Part 9
The poet Milton, according to this conception, has best expressed the nobility of the English mind, and in doing a work quite different from any of his peers has marked a sort of standard from which the ideal of English letters does not depart.
Two things are remarkable with regard to English literature, first that it came late into the field of European culture, and secondly that it has proved extraordinarily diversified. The first point is immaterial to my subject; the second is material to it; for it might be superficially imagined that such bewildering complexity and, as it were, lawless exuberance of method and of matter would never find a pole, nor ever be symbolised by but one aspect of it. Yet Milton has found that pole, and Milton's work has afforded that symbol.
In any one moment of English literary history you may contrast two wholly different masterpieces from the end of the Fourteenth to the end of the Eighteenth Centuries. After the first third of the Nineteenth, indeed, first-rate work falls into much more commonplace groove, and it is perceptible that the best verse and the best prose written in English are narrowing in their vocabulary, and, in what is far more important, their way of looking at life. The newspapers have levelled the writers down as with a trowel; you have not side by side the coarse and the refined, the amazing and the steadfast, the grotesque and the terrible; but in all those earlier centuries you had side by side manner and thought so varied that a remote posterity will wonder how such a wealth could have arisen upon so small an area of national soil. _Piers Plowman_ and the _Canterbury Tales_ are two worlds, and a third world separate from each is the world of those lovely lyrics which are now so nearly forgotten, but which the populace, spontaneously engendered and sang throughout the close of the Middle Ages. The Sixteenth Century was perhaps less modulated, and flowed, especially towards its end, in one simpler stream, but in the Seventeenth what a growth of variety from the Jacobean translation of the Bible to Swift. The very decade in which _Paradise Lost_ was published corresponded with the first riot of the Restoration.
If we look closely into all this diversity we can find two common qualities which mark out all English work in a particular manner from the work of other nations. To qualities of this kind, which are like colours rather than like measurable things, it is difficult to give a title; I will hazard, however, these two words, "Adventure" and "Mystery." There is no English work of any period, especially is there no English work of any period later than the middle of the Sixteenth Century, which has not got in it all those emotions which proceed from the love of Adventure. How notable it is, for instance, that Landscape appears and reappears in every diverse form of English verse. Even in Shakespeare you have it now and then as vivid as a little snapshot, and it runs unceasingly through every current of the stream; it glows in Gray's _Elegy_, and it is the binding element of _In Memoriam_. It saves the earlier work of Wordsworth, it permeates the large effect of Byron, and those two poems, which to-day no one reads, _Thalaba_ and _The Curse of Kehama_, are alive with it. It is the very inspiration of Keats and of Coleridge. Now this hunger for Landscape and this vivid sense of it are but aspects of Adventure; for the men who thus feel and speak are the men who, desiring to travel to unknown places, are in a mood for sudden revelations of sea and land. So a living poet has written--
When all the holy primal part of me Arises up within me to salute The glorious vision of the earth and sea That are the kindred of the destitute....
The note of those four lines is the note of Landscape in English letters, and that note is the best proof and effect of Adventure. If any man is too poor to travel (though I cannot imagine any man so poor), or if he is constrained from travel by the unhappy necessities of a slavish life, he can always escape through the door of English letters. Let such a one read the third and fourth books of _Paradise Lost_ before he falls asleep and he will find next morning that he has gone on a great journey. Milton by his perpetual and ecstatic delight in these visions of the world was the normal and the central example of an English poet.
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'd Hangs in the clouds....
or, again,
.... Hesperus, that led The Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon, Rising in cloudy majesty, at length Apparent Queen, unveiled....
He everywhere, and in a profusion that is, as it were, rebellious against his strict discipline of words, sees and expresses the picture of this world.
