Part 10

Browning was neither of Cambridge nor of Oxford, but his genius was much more akin to Oxford than to Cambridge, and towards the end of his life, particularly after his son had entered at Balliol College, he was very often seen amongst us. Though he was not what we call a scholar, his mind was saturated with classical lore, and his appreciation of Greek poetry, Greek mythology, and Greek sculpture was very keen. He could not quote Greek verses, but he was steeped in the Greek tragedians and lyric poets. Of course this classical sympathy was but one side of his poetry. Browning was full of sympathy, nay, of worship, for anything noble and true in literature, ancient or modern. And what was most delightful in him was his ready response, his generosity in pouring out his own thoughts before anybody who shared his sympathies. For real and substantial conversation there was no one his equal, and even in the lighter after-dinner talk he was admirable. His health seemed good, and he was able to sacrifice much of his time to society. He had one great advantage, he never consented to spoil his dinner by making, or, what is still worse, by having to make, a speech. I once felt greatly aggrieved, sitting opposite Browning at one of the Royal Academy dinners. I had to return thanks for literature and scholarship, and was of course rehearsing my speech during the whole of dinner-time, while he enjoyed himself talking to his friends. When I told him that it was a shame that I should be made a martyr of while he was enjoying his dinner in peace, he laughed, and said that he had said No once for all, and that he had never in his life made a public speech. I believe, as a rule, poets are not good speakers. They are too careful about what they wish to say. As dinner advanced I became more and more convinced of the etymological identity of _honor_ and _onus_. At last my turn came. Having to face the brilliant society which is always present at this dinner, including the Prince of Wales, the Ministers of both parties, the most eminent artists, scientists, authors and critics, I had of course learnt my speech by heart, and was getting on very well, when suddenly I saw the Prince of Wales laughing and saying something to his neighbour. At once the thread of my speech was broken. I began to think whether I could have said anything that made the Prince laugh, and what it could have been, and while I was thinking in every direction, I suddenly stood speechless. I thought it was an eternity, and I was afraid I should have to collapse and make the greatest fool of myself that ever was. I looked at Browning and he gave me a friendly nod, and at that moment my grapple-irons caught the lost cable and I was able to finish my speech. When it was over I turned to Browning and said: “Was it not fearful, that pause?” “Far from it,” he said, “it was excellent. It gave life to your speech. Everybody saw you were collecting your thoughts, and that you were not simply delivering what you had learnt by heart. Besides, it did not last half a minute.” To me it had seemed at least five or ten minutes. But after Browning’s good-natured words I felt relieved, and enjoyed at least what was left of a most enjoyable dinner, the only enjoyable public dinner I know.

The best place to see Browning was Venice, and I think it was there that I saw him for the last time. He was staying in one of the smaller palaces with a friend, and he was easily persuaded to read some of his poems. I asked him for his poem on Andrea del Sarto, and his delivery was most simple and yet most telling. He was a far better reader than Tennyson. His voice was natural, sonorous, and full of delicate shades; while Tennyson read in so deep a tone, that it was like the rumbling and rolling sound of the sea rather than like a human voice. His admirers, both gentlemen and ladies, who thought that everything he did must be perfect, encouraged him in that kind of delivery; and while to me it seemed that he had smothered and murdered some of the poems I liked best, they sighed and groaned and poured out strange interjections, meant to be indicative of rapture.

There is a definiteness in Tennyson’s poetry which makes it easy to recite and even to declaim his poems, while many of Browning’s compositions do not lend themselves at all to vivâ voce repetition. There is always a superabundance of thought and feeling in them, and his mastery of rhyme and rhythm proved a temptation which he could not always resist. One often wished that some of Browning’s poems could have passed through the Tennysonian sieve, to take away all that is unnecessary in them, and to moderate his exuberant revelling in language. Still his friends know what they possess in his poetry. When they are sad, he makes them joyful; when they exult, he tones them down; when they are hungry, he feeds them; when they are poor, he makes them rich; and, like a true prophet, he knows how to bring fresh water out of the rocks, out of the commonest events in our journey through the desert of life. It is a pity that his poetry does not lend itself to translation. Perhaps he is too thoroughly English, perhaps his sentences are too labyrinthine even for German readers. Anyhow, Browning is known abroad much less than Tennyson, and if translatableness is a test of true poetry, his poetry would not stand that test well.

To have known such men as Tennyson and Browning is indeed a rare fortune. It helps us in two ways. We are preserved from extravagant admiration, which is always stupid; and, on the other hand, we can enjoy even insignificant verses of theirs, as coming from our friends and lighting up some corner of their character. There are cases where personal acquaintance with the poets actually spoils our taste for their poetry, which we might otherwise have enjoyed; and to imagine that one knows a poet better because one has once shaken hands with him, is a fatal mistake. It would be far better to go at once to Westminster Abbey, and spend a few thoughtful moments at the tombs of such poets as Tennyson or Browning, for there, at all events, there would be no disappointment.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS IV

Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and distant admirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for many years. It is difficult to know what to do. To answer all the letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a book in order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it, one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book; but he forgets that in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite unconscious that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a man’s working day. And there is this further danger: however guarded one may be in expressing one’s gratitude or one’s opinion of the merits of a book, one’s letter is apt to appear in advertisements, if only far away in India or the Colonies; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author’s compliments, that is, by an enterprising publisher.

