Part 28

This shrewd sense gives a solidity to the verses of Béranger which the social and amusing sort of poetry commonly wants; but nothing can redeem it from the reproach of wanting _back_ thought. This is inevitable in such literature; as it professes to delineate for us the light essence of a fugitive world, it cannot be expected to dwell on those deep and eternal principles on which that world is based. It ignores them as light talk ignores them. The most opposite thing to the poetry of society is the poetry of inspiration. There exists, of course, a kind of imagination which detects the secrets of the universe—which fills us sometimes with dread, sometimes with hope—which awakens the soul, which makes pure the feelings, which explains nature, reveals what is above nature, chastens ‘the deep heart of man.’ Our senses teach us what the world is; our intuitions where it is. We see the blue and gold of the world, its lively amusements, its gorgeous if superficial splendour, its currents of men; we feel its light spirits, we enjoy its happiness; we enjoy it, and we are puzzled. What is the object of all this? Why do we do all this? What is the universe _for_? Such a book as Béranger’s suggests this difficulty in its strongest form. It embodies the essence of all that pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving, unaccountable world in which men spend their lives,—which they are compelled to live in, but which the moment you get out of it seems so odd that you can hardly believe it is real. On this account, as we were saying before, there is no book the impression of which varies so much in different moods of mind. Sometimes no reading is so pleasant; at others you half-despise and half-hate the idea of it; it seems to sum up and make clear the littleness of your own nature. Few can bear the theory of their amusements; it is essential to the pride of man to believe that he is industrious. We are irritated at literary laughter, and wroth at printed mirth. We turn angrily away to that higher poetry which gives the outline within which all these light colours are painted. From the capital of levity, and its self-amusing crowds; from the elastic _vaudeville_ and the grinning actors; from _chansons_ and _cafés_ we turn away to the solemn in nature, to the blue over-arching sky: the one remains, the many pass; no number of seasons impairs the bloom of those hues, they are as soft to-morrow as to-day. The immeasurable depth folds us in. ‘Eternity,’ as the original thinker said, ‘is everlasting.’ We breathe a deep breath. And perhaps we have higher moments. We comprehend the ‘unintelligible world;’ we see into ‘the life of things;’ we fancy we know whence we come and whither we go; words we have repeated for years have a meaning for the first time; texts of old Scripture seem to apply to _us_.... And—and—Mr. Thackeray would say, You come back into the town, and order dinner at a _restaurant_, and read Béranger once more.

And though this is true—though the author of _Le Dieu des Bonnes Gens_ has certainly no claim to be called a profound divine—though we do not find in him any proper expression, scarcely any momentary recognition, of those intuitions which explain in a measure the scheme and idea of things, and form the back-thought and inner structure of such minds as ours,—his sense and sympathy with the people enable him, perhaps compel him, to delineate those essential conditions which constitute the structure of exterior life, and determine with inevitable certainty the common life of common persons. He has no call to deal with heaven or the universe, but he knows the earth; he is restricted to the boundaries of time, but he understands time. He has extended his delineations beyond what in this country would be considered correct; _Les Cinq Étages_ can scarcely be quoted here; but a perhaps higher example of the same kind of art may be so:

‘_Le Vieux Vagabond._

‘Dans ce fossé cessons de vivre; Je finis vieux, infirme et las; Les passants vont dire: “Il est ivre.” Tant mieux! ils ne me plaindront pas. J’en vois qui détournent la tête; D’autres me jettent quelques sous. Courez vite, allez à la fête: Vieux vagabond, je puis mourir sans vous.

‘Oui, je meurs ici de vieillesse, Parce qu’on ne meurt pas de faim. J’espérais voir de ma détresse L’hôpital adoucir la fin; Mais tout est plein dans chaque hospice, Tant le peuple est infortuné. La rue, hélas! fut ma nourrice: Vieux vagabond, mourons où je suis né.

‘Aux artisans, dans mon jeune âge, J’ai dit: “Qu’on m’enseigne un métier.” “Va, nous n’avons pas trop d’ouvrage,” Répondaient-ils, “va mendier.” Riches, qui me disiez: “Travaille,” J’eus bien des os de vos repas; J’ai bien dormi sur votre paille: Vieux vagabond, je ne vous maudis pas.

‘J’aurais pu voler, moi, pauvre homme; Mais non: mieux vaut tendre la main. Au plus, j’ai dérobé la pomme Qui mûrit au bord du chemin. Vingt fois pourtant on me verrouille Dans les cachots, de par le roi. De mon seul bien on me dépouille: Vieux vagabond, le soleil est à moi.