If Landscape be the best test of this quality of adventure in English poets and the Milton as their standard, so the mystic character of English verse appears in them and in him. No period could be so formal as to stifle or even to hide this demand of English writers for Mystery and for emotions communicable only by an art allied to music. The passion is so strong that many ill-acquainted with foreign literature will deny such literature any poetic quality because they do not find in it the unmistakable thrill which the English reader demands of a poet as he demands it of a musician. As Landscape might be taken for the best test of Adventure, so of this appetite for the Mysterious the best measurable test is rhythm. Highly accentuated rhythm and emphasis are the marks and the concomitants of that spirit. As powerful a line as any in the language for suddenly evoking intense feeling by no perceptible artifice is that line in _Lycidas_--
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
I confess I can never read that line but I remember a certain river of twenty years ago, nor does revisiting that stream and seeing it again with my eyes so powerfully recall what once it was to those who loved it as does this deathless line. It seems as though the magical power of the poet escaped the effect of time in a way that the senses cannot, and a man curious in such matters might find the existence of such gifts to be a proof of human immortality. The pace at which Milton rides his verse, the strong constraint within which he binds it, deeply accentuate this power of rhythm and the mystical effect it bears. Now you would say a trumpet, now a chorus of human voices, now a flute, now a single distant song. From the fortieth to the fifty-fifth line of the third book _Paradise Lost_ has all the power and nature of a solemn chant; the large complaint in it is the complaint of an organ, and one may say indeed in this connection that only one thing is lacking in all the tones Milton commanded; he disdained intensity of grief as most artists will disdain intensity of terror. But whereas intensity of terror is no fit subject for man's pen, and has appealed only to the dirtier of our little modern fellows, intense grief has been from the very beginning thought a just subject for verse.
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloenta Ampyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmên Krêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê Aphroditê Hêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' Hektôr Ek domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
Milton will have none of it. It is the absence of that note which has made so many hesitate before the glorious achievement of _Lycidas_, and in this passage which I quote, where Milton comes nearest to the cry of sorrow, it is still no more than what I have called it, a solemn chant.
.... Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men Cut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair, Presented with a Universal blanc Of Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd, And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather thou, Celestial light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.
There is one other character in Milton wherein he stands not so much for English Letters as for a feature in English nature as a whole, which is a sort of standing apart of the individual. Where this may be good and where evil it is not for a short appreciation to discuss. It is profoundly national and nowhere will you see it more powerfully than in the verse of this man. Of his life we all know it to be true, but I say it appears even in his verse. There is a sort of _noli me tangere_ in it all as though he desired but little friendship and was not broken by one broken love, and contemplated God and the fate of his own soul in a lonely manner; of all the things he drew the thing he could never draw was a collectivity.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
What a great thing it is in this perplexed, confused, and, if not unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is cleanly itself! What a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. Hans Christian Andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition is justified. Of men for whom so much and more is said by their contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? Contemporary praise has a way of gathering dross. We all know why. There is the fear of this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance philosophy of the moment over-weighing the praise-giver. In a word, perhaps not half-a-dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed tradition. It is not to be pretended that according to that test so must men be judged. Many of the very greatest, Hugo for instance, and in his line, Huxley (a master of English); or, again, to go further back, the great Byron, would not pass the test.
Things have been said about most men, great or little, in our fevered time, so exaggerated, so local and so lacking balance, whether of experience or of the fear of posterity, that contemporary opinion should not be allowed by its misfortunes to weigh them down. But a man has a quality of his own when he is so made that even his contemporaries do him justice, and that was the case with Hans Christian Andersen. I will bargain that if our letters survive five hundred years, this excellent writer will quietly survive. Even the French may incorporate him. And next it is the business of one who praises so much to ask in what the excellence of this writer consists. It is threefold: in the first place, he always said what he thought; in the second place, he was full of all sorts of ways of saying it; and, in the third place, he said only what he had to say.
To say what one thinks, that is, to tell the truth, is so exceedingly rare that one may almost call it a grace in a man. Just those same manifold strings which pull contemporary criticism hither and thither, and which have made me suggest above that contemporary criticism commonly belittles a man in the long run, just those same strings pull at every writer to make him conform to what he knows to be false in his time. But some men--with limitations, it is true, and only by choosing a particular framework--manage to tell the truth all their lives; those men, if they have other literary qualities, are secure of the future.
