Chapter 5

This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise what the democratic spirit of America really is. Granted, however, that it is a free and a noble spirit, I feel a doubt as to whether it is possible for any nation, at any time in the world's history, really to take a new start. The American nation is not a new nation; it is in a sense a very old' nation. It has had a perfectly new and magnificent field for its energies, and it has made a sweep of the old conventions; but it cannot get rid of its inheritance of temperament; and I think that, so far as I can judge, it is too anxious to emphasize its sense of revolt, its consciousness of newness of life. Whitman himself would not be so anxious to declare the ennui of the old, if he did not feel himself in a way trammelled by it. The moment that a case is stated with any vehemence, that moment it is certain that the speaker has antagonists in his eye. There is a story of Professor Blackie at Edinburgh making a tirade against the stuffiness of the old English universities to Jowett, the incisive Master of Balliol. At the end, he said generously, "I hope you people at Oxford do not think that we are your enemies up here?" "No," said Jowett drily; "to tell the truth, we don't think about you at all!" The man who is really making a new beginning, serenely confident in his strength, does not, as Professor Blackie did, concern himself with his predecessors at all. Perhaps, indeed, the democratic spirit of America may be quietly glorying in its strength, and may be merely waiting till it suits it to speak. But I do not think it can be said to have found full expression. It seems to me--I may well be wrong--that in matters of culture, the American is far more seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than the Englishman. The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is anarchical and anti-classical. Writers like Wordsworth, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them. They did not even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they thought, and as they thought it. But the spirit of American literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic spirit. It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself, shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new ideas. It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature experiments. It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not comprehending the spirit. A revolt in literary art, such as the Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with the old forms and traditions. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked. They used the past as a quarry, not as a model. But the famous American writers have not originated new forms, or invented a different use of language; they have widened and freshened traditions, they have not thrown them overboard. Neither, if I interpret facts rightly, have the Americans developed a new kind of aristocracy. Whitman's talk of democratic averages is beside the point. The process of levelling up and levelling down only produces low standards. What the world needs, whether in England or America, is a new sort of aristocracy--simple, disinterested, bold, sympathetic, enthusiastic men, of clear vision and free thought. And what the democracy needs is not an envious dislike of all prominence and greatness, but an eye for all greatness, and an admiration for all courage and largeness of soul. England suspects, perhaps erroneously, that America has founded an aristocracy of wealth and influence and physical prowess, rather than an aristocracy of simplicity and fearlessness. One believes that the competitive, the prize-winning spirit, is even more dominant in America than in England. No one doubts the fierce energy and the aplomb of America; but can it be said that IDEAS, the existence of which is the ultimate test of national vigour, are really more prevalent in America than in England? It all depends, of course, upon whether one values the Greek or the Roman ideal more highly, the interest, that is, of life, or the desire to rule and prosper. If the aim of civilisation is orderliness, then the Roman aim is the better; but if the aim is spiritual animation, then the Greeks are the winners. Yet in the last century, England has been more fruitful in ideas than America, although America is incomparably more interested in education than England is.

But it is hard to balance these things. What remains is the fact that Walt Whitman has drawn a fine democratic ideal. His democrat is essentially a worker, with every sort of vigorous impulse, living life in an ecstasy of health and comradeship, careless of money and influence and position, content to live a simple life, finding beauty, and hope, and love, and labour, enough, in the spirit of the great dictum of William Morris, that the reward of labour is life--not success or power or wealth, but the sense of living fully and freely.

I do not claim that this spirit exists in England yet; but does it exist in America? What, in fact, constitutes the inspiration of the average American; what does he expect to find in life, and to make of life? Whitman has no doubt at all. But in what other American writer does this ideal find expression?

4

It remains to say a few words about the artistic methods of Walt Whitman. He himself claims no artistic standard whatever. He says that he wishes to create an atmosphere; and that his one aim has been suggestiveness. "I round and finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine."

He says that his purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents or courtesies--all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included--to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism."

It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that, art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty, and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that expression. Architecture, for instance, and music, are alike based upon instinctive preferences in human beings, the one for geometrical form, the other for the combination of vibrations. It is a law of music, for instance, that the human being prefers an octave in absolute unison, and not an octave of which one note is a semitone flat. That is not a rule invented by critics; it is a law of human perception and preference. Similarly there is undoubtedly a law which determines human preferences in poetry, though a far more complicated law, and not yet analysed. The new poet is not a man who breaks the law, but one who discovers a real extension of it.

