Part 23

Moreover, _The Faerie Queene_ must celebrate Queen Elizabeth, just as "Orlando Furioso" must praise the House of Este. It was in feudal societies, under the protection of princes, that these romantic enterprises had to be conducted, if they were conducted at all. There was a pleasant confusion, like that of coloured strands in a solemn tapestry, between the laudation of the Sovereign and the celebration of the virtues. Sometimes the monarch was not so virtuous as the poet could have wished; sometimes his Court was as little like fairyland as was humanly possible. That only added to the skill of the poet; that only added rainbow colours to the fabric of the invention.

Then there was always the allegory, with which, in fact, anything on earth could be connected, in the course of which not only could no compliment be excessive, but no attribution could be so certain that it was not able, under pressure, to be denied. Positive persons, in our rash age, do much profane the allegory, which, nevertheless, is essential to all fairy poetry. Without it, what would become of _The Romaunt of the Rose_, or of _The Dream of Poliphile_; what, even, of the _Divine Comedy_? Hazlitt merrily says that people "are afraid of allegory, as if it would bite them.... If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them." The fact is, persons who hate fairy poetry make the allegory an excuse for their aversion, which is like saying that you hate the flavour of olives because they have stones in them.

It is a peculiarity of the romance of fairyland that it never introduces us to fairies. Nothing is so prosaic as a fairy, seen in the broad light of Early Victorian illustration. A little being in short skirts and sandals, standing on one toe on the tip of a rosebud, with a spangle in her sleek hair and a wand in her taper fingers--nothing is more repulsive to the Muses. But the whole secret of the great fairy poets is that they are engaged in searching for fairies without ever suffering the disenchantment of finding them. There are none, I think, in the broad pages of Spenser; even, by a beautiful pleasantry, the Fairie Queene herself being entirely absent throughout the poem, at all events as we now possess it.

The personages in _The Faerie Queene_, noble and miraculous as they are, are not of the fairy persuasion at all. They wander through the forests in the hope of coming upon these supernatural denizens, but they never succeed in doing so. The Holy Grail appeared far oftener to the Knights of the Round Table than a real fairy was perceived by Paradel or Blandamour. These men of chivalry were much interested in the subject, but, as a rule, they were poorly instructed. It was in the House of Temperance that Sir Guyon found the book, that hight _Antiquity of Faeryland_, which seems to have been a sort of _Who's Who_, or _Complete Peerage_ of the supernatural world. He flew to the perusal of it, and wherever in it

"he greedily did look, Offspring of Elves and Fairies there he found,"

but he found no examples on the

"island, waste and void, That floated in the midst of that great lake,"

(where it is impossible not to believe that Mr. W. B. Yeats would have been more successful).

A critic has said that nothing is closer to an intensely lyrical song than a violently burlesque story. The sense of beauty immediately evoked by the one is suggested, conversely, or in the way of topsy-turvy, by the other. This principle had been introduced into literature--or at least into modern literature, for the Greeks had it illustrated in Aristophanes--a hundred years before the time of Spenser, by the _Morgante Maggiore_ of Pulci, where Orlando, the pink of romantic chivalry, comes into collision with certain "immeasurable giants" and other wild absurdities. The atmosphere of that poem is perfectly heroic:

Twelve Paladins had Charles in court, of whom The wisest and most famous was Orlando; Him traitor Gan conducted to the tomb In Roncesvalles, as the villain planned to, While the horn rang so loud, and knelled the doom Of their sad rout, though he did all knight can do; And Dante in his Comedy has given To him a happy seat with Charles in heaven.

But, in another turn, we find this splendid Orlando lifting his sword to give his beautiful lady, Aldabelle, a smack on the face with the flat of it. This is burlesque, and Pulci seems to have been the inventor of the _genre_. He was followed by Boiardo, who wrote of Orlando in love, and by Ariosto, who described the madness of Orlando, and by a multitude of other sixteenth century poets, who described, in this epic mixture of lyricism and burlesque, various other episodes in the life of the hero. It was from them, from these Italian precursors, whom Spenser had read so carefully, that he borrowed the ugly and violent elements which he introduces, so much to the scandal of some critics, into the embroidered texture of _The Faerie Queene_.

In all this, however, which is very characteristic of the romance of fairy poetry, we do wrong to be scandalized. The ugly things, like the misfortunes of Braggadochio and his Squire (in _The Faerie Queene_), and the fantastic things, like the journey of Alstolfo to the Moon to recover the wits of Orlando (in Ariosto), are just as necessary to our pleasure as the description of the Bower of Bliss, or of Angelica's flight from Rinaldo. They are all part of that desire to escape from the obvious and the commonplace features of life which inspires this whole class of poetry. Those who are naturally conscious that life runs at a dead level desire to heighten it, and whether this is done in the lyric spirit or in the burlesque, or in both at once, matters very little. The essential thing is to lift the spirit and quicken the pulse.

