Part 4

The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.

All these things Dunoyer's careful book upon two men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research which dignifies the modern French School of History, has suggested to my mind.

Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.

ON A POET

The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the New Forest saw before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very clear line of the Island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the English sea.

For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use this metaphor) was the landscape and the air of England--especially of South England and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern Avon of Wiltshire to the cliffs of the Island which a man surveys from the ridges of which I speak.

Let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to Europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. There are indeed some classics--one might count them upon the fingers of both hands--which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer. But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion--and so sincere while they remain--that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire, and with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthy things are moulded and informed by the process of time. Let us attempt then to stand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter) to be judged in general terms, but in particular--since writing is like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. A man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he _was_, what his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of _largesse_ would have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness; why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed.

If we so examine Swinburne we shall, as I have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea. In this Swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even neglect his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the Eighteenth Century, for instance), in such a time the influence of Swinburne's work will weaken too.

Next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression, and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always known. But it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his Poetic Art as the chief rule to consider "Music and always Music," was, in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. Sense is not sacrificed wholly in any place, it is but rarely imperilled even by this motive in Swinburne. But one feels that reason has in the construction no divine place, but is subsidiary--as it is subsidiary in unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it is subsidiary (since one should be just even in judging extravagance) in all the major emotions of the human soul: in love, in combat, in despair. And in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to music, is to be discovered the source of another characteristic in the work: the perpetual repetition. Two men, both sedulous and scholarly admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory judgments that Swinburne was unequalled in the range of his vocabulary, and that Swinburne was, quite beyond parallel, repetitive. Each judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer as a paradox or a truism. Yet both are true, and both have an illuminating meaning when his work is considered. That vast vocabulary (and if you will be at the pains to note word upon word or to make a short concordance you will see that the word "vast" is just)--that vast vocabulary, I say, proceeded from the necessity of satisfying the ear. An exact shade of length and emphasis were needed; they must be exactly filled, and some one word out of the thousands upon thousands which the numerically richest language of our time possesses must be hit upon to do the work. This surely was the source of that wide range. So also was it the source of the repetition.

Repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. It is deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary and an odious symptom of fatigue. The repetitions of Catullus in their way, the repetitions of the Hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be; or rather (for their voluntary quality is obvious) they were exactly designed to produce a particular effect, and did produce it; the repetition of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be neglected. Swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor of the other; they were the recurrence of a set of words or of single words which suited the sound in his head. And just as to fit exactly a void of known form one word exactly fitting must be found (fitting not reason but the ear) so those which had been found to fit particular rhythms must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool and that to do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the past. The word in Swinburne was subordinate.

It is a commonplace, and a true one--to pass to another matter--that the English writers of the later Nineteenth Century (and not the writers alone) reposed upon the Jacobean translation of the Old Testament. That unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental characters in which appear more largely with every process of retreat from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous effect. Swinburne is as full of it as Kipling; the ready-made phrases of weary political discussion are full of it. The whole national life, in so far as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it. Many of Swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the English Psaltry, and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character or even a biblical transcription. Herein, again, as in that effect of landscape and of air, he is national in every particle of his poetic being; and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him, and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics of his life and of his opinion. The man who in youth was ardent for a liberty which leant much nearer to anarchy than to the republic, who ranged, as the fashion was over all Europe, to find subjects for that mood, in age perpetually sounded a note which had in it something exaggerated of fury and of protest against whatever might be thought to be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the national life. Yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either field; the passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn from the untrammelled nature about him which ran through him and made him write. The convinced and extreme political insistence of his later verse was drawn from the same source. It was still the surroundings of his own land that compelled him.

