CHARLES LAMB
Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literature and a very enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, and widely spoken of, of any stylist we possess, and the least understood. It was his humour, while living, to create misunderstanding, and he creates it still. And yet he is recognized on all sides as a Classic of the unapproachable breed. Charles Lamb has among his admirers more uninteresting people than any great artist has ever had except Thackeray. He has more academic people in his train than anyone has ever had except Shakespeare. And more severe, elderly, pedantic persons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer.
These people all read Lamb, talk Lamb, quote Lamb, but they do notsuggestLamb; they do not "smack," as our ancestors used to say, of the true Elia vein.
But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Not only has this evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the "good people;" he has fooled the "wicked ones." I have myself in the circle of my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people, of the type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a mania for Oscar Wilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one of them "can read" Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them; in making them suppose he is something quite different from what he is. He used to tell his friends that every day he felt himself growing more "official" and "moral." He even swore he had been taken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our friends of the "enclosed gardens" still take him for a Verger. But he is a more remarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there were some extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage," spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than—I devoutly pray—my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones adored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them—more than he ought.
It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of Charles Lamb. Jocular Bishops, archly toying Rural Deans, Rectors with a "penchant" for anecdote, scholarly Canons with a weakness for Rum Punch, are all inclined to speak as if in some odd way he was of their own very tribe. He had absolutely nothing in common with them, except a talent for giving false impressions! With regard to the devotion to him which certain gentle and old-fashioned ladies have—one's great-aunts, for instance—I am inclined to think that much more might be said. There is a quality, a super-refined, exquisite quality, and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it, which the more thick-skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss.
It is all very well for us to talk of "burning with a hard gem-like flame," when, as a matter of fact, we move along, dull as cave-men, to some of the finest aesthetic effects in the world. Not to appreciate the humour of that rarest and sweetest of all human types, the mischievous-tongued Great-Aunt, is to be nothing short of a profane fool.
But Charles Lamb is a very different person from our Goldsmiths and Cowpers and Austens, and their modern representatives. It needs something else in a Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony to appreciatehim.It needs an imagination that is very nearly "Shakespearean" and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which a Flaubert or an Anatole France might be proud.
So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly. The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern—the sublime Olympian—what a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Something between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancy he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all senses of that word, a gentleman he was.
Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escape from his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office work, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot be too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself, perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary to utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him.
It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for "little things." Well might he turn to "little things," when great things—his Sun and his Moon—had been turned for him to Blood! But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and more Philosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldly Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched upon Lamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him more than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated. His "unselfishness," his "sweetness," of which these good men make so much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life. Lamb was, in his life, a great epicurean philosopher, as, in all probability, many other "saints" have been. The things in him that fretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his outbursts of capricious impishness, his perversity and his irony, were just as much part of the whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his sister.
What one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a very wise and very subtle "way of life," a way that, amid many outrageous experiences, will be found singularly lucky.
In the first place, let it be noted, Lamb deliberately cultivates the art of "transforming the commonplace." It is as absurd to deny the existence of this element—from which we all suffer—as it is to maintain that it cannot be changed. Itcanbe changed. That is precisely what this kind of rare genius does. It is a miracle, of course, but everything in art is a miracle.
Nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions, and if you are born for such "universalism," you may swallow them wholesale. The danger of such a downright manner of going to work is that it blunts one's critical sense. If you swallow everything just as it is, youtastevery little. But Charles Lamb is nothing if not "critical," nothing if not an Epicure, and his manner of dealing with the "commonplace" sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one's taste.
And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's "blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual achievement—at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph—that makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man. The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too self-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either tradition.
Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moral philosopher. Elia is an artist, who understands theimportance of ritualin life—but of naturalness in ritual.
How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in one's loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistines never really let the world know how Bohemian at heart they are! And how much of our modern "artistic feeling" is a pure affectation! Now, whatever Elia was not, he was wantonly, wickedly, whimsically natural.
He never concealed his religious feelings, his superstitious feelings. He never concealed his fancies, his fads, his manias, his vices. He never concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith. He never concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt.
He accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared, and did not hesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. If he had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he had recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also without shame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original, and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot," says he, "sit and think. Books think for me." Well, books did "think for him," for he managed to press the books of the great poets into his service, as no mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the great poets he used. We say deliberately "poets," for, as Pater points out, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to leave the company of those who write prose.
Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to understand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches," or that other Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that are written for a very different circle. Certain sentences in "Dream-children," too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath completely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and wistful as "anonymous ballads," alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour, such as generous souls love. Elia's style is the only thing in English prose that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich, capricious, wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb's manner, Pater's is precise, demure and over-grave, Wilde's fantastic and over-provocative, Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical.
Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's "little touches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be led, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can quote them both—or any other great old master—and if it were not for the "inverted commas" we should not be aware of the insertion.
Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it a turn, a twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the very grease-spots on a scullion's apron!
There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russia have no Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D'Annunzios belong to a different tribe. Even Turgenieff, just because he has to "get on with his story" cannot do precisely this.
Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can be read over and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they were living people's features. And they are living. They are as living as those Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as the drawings of Lionardo. They also—in their place—are "pure line" to use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginative suggestion."
The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia. One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It would seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacocks whose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails brings down the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as cold as ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansies that "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of the street-singers leave them cold.
It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, who must always be clutching "cameos from Syracuse" between their fingers, which leads them, when the tension of the "gem-like flame" can be borne no more, into sheer garishness and brutality. One knows it so well, that particular tone; the tone of the jaded amorist, for whom "the unspeakable rural solitudes" and "the sweet security of streets" mean, both of them, boredom and desolation.
It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, notinterestingenough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it isthatwhich is lacking.
Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but one thing he did not avoid—the innocence of unmitigated foolishness! He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life that Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the world with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its by-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its Circuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey" among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish, wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just those side-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figures traced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law and the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.
DICKENS
It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief" for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give one's personal appreciation that kind of form.
Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance, or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously handicapped.
Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy," Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators aredruggedwith the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their author?
Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment, horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed "unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens—in his style, his method, his vision, his art—actually appeals to one particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination. Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But Dickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde—that Uranian Baby—or as Paul Verlaine—that little "pet lamb" of God—felt themselves to be childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing more than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children's cult at the present day plays strange tricks.
But Dickens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authentic reaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by "New Educational Methods," glutted with toys, depraved by "understanding sympathy," and worn out by performances of "Peter Pan," believe—really and truly—in fairies any more? But, in spite of sentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "It doesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" and cultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlings cold to Titania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies, with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabit and the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decorated beyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. They will dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They will talk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And all will go well with "the Child in the House," even if he has not so much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!
If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they would know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and "aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knows whither it comes or where it goes!
To endow the little every-day objects that surround us—a certain picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow, a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it—with the fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and that is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined to people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag, Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!
And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men have come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and murmur in its shadows!
How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some tall house—the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer—surely there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond interpretation!
It is not only children—and yet it is children most of all—who get the sense, in a weird, sudden flash, of the demonic life of inanimate things. Why are our houses so full of things that one had better not look at, things that, like the face of Salome, had better be seen in mirrors, and things that must be forbidden to look at us? The houses of mortal men are strange places. They are sepulchres and cemeteries. Dungeons are they, and prison cells. Not one of them but have murderous feet going up and down. Not one of them but have lavisher's hands, fumbling, back and forth, along the walls. For the secret wishes, and starved desires, and mad cravings, and furious revolts, of the hearts of men and women, living together decently in their "homes," grow by degrees palpable and real and gather to themselves strange shapes.
No writer who has ever lived can touch Dickens in indicating this sort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror. For it is children, more than any, who are conscious how "haunted" all manner of places and things are. And people themselves! The searching psychologists are led singularly astray. They peer and pry and repine, and all the while the real essence of the figure lies in its momentary expression—in its most superficial gesture.
Dickens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds nothing but monstrous exaggeration here—and fantastic mummery. If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there was—"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are right. Dickens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits the mark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There is something more whimsical, more capricious, moreunreal,than philosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People are actually—as every child knows—much worse and much better than they "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune their souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. Peoplethinkwith their bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.
