Rhoda Flemingis one of the least known of the novels, and in a sense it is one of the most disagreeable. To the general it has always been caviare, and caviare it is likely to remain; for the general is before all things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon the superstitions of respectability asRhoda Fleminghas been written. And besides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages too elementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignant and too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They care for no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is not restrained. It irks them to grapple with problems capable of none save a tragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temper with things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, of human nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in the outcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for them whose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials as character largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply felt and poignantly expressed there is such a feast inRhoda Flemingas no other English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is full of failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who is such a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; who suggests (with someother of Mr. Meredith’s creations) a close, deliberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens: a writer with whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, and who, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost be described as the other’s evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool, of whom his author is so bitterly contemptuous that he is never once permitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever and who, though he bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil ofTom Jonesis so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical mode of presentation as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously to imperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrous Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all these are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it is that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the two sisters—Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner! Where else in English fiction is such a ‘human oak log’ as their father, the Kentish yeoman William Fleming? And where in English fiction is such a problem presented as that in the evolution of which these three—with a following so well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and JonathanEccles and the evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and Master Gammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of human saurian—are dashed together, and ground against each other till the weakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may and does fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and Algernon Blancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and he makes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. With these he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unity of effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to great creative art; and at their highest stress of emotion, the culmination of their passion, they appeal to and affect you with a force and a directness that suggest the highest achievement of Webster. Of course this sounds excessive. The expression of human feeling in the coil of a tragic situation is not a characteristic of modern fiction. It is thought to be not consistent with the theory and practice of realism; and the average novelist is afraid of it, the average reader is only affected by it when he goes to look for it in poetry. But the book is there to show that such praise is deserved; and they who doubt it have only to read the chapters called respectively ‘When the Night is Darkest’ and ‘Dahlia’s Frenzy’ to be convinced and doubt no longer. It has been objected to the climax ofRhoda Flemingthat it is unnecessarilyinhumane, and that Dahlia dead were better art than Dahlia living and incapable of love and joy. But the book, as I have said, is a merciless impeachment of respectability; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life is infinitely more discomforting than that of a noble death, I take it that Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative, inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and the potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely heightened and strengthened thereby.
Opinions differ, and there are those, I believe, to whom Alvan and Clotilde von Rüdiger—‘acrobats of the affections’ they have been called—are pleasant companions, and the story of those feats in the gymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is the prettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to be plain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, and the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings—not of the stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy Feverel and Richmond Roy—but creatures of gossamer and rainbow, phantasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiriting points in sexual philosophy.
Just as Molière in the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Molière is brief, exquisite, lucid: classic in his union of ease and strength, of purity and sufficiency, of austerity and charm. InThe EgoistMr. Meredith is even more artificial and affected than his wont: he bristles with allusions, he teems with hints and side-hits and false alarms, he glitters with phrases, he riots in intellectual points and philosophical fancies; and though his style does nowhere else become him so well, his cleverness is yet so reckless and indomitable as to be almost as fatiguing here as everywhere. But in their matter the great Frenchman and he have not much to envy each other. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a ‘document on humanity’ of the highest value; and to him that would know of egoism and the egoist the study of Sir Willoughby is indispensable. There is something in him of us all. He is a compendium of the Personal in man; and if in him the abstract Egoist have not taken on his final shape and become classic and typical it isnot that Mr. Meredith has forgotten anything in his composition but rather that there are certain defects of form, certain structural faults and weaknesses, which prevent you from accepting as conclusive the aspect of the mass of him. But the Molière of the future (if the future be that fortunate) has but to pick and choose with discretion here to find the stuff of a companion figure to Arnolphe and Alceste and Célimène.
His verse has all the faults and only some of the merits of his prose. Thus he will rhyme you off a ballad, and to break the secret of that ballad you have to take to yourself a dark lantern and a case of jemmies. I like him best inThe Nuptials of Attila. If he always wrote as here, and were always as here sustained in inspiration, rapid of march, nervous of phrase, apt of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightful to the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altar of popularity. Here he is successfully himself, and what more is there to say? You clap for Harlequin, and you kneel to Apollo. Mr. Meredith doubles the parts, and is irresistible in both. Such fire, such vision, such energy onthe one hand and on the other such agility and athletic grace are not often found in combination.
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature’s essence. It is the artist’s function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal. Always artistic, Mr. Meredith’s work is often great art.
