land of shadows. The more clearly he sees a thing the better he sings it; and provided that he do see it nothing is beneath the caress of his muse. The bays and rosemary that wreath the hall at Yule, the log itself, the Candlemas box, the hock-cart and the maypole, nay,
‘See’st thou that cloud as silver clear,Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere?Tis Julia’s bed!’—
‘See’st thou that cloud as silver clear,Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere?Tis Julia’s bed!’—
And not only does he listen to the ‘clecking’ of his hen and know what it means: he knows too that the egg she has laid is long and white; so that ere he enclose it in his verse, you can see him take it in his hand, and look at it with a sort of boyish wonder and delight. This freshness of spirit, this charming and innocent curiosity, he carries into all he does. He can turn a sugared compliment with the best, but when Amaryllis passes him by he is yet so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that ‘winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat’ which has rippled to such good purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is merely ‘a fable, song, a fleeting shade,’ he has saved enough of them from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There ‘in their habit as they lived’ they dance in round, they fill their laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever maying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and set them for ever where they are.
And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as those younglings of the year she bears with her in ‘wicker ark’ or ‘lawny continent.’ Herrick is pre-eminently the poet of flowers. He alone were capable of bringing back
‘Le bouquet d’OphélieDe la rive inconnue où les flots l’ont laissé.
‘Le bouquet d’OphélieDe la rive inconnue où les flots l’ont laissé.
He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tender and shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondest metaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves, and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able so well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually ‘poor girls neglected.’ His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the ‘flowery nunnery,’ the old singer finds life so good a thing that he dreadsto lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regret with which he sees things hastening to their end.
That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In hisNoble NumbersHerrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocaña, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple gallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances and villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than Catholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to be wondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity and earnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitable daintiness of surface.
Mr. Locker’s verse has charmed so wisely and so long that it has travelled the full circle of compliment and exhausted one part of the lexicon of eulogy. As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever the sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerly restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once exquisite and paternal. If they pun, ’tis with an air: even thus might Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! There is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it gets leave to beam on unperceived. There is humour too, but humour so polite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you in doubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there is a vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to thedelight no less than to the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touched with passion, as inThe Unrealized Idealand that lovely odelet to Mabel’s pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the least approachable of all.
For as English as she is, indeed, his muse is not to be touched off save in French. To think of her is to reflect that she isdelicate,spirituelle,sémillante—une fine mouche,allez! Thesalonhas disappeared,—‘Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose’; but she was born with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a buckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with an incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction; and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet’s very own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end is invariable. ‘I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.’ Even as in her master’s finest song.
The Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, there is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the ‘rire énorme’ of theFrogsand theLysistrata. But it is suspected that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in their way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turned sentences in prose. But their function ispurely verbal; they are the raw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being to glorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets and rondels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight-and-twenty members of a fair ballade.
It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing of modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rare artist in words and cadences. He writes of ‘Pierrot, l’homme subtil,’ and Columbine, and ‘le beau Léandre,’ and all the marionettes of that pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty and propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax as passionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in the process and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he were carving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven’s ‘Fifth,’ or producingKing Learor theRonde de Nuit. He is profoundly artificial, but he is simple and eveninnocent in his artifice; so that he is often interesting and even affecting. He knows so well what should be done and so well how to do it that he not seldom succeeds in doing something that is actually and veritably art: something, that is, in which there is substance as well as form, in which the matter is equal with the manner, in which the imagination is human as well as æsthetic and the invention not merely verbal but emotional and romantic also. The dramatic and poetic value of such achievements in style asFloriseandDiane au Boisis open to question; but there can be no doubt thatGringoireis a play. There is an abundance of ‘epical ennui’ inle Sang de la Coupeandles Stalactites; but the ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’ and the charming epigram in which the poet paints a processional frieze of Hellenic virgins are high-water marks of verse. But, indeed, if Pierrot and Columbine were all the race, and the footlights might only change places with the sun, then were M. de Banville by way of being a Shakespeare.