‘Le pauvre a-t-il une patrie? Que me font vos vins et vos blés, Votre gloire et votre industrie, Et vos orateurs assemblés? Dans vos murs ouverts à ses armes Lorsque l’étranger s’engraissait, Comme un sot j’ai versé des larmes: Vieux vagabond, sa main me nourrissait.

‘Comme un insecte fait pour nuire, Hommes, que ne m’écrasiez-vous! Ah! plutôt vous deviez m’instruire A travailler au bien de tous. Mis à l’abri du vent contraire, Le ver fût devenu fourmi; Je vous aurais chéris en frère: Vieux vagabond, je meurs votre ennemi.’

Pathos in such a song as this enters into poetry. We sympathise with the essential lot of man. Poems of this kind are doubtless rare in Béranger. His commoner style is lighter and more cheerful; but no poet who has painted so well the light effervescence of light society can, when he likes, paint so well the solid, stubborn forms with which it is encompassed. The genial, firm sense of a large mind sees and comprehends all of human life, which lies within the sphere of sense. He is an epicurean, as all merely sensible men by inevitable consequence are; and as an epicurean, he prefers to deal with the superficial and gay forms of life; but he can deal with others when he chooses to be serious. Indeed, there is no melancholy like the melancholy of the epicurean. He is alive to the fixed conditions of earth, but not to that which is above earth. He muses on the temporary, as such; he admits the skeleton, but not the soul. It is wonderful that Béranger is so cheerful as he is.

We may conclude as we began. In all his works, in lyrics of levity, of politics, of worldly reflection,—Béranger, if he had not a single object, has attained a uniform result. He has given us an idea of the essential French character, such as we fancy it must be, but can never for ourselves hope to see that it is. We understand the nice tact, the quick intelligence, the gay precision; the essence of the drama we know—the spirit of what we have seen. We know his feeling:—

‘J’aime qu’un Russe soit Russe, Et qu’un Anglais soit Anglais; Si l’on est Prussien en Prusse, En France soyons Français.’

He has acted accordingly: he has delineated to us the essential Frenchman.

_MR. CLOUGH’S POEMS._[14]

(1862.)

No one can be more rigid than we are in our rules as to the publication of remains and memoirs. It is very natural that the friends of a cultivated man who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it, should desire to publish to the world the grounds of their faith, and the little symptoms of his immature excellence. But though they act very naturally, they act very unwisely. In the present state of the world there are too many half-excellent people: there is a superfluity of persons who have all the knowledge, all the culture, all the requisite taste,—all the tools, in short, of achievement, but who are deficient in the latent impulse and secret vigour which alone can turn such instruments to account. They have all the outward and visible signs of future success; they want the invisible spirit, which can only be demonstrated by trial and victory. Nothing, therefore, is more tedious or more worthless than the posthumous delineation of the possible successes of one who did not succeed. The dreadful remains of nice young persons which abound among us prove almost nothing as to the future fate of those persons, if they had survived. We can only tell that any one is a man of genius by his having produced some work of genius. Young men must practise themselves in youthful essays; and to some of their friends these may seem works not only of fair promise, but of achieved excellence. The cold world of critics and readers will not, however, think so; that world well understands the distinction between promise and performance, and sees that these laudable _juvenilia_ differ from good books as much as legitimate bills of exchange differ from actual cash.

If we did not believe that Mr. Clough’s poems, or at least several of them, had real merit, not as promissory germs, but as completed performances, it would not seem to us to be within our province to notice them. Nor, if Mr. Clough were now living among us, would he wish us to do so. The marked peculiarity, and, so to say, the _flavour_ of his mind, was a sort of truthful scepticism, which made him anxious never to overstate his own assurance of anything; which disinclined him to overrate the doings of his friends; and which absolutely compelled him to underrate his own past writings, as well as his capability for future literary success. He could not have borne to have his poems reviewed with ‘nice remarks’ and sentimental epithets of insincere praise. He was equal to his precept:—

‘Where are the great, whom thou wouldst wish to praise thee? Where are the pure, whom thou wouldst choose to love thee? Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee, Whose high commands would cheer, whose chiding raise thee? Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.’

To offer petty praise and posthumous compliments to a stoic of this temper, is like buying sugar-plums for St. Simon Stylites. We venture to write an article on Mr. Clough, because we believe that his poems depict an intellect in a state which is always natural ‘to such a being as man in such a world as the present,’ which is peculiarly natural to us just now; and because we believe that many of these poems are very remarkable for true vigour and artistic excellence, although they certainly have defects and shortcomings, which would have been lessened, if not removed, if their author had lived longer and had written more.