Two obvious reasons why Byron has long been a prophet more honoured abroad than at home are his life and his work. He is the most romantic figure in the literature of the century, and his romance is of that splendid and daring cast which the people of Britain—‘an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal’—prefers to regard with suspicion and disfavour. He is the type of them that prove in defiance of precept that the safest path is not always midway, and that the golden rule is sometimes unspeakably worthless: who set what seems a horrible example, create an apparently shameful precedent, and yet contrive to approve themselves an honour to their country and the race. To be a good Briton a man must trade profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the established order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere but on his sleeve. Byron did none of these things, though he was a public character, and ought for the example’s sake to have done them all, and done them ostentatiously. He lived hard, and drank hard, and played hard.He was flippant in speech and eccentric in attire. He thought little of the sanctity of the conjugal tie, and said so; and he married but to divide from his wife—who was an incarnation of the national virtue of respectability—under circumstances too mysterious not to be discreditable. He was hooted into exile, and so far from reforming he did even worse than he had done before. After bewildering Venice with his wickedness and consorting with atheists like Shelley and conspirators like young Gamba, he went away on a sort of wild-goose chase to Greece, and died there with every circumstance of publicity. Also his work was every whit as abominable in the eyes of his countrymen as his life. It is said that the theory and practice of British art are subject to the influence of the British school-girl, and that he is unworthy the name of artist whose achievement is of a kind to call a blush to the cheek of youth. Byron was contemptuous of youth, and did not hesitate to write—inBeppoand inCain, inManfredandDon Juanand theVision—exactly as he pleased. In three words, he made himself offensively conspicuous, and from being infinitely popular became utterly contemptible. Too long had people listened to the scream of this eagle in wonder and in perturbation, and the moment he disappeared they grew ashamed of their emotion and angry with its cause, and began to hearken to other and more melodious voices—to Shelley and Keats, toWordsworth and Coleridge and the ‘faultless and fervent melodies of Tennyson.’ In course of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foe of all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himself to flout the author ofDon Juanopenly and to lift up his heavy hand against the fops and fanatics who had affected the master’s humours, he did so amid general applause. Meanwhile, however, the genius and the personality of Byron had come to be vital influences all the world over, and his voice had been recognised as the most human and the least insular raised on English ground since Shakespeare’s. In Russia he had created Pushkin and Lermontoff; in Germany he had awakened Heine, inspired Schumann, and been saluted as an equal by the poet ofFausthimself; in Spain he had had a share in moulding the noisy and unequal talent of Espronceda; in Italy he had helped to develop and to shape the melancholy and daring genius of Leopardi; and in France he had been one of the presiding forces of a great æsthetic revolution. To the men of 1830 he was a special and peculiar hero. Hugo turned in his wake to Spain and Italy and the East for inspiration. Musset, as Mr. Swinburne has said—too bitterly and strongly said—became in a fashion a Kaled to his Lara, ‘his female page or attendant dwarf.’ He was in some sort thegrandsire of the Buridan and the Antony of Dumas. Berlioz went to him for the material for hisHarold en Italie, hisCorsaireoverture, and hisEpisode. Delacroix painted theBarque de Don Juanfrom him, with theMassacre de Scio, theMarino Faliero, theCombat du Giaour et du Pacha, and many a notable picture more. Is it at all surprising that M. Taine should have found heart to say that alone among modern poets Byron ‘atteint à la cime’? or that Mazzini should have reproached us with our unaccountable neglect of him and with our scandalous forgetfulness of the immense work done by him in giving a ‘Europeanrôle. . . to English literature’ and in awakening all over the Continent so much ‘appreciation and sympathy for England’?
He had his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he is the antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation—those artists pensive and curious and sedately self-contained—whom Arnold best loved and of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. Byron and Wordsworth are like the Lucifer and the Michael of theVision of Judgment. Byron’s was the genius of revolt, asWordsworth’s was the genius of dignified and useful submission; Byron preached the dogma of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis; Byron’s theory of life was one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth’s one of self-restraint and self-improvement; Byron’s practice was dictated by a vigorous and voluptuous egoism, Wordsworth’s by a benign and lofty selfishness; Byron was the ‘passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope,’ Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman. Both were influences for good, and both are likely to be influences for good for some time to come. Which is the better and stronger is a question that can hardly be determined now. It is certain that Byron’s star has waned, and that Wordsworth’s has waxed; but it is also certain that there are moments in life when theOde to Veniceis almost as refreshing and as precious as the ode on theIntimations, and when the epic mockery ofDon Juanis to the full as beneficial as the chaste philosophy ofThe Excursionand theOde to Duty. Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was only interested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit of undue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer’s opinion that Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician: partly, it would appear, for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly to have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be a mistake. Then,he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the warmth of that consummate artist’s expressions and explaining some of them away. Again, he was pitiful or disdainful, or both, of Scott’s estimate; and he did not care to discuss the sentiment which made that great and good man thinkCainand theGiaourfit stuff for family reading on a Sunday after prayers, though as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, in one of the wisest and subtlest bits of criticism I know, the sentiment is both natural and beautiful, and should assist us not a little in the task of judging Byron and of knowing him for what he was. That Arnold should institute a comparison between Leopardi and Byron was probably inevitable: Leopardi had culture and the philosophic mind, which Byron had not; he is incapable of influencing the general heart, as Byron can; he is a critics’ poet, which Byron can never be; he was always an artist, which Byron was not; and—it were Arnoldian to take the comparison seriously. Byron was not interested in words and phrases but in the greater truths of destiny and emotion. His empire is over the imagination and the passions. His personality was many-sided enough to make his egoism representative. And as mankind is wont to feel first and to think afterwards, a single one of his heart-cries may prove to the world of greater value as a moral agency than all the intellectual reflections that Leopardi contrivedto utter. After examining this and that opinion and doubting over and deprecating them all, Arnold touched firm ground at last in a dictum of Mr. Swinburne’s, the most pertinent and profound since those of Goethe, to the effect that in Byron there is a ‘splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.’ With this ‘noble praise’ our critic agreed so vigorously that it became the key-note of the latter part of his summing up, and in the end you found him declaring Byron the equal of Wordsworth, and asserting of this ‘glorious pair’ that ‘when the year 1900 is turned, and the nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first names with her will be these.’ The prophecy is as little like to commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardent Shelleyite: there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl ofRizpahandVastnessandLucretiusandThe Voyage, to whom it must seem impertinent beyond the prophet’s wont; there are—(buttheyscarce count)—who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was not uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility to infuriate whatever poet-sects there be. Especially the Wordsworthians.