The only consolation which comes to people of this fatigued and wistful temperament is that which they receive from a persuasion of the reality of what is marvellous and incredible. Like the theologians, such readers believe certain things to be true because it is impossible that they should be true. They do not ask why, or where, or when, the incidents happened; they are satisfied with the vision and with all its chimerical wonders. In their dreams they see Belphoebe hurrying through the woodland, her hair starred as thick as snow by the petals of the wild roses her tempestuous flight has shaken down upon it, and they do not ask what she represents, nor whither she hastens, nor her relation to fact and history:

And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held, And at her back a bow and quiver gay, Stuft with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled The savage beasts in her victorious play, Knit with a golden bauldrick, which forelay Athwart her snowy breast.

Who needs to ask whither Belphoebe goes, or what she means? She is a vision created for the deep contentment of those in whom the longing for noble images and uplifted desires and generous, childlike dreams is perennial.

Critics like to assume that the enthusiasm which breeds this kind of chivalrous poetry is dead and buried in the classics. They no more expect to see a new _Faerie Queene_ published than to hear of a new dodo inhabiting the plantations of the interior of Madagascar. But in literature it is always unsafe to say that a door is closed for ever; if we are rash enough to make such an assertion, it is sure to fly open in our faces. It was a commonplace of criticism ten years ago that the epic would never reappear in literature, and behold Mr. Doughty presents us with a _Dawn in Britain_ which is as long as the _Lusiads_ would be if _Paradise Lost_ were tacked on to the tail of it. Last week I read in a very positive volume that the Pastoral can never revisit the cold glimpses of a world that has exchanged its interest in shepherds for a solicitude about miners and chauffeurs. My instant reflection on reading that opinion was to wonder how soon a young poet would publish a fresh set of Bucolics, with the contest of Damaetas and Menalcas set forth to a new tune upon the Pans' pipes.

For this reason I cannot say that I was astonished, although much interested, to find a young man--and, I venture to think, a young man of some genius--reviving the old music of the magic woodland, which had seemed to be dead, or closed, since the seventeenth century. It is a wish to make his work a little known to English readers which has led me to venture on some remarks to-day about the Romance of Fairyland. M. Albert Mockel is a Fleming, and if M. Octave Mirbeau, in a celebrated article in the Paris _Figaro_, had not called M. Maeterlinck the Belgian Shakespeare, I should have been tempted to describe M. Mockel as the Belgian Spenser. I may go so far as to call him a Belgian Ariosto. M. Mockel has not enjoyed the same popularity as his eminent countryman; perhaps he had no Octave Mirbeau to immortalize him with a gorgeous paradox. But in 1891 M. Mockel, who must then have been very youthful, published a poem, entitled _Chantefable_, which was enough to inspire great hopes of his future among not a few judicious readers. He has done nothing, in my judgment, to justify those hopes so fully as he now has in the volume he has published, called, _Contes pour les Enfants d'hier_, with ingenious illustrations by M. Auguste Donnay. These illustrations are very clever, although they would never have been drawn had it not been for Aubrey Beardsley's _Morte d'Arthur_ (1893). M. Donnay is skilful, and he emulates Beardsley's wonderful, pure line, without always perfectly attaining to it.

But the book itself is of a more classic cast, and deserves longer attention. Here, to quite a remarkable extent, we find the old stateliness of the fabulous society, the old ceremonial procession of wonderful events and incredible people. Here, once more, we enter a world as audaciously designed as Ariosto's, as intricately splendid as Spenser's. Here, again, is what a critic of _The Faerie Queene_ has called "the inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident." The vulgarity of present existence is buried under such a panoply and magnificence of fable that the grown-up children, the blessed _enfants d'hier_, can forget and ignore it.

It would be tedious to retell briefly, in poor words, the brilliant stories which owe so much to the solemn and highly-coloured language in which they are deliberately narrated. But I cannot refrain from giving an outline of the last of them, _The Island of Rest_. In M. Mockel's gallery there is no more magnificent figure than that of Jerzual, Prince of Urmonde. We may call him the Roland of our Belgian Boiardo. All the world is aware of the mysterious end of Prince Jerzual; he went away over the waves of the sea, and nothing was ever heard of him again. But only M. Mockel knows what happened, and he has now consented to reveal it.