The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." He seems to go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs, jags, wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snouts into terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what we actually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, are we to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautiful people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic people. Dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us, wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin, or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from the rattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone.
Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as wear the form of women—and yet may never know "love"! It is wonderful—when you think of it—how much of absorbing interest is left in life, when you have eliminated "sex," suppressed "psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! How unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!
Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure—the adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion, full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to respond—poor devil—to a certain kind of signal!
Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, gives one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is to be taken for what it is—an extraordinary Pantomime. The people who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists—but, God help them! they are not in the game.
The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particular city leads us further. Dickens has managed to get the inner identity of London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else; as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly. One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it is something else also. More than any place on earth it seems to have that weight, that mass, that depth, that foursquare solidity, which reassures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. It descends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives one the impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity, upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris, man will be able to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata. And Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of this Titanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, its alleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, its circuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as the human atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinning crowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole," we cannot but feel that somehow wemustgather strength and friendliness enough to applaud such a tremendous Performance.
Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the town alone. There aresuggestionsof his, relating to country roads and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except, perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism" into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand. A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there; with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide marsh-land—like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"—with I know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that to some people—to children, for instance—remain in the mind when all else of their country journey is forgotten.
There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into wistful, tender, little-girl sobs—and catches the rhythm of poetry—as in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in Dickens will say something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in street and tavern, that art itself "gives up," and applauds, speechless.
After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author, undistracted by psychology—unseduced by eroticism. There remain a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed! Birth, for instance—the mystery of birth—and the mystery of death. One never forgets death in reading Dickens. He has a thought, a pity, for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still, while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of our mortality's last jest.
And to the last he is—like all children—the lover of Players. Every poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of them by no means suitable to children—but we need not be alarmed. There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while Dickens is their "Manager," Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or long without their applause!
He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England—and what would London be?—if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a sprinkling of that ingredient!
He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.
He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a melodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama. And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little Showman do the same?
GOETHE
As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted—after these years—and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciate ogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart he bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved, yes!—by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research; but the other, raised aloft, noble and welcoming, carries the laurel crown of the triumph of Imagination!
So, between Truth and Poetry—"im ganzen guten, schonen,"—stands our Lord of Life!
Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!—hardly fathomed yet, in its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.
Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke—taking first one impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then another—what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One hears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often in these days. But "cosmic," with its Whitmanesque, modern connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When he did—in his earlier youth—before the hardening process of his Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses—it was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at Strassburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!
I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away," or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude, cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing vague about Goethe'sintimacy,if I may put it so, with the Earth. He and It seemed destined to understand one another mostserenely,in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!
The Goethean attitude to the Universe is too self-poised and self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment. It is too—what shall I say?—too sly anddemonic—too muchinsidethe little secrets of the great Mother—to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwind of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too far, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic, evaporates, like a thin stream of Parnassian smoke.
How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is theGermanin him. For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman, Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who keep bowing to the ground and muttering "Olympian"!
Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too far when I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, something humorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough, with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakes him, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, in little pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity—a simplicity grave-eyed, portentious and solemn—almost like that of some great Infant-Faun, trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our human "Categorical Imperative"! World-child, as he was, the magic of the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange, dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we find him so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being he worshipped; and so transparently certain of his personal survival after Death!
There is no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history of our Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed of some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. There is much reassurance in this. More than has been, perhaps, realized. For it is probable that "in his caves of ice," Leonardo also felt himself indestructible by the Arch-Enemy. One thinks of those Cabalistic words of old Glanville, "Man does not yield himself to Death—save by the weakness of his mortal Will."
Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata; Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis of Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table; Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of Living!
How vividly returns to me—your pardon, reader!—the first time I read "The Sorrows of Werter" in that little "Three-penny" edition published by Messrs. Cassell! It was in a Barge, towed by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists rose—under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern. Where is that girl now, I wonder? Is she alive? Will she ever blush with anger at being thus gently lifted up, from beneath the kind Somersetshire mists, into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We are all passing one another, in mist-darkened barges, swift or slow. She is a wraith, a shadow, a receding phantom; but I wave my hand to her over the years! I shall always associate her with Lotte; and I never smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "the Sorrows of Werter."