To many Hugo was of the race of Æschylus and Shakespeare, a world-poet in the sense that Dante was, an artist supreme alike in genius and in accomplishment. To others he was but a great master of words and cadences, with a gift of lyric utterance and inspiration rarely surpassed but with a personality so vigorous and excessive as to reduce its literary expression—in epic, drama, fiction, satire and ode and song—to the level of work essentially subjective, in sentiment as in form, in intention as in effect. The debate is one in which the only possible arbiter is Time; and to Time the final judgment may be committed. What is certain is that there is one point on which both dissidents and devout—the heretics who deny with Matthew Arnold and the orthodox who worship with Mr. Swinburne and M. de Banville—are absolutely agreed. Plainly Hugo was the greatest man of letters of his day. It has been given to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, so rich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so that the record ofhis career embraces a period of more than sixty years. There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did not prove his right. From first to last; from the time of Chateaubriand to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure from the scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the past like Alexander’s empire.
In 1826, in a second set ofOdes et Ballades, he announced his vocation in unmistakeable terms. He was a lyric poet and the captain of a new emprise. His genius was too large and energetic to move at ease in the narrow garment prescribed as the poet’s wear by the dullards and the pedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms of Ronsard and the Pleiad; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words and verses tricked with new-spangled ore; to be curious in cadences, careless of stereotyped rules, prodigal of invention and experiment, defiant of much long recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination of the highest quality, the very genius of style,and a sense of the plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In verse there were the examples of André Chenier and Lamartine; in prose the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon. Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundations of a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised in the novels of Walter Scott; and in the life and work of Byron the race had such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change, such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority and convention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo like all great artists was essentially a child of his age: ‘Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.’ In 1827 he published hisCromwell, and came forth as a rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable production, tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage; and to compare it to such work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to the world—Hyperion, for instance, or theEve of St. Agnes—is to glory in the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historical document it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession of faith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it is mistaken, in places it iseven absurd. But from the moment of its appearance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way forAlbertusand forAntony, forRollaand theTour de Nesle; and it was also the ‘fiat lux’ in deference to which the world has accepted with more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and morals effected inSalammbôandl’Education sentimentaleand the Egyptian darkness achieved in work likela Terreandune Vieandles Blasphèmes. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses and æsthetic epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoever manifestations of romanticism mankind and the arts have since been called upon to consider and endure: from the humours of Petrus Borel to the experiments of Claude Monet and the ‘discoveries’ of Richard Wagner.