In a certain sense there are two great opinions about everything. There are two about the universe itself. The world as we know it is this. There is a vast, visible, indisputable sphere, of which we never lose the consciousness, of which no one seriously denies the existence, about the most important part of which most people agree tolerably and fairly. On the other hand, there is the invisible world, about which men are not agreed at all, which all but the faintest minority admit to exist somehow and somewhere, but as to the nature or locality of which there is no efficient popular demonstration, no such compulsory argument as will _force_ the unwilling conviction of any one disposed to denial. As our minds rise, as our knowledge enlarges, as our wisdom grows, as our instincts deepen, our conviction of this invisible world is daily strengthened, and our estimate of its nature is continually improved. But—and this is the most striking peculiarity of the whole subject—the more we improve, the higher we rise, the nobler we conceive the unseen world which is in us and about us, in which we live and move, the more unlike that world becomes to the world which we _do_ see. The divinities of Olympus were in a very plain and intelligible sense part and parcel of this earth; they were better specimens than could be found below, but they belonged to extant species; they were better editions of visible existences; they were like the heroines whom young men imagine after seeing the young ladies of their vicinity—they were better and handsomer, but they were of the same sort; they had never been seen, but they might have been seen any day. So too of the God with whom the Patriarch wrestled: he might have been wrestled with even if he was not; he was that sort of person. If we contrast with these the God of whom Christ speaks—the God who has not been seen at any time, whom no man hath seen or can see, who is infinite in nature, whose ways are past finding out, the transition is palpable. We have passed from gods—from an invisible world which is similar to, which is a _natural appendix_ to, the world in which we live,—and we have come to believe in an invisible world, which is altogether unlike that which we see, which is certainly not opposed to our experience, but is altogether beyond and unlike our experience; which belongs to another set of things altogether; which is, as we speak, transcendental. The ‘possible’ of early barbarism is like the reality of early barbarism; the ‘may be,’ the ‘great perhaps,’ of late civilisation is most unlike the earth, whether barbaric or civilised.

Two opinions as to the universe naturally result from this fundamental contrast. There are plenty of minds like that of Voltaire, who have simply no sense or perception of the invisible world whatever, who have no ear for religion, who are in the technical sense unconverted, whom no conceivable process could convert without altering what to bystanders and ordinary observers is their identity. They are, as a rule, acute, sensible, discerning, and humane; but the first observation which the most ordinary person would make as to them is, that they are ‘limited;’ they understand palpable existence; they elaborate it, and beautify and improve it; but an admiring bystander, who can do none of these things, who can beautify nothing, who, if he tried, would only make what is ugly uglier, is conscious of a latent superiority, which he can hardly help connecting with his apparent inferiority. We cannot write Voltaire’s sentences; we cannot make things as clear as he made them; but we do not much care for our deficiency. Perhaps we think ‘things ought not to be so plain as all that.’ There is a hidden, secret, unknown side to this universe, which these picturesque painters of the visible, these many-handed manipulators of the palpable, are not aware of, which would spoil their dexterity if it were displayed to them. Sleep-walkers can tread safely on the very edge of a precipice; but those who see, cannot. On the other hand, there are those whose minds have not only been converted, but in some sense _inverted_. They are so occupied with the invisible world as to be absorbed in it entirely; they have no true conception of that which stands plainly before them; they never look coolly at it, and are cross with those who do; they are wrapt up in their own faith as to an unseen existence; they rush upon mankind with ‘Ah, there it is! there it is!—don’t you see it?’ and so incur the ridicule of an age.

The best of us try to avoid both fates. We strive, more or less, to ‘make the best of both worlds.’ We know that the invisible world cannot be duly discerned, or perfectly appreciated. We know that we see as in a glass darkly; but still we look on the glass. We frame to ourselves some image which we know to be incomplete, which probably is in part untrue, which we try to improve day by day, of which we do not deny the defects,—but which nevertheless is our ‘all;’ which we hope, when the accounts are taken, may be found not utterly _unlike_ the unknown reality. This is, as it seems, the best religion for finite beings, living, if we may say so, on the very edge of two dissimilar worlds, on the very line on which the infinite, unfathomable sea surges up, and just where the queer little bay of this world ends. We count the pebbles on the shore, and image to ourselves as best we may the secrets of the great deep.