And this leads me to the second point, which is that Andersen could not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a hundred different things. Now this character has been much exaggerated among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. It is not the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing. There is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. This quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called "characters"; and whether we recognise those "characters" as portraits drawn from the real world (they are such in Balzac), or as figments (they are such in Dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such in Shakespeare and in Homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature to the creative power.
Lastly, I say that Andersen said what he had to say and no more. This quality in writers is not restraint--a futile word dear to those who cannot write--it is rather a sort of chastity in the pen. The writer of this kind is one who unconsciously does not add; if any one were to ask him why he should not add an ornament or anything supposititious, he would be bewildered and perhaps might answer: "Why should I?" The instinct behind it is that which produces all terseness, all exactitude, and all economy in style.
Andersen, then, had all those three things which make a great writer, and a very great writer he is.
Note that he chose his framework, or, at any rate, that he was persuaded to it. He could not have been so complete had he not addressed himself to children, and it is his glory that he is read in childhood. There is no child but can read Hans Christian Andersen, and I at least have come across no man who, having read him in childhood, does not continue to read him throughout life. He wrote nothing that was not for the enlivening or the sustenance or the guiding of the human soul; he wrote nothing that suggested questions only. If one may speak of him in terms a trifle antiquated (or rather for the moment old-fashioned), he was instinct with charity, and therefore he is still full of life.
Having said so much of Andersen in general, something should be said of him in particular. He was Northern; you always feel as you read him that if his scene is laid in the open air, the air is fresh and often frosty; that if he is talking indoors the room is cosy and often old. Certain passions which the North lacks are lacking in him, both upon their good and upon their evil side. He is never soldierly, and he is never revengeful; he is never acute with the desire for life, but, again, he is never envious. Those who read him and who are also Northern may well be in love with Denmark. It is a triumph of our civilisation that this little land, quite outside the limits of the Roman Empire, not riven by any of the Empires' great vital resurrections, undisturbed by the vision of the Twelfth and of the Thirteenth Centuries, spared from the march of Napoleon's armies, should be so completely European. What could be more European to-day than that well-organised, contented, peasant State? It is a good irony to put against the blundering prophecies of barbaric people that beyond the Germanies this secure and happy State exists. One might put it in a phrase a little too epigrammatic and say that as one reads Hans Christian Andersen one remembers Elsinore, and one recalls the good architecture of Copenhagen. If ever any misfortune again shall threaten that State, and if barbarism attempts to play the fool with it, something that really is the conscience of Europe and not the empty and sham organisation to which that phrase is too often prostituted will arise and protect the Danes.
THE CHRISTMAS OF 1808
No British Army in force has capitulated in Europe for many generations. It is the peculiar historical position of this country. That historical fact lends to the common history of the schools and universities an attitude towards military history in general which is commonly distorted, but it lends to the policy of the country as a whole a confident tradition, the strength and value of which it is impossible to exaggerate.
The nearest touch to such a disaster, if we except the sieges, was passed during the days in which these words are written and read; the close thing came about in the days just before and just after Christmas, one hundred and two years ago. I will attempt to describe as simply as I can the nature of that adventure.
It must first of all be premised that, in the words of Napier, position determines the fate of armies. No truth is more apparent to the soldier, none more forgotten by the civilian--and more especially by the civilian touched with the unmilitary vice of Jingoism. Position determines the fate of armies, and, armaments being supposedly equal, he is a great or a fortunate general who, in the critical moment, has so arranged matters that disposition is upon his side, or who by some stroke of luck is in that advantage. There are exceptions to this truth. Certain decisive battles (though very few) have utterly determined campaigns; and among these battles some, again, have been won at a drive, and by a sort of impetus, the factor of position being so simple as to be negligible, or so equally balanced as to advantage neither side and be eliminated. But, as a rule, it is true even of decisive actions, that position is the determining factor. It is necessarily true of the strategy of a campaign, and it is with this consideration that I return to the particular crisis of the British Army at the close of December 1808.
Sir John Moore, as every one knows, had raided right into the North of Spain, with the object of withdrawing the pressure of the French upon the South of that country. It was in the South that French ambition had found its first check, and that Napoleon's plan had been warped by the unexpected and, as it were, impossible capitulation of Baylen. Close upon twenty thousand of the French forces had there laid down their arms. The Emperor came in person to restore the fortunes of his house; it was in the South that resistance could best be expected; by the occupation of the South that he might put himself at ease over the whole territory, and from the South that the English operations were destined to draw him.