His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisite clarity. Of its kind it is as nearly as possible perfect. You think of Horace as you read; and you think of those among our own eighteenth century poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. The epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the noun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect of it all is that ‘something has here got itself uttered,’ and for good. Could anything, for instance, be better, or less laboriously said, than this poet’s remonstranceTo an Intrusive Butterfly? The thing is instinct with delicate observation, so aptly and closely expressed as to seem natural and living as the facts observed:
‘I watch you through the garden walks,I watch youfloatbetweenTheavenuesof dahlia stalks,Andflickeron the green;Youhoverround the garden seat,Youmount, youwaver. . .* * * * *Across the roomin loops of flightI watch you wayward go;* * * * *Before the bust you flaunt and flit—* * * * *Youpause, youpoise, youcircle upAmong my old Japan.’
‘I watch you through the garden walks,I watch youfloatbetweenTheavenuesof dahlia stalks,Andflickeron the green;Youhoverround the garden seat,Youmount, youwaver. . .
* * * * *
Across the roomin loops of flightI watch you wayward go;* * * * *Before the bust you flaunt and flit—* * * * *Youpause, youpoise, youcircle upAmong my old Japan.’
And all the rest of it. The theme is but the vagaries of a wandering insect; but how just and true is the literary instinct, how perfect the literarysavoir-faire! The words I have italicised are the only words (it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion; and yet how quietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they are set to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect! In writing of this sort there is a certain artistic good-breeding whose like is not common in these days. We have lost the secret of it: we are too eager to make the most of our little souls in art and too ignorant to do the best by them; too egoistic and ‘individual,’ too clever and skilful and well informed, to be content with the completeness of simplicity. Even the Laureate was once addicted to glitter for glitter’s sake; and with him to keep them in countenance there is a thousand minor poets whose ‘little life’ is merely a giving way to the necessities of what is after all a condition of intellectual impotence but poorly redeemed by a habit of artistic swagger. The singer of Dorothy and Beau Brocade is of another race. He is ‘the co-mate and brother in exile’ of Matthew Arnold and the poet ofThe UnknownEros. Alone among modern English bards they stand upon that ancient way which is the best: attentive to the pleadings of the Classic Muse, heedful always to give such thoughts as they may breed no more than their due expression.
One of the very few great musicians who have been able to write their own language with vigour and perspicuity, Berlioz was for many years among the kings of the feuilleton, among the most accomplished journalists of the best epoch of the Parisian press. He had an abundance of wit and humour; his energy and spirit were inexhaustible; within certain limits he was a master of expression and style; in criticism as in music he was an artist to his finger-ends; and if he found writing hard work what he wrote is still uncommonly easy reading. He is one of the few—the very few—journalists the worth of whose achievement has been justified by collection and republication. Louis Veuillot has been weighed in this balance, and found wanting; and so has Janin prince of critics. With Berlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as a student of life; if you are interested in life and music both he is irresistible. TheMémoiresis one of the two or three essays in artistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto’s story of himself and his own doings; the two volumes of correspondence rank with the most interestingepistolary matter of these times; in theGrotesques, theA Travers Chants, theSoirées de l’Orchestrethere is enough of fun and earnest, of fine criticism and diabolical humour, of wit and fancy and invention, to furnish forth a dozen ordinary critics, and leave a rich remainder when all’s done. These books have been popular for years; they are popular still; and the reason is not far to seek. Berlioz was not only a great musician and a brilliant writer; he was also a very interesting and original human being. His writings are one expression of an abnormal yet very natural individuality; and when he speaks you are sure of something worth hearing and remembering.
Apart from Cellini’s ruffianism there are several points of contact between the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of an opera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with his subject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness of temper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, the passion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what is little and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of theFlorentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of theDébats, the author of theGrotesques de la Musiqueand theA Travers Chants, and the Benvenuto who, as Il Lasca writes of him,
‘Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzaleDelle cose malfatte dicea male.’