The question then, roughly, is this: Whitman chose to express himself in a species of poetry, based roughly upon Hebrew poetry, such as we have in the Psalms and Prophets. If this is a true expansion of the aesthetic law of poetry, then it is a success; if it is not a true expansion, but only a wilful variation, not consonant with the law, it is a failure.

Now there are many effects in Whitman which are, I believe, inconsistent with the poetical law. Not to multiply instances, his grotesque word-inventions--"Me imperturbe!" "No dainty dolce affettuoso I," "the drape of the day"--his use of Greek and Latin and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt, his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind, but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any kind of mind.

Then too his form constantly collapses, as though he had no fixed scheme in his mind. There are many poems which begin with an ample sweep, and suddenly crumble to pieces, as though he were merely tired of them.

Then again there seem to me to be some simply coarse, obscene, unpleasant passages, not of relentless realism but of dull inquisitiveness. They do not attract or impress; they do not provide a contrast or an emphasis. They simply lie, like piles of filth, in rooms designed for human habitation. If it is argued that art may use any materials, I can only fall back upon my belief that such passages are as instinctively repulsive to the artistic sense as strong-smelling cheeses stacked in a library! There is no moral or ethical law against such a practice; but the aesthetic conscience of humanity instinctively condemns it. When I examine the literature which has inspired and attracted the minds of humanity, whether trained or untrained, I find that they avoid this hideous intrusion of nastiness; and I am inclined to infer that writers who introduce such episodes, and readers who like them, have some other impulse in view, which is neither the sense of beauty nor the perception of art. But if Whitman, or anyone else, can convert the world to call this art, and to enjoy it as art, then he will prove that he understands the law of preference better than I do.

But when all this has been said and conceded, there yet remain countless passages of true and vital beauty, exquisite phrases, haunting pictures, glimpses of perfect loveliness. His poems of comradeship and the open air, his pictures of family life, have often a magical thrill of passion, leaving one rapturous and unsatisfied, believing in the secrets behind the world, and hoping for a touch of like experience.

If I may take one poem as typical of the best that is in Whitman-- and what a splendid best!--it shall be "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," from the book called Sea-drift. I declare that I can never read this poem without profound emotion; it is here that he fully justifies his claim to atmosphere and suggestiveness; the nesting birds, the sea's edge, with its "liquid rims and wet sands"--what a magical phrase!--the angry moan of the breakers under the yellow, drooping moon, the boy with his feet in the water, and the wind in his hair--this is all beyond criticism.

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me? For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you Now in a moment I know what I am for,--I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

And then he cries to the waves to tell him what they have been whispering all the time.

Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night and very plainly before day-break, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.

This theme, it will be remembered, is worked out more fully in the Lincoln poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," with the "Song of Death," too long, alas, to quote here--it would be delightful even to inscribe the words--which seems to me for splendour of language, sweetness of rhythm, and stateliness of cadence--to say nothing of the magnificence of the thought--to be incontestably among the very greatest poems of the world.

If Whitman could always have written so! Then he need hardly have said that the strongest and sweetest songs remained to be sung; but this, and many other gems of poetry, lie in radiant fragments among the turbid and weltering rush of his strange verse; and thus one sees that if there is indeed a law of art, it lies close to the instinct of suppression and omission. One may think anything; one may say most things; but if one means to sway the human heart by that one particular gift of words, ordered and melodiously intertwined, one must heed what experience tells the aspirant--that no fervour of thought, or exuberance of utterance, can make up for the harmony of the firmly touched lyre, and the music of the unuttered word.

V

CHARM

There is a little village here near Cambridge the homely, summer- sounding name of which is Haslingfield. It is a straggling hamlet of white-walled, straw-thatched cottages, among orchards and old elms, full of closes of meadow-grass, and farmsteads with ricks and big-timbered barns. It has a solid, upstanding Tudor church, with rather a grand tower, and four solid corner turrets; and it has, too, its little bit of history in the manor-house, of which only one high-shouldered wing remains, with tall brick chimneys. It stands up above some mellow old walls, a big dove-cote, and a row of ancient fish-ponds. Here Queen Elizabeth once spent a night upon the wing. Close behind the village, a low wold, bare and calm, with a belt or two of trees, runs steeply up.