It is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated with men of pretensions and capacities not greatly inferior to his own, and that in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. In painting the initiative had been taken years before the publication of theCromwellmanifesto by Géricault with the famousRadeau de la Méduse, and by Delacroix with theDante et Virgile(1822) and theMassacre de Scio(1823). In music Berlioz,at this time a student in the Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged ones for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year ofHernani, was to set his mark upon the art with theSymphonie fantastique. On the stage as early as 1824 Frédérick and Firmin had realised in the personages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combination of humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forward as the earliest expression, and had realised it so completely that their work has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of the movement. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and the victory won on all essential points not in 1830 withHernanibut in 1829 withHenri Trois et sa Cour, the first of the innumerable successes of Alexandre Dumas, who determined at a single stroke the fundamental qualities of structure and form and material, and left his chief no question to solve save that of diction and style. Musset’s earlier poems date from 1828, the year ofles Orientales, Gautier’s from 1830; and these are also the dates of Balzac’sChouansandla Peau de Chagrin. Moreover, among the intimates of the young leader were men like Sainte-Beuve, who was two years his junior, and the brothers Deschamps: whose influence was doubtless exerted more frequently to encourage than to repress. Towards theend we lost sight of all this, and saw in Victor Hugo not so much the most glorious survival of romanticism as romanticism itself, the movement in flesh and blood, the revolution in general ‘summed up and closed’ in a single figure. This agreeable view of things was Hugo’s own. From the beginning he took himself with perfect seriousness, and his followers, however enthusiastic in admiration, had excellent warrant from above. ‘Iltrônetrop,’ says Berlioz of him somewhere; and M. Maxime du Camp has given an edifying account of the means he was wont to use to make himself beloved and honoured by the youth who came to him for counsel and encouragement. How perfectly he succeeded in this the political part of his function is matter of history. Gautier’s first visit to him was that of a devotee to his divinity; and years afterwards the good poet confessed that not even in pitch darkness and in a cellar fathoms under ground should he dare to whisper to himself that a verse of the Master’s was bad. So far as devotion went there were innumerable Gautiers. Sainte-Beuve was not long a pillar of orthodoxy; Dumas was always conscious of his own pre-eminence in certain qualities, and made light of Hugo’s dramas as candidly as he made much of the style in which they are written; and when some creature of unwisdom saluted Delacroix as ‘the Hugo of painting,’ the artist of theMarino Falieroand theBarque de Don Juanresented the compliment withbitterness. But these were exceptions. The youth of 1830 were Hugolaters almost to a man.
Their enthusiasm was not all irrational. Hugo’s supremacy was not that he was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurably his superior. It was not that he knew best the heart of man, or had apprehended most thoroughly the conditions of life; for Balzac so far surpassed him in these sciences that comparison was impossible. It was not that he sang the truest song or uttered the deepest word, for Musset is the poet ofRollaand theNuitsin verse and the poet ofFantasioandLorenzaccioandCarmosinein prose. But the epoch Hugo represented was interested in the manner rather than the substance of things: the revolution at whose front he had been set and whose most shining figure he became was largely a revolution of externals. With an immense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an incredible amount of ignorance—so thatCromwellwas supposed to be historical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a strangely imperfect understanding of material—so thatHernaniwas supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfect understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his innovations were horrible: his verse was poison, his example an outrage, his prosody a violation of all laws, his rhymes and tropes and metaphors so many offences against Heaven and the Muse. But to the ardent youngsters who fought beneath his banner it was his to give a something priceless and unique—a something glorious to France and never before exampled in her literature. For the distichs of Boileau—‘strong, heavy, useful, like pairs of tongs,’—he found them alexandrines with the leap and sparkle of sea waves and the sound of clashing swords and the colours of sunset and the dawn. They were tired of whitewash and cold distemper; and he gave them hangings of brocade and tapestries of price and tissues stiff with gold and glowing with new dyes. He flung them handfuls of jewels where his rivals scattered handfuls of marbles. And they paid him for his gifts with an intemperance of worship, a fury of belief, a rapture of admiration, such as no other man has known. The substance was striking, was peculiar, was novel and full of charm; but the manner was all this and something besides—was magnificent, was intoxicating, was irresistible; and Victor Hugo byvirtue of it became the foremost man of literary France. The great battle ofHernaniwas merely a battle of style. From Dumas the artist ofHenri TroisandAntony, the language of Boileau was safe enough; and his triumph, all-important and significant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It was another matter withHernani. Its success meant ruin for the Academy and destruction for the idiom of Delille and M. de Jouy; and the classicists mustered in force, and did their utmost to stay the coming wrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course; for they fought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue, they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And Victor Hugo was made captain of the victorious host, while the men who might have been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, and accepted his ensign for their own.
All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all his life long he was aposeurof the purest water. He seems to have considered the affectation of superiority an essential quality in art; for just as the cock in Mrs. Poyser’s apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him crow, so to the poet of theLégendeand theContemplationsit must have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made of his ‘oracular tongue.’ How tremendous his utterances sometimes were—informed with what majesty yet with what brilliance—is one of the things that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon the merits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. At his best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way. His speech was nothing if not artificial—in the good sense of the word sometimes and sometimes in the bad. Simplicity (it seemed) was impossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis, the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with not less consistency than complacency. In that tissue of ‘apocalyptic epigram’ which to him was style there was no room for truth and soberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he draped himself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Blas. That this grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publication ofChoses Vues. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressinghimself in the fearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace from Mr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not more startling.
Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some primary faults. Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, for energy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a master with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men. But the conception is too often found to be empty as well as spacious; the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmical capacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy tocompete with Shakespeare’s English and the German of Goethe and Heine; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a parade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brain appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of Victor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the ‘fine flower’ of his genius, the loveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a ‘Psalter of Subjectivity.’ Even his essays in prose romance—a form of art on which he has stamped his image and superscription in a manner all his own, the work by which he is best known to humanity at large—are vitiated by the same defect. For one that believes in Bishop Myriel as Bishop Myriel there are a hundred who see in him only a pose of Victor Hugo; it is the same with Ursel and Javert, withCimourdain and Lantenac and Josiane; the verypieuvreofles Travailleursis a Hugolater at heart. It is a proof of his commanding personality, that in spite of these objections he held in enchantment the hearts and minds of men for over sixty years. He is almost a literature in himself; and if it be true that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity of Shakespeare’s as it is in the exquisite good sense of Voltaire’s, it is also true that he left the world far richer than he found it.
To select an anthology from his work were surely the pleasantest of tasks. One richer in grace and passion and sweetness might he chosen out of Musset; one wrought more truly of the finer stuff of humanity as well as more bountifully touched with tact and dignity and temper from the work of Tennyson. But the Hugo selection would combine the rarest technical merits with a set of interests all its own. It would give, for instance, theStellaof theChâtimentsand thePauvres Gensof theLégende. On one page would be found that admirableSouvenir de la Nuit du Quatre, which is at once the impeachment and the condemnation of the Coup d’État; and on another the little epic ofEviradnus, withits immortal serenade, a culmination of youth and romance and love:
‘Si tu veux, faisons un rêve.Montons sur deux palefrois.Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève.L’oiseau chante dans les bois.. . . . .Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.Je serai grand et toi riche,Puisque nous nous aimerons.. . . . .Tu seras dame et moi comte.Viens, mon œeur s’épanouit.Viens, nous conterons ce conteAux étoiles de la nuit.’
‘Si tu veux, faisons un rêve.Montons sur deux palefrois.Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève.L’oiseau chante dans les bois.
. . . . .
Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.Je serai grand et toi riche,Puisque nous nous aimerons.
. . . . .
Tu seras dame et moi comte.Viens, mon œeur s’épanouit.Viens, nous conterons ce conteAux étoiles de la nuit.’
Here, a summary of all the interests of romanticism, would be the complaint of Gastibelza:
‘Un jour d’été, où tout était lumière,Vie et douceur,Elle s’en vint jouer dans la rivièreAvec sa sœur.Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagneEt son genou . . .—Le vent qui vient à travers la montagneMe rendra fou!’—
‘Un jour d’été, où tout était lumière,Vie et douceur,Elle s’en vint jouer dans la rivièreAvec sa sœur.Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagneEt son genou . . .—Le vent qui vient à travers la montagneMe rendra fou!’—
here the adorableVieille Chanson du Jeune Temps:
‘Rose, droite sur ses hanches,Leva son beau bras tremblantPour prendre une mûre aux branches:Je ne vis pas son bras blanc.Une eau courait, fraîche et creuse,Sur les mousses de velours;Et la nature amoureuseDormait dans les grands bois sourds.’—
‘Rose, droite sur ses hanches,Leva son beau bras tremblantPour prendre une mûre aux branches:Je ne vis pas son bras blanc.
Une eau courait, fraîche et creuse,Sur les mousses de velours;Et la nature amoureuseDormait dans les grands bois sourds.’—
and here, not unworthy to be remembered withProud Maisie, that wonderful harmony of legendand superstition and the facts and dreams of common life, the death-song of Fantine:
‘Nous acheterons de bien belles choses,En nous promenant le long de faubourgs.La Vierge-Marie auprès de mon poëleEst venue hier, en manteau brodé,Et m’a dit: Voici, caché sous mon voile,Le petit qu’un jour tu m’as demandé.Courez à la ville; ayez de la toile,Achetez du fil, achetez un dé.Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,Les bluets sont bleus, j’aime mes amours.’
‘Nous acheterons de bien belles choses,En nous promenant le long de faubourgs.
La Vierge-Marie auprès de mon poëleEst venue hier, en manteau brodé,Et m’a dit: Voici, caché sous mon voile,Le petit qu’un jour tu m’as demandé.Courez à la ville; ayez de la toile,Achetez du fil, achetez un dé.
Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,Les bluets sont bleus, j’aime mes amours.’