On the 21st of December, a Wednesday, Lord Paget, with the Tenth and Fifteenth Hussars, surprised an advanced body of French Cavalry at Sahagun. It was the extreme limit of Moore's great raid; the town was occupied, and all the Thursday, all the Friday, Moore halted there with his force of some twenty-three thousand and sixty guns. He was nearly two hundred miles from the port on the sea-coast, whereto he must retire if he would escape. In front of him was Soult, against whom it was his business, if he were undisturbed, to march from Sahagun immediately; but upon his right, nearly as far off as the sea, though not quite so far, a matter of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy miles, Napoleon, at Madrid, commanded the best and the largest of the armies in Spain. Sixty thousand men, with a hundred and fifty guns, lay at the gates of Madrid, and during those same hours in which the British Army had marched into Sahagun, Napoleon's great force began to move northward over the Guadarrama.
I will not here describe that famous march: I have done so elsewhere at greater length: but the reader, to appreciate the conditions of this great duel, must imagine a country denuded and largely mountainous, deep in snow, and subject throughout those days to intolerable weather; and the race upon the issue of which depended so many and such final things was run at a time and in a place when one would have thought that no man could be abroad. But the protagonists of the Revolutionary wars were not men like ourselves.
Christmas Day fell upon the Sunday. Moore had got ahead of his supplies; they had reached him on the Friday, and on the Saturday, Christmas Eve, he had intended to go forward and attack the opponent before him. But on that same Friday when, in the night, his Infantry were already beginning to march eastward, he heard of Napoleon's amazing feat; he knew that he had succeeded in drawing the great commander northward, but he knew also, since that commander could work miracles, that the distance separating them would be crossed with a swiftness not to be measured by the old rules of war, and that the vast force three times his own would, if he hesitated, be found holding the snow-blocked roads between his position and the sea. The order to advance was cancelled, the order to retreat was given. By Christmas Eve Baird and Hope were on the line of the Esla River; on Christmas Day, Sunday, the troops were passing that obstacle. On Monday, the 26th, the baggage and the last of the army, under Moore's own eye, were crossing by the bridge of Castro Gonzalo before Benevente, and the trick was done. There was a thick fog, the passage was far slower than the strained intelligence of the imperilled commander had designed. On that same day, the 26th, Napoleon was at Tordesillas, one long day's march away from the Esla River. He had covered in that dash of three days and a half a hundred and twenty miles, but he was too late. He was too late by half a day.
In the dark and storm-driven night of that Monday the extreme van of Napoleon's horse rode up to the bridge of Castro Gonzalo. They were unsupported, of course, and rode far before the army to discover; but, though it was not contact in any serious sense, there is something very worthily dramatic in the appearance of those tall horsemen suddenly in the night through the blinding snow, come up just too late to do more than watch the escape of Moore's column.
By the next day the purpose of the British commander was achieved: Napoleon knew he could no longer intercept: the bridge was destroyed. The opportunity of recording the envelopment and destruction of a British force was lost to Napoleon; he abandoned to Soult the further long pursuit, which is called in history the retreat upon Corunna.
ON COMMUNICATIONS
There is nothing more curious in the material change which is passing so rapidly over the modern world than what I may call the Romance of Communication.
With the Romance of Discovery every one is thoroughly acquainted. The modern world is saturated with that form of romance; it has permeated all our literature and is still the theme of most of our books of travel. But like all things which have attained a literary position, the Romance of Discovery already belongs to the past. Not that nothing remains to be discovered: on the contrary, the modern world has hardly yet begun to appreciate how it may penetrate from detail to detail and find perpetually something new in that which it thinks it knows, but the great broad unknown spaces, the horizons quite new to Europeans which break upon them for the first time, are now no longer left to the explorer. With the romance of communication, luckily for us, there is another, a newer and, in a certain sense, a much wider field. Many who have travelled largely have felt this, but it has not yet, I think, been expressed.