The simplest and quietest place imaginable, with a simple and remote life, hardly aware of itself, flowing tranquilly through it; yet this little village, by some felicity of grouping and gathering, has the rare and incomparable gift of charm. I cannot analyse it, I cannot explain it, yet at all times and in all lights, whether its orchards are full of bloom and scent, and the cuckoo flutes from the holt down the soft breeze, or in the bare and leafless winter, when the pale sunset glows beyond the wold among the rifted cloud-banks, it has the wonderful appeal of beauty, a quality which cannot be schemed for or designed, but which a very little mishandling can sweep away. The whole place has grown up out of common use, trees planted for shelter, orchards set for fruit, houses built for convenience. Only in the church and the manor is there any care for seemliness and stateliness. There are a dozen villages round about it which have sprung from the same needs, the same history; and yet these have missed the unconsidered charm of Haslingfield, which man did not devise, nor does nature inevitably bring, but which is instantly recognisable and strangely affecting.

Such charm seems to arise partly out of a subtle orderliness and a simple appropriateness, and partly from a blending of delicate and pathetic elements in a certain unascertained proportion. It seems to touch unknown memories into life, and to give a hint of the working of some half-whimsical, half-tenderly concerned spirit, brooding over its work, adding a touch of form here and a dash of colour there, and pleased to see, when all is done, that it is good.

If one looks closely at life, one sees the same quality in humanity, in men and women, in books and pictures, and yet one cannot tell what goes to the making of it. It seems to be a thing which no energy or design can capture, but which alights here and there, blowing like the wind at will. It is not force or originality or inventiveness; very often it is strangely lacking in any masterful quality at all; but it has always just the same wistful appeal, which makes one desire to understand it, to take possession of it, to serve it, to win its favour. It is as when the child in Francis Thompson's poem seems to say, "I hire you for nothing." That is exactly it: there is nothing offered or bestowed, but one is at once magically bound to serve it for love and delight. There is nothing that one can expect to get from it, and yet it goes very far down into the soul; it is behind the maddening desire which certain faces, hands, voices, smiles excite--the desire to possess, to claim, to know even that no one else can possess or claim them, which lies at the root of half the jealous tragedies of life.

Some personalities have charm in a marvellous degree, and if, as one looks into the old records of life, one discovers figures that seem to have laid an inexplicable hold on their circles, and to have passed through life in a tempest of applause and admiration, one may be sure that charm has been the secret.

Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of "In Memoriam." I remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically, morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see. He said, I remember, with a smile: "The story of Milnes Gaskell's friendship with Hallam was curious. You must know that people fell in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E-- of whom Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his friendship."

Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost's house at Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man, with a flushed face,--Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by overwork,--who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.

Odder still, the letters, poems, and remains of Hallam throw no light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid, elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam's father, in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, "It did my heart good to sit by and hear how the son snubbed the father, remembering how often the father had unmercifully snubbed me."

There is a hint of beauty in the dark eyes and the down-dropped curve of the mobile lip in the portrait, and one need not quote "In Memoriam" to prove how utterly the charm of Hallam subjugated the Tennyson circle. Wit, swiftness of insight, beauty, lovableness-- all seem to have been there; and it remains that Arthur Hallam was worshipped and adored by his contemporaries with a fierce jealousy of devotion. Nothing but the presence of an overmastering charm can explain this conspiracy of praise; and perhaps there is no better proof of it than that his friends could detect genius in letters and poems which seem alike destitute of promise and performance.

There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint, and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic, passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne. He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron, showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy, dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and found that there was nothing in it.

The dicta of his that are preserved vibrate between cynicism, shrewdness, wisdom, and tenderness. "Stop a bit," he said, as the cabinet went downstairs after a dinner to discuss the corn laws. "Is it to lower the price of bread or isn't it? It doesn't much matter which, but we must all say the same thing." Yet, after all, it is the letters and diaries of Queen Victoria that reveal the true secret of Melbourne's charm. His relation to his girl- sovereign is one of the most beautiful things in latter-day history. Melbourne loved her half paternally, half chivalrously, while it is evident that the Queen's affection for her gallant and attractive premier was of a quality which escaped her own perception. He humoured her, advised her, watched over her; in return, she idolised him, noted down his smallest sayings, permitted him to behave and talk just as he would. She lovingly records his little ways and fancies--how he fell asleep after dinner, how he always took two apples, and hid one in his lap while he ate the other.

"I asked him if he meant to cat it. He thought not, and said, 'But I like to have the power of doing so.' I observed, hadn't he just as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on the table? He laughed and said, 'Not the FULL power.'"

Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy. He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, "You see, those women bothered him so." And when he was superseded by Peel, he combated the Queen's dislike of her new premier, and did his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, "For God's sake, go and talk to the Queen!" When I was privileged to work through all Melbourne's letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up to the end.

Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,--he had not the purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,--but I know of no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same before, and said it heavily and solemnly.