There is one last thing to be said: the work has been called pagan. It is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. Those who attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan world. By pagan we mean that long, long manhood of Europe (a thousand years long to our knowledge--how much longer we know not) in which the mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the Mediterranean. Swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the North. The sea of the Atalanta in Calydon is an English sea. All that attitude in him was reaction and a protest. It was full of yearning: now pagan paganism was not full of this. The very earliest moment in which a protest of that kind is to be found is the Fourth Century. For the transformation between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our race in the first four centuries of the Roman Empire a yearning which must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted an assuagement of it or have passionately protested against that assuagement, or have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than profoundly influenced by it. What is called "paganism" since that change came is not of marble and is not calm: it is a product, not of the old time, but of the new.

ON A PROPHET

Years ago in the county of Kent a gentleman of means, culture and lineage begged me to make the acquaintance of a certain neighbour of his who dwelt in a little cottage called (by the wrath of God) "The Hollies"--and, indeed, a holly-tree of no small size, but one only, grew beside his door. This cottage was cubical in formation with the exception of the roof, which was a pyramid, and it was built of brick with the exception of the roof, which was of slate. Its name, "The Hollies," was painted outside upon the gate. This is all I have to say about the cottage.

The man who dwelt within it came that very evening to dine at the Squire's, and was what you will call obviously a gentleman. He was not a gentleman in any cryptic or mystical sense; he was not the Adumbration of a gentleman; he was not the Platonic Idea of a gentleman; he was not the Gentleman used loosely as a term for a good man; he was not rich; he spoke perfectly; he was very stupid. Much more than this, he was a Prophet.

The learned have observed (or at least the only ones among them who count have persistently observed) that it is in the nature of barbaric peoples to accept whatever is told them with sufficient assurance, conviction and simplicity, but especially if it regard the future. On this account (the learned say) he who will prophesy with flame shall certainly among barbarians become a founder. Now it is sufficiently certain that this type of man, so successful among the primitive, and perhaps also among the decayed, continues through all ages and in all societies, though varying perhaps in proportion, and certainly varying enormously in the source of his information according to the generation in which he lives, is here to-day; and this man was one of him.

At first I did not know in what a Presence I stood--or rather sat--for he was very modest, if indeed it be modest to make no noise in the eating of soup, to frown heavily, and never to speak a word. There were but three of us there, the Squire, myself, _et Rex Meus_ the Prophet. Having seen little of the world I much desired to hear what he would say; although he was still what politicians call young he seemed old to me, because he had a full beard, and because life had already wearied him, a thing incomprehensible to boys. The Squire watched him with a good deal of admiration and of fear, until at last he said, "There won't be any war." Here let me tell you that these words were pronounced in the year 1888, and a little before the bursting of the spring upon the Kentish Weald.

Nor was there one. There was no war about that time.

Those who read these lines, I am quite certain, will find them a shock. We live in a time when war is so struck with doom that it is putting on speed, as it were, to make a fine ending. War is out of our manners; we can tolerate it no more. Every year is a new reconciliation, and a new treaty in the federation of all mankind except those who have neglected their armament, and in general we are forgetting war. But there have been wars, and of some calibre--hefty and noisy wars since you and I were boys. Now in 1888 there was no war. So the Prophet was right.

The Squire was interested and humble, and being a plain man he asked why there would be no war, for it was imagined at that moment by eight or nine newspaper men that some war or other was going to break out; but what war I forget after such a lapse of time. The Prophet was a true prophet, by which I do not mean that he prophesied truth, but only that he was in keeping with all that I have ever read of his breed; he shook his doormat of a head and wagged his beard, smiling, as bearded men do, with the eyes only, and would give no reasons; and, indeed, there was no war. But as the dinner went on he talked of other things; he prophesied a Parliament in Dublin "within ten years," and, new as I was to the world, I could but note how much of his conversation worked within fixed frames and limits, as should beseem a prophet. Some things were going to happen "within five years," some "within twenty years," some--and the leap was indeed splendid--"within fifty years." Among these last I dimly remember was the spread of a universal language, which I think he called "Anglo-Saxon"; and there was something or other about the birth-rate which escapes me now, but which I can remember to have appalled me at the time, for it was a destruction of all I loved and revered in Europe.