Jerzual had loved the ineffable Alise, Princess of Avigorre, and to secure her love he had vowed that he would offer her the suzerainty of the Heights, a mysterious country surrounded by peaks of silver and crystal. Unfortunately, though he searched the habitable globe, the whereabouts of this marvellous region escaped him. One day, in despair, as he rode his magic horse, Bellardian, he came to the edge of a cliff, where the ocean stretched at his feet. Tired of his vain adventures, Jerzual flung the reins on the mane of Bellardian, and spurred him onward. The obedient steed leaped the cliff, and descended on the surface of the waters, which undulated gently beneath him, but bore up both horse and rider. They galloped over the calm sea for hours and hours, for days and days, until at last a fairy island appeared on the horizon, and displayed, as they approached, a silver zone of pure peaks, lifted like a tiara high over the ring of green and golden verdure. This was the land of Jerzual's desire, but neither the white Bellardian nor his incomparable master succeeded in landing upon that exquisite shore without prolonged adventures, which it is not my business to recount. Suffice to say, that they sank in safety on the sands at last.

How they were discovered there by Aigueline, the cruel daughter of the Sea, and sole inhabitant of the island; how the heart of Jerzual fluctuated in the terrible dilemma between his present good fortune and his duty to the Princess; how staunch and uplifted poor Bellardian was, and how strange and pitiful his fate; how the enchantments of Aigueline were broken at last; and how, when the disillusioned Jerzual walked in frenzy upon the sands of the island shore, he saw the shallop of the Princess of Avigorre sail by, with banners flying from it which were not his, but those of his rival, Ellerion, Prince of Argilea; this, and much more, and all of it equally gorgeous and convincing, must be read in the delightful pages of M. Mockel's _Contes pour les Enfants d'hier_.

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD WOLSELEY

There is at present no record of Lord Wolseley, who died just too recently to be included in the latest Supplement of the _Dictionary of National Biography_. His memory loiters in the limbo which always surrounds the famous dead for a few years after their decease. Then follow, in due course, the official Life and the selected correspondence; and so finally the monument is unveiled for the pigeons of the Press to perch upon. To my friends, Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir George Arthur, have been entrusted the duty of arranging the memoirs of our greatest modern soldier, and their work will be formidable, for the Great War, of which Wolseley, in flashes of genius, had prescience, has swept over us, and has confused the landmarks of our memories. I feel sure that they will bring judgment and discretion to their task, which is a noble one. But they will certainly, and properly, be inclined to concentrate their effort on the military aspects of their subject, since Lord Wolseley was a soldier before everything else, and so completely a soldier that other aspects must be dwarfed in contemplation of his military glory. These may easily, indeed, be excluded altogether, and I therefore venture to recall, before it is too late, certain scenes which I observed during a prolonged and delighted acquaintanceship, in which the sword ceased to be "vambrashed," as the Elizabethans used to say, and in which the great general was simply an amateur of letters, eager to talk about books and even ambitious to write them. I shall not fall into the error of describing him as a great author, but I think that it may be amusing to preserve some intellectual sketch of a character essentially imposing in very different surroundings.

Lord Wolseley was not prominent before the world as a man of letters, and I shall not pretend that he could claim that particular distinction, though he wrote easily and well. Of his best books I shall have something presently to say. But I think it is known to only a very few survivors that he had a predilection and even a passion for literature, which he shared, I should think, with no man of action of his time. He was an insatiate reader, and his reading covered a surprising range. For a man to whom life offered excitement and animation in almost every direction, it was notable how much time he found to spare for intellectual amusement. He attributed his love of reading to the influence of his Irish mother. He said once to me, "I would sooner live upon porridge in a bookroom than upon venison and truffles where books were not," and this meant much from one who was by no means indifferent to the truffles and the venison of life. The curious thing is that this obsession with literature nowhere peeps out in his published works, and is notably absent in his autobiography, _The Story of a Soldier's Life_, where we should particularly expect to find traces of it. For this defect in the general portraiture of that book there are reasons, upon which I may touch later on. It is a useful chain of military records, but it is a portrait of its author in full uniform, with cocked hat and sword. It was my good fortune to see him always in mufti, and if I essay a snapshot of him I am bound to show him with a book in his hand.

