Part 11

Gray speaks of Mason's 'insatiable reforming mouth,' and remarks that he has no passions 'except a little malice and revenge.' There was a good deal of acidity in his nature, developed, perhaps, by his uncongenial position and by domestic trouble, if he had not the rancour and force which make a great satirist; but in earlier days Gray found in him a simple-minded and enthusiastic disciple, who read little or nothing, but wrote abundance, 'and that with a design to make a fortune by it.' His two poems 'Elfrida' and 'Caractacus' were fruits of this early fluency. They have been criticised elaborately by Hartley Coleridge, but belong, I think, to that kind and class of literature upon which serious criticism would be rather wasted. It is not that they are bad; rather they suggest an uncomfortable reflection upon the quantity of real talent, as well as conscientious effort, which may be thrown away in producing work unmistakably second-rate and void of genuine vitality. We can better estimate the extreme rarity and value of genius by measuring it against the achievements of remarkable cleverness. Hastily read, or read whilst still possessing the gloss of novelty, Mason's work might look like Gray's. Here, for example, is the first stanza of a chorus from 'Caractacus,' which Gray not only praised to Mason, but cites in one of his notes as a proof that sublime odes could still be written in English:—

Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread, That shook the earth with thund'ring tread? 'Twas Death. In haste The warrior past; High towered his helmed head: I mark'd his mail; I mark'd his shield; I 'spyed the sparkling of his spear; I saw his giant arm the falchion wield; Wide wav'd the lickering blade, and fir'd the angry air.[7]

Longer quotation might be tiresome; but Mason continues to the end with all the manner of a genuine poet, and doubtless cheated himself as well as Gray into the impression that he had the real stuff in him. The effect is respectable at a little distance, though the work will not bear a moment's inspection.

The general design of the plays, however, is more to my purpose than the merits of their execution. At that time the worship of Shakespeare, though sometimes extravagant, had not become a mere slavish idolatry. It was still permitted to see spots in the sun, and not yet fashionable for poets to try to revive the Elizabethan style, though Mason made one feeble attempt at a play 'on the English model.' Gray, with his catholic taste, admired Racine, and began a play in imitation of 'Britannicus;' and the faithful Mason decided that a 'medium between the French and English taste would be preferable to either.' He had also a fancy that the ancient chorus might be restored, so as at once to give greater opportunities for poetical descriptions and the graceful introduction of 'moral reflections.' Though Gray ridiculed his arguments pretty sharply, he stuck to his plan as obstinately as Sam Weller when insisting, in defiance of paternal remonstrances, upon a poetical conclusion to his love-letter. Accordingly, in 'Elfrida' and 'Caractacus,' certain bands of British virgins and druids talk the twaddle and burst into the lyrical irrelevance which are the functions of a chorus. Mason had abundant self-complacency; and though his plays had only a moderate success, owing to the bad taste of the public, he felt that his ingenious eclecticisms combined the various merits of Sophocles, Racine, and Shakespeare. Unsuccessful authors may well invoke blessings on the man who invented conceit. But Mason, after all, writes like a cultivated scholar, with sensibility to poetic excellence, though without real poetic power; and if we laugh at his taste, our grandchildren will probably laugh with equal self-satisfaction at ours.

In truth, this fashion of writing plays not intended, or scarcely intended, for the stage, of which Mason was one of the first originators, is characteristic of the whole school. I will not argue a large question here, or deny that something may be said for the practice; and yet it seems as though a play which is not to be acted has a more than superficial resemblance to the feudal castles which were not meant for defence, and the abbeys in which there were to be no monks. The form is dictated by conditions which are no longer present to the writer's mind, and are therefore apt to be a mere encumbrance. If you build a portcullis to let in cows, not to exclude marauders, it is apt to become rather ludicrously unreal. If you know that your play is to be read and not to be seen, the whole dramatic arrangement is on the way to become a mere sham. It does not grow out of the poetical conception, but is fitted on to it in compliance with a fashion. Why bother yourself to make the actors tell a story, when it is simpler and easier to tell it yourself?