‘Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzaleDelle cose malfatte dicea male.’
Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiates upon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with much the same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the rapture of conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty ofDivinités du Styxor the adagio of the so-calledMoonlight Sonata. It is written of Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari’s attack upon that cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call ‘the marvel of beautiful things,’ that if he had lived to see the result,
‘Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle;E saltando,e correndo,e fulminando,S’ andrebbe querelando,E per tutto gridando ad alta voceGiorgin d’Arezzo meterebbe in croce,Oggi universalmenteOdiato della genteQuasi publico ladro e assassino’;
‘Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle;E saltando,e correndo,e fulminando,S’ andrebbe querelando,E per tutto gridando ad alta voceGiorgin d’Arezzo meterebbe in croce,Oggi universalmenteOdiato della genteQuasi publico ladro e assassino’;
and you are reminded irresistibly of Berlioz betrampling Lachnith and the ingenious Castil-Blaze and defending Beethoven against the destructive pedantry of Fétis. And, just as theVitais invaluable as a personal record of artist-lifein the Italy of the Renaissance, so are theMémoiresinvaluable as a personal record of the works and ways of musicians in the Paris of the Romantic revival. Berlioz is revealed in them for one of the race of the giants. He is the musician of 1830, as Delacroix is the painter; and his work is as typical and as significant as theSardanapaleand theFaustlithographs.
To read theMémoiresis to feel that in writing them the great musician deliberately set himself to win the heart of posterity. He believed in himself, and he believed in his music: he divined that one day or another he would be legendary as well as immortal; and he took an infinite deal of pains to make certain that the ideal which was presently to represent him in men’s minds should be an ideal of which he could thoroughly approve. It is fair to note that in this care for the good will and the good word of the future he was not by any means alone. Theromantiques, indeed, were keen—from Napoleon downwards—to make the very best of themselves. The poet of theLégende des Siècles, for example, went early to work to arrange the story of his life and character at least as carefully as he composedthe audiences of hispremières; and he did it with so light a hand, and with such a sense of the importance of secrecy, that it is even now by no means so well and widely known as it should be thatVictor Hugo raconté par un Témoin de sa Vieis the work of the hero’s wife, and was not only inspired but may also have been revised and prepared for publication by the hero himself. Again, the dramatist ofAntonyand the novelist ofBragelonnewas never so happy as when he was engaged upon the creation of what he hoped would be the historical Dumas; he made volume after volume of delightful reading out of his own impressions and adventures; he turned himself into copy with a frankness, a grace, a gusto, a persistency of egoism, which are merely enchanting. Berlioz, therefore, had good warrant for his work. It is more to the point, perhaps, that he would have taken it if he had not had it. And I hold that he would have done well; for (in any case) a great man’s notion of himself is,ipso facto, better and more agreeable and convincing, especially as he presents it, than the idea of his inferiors and admirers, especially as presented by them. Berlioz, it is true, was prodigal in theseMémoiresof his of wit and fun and devilry, of fine humanity and noble art, of good things said and great things dreamed and done and suffered; but he was prodigal of invention and suppression as well, and the result, while considerably less veracious, is all the more fascinating,therefor. One feels that for one thing he was too complete an artist to be merely literal and exact; that for another he saw and felt things for himself, as Milton did before him—Milton in the mind’s eye of Milton the noblest of created things and to Mr. Saintsbury almost as unpleasing a spectacle as the gifted but abject Racine; and for a third that from his own point of view he was right, and there is an end of it.
It was thought that with George Eliot the Novel-with-a-Purpose had really come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated that those perfect days were on the march when men and women would propose—(from the austerest motives)—by the aid of scientific terminology.