There are, however, some minds (and of these Mr. Clough’s was one) which will not accept what appears to be an intellectual destiny. They struggle against the limitations of mortality, and will not condescend to use the natural and needful aids of human thought. They will not _make their image_. They struggle after an ‘actual abstract.’ They feel, and they rightly feel, that every image, every translation, every mode of conception by which the human mind tries to place before itself the Divine mind, is imperfect, halting, changing. They feel, from their own experience, that there is no one such mode of representation which will suit their own minds at all times, and they smile with bitterness at the notion that they could contrive an image which will suit all other minds. They could not become fanatics or missionaries, or even common preachers without forfeiting their natural dignity, and foregoing their very essence. To cry in the streets, to uplift their voice in Israel, to be ‘pained with hot thoughts,’ to be ‘preachers of a dream,’ would reverse their whole cast of mind. It would metamorphose them into something which omits every striking trait for which they were remarked, and which contains every trait for which they were not remarked. On the other hand, it would be quite as opposite to their whole nature to become followers of Voltaire. No one knows more certainly and feels more surely that there is an invisible world, than those very persons who decline to make an image or representation of it, who shrink with a nervous horror from every such attempt when it is made by any others. All this inevitably leads to what common, practical people term a ‘curious’ sort of mind. You do not know how to describe these ‘universal negatives,’ as they seem to be. They will not fall into place in the ordinary intellectual world any how. If you offer them any known religion, they ‘won’t have that;’ if you offer them no religion, they will not have that either; if you ask them to accept a new and as yet unrecognised religion, they altogether refuse to do so. They seem not only to believe in an ‘unknown God,’ but in a God whom no man can ever know. Mr. Clough has expressed, in a sort of lyric, what may be called their essential religion:

‘O Thou whose image in the shrine Of human spirits dwells divine! Which from that precinct once conveyed, To be to outer day displayed, Doth vanish, part, and leave behind Mere blank and void of empty mind, Which wilful fancy seeks in vain With casual shapes to fill again!

O Thou, that in our bosom’s shrine Dost dwell, unknown because divine! I thought to speak, I thought to say, “The light is here,” “Behold the way,” “The voice was thus” and “Thus the word,” And “Thus I saw,” and “That I heard,”— But from the lips that half essayed The imperfect utterance fell unmade.

O Thou, in that mysterious shrine Enthroned, as I must say, divine! I will not frame one thought of what Thou mayest either be or not. I will not prate of “thus” and “so,” And be profane with “yes” and “no,” Enough that in our soul and heart Thou, whatso’er Thou mayst be, art.’

It was exceedingly natural that Mr. Clough should incline to some such creed as this, with his character and in his circumstances. He had by nature, probably, an exceedingly real mind, in the good sense of that expression and the bad sense. The actual visible world as it was, and as he saw it, exercised over him a compulsory influence. The hills among which he had wandered, the cities he had visited, the friends whom he knew,—these were his world. Many minds of the poetic sort easily melt down these palpable facts into some impalpable ether of their own. To such a mind as Shelley’s the ‘solid earth’ is an immaterial fact; it is not even a cumbersome difficulty—it is a preposterous imposture. Whatever may exist, all that _clay_ does not exist; it would be too absurd to think so. Common persons can make nothing of this dreaminess; and Mr. Clough, though superficial observers set him down as a dreamer, could not make much either. To him, as to the mass of men, the vulgar, outward world was a primitive fact. ‘Taxes _is_ true,’ as the miser said. Reconcile what you have to say with green peas, for green peas are certain; such was Mr. Clough’s idea. He could not dissolve the world into credible ideas and then believe those ideas, as many poets have done. He could not catch up a creed as ordinary men do. He had a _straining_, inquisitive, critical mind; he scrutinised every idea before he took it in; he did not allow the moral forces of life to act as they should; he was not content to gain a belief ‘by going on living.’ He said,

‘_Action will furnish belief_; but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know.’

He felt the coarse facts of the plain world so thoroughly that he could not readily take in anything, which did not seem in accordance with them and like them. And what common idea of the invisible world seems in the least in accordance with them or like them?

A journal-writer in one of his poems has expressed this:

‘Comfort has come to me here in the dreary streets of the city, Comfort—how do you think?—with a barrel-organ to bring it. Moping along the streets, and cursing my day as I wandered, All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune. Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying. Ah, there is some great truth, partial very likely, but needful, Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of the English psalm-tune: Comfort it was at least; and I must take without question Comfort, however it come, in the dreary streets of the city.

‘What with trusting myself, and seeking support from within me, Almost I could believe I had gained a religious assurance, Formed in my own poor soul a great moral basis to rest on. Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it factitious entirely; I refuse, reject, and put it utterly from me; I will look straight out, see things, not try to evade them; Fact shall be fact for me, and the Truth the Truth as ever, Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and doubtful.— Off, and depart to the void, thou subtle, fanatical tempter!’