In this sense literature grows more 'artificial' as it is encumbered with more dead forms having no significance except as remnants of extinct conditions. There was a time, we are told, when art was perfectly spontaneous, and the critic was happily not existent. People sang or recited by instinct, without asking how or why. That golden age—if it ever existed since men were monkeys—had long passed away even in the beginning of modern literature. Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, probably thought about the principles of their art almost as much as their modern critics, and were very consciously trying experiments and devising new forms of expression. But as the noxious animal called a critic becomes rampant, we have a different phase, which seems to be illustrated by the case of Gray and his fellows. The distinction seems to be that the critic, as he grows more conceited, not only lays down rules for the guidance of the imaginative impulse, but begins to think himself capable of producing any given effect at pleasure. He has got to the bottom of the whole affair, and can tell you what is the chemical composition of a 'Hamlet,' or an 'Agamemnon,' or an 'Iliad,' and can therefore teach you what materials to select and how to combine them. He can give you a recipe for an epic poem, or for communicating the proper mediæval or classical flavour to your performance. If he is as clever a man as Mason, he will perhaps go a little further, and show not only how to extract the peculiar essence of a Racine or a Shakespeare, but how to mix the result so as to produce something better than either. In one respect he has clearly made an advance. He is beginning to appreciate the necessity of an historical study of different literary forms. In such quaint, old-fashioned criticism as Addison applied to Milton, where Longinus, and Aristotle, and the learned M. Bossu are invoked as final authorities about the 'fable' and the 'machinery' and the character of the hero, we perceive that the critic is still persuaded that there is one absolutely correct and infallible code of art, applicable in all times and places. Milton and Homer are regarded as belonging to the same class, and are to be judged by the same laws. The later critic, taking a wider survey and rummaging amongst the antiquarian stores to discover any pearls hidden under Dryasdust's accumulations, began to see that there were many different types of art, each of which possessed its own charm and characteristic excellence. He scarcely saw at first that each form was also the outgrowth of a particular set of conditions, and could not be produced independently of them. It seemed easy to restore anything that struck him as picturesque or graceful. He could give the old ballad air by an arbitrary combination of bad spelling, or make his ruined abbey out of a scene-painter's materials.

This early race of critics had no direct hostility to their own century or to its early classicalism. They were not iconoclasts, but only adding some new idols to the old pantheon. They aimed at being men of finer and more catholic taste than their neighbours, but wished to extend the borders of orthodoxy, to repeal the anathema which had been pronounced upon the 'Gothicism' and barbarism of our old authors, not to anathematise the existing order in revenge. They were quiet, orthodox, and substantially conservative, even if nominally Whiggish, and feared or detested revolutionary impulses of any kind from the bottom of their hearts. Such men as Mason or the Wartons tried literary experiments which are now of no great value, because they represent at best the attempts of a superficial connoisseur of talent. They did something by attracting interest to researches which produced greater results when carried on by more thorough workers in the same mine. But it is also true that they were amongst the first to fall into the blunders, since repeated on a more gigantic scale by successors, who have tried more systematically to galvanise extinct forms into a semblance of vitality.

Gray, the man of real poetic genius, was also, if his friends judged rightly, the most profound antiquarian and the most deeply read of the whole school. Many of his critics have lamented the time which he spent in making elaborate tables of chronology, in studying genealogy, and annotating Dugdale's 'Monasticon,' or Grosier's 'History of the Chinese Dynasties,' or the 'Botany' of Linnæus, when he might have been writing more elegies. There is so much to regret in the world that one would not waste much lamentation upon might-have-beens. It is a thousand pities that Burns took to drink, that Byron quarrelled with his wife, that Shelley was drowned in a squall, and that Gray wasted intellect upon labours which were absolutely fruitless, but we cannot afford to sit down and cry over it all. We must take what we can get, and be thankful. But neither can one quite accept the optimist theory that Gray really did all that he could have done under different circumstances. The fire was all but choked by the fuel, and the cloisters of Pembroke acted as a tolerably effective extinguisher upon what was left. The peculiar merit of Gray is that he had force enough, though only at the cost of slow and laborious travail, to find an utterance for genuine emotion, which was enriched instead of being made unnatural by his varied culture. The critic in him never injured the quality, but only reduced the quantity, of his work. What little he left is so perfect in its kind, so far above any contemporary performances, because he never forgot, like some learned people, that the ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors. He could rarely cast aside his reserve, or forget his academical dignity enough to speak at all; but when he does speak he always shows that the genuine depth of feeling underlies the crust of propriety. He cannot drop, nor does he desire to drop, the conventionality of style, but he makes us feel that he is a human being before he is a critic or a don. He wears stately robes because it is an ingrained habit, but he does not suppose that the tailor can make the man. In his letters this is as clear as in his poetry. His habitual reserve restrains him from sentimentalising, and he generally relieves himself by a pleasant vein of sub-acid humour. But now and then he speaks, as it were, shyly or half afraid to unbosom himself, and yet with a pathetic tenderness which conquers our sympathy. Such is the beautiful little letter to Mason on the death of his wife, or still more the letter in which he confides to his friend Nichols how he had 'discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one's whole life one can never have more than a single mother.' Sterne might have written a chapter of exquisite sentimentalising without approaching the pathetic charm of that single touch of the reserved and outwardly pedantic don. His utterance is wrung from him in spite of himself, and still half veiled by the quaintness of the phrase.