And from this masterpiece of simple and direct emotion, which to me has always seemed the high-water mark of Hugo’s lyrical achievement as well as the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces of another inspiration: to the luxurious and charming graces ofSara la Baigneuse; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo ofles Djinns; to ‘Si vous n’avez rien à me dire,’ that daintiest of songlets; to the ringing rhymes and gallant spirit of thePas d’Armes du Roi Jean:
‘Sus, ma bête,De façonQue je fêteCe grison!Je te baillePour ripaillePlus de paille,Plus de son,Qu’un gros frère,Gai, friand,Ne peut faire,MendiantPar les placesOù tu passes,De grimacesEn priant!’—
‘Sus, ma bête,De façonQue je fêteCe grison!Je te baillePour ripaillePlus de paille,Plus de son,
Qu’un gros frère,Gai, friand,Ne peut faire,MendiantPar les placesOù tu passes,De grimacesEn priant!’—
to the melodious tenderness of ‘Si tu voulais, Madelaine’; to the gay music of theStances à Jeanne:
‘Je ne me mets pas en peineDu clocher ni du beffroi.Je ne sais rien de la reine,Et je ne sais rien du roi.’—
‘Je ne me mets pas en peineDu clocher ni du beffroi.Je ne sais rien de la reine,Et je ne sais rien du roi.’—
to the admirable song of the wind of the sea:
‘Quels sont les bruits sourds?Ecoutez vers l’ondeCette voix profondeQui pleure toujours,Et qui toujours gronde,Quoiqu’un son plus claireParfois l’interrompe . . .Le vent de la merSouffle dans sa trompe.’—
‘Quels sont les bruits sourds?Ecoutez vers l’ondeCette voix profondeQui pleure toujours,Et qui toujours gronde,
Quoiqu’un son plus claireParfois l’interrompe . . .Le vent de la merSouffle dans sa trompe.’—
to theRomance Mauresque, to the barbaric fury ofles Reîtres, to the magnificent rodomontade of theRomancero du Cid. ‘J’en passe, et des meilleurs,’ as Ruy Gomez observes of his ancestors. Here at any rate are jewels enough to furnish forth a casket that should be one of the richest of its kind! The worst is, they are most of them not necessaries but luxuries. It is impossible to conceive of life without Shakespeare and Burns, withoutParadise Lostand theIntimationsode and the immortal pageant of theCanterbury Tales; but (the technical question apart) to imagine it wanting Hugo’s lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of which he was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like the magician’s money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution, into withered leaves; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is not for general circulation.
Heine had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjects not more neatly than indelibly. And really he alone were capable of dealing adequate vengeance upon his translators. His verse has only violent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible. Once read as it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual acquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with; we are on thorns as the translator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individual hurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among our borders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails? Why cannot he carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and lays a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire the effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard for such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walked into your garden and amused himself so with yourcabbages, you could put him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled! To turnFaustinto English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of theCommediathan one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed.Don Quixote,le Père Goriot,The Frogs,The Decameron—the trail of the translator is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded withla Vita Nuova, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered upon Banville and Gérard de Nerval, the word ‘translator’ would be odious as the word ‘occupy.’ And ‘occupy’ on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy Tearsheet is an odious word indeed.
The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his subject and himself; he istoo often a common graveyard mason that would play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist’s work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine’s accomplishment is remote from him as Heine’s genius. He perverts his author as rhyme and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author’s form, his author’s personality, his author’s charm of diction and of style; and here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine’s rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the swiftness and the certainty of exquisitephysical sensations. In such a transcript as Sir Theodore’s all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the translator has been by.
In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of the verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are obviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are cold even to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of the rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here alone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material for material’s sake which is held to be essential to the composition of a great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from the endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with something of their author’s own emotion of creation—for any, indeed, of the characteristic attributes of modern poetry—you shallturn to him in vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare’s fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking’s sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shakespearean—for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean faculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin to that of a gallery of Greek marbles.
Other poets say anything—say everything that is in them. Browning lived to realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris is nothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that would seem impossible if it were not a livingfact; even the Laureate is sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and superfluous, of words for words’ sake, of cadences that have no reason of being save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth saying. In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever is impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain. Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principle on which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in these instances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not to the principle nor the poet’s application of it but to the poet himself, who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him to accomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose qualities—and by no means the least Hellenic of them—was a fine consciousness of his limitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idle to deny. There isMeropeto bear witness to the fact; and ofMeropewhat is there to say? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play: an essay, that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, so that the attempt to revive it—to create a soul under the ribs of very musty death—is a blunder alike in sentiment and in art. As evidently Arnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even the Forsaken Merman, all these are expressions of purely personal feeling—are so manymetamorphoses of Arnold. InMeropethere is no such basis of reality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knew little or nothing of his characters—of Merope or Æpytus or Polyphontes, of Arcas or Laias or even the Messenger; at every step the ground is seen shifting under his feet; he is comparatively void of matter, and his application of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing the wind; he is washing not gold but water.
It is other-guess work withEmpedocles, theDejaneirafragment,Sohrab and Rustum, thePhilomela, his better work in general, above all with the unique and unapproachedBalder Dead. To me this last stands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which thesimilitudes of the ‘Ionian father of his race’ are pre-eminently distinguished:—
‘And as a spray of honeysuckle flowersBrushes across a tired traveller’s faceWho shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dustOn a May evening, in the darken’d lanes,And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by—So Hoder brushed by Hermod’s side.’
‘And as a spray of honeysuckle flowersBrushes across a tired traveller’s faceWho shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dustOn a May evening, in the darken’d lanes,And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by—So Hoder brushed by Hermod’s side.’