"Werter" has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth's first passion. It is good to plunge one's hands, when one has grown cynical and old, into that innocent, if somewhat turbid, fountain. When we pass to "Wilhelm Meister," we are in quite a different world. The earlier part of this book has the very stamp of the Goethean "truth and poetry." One can read it side by side with the great "Autobiography" and find the shrewd insight and oracular wisdom quite equally convincing in the invention and the reality. What an unmistakable and unique character all these imaginary persons of Goethe's stories have! They are so different from any other persons in fiction! Wherein does the difference lie? It is hard to say. In a sense, they are more life-like and real. In another sense, they are more fantastic. Sometimes they seem mere dolls—like the figures in his own puppet-show—and we can literally "see the puppets dallying."
Jarno is a queer companion for a man to have. And what of the lady who, when she was asked whether she had ever loved, answered, "never or always"? Phillina is a very loving and an extremely vivacious wench. Goethe's sublime unconsciousness of ordinary moral qualms is never better observed than in the story of this extravagant young minx. Then, in the midst of it all, the arresting, ambiguous little figure of poor Mignon! What does she do—a child of pure lyrical poetry—a thing out of the old ballads—in this queer, grave, indecent company? That elaborate description of Mignon's funeral so carefully arranged by the Aesthetic "Uncle," has it not all the curious qualities of the Goethean vein—its clairvoyant insight into the under-truth of Nature—its cold-blooded pre-occupation with "Art"—its gentle irony—its mania for exact detail? The "gentle irony" of which I speak has its opportunity in the account of the "Beautiful Soul" or "Fair Saint." It reads, in places, like the tender dissection of a lovely corpse by a genial, elderly Doctor.
But the passage which, for me, is most precious is that Apprentice's "Indenture." I suppose in no other single paragraph of human prose is there so much concentrated wisdom. "To act is easy—to think is hard!" How extraordinarily true that is! But it is not the precise tune of the strenuous preachers of our time! The whole idea of the "Pedagogic Province," ruled over by that admirable Abbé, is so exquisitely in Goethe's most wise and yet most simple manner! The passage about the "Three Reverences" and the "Creed" is as good an instance of that sublime Spinozistic way of dealing with the current religion as that amazing remark he made once to Eckerman about his own faith: "When I want scientific unity, I am a Pantheist. When I desire poetical multifariousness, I am a Polytheist. And when my moral nature requires a Personal God—there is room for That also?"
When one comes to speak of Faust, it is necessary for us to remember the words the great man himself used to his follower in speaking of this masterpiece. Eckermann teased him for interpretations. "What," said he to Goethe, "is the leading Idea in the Poem?" "Do you suppose," answered the Sage, "that a thing into which I have put the Life-Blood of all my days is able to be summoned up in anything so narrow and limited as an Idea?"
Personally, I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the most permanentlyinterestingof all the works that have proceeded from the human brain.
Its attitude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen and sustain and put courage—if not the Devil—into us than anything I know. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the Philosophy of his life is the Philosophy of Faust, I bow down humbly before him. I did meet such a man once. I think he was a Commercial Traveller from Buffalo.
How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem—if it be a problem—of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evil in the world—"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"—plays an absolutely essential role. "By means of it God fulfils his most cherished purposes." Had Faust not seduced poor little Gretchen, he would never have passed as far as he did along the road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim—in her translunar Apotheosis—would not have beenthereto lift him Heavenwards at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles, when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knows perfectly well—queer Son of Chaos as he is—that he is bound to be defeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resist the great stream of Life which, according to his view, had better never have broken loose from primeval Nothingness.
That is ultimately Goethe's contribution to the disputes about what we call "God." The name does not matter. "Feeling is all in all. The name is sound and smoke." "God," or "the Good," is to Goethe simply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards, to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil. Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blundering method of assisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, or dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-stream Goethe is more Catholic and more subtle than Nietzsche.