Gray's love of nature shows itself in the same way. He does not make poetical capital out of it, and indeed has an impression that it would be scarcely becoming. He would agree with Pope's contempt for 'pure description.' Fields and hills should only be admitted in the background of his dignified poetry, and just so far as they are obviously appropriate to the sentiment to be expressed. But when he does speak it is always with the most genuine feeling in every word. There is a charming little description of the Southampton Water and of a sunrise—he can 'hardly believe' that anybody ever saw a sunrise before—which are as perfect vignettes as can be put upon paper within equal limits, worth acres of more pretentious word-painting. He rather despised Mason's gardening tastes, it seems, on the ground that his sham wildernesses and waterfalls could never come up to Skiddaw and Lodore. To spend a week at Keswick is for him to be 'in Elysium.' He kept notes, too, about natural history, which seem to show as keen an interest in the behaviour of birds or insects as that of White of Selborne himself. And yet his sensibility to such impressions has scarcely left a trace in his poetry, except in the moping owl and the droning flight of the beetle in the 'Elegy.' The Spring has to appear in company with the 'rosy-bosom'd hours,' and the Muse and the insects have to preach a pathetic little sermon to justify the notice which is taken of them. Obviously this is not the kind of mountain worship which would satisfy Scott or Wordsworth. Gray was, perhaps, capable of feeling 'the impulse from the vernal wood' as truly as Wordsworth, but he would have altogether rejected the doctrine that it could teach him more than all 'the sages,' and resisted the temptation to throw his books aside except for a brief constitutional. A turn in the backs of the colleges was enough for him, as a rule, and sometimes he may thoroughly enjoy a brief holiday by the side of Derwentwater as a delightful relief after the muddy oozings of the Cam. Nobody could, in this sense, love nature with a more sincere and vivid affection; but such a love of nature is not symptomatic, as with Wordsworth, or Cowper, or Rousseau, of any preference of savage, or rustic, or simple life to the existing order of civilised society. It implied at most the development of a new taste, inadequately appreciated by the cockney men of letters of his own or the preceding generation, but not that passionate longing for relief from an effete set of conventions, poetical, political, and social, characteristic of the rising school. His head, when he travels, is evidently as full of Dugdale's 'Monasticon' as of Ossian, and he reconstructs and repeoples Netley Abbey in fancy to give a charm to the Solent. He places in it a monk, who glances at the white sail that shoots by over a stretch of blue glittering sea visible between the oak groves, and then enters and crosses himself to drive away the tempter who has thrown that distraction in his way. Gray himself pretty much shared the sentiments of his imagined monk, and only catches occasional glimpses of natural scenery from the loopholes of his retreat in an eighteenth-century cloister.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The last line is an emendation for 'Courage was in his van and Conquest in his rear,' a line still more _à la Gray_, but removed in compliance with a criticism of Gray's.

_STERNE_

'Love me, love my book' is a version of a familiar proverb which one might be slow to accept. There are, as one need hardly say, many admirable persons for whose sake one would gladly make any sacrifice of personal comfort short of that implied in a study of their works. But the converse of the statement is more nearly true. I confess that I at any rate love a book pretty much in proportion as it makes me love the author. I do not of course speak of histories or metaphysical treatises which one reads for the sake of the information or of the logical teaching; but of the imaginative books which appeal in the last resort to the sympathy between the writer and the reader. It matters not whether you are brought into contact with a man by seeing or hearing, by the printed or spoken word—the ultimate source of pleasure is the personal affinity. To read a book in the true sense—to read it, that is, not as the critic but in the spirit of enjoyment—is to lay aside for the moment one's own personality, and to become a part of the author. It is to enter the world in which he habitually lives—for each of us lives in a separate world of his own—to breathe his air, and therefore to receive pleasure and pain according as the atmosphere is or is not congenial. I may by an intellectual effort perceive the greatness of a writer whose character is essentially antagonistic to my own; but I cannot feel it as it must be felt for genuine enjoyment. The qualification must, of course, be understood that a great book really expresses the most refined essence of the writer's character. It gives the author transfigured, and does not represent all the stains and distortions which he may have received in his progress through the world. In real life we might have been repelled by Milton's stern Puritanism, or by some outbreak of rather testy self-assertion. In reading 'Paradise Lost,' we feel only the loftiness of character, and are raised and inspirited by the sentiments, without pausing to consider the particular application.