However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful remarks for my books, they have made me presents of MSS. and local publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British Museum, and I feel sure that they have not been offended even though I could not enter into a long correspondence with every one of my epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted to comply with one half of these requests, I could have done nothing else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a publisher were to write to me! The introduction of postcards has proved, no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may truly say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the appeal, but go to a library, where I have to waste hours and hours in finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it. Why should not others do the same?

And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also. I do sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all, I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like letters and books, and very often they are interesting and even delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my books, that is another compliment which I always value; and they often speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten.

It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called _pace_. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real characteristic points in a face.

It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed. Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill, in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush, has certainly been extraordinary, and several of them seem to have seen in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I myself had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. I remember one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman (I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a trigonometrical survey of myself and my surroundings. At last I had to tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As he seemed so interested in my work I naturally expected he would ask me to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind! “I am sorry,” he said, “but you don’t mind my sitting here in your library till you come back?” And, true enough, there I found him when I came home after an hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max Müller, published in an American journal. This power of observation which these interviewers, and to a certain extent most American travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St. Peter or Santa Sophia, or such giants as Tennyson or Browning, we ought to take a leaf out of the book of our American friends, and try to acquire some of their pace and go.

And then, America does not send us interviewers only, but nearly all their most eminent men and their most charming women pay us the compliment of coming over to the old country. They generally cannot give us more than a few days, or it may be a few hours only; and in that short space we also have to learn how to measure them, how to appreciate and love them. It has to be done quickly, or not at all. Living at Oxford, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely at home they feel in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions for ever.

Emerson, I am grieved to say, when during his last visit to England he spent some days with us, accompanied and watched over by his devoted daughter, was already on the brink of that misfortune which overtook him in his old age. His memory often failed him, but as through a mist the bright and warm sun of his mind was always shining, and many of his questions and answers have remained engraved in my memory, weak and shaky as that too begins to be. I had forgotten that Emerson had ceased to be an active preacher, and I told him that I rather envied him the opportunity of speaking now and then to his friends and neighbours on subjects on which we can seldom speak except in church. He then told me not only what he had told others, that “he had had enough of it,” but he referred to an episode in his life, or rather in that of his brother, which struck me as very significant at the time. “There was an ecclesiastical leaven in our family,” he said. “My brother and I were both meant for the ministry in the Unitarian community. My brother was sent by my father to Germany (I believe to Göttingen), and after a thorough study of theology was returning to America. On the voyage home the ship was caught in a violent gale, and all hope of saving the ship and the lives of the passengers was given up. At that time my brother said his prayers, and made a vow that if his life should be spared he would never preach again, but give up theology altogether and earn an honest living in some other way. The ship weathered the storm, my brother’s life was saved, and, in spite of all entreaties, he kept his vow. Something of the same kind may have influenced me,” he added: “anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach from the pulpit.” And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A few years’ study at Göttingen might have been useful to the younger Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going first to school to learn how others before him had grappled with them. And this was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and the directness of his judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had at first nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favourite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times.

What Emerson’s personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime. A friend of his who had watched Emerson and his work and his ever-increasing influence, declares without hesitation that “the American nation is more indebted to his teaching than to any other person who has spoken or written on his themes during the last twenty years.” He calls his genius “the measure and present expansion of the American mind.” And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I still remember the time when even experienced literary judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other.

After a time some more searching critics were amazed at sentences which spoke volumes, and showed that Emerson, though he had never written a systematic treatise on philosophy, stood on a firm foundation of the accumulated philosophic thought of centuries. Let us take such a sentence as “_Generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind—hence the thrill that attends_.” To the ordinary reader such a sentence can convey very little; it might seem, in fact, a mere exaggeration. But to those who know the long history of thought connected with the question of the origin of conceptual thought as the result of ceaseless generalisation, Emerson’s words convey the outcome of profound thought. They show that he had recognised in general ideas, which are to us merely the result of a never-ceasing synthesis, the original thoughts or logoi underlying the immense variety of created things; that he had traced them back to their only possible source, the Divine Mind, and that he saw how the human mind, by rising from particulars to the general, was in reality approaching the source of those divine thoughts, and thus becoming conscious, as it were, of the influx of divinity. Other philosophers have expressed similar thoughts by saying that induction is the light that leads us up, deduction the light that leads us down. Mill thought that generalisation is a mere process of mother-wit, of the shrewd and untaught intelligence; and that, from one narrow point of view, it is so, has been fully proved since by an analysis of language. Every word is a generalisation, and contains in itself a general idea, the so-called root. These first generalisations are, no doubt, at first the work of mother-wit and untaught intelligence only, and hence the necessity of constantly correcting them, whether by experience or by philosophy. But these words are nevertheless the foundation of all later thought, and if they have not reached as yet the fulness of the Divine Logoi, they represent at least the advancing steps by which alone the human mind could reach, and will reach at last, the ideas of the Divine Mind.

Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson’s shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists (realists) or nominalists. Evolutionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man, from the thrills of the moneres to the thoughts of man. Nominalists again think that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived or created. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realised in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first Thinker of Thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act; the first act is the Volition or the Thought of the universe, unless we hold that there can be effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos.

Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson’s thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, between a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson’s influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that I had gained something that could never be taken from me.

Another eminent American who often honoured my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States Minister in England. He was a Professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled “Among my Books.” His “Biglow Papers,” which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland.

I came to know him first as a sparkling correspondent, and then as a delightful friend.

Here is the letter which began our intimacy:—