Here is Homer’s direct and moving because most human and comprehensive touch in narrative:—
‘But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rodeTo Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,High over Asgard, to light home the king.But fiercely Odin gallop’d, moved in heart;And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rangAlong the flinty floor of Asgard streets,And the Gods trembled on their golden bedsHearing the wrathful Father coming home—For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came.And to Valhalla’s gate he rode, and leftSleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall;And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.’
‘But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rodeTo Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,High over Asgard, to light home the king.But fiercely Odin gallop’d, moved in heart;And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rangAlong the flinty floor of Asgard streets,And the Gods trembled on their golden bedsHearing the wrathful Father coming home—For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came.And to Valhalla’s gate he rode, and leftSleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall;And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.’
And here—to have done with evidence of what is known to every one—here is the Homeric mariner, large and majestic and impersonal, of recording speech:—
‘Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way?—Speak, were not this a way, a way for Gods?If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms,Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior ThorDrawn in his car beside me, and my sons,All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train,Should make irruption into Hela’s realm,And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light,And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven?’
‘Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way?—Speak, were not this a way, a way for Gods?If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms,Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior ThorDrawn in his car beside me, and my sons,All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train,Should make irruption into Hela’s realm,And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light,And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven?’
One has but to contrast such living work as this with the ‘mouldering realm’ ofMeropeto feel the difference with a sense of pain;
‘For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead,Whom Hela with austere control presides’;
‘For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead,Whom Hela with austere control presides’;
while this in its plain, heroic completeness is touched with a stately life that is a presage of immortality. It is evident, indeed, that Arnold wroteBalder Deadin his most fortunate hour, and thatMeropeis his one serious mistake in literature. For a genius thus peculiar and introspective drama—the presentation of character through action—is impossible; to a method thus reticent and severe drama—the expression of emotion in action—is improper. ‘Not here, O Apollo!’ It is written that none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama. Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer; and how should Matthew Arnold?
He has opinions and the courage of them; he has assurance and he has charm; he writes with an engaging clearness. It is very possible to disagree with him; but it is difficult indeed to resist his many graces of manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by the variety and quality of hismatter. He was described as ‘the most un-English of Britons,’ the most cosmopolitan of islanders; and you feel as you read him that in truth his mind was French. He took pattern by Goethe, and was impressed by Leopardi; he was judiciously classic, but his romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman; he apprehended Heine and Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice de Guérin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke and Arthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer; he was an authority on education, poetry, civilisation, theSong of Roland, the love-letters of Keats, the Genius of Bottles, the significance ofeutrapelosandeutrapelia. In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is a noisy and affected age; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion and extravagant repudiation; there is an element of swagger in all its words and ways; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. Matthew Arnold’s function was to protest against its fashions by his own intellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call it to order. He was not particularly original, but he had in an eminent degree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing, which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so common among us English as our kindest critics would have us believe. He would take a handful of golden sentences—things wisely thought and finely saidby persons having authority—and spin them into an exquisite prelection; so that his work with all the finish of art retains a something of the freshness of those elemental truths on which it was his humour to dilate. He was, that is to say, an artist in ethics as in speech, in culture as in ambition. ‘Il est donné,’ says Sainte-Beuve, ‘de nos jours, à un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux, de recueillir, d’ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite, avec noblesse.’ That is true enough; but Arnold was one of the few, and might ‘se vanter d’être resté fidèle à soi-même, à son premier et à son plus beau passé.’ He was always a man of culture in the good sense of the word; he had many interests in life and art, and his interests were sound and liberal; he was a good critic of both morals and measures, both of society and of literature, because he was commonly at the pains of understanding his matter before he began to speak about it. It is therefore not surprising that the part he played was one of considerable importance or that his influence was healthy in the main. He was neither prophet nor pedagogue but a critic pure and simple. Too well read to be violent, too nice in his discernment to be led astray beyond recovery in any quest after strange gods, he told the age its faults and suggested such remedies as the study of great men’s workhad suggested to him. If his effect was little that was not his fault. He returned to the charge with imperturbable good temper, and repeated his remarks—which are often exasperating in effect—with a mixture of mischievousness and charm, of superciliousness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity of phrase, unique in modern letters.