If this be true in some degree of all imaginative writers, it is especially true of humourists. For humour is essentially the expression of a personal idiosyncrasy, and a man is a humourist just because the tragic and the comic elements of life present themselves to his mind in new and unexpected combinations. The objects of other men's reverence strike him from the ludicrous point of view, and he sees something attractive in the things which they affect to despise. It is his function to strip off the commonplaces by which we have tacitly agreed to cover over our doubts and misgivings, and to explode empty pretences by the touch of a vigorous originality; and therefore it is that the great mass of mankind are apt to look upon humour of the stronger flavour with suspicion. They suspect the humourist—not without reason—of laughing at their beards. There is no saying where he may not explode next. They can enjoy the mere buffoonery which comes from high spirits combined with thoughtlessness. And they can fairly appreciate the gentle humour of Addison, or Goldsmith, or Charles Lamb, where the kindliness of the intention is so obvious that the irony is felt to be harmless. It represents only the tinge of melancholy which every good man must feel at the sight of human folly, and is used rather to light up by its gentle irradiation the amiable aspects of weakness than to unmask solemn affectation and successful hypocrisy. As soon as the humourist begins to be more pungent, and the laughter to be edged with scorn and indignation, good quiet people who do not like to be shocked begin to draw back. They are half ashamed when a Cervantes or a Montaigne, a Rabelais or a Swift, takes them into his confidence and proposes in the true humourist's spirit to but show them the ugly realities of the world or of his own mind. They shrink from the exposure which follows of the absurdity of heroes, the follies of the wise, the cruelty and injustice of the virtuous. In their hearts they take this daring frankness for sheer cynicism, and reject his proffered intimacy. They would rather overlook the hollowness of established conventions than have them ruthlessly exposed by the sudden audacity of these daring rebels. To the man, on the contrary, who is predisposed to sympathy by some affinity of character, the sudden flash of genuine feeling is infinitely refreshing. He rejoices to see theories confronted with facts, solemn conventions turned inside out, and to have the air cleared by a sudden burst of laughter, though it may occasionally have something rather savage in it. He welcomes the discovery that another man has dared to laugh at the idols before which we are all supposed to bow in solemn reverence. We love the humour in short so far as we love the character from which it flows. Everybody can love the spirit which shows itself in the 'Essays on Elia;' but you can hardly love the 'Tale of a Tub' or 'Gulliver' unless you have a sympathy with the genuine Swift which overpowers your occasional disgust at his misanthropy. But to this general rule there is one marked exception in our literature. It is impossible for any one with the remotest taste for literary excellence to read 'Tristram Shandy' or the 'Sentimental Journey' without a sense of wondering admiration. One can hardly read the familiar passages without admitting that Sterne was perhaps the greatest artist in the language. No one at least shows more inimitable felicity in producing a pungent effect by a few touches of exquisite precision. He gives the impression that the thing has been done once for all; he has hit the bull's eye round which inspiring marksmen go on blundering indefinitely without any satisfying success. Two or three of the scenes in which Uncle Toby expresses his sentiments are as perfect in their way as the half-dozen lines in which Mrs. Quickly describes the end of Falstaff, and convince us that three strokes from a man of genius may be worth more than the life's labour of the cleverest of skilled literary workmen. And it may further be said that Uncle Toby, like his kinsmen in the world of humour, is an incarnation of most lovable qualities. In going over the list—a short list in any case—of the immortal characters in fiction, there is hardly any one in our literature who would be entitled to take precedence of him. To find a distinctly superior type, we must go back to Cervantes, whom Sterne idolised and professed to take for his model. But to speak of a character as in some sort comparable to Don Quixote, though without any thought of placing him on the same level, is to admit that he is a triumph of art. Indeed, if we take the other creator of types, of whom it is only permitted to speak with bated breath, we must agree that it would be difficult to find a figure even in the Shakespearean gallery more admirable in its way. Of course, the creation of a Hamlet, an Iago, or a Falstaff implies an intellectual intensity and reach of imaginative sympathy altogether different from anything which his warmest admirers would attribute to Sterne. I only say that there is no single character in Shakespeare whom we see more vividly and love more heartily than Mr. Shandy's uncle.