My acquaintance with Lord Wolseley began in 1888, and I owed it to a common friend whom I never cease to deplore, the ever-ingenious Andrew Lang. I have forgotten how these two came together, but they had a great appreciation of each other's company. Wolseley was now just fifty-five, but he looked much younger, and he flashed about as though the spirit of April still laughed at him. The first thing which struck an observer on meeting him was that he had the gestures of a boy; the elastic footstep, the abruptly vivid movements, one would almost say were those of a happy child. In 1888 Lord and Lady Wolseley were still inhabiting a small house in Hill Street, but immediately after I first knew them they moved to the Ranger's House in Greenwich Park, the scene for me of delightful memories during the next two years. Wolseley was at that time Adjutant-General of the Forces, under Stanhope, and afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland under Campbell-Bannerman. He worked hard every day at the War Office, and came down to Greenwich in the afternoon like any civil servant or bank clerk. His life at that time was marked by the serene and unaffected simplicity which always seemed to me the cardinal feature of his personal character. Much in Wolseley had an appearance of inconsistency. For instance, it cannot be questioned that he demanded a great deal from those who worked under him professionally, nor that he was careful of his own prestige. But when he was released from his military work, he became the least assuming of mankind. Moreover--and this makes the attempt to paint him particularly difficult--he was not, to the public eye, conspicuous, as other great generals have been, through demeanour or appearance. I used often to be surprised, when we were walking together in the street, to notice how few people recognized him, although he was then at the height of his celebrity.

In September, 1889, when my wife and I were going over to the Continent, we observed a shortish gentleman, in tourist dress, pacing the deck of the steamer, and we said to each other: "Does not that man remind you of somebody?" Presently he stopped before us, smiling, and it was Wolseley. He was going alone to Metz, from which point he proposed to make a tour of personal observation round all the battlefields of 1870. He said that there were inconsistencies in the published accounts, and that he had meditated over them till it was impossible for him to rest until he had settled his difficulties by independent inspection. He told us not to say we had met him, and it was an example of that want of conspicuousness, which I have noted, that, although it was broad daylight, and he then one of the most famous figures in England, no one else did seem to recognize him. He had theories about the Franco-German campaign for which he sought confirmation. I begged him to let me know what the result might be, and so he wrote to me, from Brunswick, on October 4th:

I postponed writing to you until my tour round the battle-fields should have finished, as I could not tell what to write upon the subject until I had studied the ground. I need scarcely tell you that I knew the chief episodes of each great fight very well before I came abroad. The German account of the events is so full and truthful that no student of war has any excuse for ignorance. With that book, and maps and plans, I have carefully studied every phase of every battle-field from Sedan in the North to Strasburg in the South, and I find I could not write upon the subject without expressions of opinion that would be very unpleasant to many men now alive. The Germans outnumbered the French in nearly all those battles to a large extent, and though the French allowed themselves to be surprised, and their leaders committed every possible mistake, the errors of the Germans were very glaring upon many occasions. Almost all their battles were not only fought in a manner entirely different from what was intended, but, in nearly every case, they were brought on without, and on some occasions contrary to, the positive orders and intentions of the Generals.

When I saw him at Greenwich soon after his return he spoke more plainly still. He said that he had found, to his great surprise, that the Germans, whose luck, he declared, had been incredible, had been very nearly defeated more than once or twice. He had been particularly excited by his inspection of the battlefield of Gravelotte. If that battle had not, he said, been won by what was really "a fluke," the day would have closed upon the German Army in about the most unfortunate position an army could possibly be placed in. All this struck me, ignorant of tactics as I am, as so very interesting that I entreated him to change his mind and write a complete record of his observations on the battlefields. But he said that the praise of German strategy had reached such a pitch of infatuation in England that he should be "accused of all sorts of things." Nevertheless, I pressed him to write down his experience, even if he kept it private. He finally promised that he would do so that winter, but I never heard any more about it. His last words were "I dare not publish my views," and presently he had to go off to Newcastle on military business, which quite diverted his thoughts. It must be observed that we trusted in those days wholly to German historians, and that the French account, which confirmed Lord Wolseley to the letter, was not published until ten years later.

It was while I was walking with him in Greenwich Park one afternoon about this time that I first realized that he had any literary ambition. He acknowledged a constant temptation to use his pen. I had thought of him as a reader, but hardly as a writer, although he had published his soldiers' _Pocket-Book for Field Service_ some twenty years before. I learned afterwards, from Andrew Lang, that Lord Wolseley had produced a novel, under a feigned name; this I had never seen, and Lang did not encourage me to hunt for it. But now, with considerable leisure, he was ready to be encouraged to write on matters at the fringe of his daily occupation. He did not, however, see any particular theme lying in wait for him. During a visit I had lately paid to the United States I had enjoyed a good deal of conversation with two of the leading generals of the Civil War, with Philip Henry Sheridan and with William Tecumseh Sherman. It was Sherman who made the celebrated march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah at the end of 1864; his tenacity and clairvoyance delighted Wolseley, who was nevertheless inclined to blame Sherman for an excess of ruthlessness in his methods. He laughed when I told him that I had heard Sherman, when teased at a supper-party for destroying some town, first deny the charge, and then, when it was daringly repeated, turn round on the railer like an old snow-leopard, and cry: "Next time I'll burn the whole darned city to the ground."