I think that of all recent books the two that have pleased me best and longest are those delightful renderings into English prose of the Greek of Homer and Theocritus, which we owe, the one to Messrs. Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang and the other to Mr. Lang’s unaided genius. To read thisOdysseyof theirs is to have a breath of the clear, serene airs that blew through the antique Hellas; to catch a glimpse of the large, new morning light that bathes the seas and highlands of the young heroic world. In a space of shining and fragrant clarity you have a vision of marble columns and stately cities, of men august in single-heartedness and strength and women comely and simple and superb as goddesses; and with a music of leaves and winds and waters, of plunging ships and clanging armours, of girls at song and kindly gods discoursing, the sunny-eyed heroic age is revealed in all its nobleness, in all its majesty, its candour, and its charm. The air is yet plangent with echoes of the leaguer of Troy, and Odysseus the ready-at-need goes forth upon his wanderings: into the cave of Polypheme, into the land of giants,into the very regions of the dead: to hear among the olive trees the voice of Circe, the sweet witch, singing her magic song as she fares to and fro before her golden loom; to rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, the kind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids; to reach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace and honour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as he sailed out to the sunset and the mysterious west,
Sol con un legno, e con quella compagnaPicciola, dalla qual non fue deserto,
Sol con un legno, e con quella compagnaPicciola, dalla qual non fue deserto,
the great wind rushed upon him from the new-discovered land, and so ended his journeyings for ever; and all with him is energy and tact and valour and resource, as becomes the captain of an indomitable human soul. His society is like old d’Artagnan’s: it invigorates, renews, inspires. I had rather lack the friendship of the good Alonso Quijada himself than the brave example of these two.
With certain differences it is the same with our Theocritus. From him, too, the mind is borne back to a ‘happier age of gold,’ when the world was younger than now, and men were not so weary nor so jaded nor so highly civilised as they choose to thinkthemselves. Shepherds still piped, and maidens still listened to their piping. The old gods had not been discrowned and banished; and to fishers drawing their nets the coasts yet kept a something of the trace of amorous Polypheme, the rocks were peopled with memories of his plaint to Galatea. Inland, among the dim and thymy woods, bee-haunted and populous with dreams of dryad and oread, there were rumours of Pan; and dwellers under thatch—the goatherd mending his sandals, the hind carving his new staff, the girls who busked them for the vintaging—were conscious, as the wind went by among the beeches and the pines, and brought with it the sounds of a lonely and mysterious night, that hard by them in the starry darkness the divine Huntress was abroad, and about the base of Ætna she and her forest maids drove the chase with horn and hound. In the cities ladies sang the psalm of Adonis brought back from ‘the stream eternal of Acheron.’ Under the mystic moon love-lorn damsels did their magic rites, and knit up spells of power to bring home the men they loved. Among the vines and under the grey olives songs were singing of Daphnis all day long. There were junketings and dancings and harvest-homes for ever toward; the youths went by to the gymnasium, and the girls stood near to watch them as they went; the cicalas sang, the air was fragrant with apples and musical with the sound of flutes and running water; whilethe blue Sicilian sky laughed over all, and the soft Sicilian sea encircled the land and its lovers with a ring of sapphire and silver. To translate Theocritus, wrote Sainte-Beuve, is as if one sought to carry away in one’s hand a patch of snow that has lain forgotten through the summer in a cranny of the rocks of Ætna:—‘On a fait trois pas à peine, que cette neige déjà est fondue. On est heureux s’il en reste assez du moins pour donner le vif sentiment de la fraîcheur.’ But Mr. Lang has so rendered into English the graces of the loveliest of Dorian singers that he has earned the thanks of every lover of true literature. Every one should read his book, for it will bring him face to face with a very prince among poets and with a very summer among centuries. That Theocritus was a rare and beautiful master there is even in this English transcript an abundance of evidence. Melancholy apart, he was the Watteau of the old Greek world—an exquisite artist, a rare poet, a true and kindly soul; and it is very good to be with him. We have changed it all of course, and are as fortunate as we can expect. But it is good to be with Theocritus, for he lets you live awhile in the happy age and under the happy heaven that were his. He gives you leave and opportunity to listen to the tuneful strife of Lacon and Comatas; to witness the duel in song between Corydon and Battus; to talk of Galatea pelting with apples the barking dog of her love-lorn Polypheme;under the whispering elms, to lie drinking with Eucritus and Lycidas by the altar of Demeter, ‘while she stands smiling by, with sheaves and poppies in her hand.’
It is relief unspeakable to turn from the dust and din and chatter of modern life, with its growing trade in heroes and its poverty of men, its innumerable regrets and ambitions and desires, to this immense tranquillity, this candid and shining calm. They had no Irish Question then, you can reflect, nor was theology invented. Men were not afraid of life nor ashamed of death; and you could be heroic without a dread of clever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for no hope of illuminated scrolls. Odysseus disguised as Irus is still Odysseus and august. How comes it that Mr. Gladstone in rags and singing ballads would be only fit for a police-station? that Lord Salisbury hawking cocoa-nuts would instantly suggest the purlieus of Petticoat Lane? Is the fault in ourselves? Can it be that we have deteriorated so much as that? Nerves, nerves, nerves! . . . These many centuries the world has had neuralgia; and what has come of it is that Robert Elsmere is an ideal, and the bleat of the sentimentalist might almost be mistaken for the voice of living England.