To the Sceptic—(an apostate, and an undoubted male)—another view was preferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the ‘Death’s-Head Style’ of art a trifle too far. He read her books in much the same spirit and to much the samepurpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested her technology; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him; and when she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with understanding—instead of letting them explain themselves, as several great novelists have been content to do—he recalled how Wisdom crieth out in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in this case the fault was Wisdom’s own. He accepted with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner’s gratitude, her woman generally, from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with very few exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him Deronda was an incarnation of woman’s rights; Tito an ‘improper female in breeches’; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom it is said that they have ‘had a disappointment.’ And Lydgate alone had aught of the true male principle about him.
Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about GeorgeEliot. It has been said of her books—(‘on several occasions’)—that ‘it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels’; that, ‘while less romantic than Euclid’s Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading’; and that ‘they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.’ Herself, too, has been variously described: as ‘An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery’; as ‘George SandplusScience andminusSex’; as ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset’; as ‘the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.’ The comparison of her admirable talent to ‘not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello’ seems suggestive and is not unkind.
Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer: he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the Spanish Main, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late for that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his best to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirable instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While as for your tricksof fence—your immortalpassado, yourpunto reverso—if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and has not Cribb of Gloucestershire—that renowned, heroic, irresistible Thomas—beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty thousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which has rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who, albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? And if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king’s highway be vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon, he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that what with these and some kindred diversions—a little horse-whispering and ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible—he can manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the world wags, is given to few.Add to it the credit of having written as good a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, the happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold in worship—as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or the pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that Borrow was a man uncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?
He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumas himself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault; he marshalled his personages and arranged his scene with something of that passion for effect which entered so largely into the theory of M. le Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To his chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is hisown, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that Lavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then—as the manner of Lesage commands—the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted courses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once more and passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priest to baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an applewoman to mystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study and help and portray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly, unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circumstantial as Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to the end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate: you feel that like Ben Jonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithful and exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the less pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is Lavengro’s and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover, that all of itshould be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English, with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious but homely—the speech of an artist in sods and turfs—if at first it surprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you go on to forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcome of a man’s experience which it purports to be. Add that it is all entirely unsexual; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of the heart as woman moves it; that the book does not exist in which the relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than inLavengroandThe Romany Rye; that that picaresque ideal of romance which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appeal to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens ofPickwick, finds such expression inLavengroandThe Romany Ryeas nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough.
Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him to jumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengro will always, I think, be found worthy of companionship, if only as the one exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp, the tinker whocan write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a habit of Monte-Cristo—that is George Borrow. For them that love these differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other side of the road and fare in peace elsewhither.
To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac’s novels had been dug out of a suffering woman’s heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac’s method and results but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had ‘incomparable power’ he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his ‘Pigault-Lebrun des duchesses’ is only malicious: he resented the man’s exuberant and inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some dropsof that sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of theComédie humainethan Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac’s women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession declares that theParisiennesof theComédieare everything they ought to be—the true daughters of their ‘bon gros libertin de père.’ And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer—English of course—can find no better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline ofla Peau de Chagrinas the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other party must be wrong. Which is it? ‘Qui trompe-t-on ici?’ Is Taine a better judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It may be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as theComédie; it is a fact that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted theComédiein its totality; and that is reason goodenough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.
Balzac’s ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot’s Cleopatra, and only dies because ‘elle va faire le bon Dieu’—as who should say ‘to mash the Old Man’; Frenhœffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claës, Béatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon—the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the argument is proved in advance: there is theComédieitself—‘the new edition fifty volumes long.’ Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is theComédie. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it; and it exists—if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous—if the materials be in some sort worm-eatenand crumbling. Truly, he had ‘incomparable power.’ He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French society to show that he passed that way, and had ‘incomparable power.’ The phrase is Mr. Henry James’s, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and refrain from it.