The dinner went on, and as he got more food and wine into him he prophesied less--for fasting is the mother of prophecy. He was still assertive, he was still sure; his talk was still of public men, of continents, of armies, of battle and of sudden death, but the future entered less into it, and the present more. He became not so much a prophet, but, if I may use the word quite gently, more of a liar. I can remember vividly now, after so many years, how he stood in the hall of that great house, all wrapped up to go through the park to "The Hollies." I looked at his large frame and masterful demeanour. I remembered all that he had said, both of things distant from me and of things to come, and I admired such eyes in the brain.

It was ten years before I met him again. I am wrong--it was nine. I met him upon a steamboat in the North Sea, and he remembered me. We looked over the side of the ship and talked about America and Spain. As to the chance of war he waved it all away with his hand. It might come or it might not [the truth was, it was too near for his type of vision], but what would come _after_, whether the war was fought or not, was quite clear. "America," he said, "would learn that she could fight a European Power." It seems that having learnt this, all sorts of things would happen, and there would be banging and bingeing to some tune. The earning of one's living, the weight and dullness which come upon the mind from seeing too many places and knowing too many men, left my impression less vivid. For, as it says in the song--

Ki moulte y resve mainte a vu: Ki pleure trop a trop vescu.

But anyhow there remains to me the impression of that conflict between the Old World and the New which I was destined to experience, and which I in no way desired. He had been following French politics also, and he told me--not by way of prophecy, but as a revelation of inner truth--why it was that Germany had not declared war upon France and taken Paris in the autumn of the preceding year. I talked to him, therefore, of the 75mm. gun. He did not shirk it. He talked of it as one who knew; and as I heard him my mind grew aged. I left him in a port of Holland after luncheon, and the last I remember of him on that occasion was a slight gesture of his from the wrist only (for he was a dignified man) explaining how all that I saw, the port, the shipping, the docks, everything, would be German "within ten years."

I met him again several times in the succeeding waves of our century. I met him just before the Boer War, and a little after Colenso. He prophesied only upon one matter upon these occasions, and that was the length of the conflict, which, with an exact discrimination, he invariably placed within "six months" of the day upon which he addressed me, and the third time he assured me of this thing was in the month of February 1902, and that time he was right.

Since then I have met him continually, for he knows less people than he used to do, and he has fallen into a routine of old friends. The Squire is dead, and he only goes down to "The Hollies" now and again. It is his pleasure still to foresee. The war over, he bought Consols. He was careful to explain that he was no fool. They were at 97. They would fall, of course; he was not buying for immediate rise. In part of this anticipation he was not disappointed, but in another part he was. He was in a fume for some little time about an approaching war with Russia upon the frontiers of India, and again he would return to that recurrent theme of his life, the destruction of all limitrophous civilisations by the organised might of Germany. But his chief concern was the march of China upon Europe, which, as he clearly foresaw, could not be long delayed. "That," he said, with a sort of Christian enthusiasm, "would bind us all together once more!"

Whether it be a labour to prophesy or no, his hair had certainly grown white in the pursuit of his vocation, and when I last saw him (which was a little after the Epiphany in Rugby Station, waiting for the train to Carlisle) we spent ten minutes together, and he told me with unabated gladness that war would break out in the Balkans "when the snow melted." I asked him at what time this change came about in the Balkans, but he did not know.

ON BELIEVING

Whenever one studies, even superficially, any generation of men who have acted in the past and of whose actions there is some considerable record, that, I think, which most strikes the curious student is the nature of the things which were taken for granted during the period.

Very much might be written--whole books--upon the effects which this has upon history. Innumerable points arise as one considers it. For instance, there is no case I can remember of the things which were taken for granted existing in the same plenitude of record as the other things of history. The men of the Ninth Century did not sit down formally and tell us that they looked at the world in such and such a fashion. We have to glean and to pick out their standpoint by working parallel, noting unconscious expressions and side effects. It is like watching a man speaking on some matter of minor interest and trying to define through his tone and gesture the standpoint from which not only that minor interest, but every other, is regarded by his mind.