Self-realization?Certainly! That is an aspect of it which was not likely to be forgotten by the great Egoist whose sole object, as he confessed, was to "build up the Pyramid of his Existence" from the broadest possible base. But not only self-realization. The "dying to live" of the Christian, as well as "the rising above one's body" of the Platonist, have their part there. Ascetism itself, with all its degrees of passionate or philosophical purity, is as much an evocation of the world-spirit—of the essential nature of the System of Things—as is the other.
It is, of course, ultimately, quite a mad hope to desire toconvert"the Spirit that Denies." He, too, under the Lord, is an accomplice of the Life-stream. He helps it forward, even while he opposes himself to it, just as a bulwark of submerged rocks make the tide leap landward with more foaming fury!
Goethe's idea of the "Eternal Feminine" leading us "upward and on" is not at all the sentimental nonsense which Nietzsche fancied it. In a profound sense it is absolutely true. Nor need the more anti-feminist among us be troubled by such a Truth. We have just seen that the Devil himself is a means, and a very essential means, for leading us "upward and on."
Goethe is perfectly right. The "love of women," though a destructive force, and a frightful force as far as certain kinds of "art" and "philosophy" are concerned, cannot be looked upon as anything but "a provocation to creation," when the whole large scheme of existence is taken into account.
I think myself that it is easy to make too much of Goethe's Pantheism. The Being he worshipped was simply "Whatever Mystery" lies behind the ocean of Life. And if no "mystery" lies behind the ocean of life,—very well! A Goethean disciple is able, then, to worship Life, with no mystery behind it! It is rather the custom among clever, tiresome people to disparage thatsecond part of Faust,with its world-panoramic procession of all the gods and demi-gods and angels and demons that have ever visited this earth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would he be, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf," who found nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens and Centaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I can myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "Blessed Boys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, in the end, making "indecent overtures" to the little Heavenly Butterflies, who pelt him with roses—even that does not confuse my mind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"—the under-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr. Faust is not more essential in the great mad game!
Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do not feel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strange poem with a nobler courage to endure life, and a larger view of its amazing possibilities!
I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "Elective Affinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinary company of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethe compels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifying of church-yards! "The Captain," "the Architect"—not to speak of the two bewildering women—do they not suggest fantastic figures out of one's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-child like Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our little pre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry of these people—we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" with some odd twist in our quiet heads.
The solemn immorality, amounting to outrageous indecency, of those scenes between the assorted lovers when they make "double" love, and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments follow their "elective affinities," is a thing that may well stagger the puritan reader. The puritan reader will, indeed, like old Carlyle, be tempted more than once to fling these grave, unblushing chronicles, with their deep, oracular wisdom and their shameless details, into the dust-heap. But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot conceal from one's self that things arelike that—and if the hyaena's howl, from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on his oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches our self-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "the Prologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life's cesspools go about their work!
Probably it will not be the "indecency" of certain things in Goethe that will most offend our modern taste; it will be that curious, grave pre-occupation of his, so objective and stiff, with artistic details, and architectural details, and theatrical details!
One must remember his noble saying, "Earnestness alone makes life Eternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its main purpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If the Transitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must take ourselves and our work very seriously indeed!
And such "seriousness," such high, patient, unwearied seriousness, is, after all, Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation. He knows well enough our deepest doubt, our most harrowing scepticism. He has long ago "been through all that." But he has "returned"—not exactly like Nietzsche, with a fierce, scornful, dramatic cry, to a contemptuous "superficiality"—he has returned to the actual possibilities that the world offers, "superficial" and otherwise, of turning the whole strange business into a solid, four-square "work of art." We must reject "evil," quietly and ironically; not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "we have our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true," not because it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along this particular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmal mothers" communicate itself to our labour.
And so we come back, like the grief-stricken children over Mignon's grave, to Life and Life's toil. There only, in the inflexible development of what taste, of what discernment, of what power, of what method, of what demonic genius, we may have been granted by the gods, lies "the cosmic secret." That is all we have in our human hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us—and only in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love to the Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion of Free-Will part of his universal Purpose!