To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Séraphine and Giboyer, of Olympe and the Marquis d’Auberive, there were analogies between the genius of Labiche and the genius of Teniers. ‘C’est au premier abord,’ says he, ‘le même aspect de caricature; c’est, en y regardant de plus près, la même finesse de tons, la même justesse d’expression, la même vivacité de mouvement.’ For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akin to Honoré Daumier. Earnestness and accomplishment apart, he has much in common with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovial ingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct of observation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of the playwright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche’s work, and Augier is right. He is before everything a dramatist: an artist, that is, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of its personages; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is never either the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is often careless and futile: he will squander—(as inVingt-neuf Degrés à l’Ombreandl’Avare en GantsJaunes)—an idea that rightly belongs to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and then, as inMoiandle Voyage de M. Perrichon, he is an excellent comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character with impeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as inles Petits Oiseauxandles Vivacités du Capitaine Tic, he is content to tell a charming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as inCélimare le Bien-Aimé(held by M. Sarcey to be the high-water mark of the modernvaudeville),le Plus Heureux des Trois, andle Prix Martin, he fights again from a humouristic point of view that triangular duel between the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a place in the literature of France; and then he shows the reverse of the medal of adultery—with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by the ghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord. Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and—as in theCagnotte, theChapeau de Paille, and theTrente Millions—to producing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictated from an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildest he never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue is always right and appropriate, however extravagant it be.His vivid and varied knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enough of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists; and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of him, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human nature and human feeling in such drolleries as theChapeau de Pailleandle Plus Heureux des Troisthan in all the serious dramas of Ponsard (say) and Hugo put together.
Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to play its maddest pranks at will.Moiis an admirable comedy, and De la Porcheraie is almost hideously egoistic; theVoyage de M. Perrichonis delightful reading,and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but theChapeau de Paille, theCagnotte, theTrente Millions, theSensitive, theDeux Merles Blancs, theDoit-On le Dire, and their compeers—with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy-turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your Chimæra has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of the great globe of Molière—that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius for its scientific men, and Lélie and Agnès for its incarnations of love and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired to the Academy’s spare arm-chair—that one above all others but just vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy—was a fact that roused theRevue des Deux Mondeseven to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than EugèneLabiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years—for almost as long, that is, as theRevuehad been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel. ‘I regarded him not,’ quoth Sir John of one that would have moved him to sapience, ‘and yet he talked wisely.’ Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of theRevue, would never have said all that—the second part of it he might—of anything signed ‘Eugène Labiche,’ nor—so I love to believe—would his august creator either. For is not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to be perpetual sherris? And when time and season fit, what more can the heart of man desire?
Champfleury—novelist, dramatist, archæologist, humourist, and literary historian—belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and Philothée O’Neddy; but he could remember the production ofles Burgraves, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the melancholy speech of poor Célestin Nanteuil—the famous ‘Il n’y a plus de jeunesse’ of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his time: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouvière, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo’s; he had lived so near the red waistcoat of Théophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in Paris (underthe inspiration of the artist ofla Femme qui taille la Soupe) in ‘un habit en bouracan vert avec col à la Marat, un gilet de couleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d’un jaune assez malséant,’ together with ‘une triomphante cravate de soie jaune’—a vice of Baudelaire’s inventing—and ‘un feutre ras dans le goût de la coiffure de Camille Desmoulins.’ And having seen for himself, he could judge for himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a humourist and an observer, and he became a ‘realist’ as soon as he began to write.
His work is an antipodes not only ofHernaniandNotre-Damebut ofSarrazineandla Cousine BetteandBéatrixas well. For the commonplace types and incidents, the everyday passions and fortunes, of theAventures de Marietteand theMascarade de la Vie Parisiennerepresent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and the extravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of things trivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, and they purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as itought to be. But the pupil’s point of view is poles apart from the master’s; his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order of ideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting; with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plain and sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with using experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with considering fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself. Between an artist of this sort—pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with malice, a little cynical—and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could be little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be the others’ historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his history should be other than partial and narrow—than at best an achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury’s was a personality apart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested in everything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the humourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies in romanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.