Part 5

The ten syllables are there all right, but except in the last line there is no recognizable rhythm of any kind, whether regular or irregular. But when Surrey comes to the second stanza—

Auream quisquis mediocritatem Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda Sobrius aula—

some lucky accident inspires him with the genius to translate in these words:

Whoso gladly halseth the golden mean, Void of dangers advisedly hath his home; Not with loathsome muck as a den unclean, Nor palace like, whereat disdain may gloam.

Not only is this a very good translation, but it is also a very interesting and subtle metrical experiment. What could be more felicitous than this stanza made up of three trochaic lines, quickened by beautiful dactylic resolutions, and a final iambic line of regular measure—the recognized tonic chord that brings the music to its close? And yet the tunelessness of the first stanza is enough to prove that Surrey’s achievement is as much a product of accident as the foam on the jaws of Apelles’ dog. He was doing his best all the time to write decasyllabics with the normal iambic beat of the last line. His failures to do so were sometimes unconscious strokes of genius.

XII: POLITE CONVERSATION

There are some people to whom the most difficult to obey of all the commandments is that which enjoins us to suffer fools gladly. The prevalence of folly, its monumental, unchanging permanence and its almost invariable triumph over intelligence are phenomena which they cannot contemplate without experiencing a passion of righteous indignation or, at the least, of ill-temper. Sages like Anatole France, who can probe and anatomize human stupidity and still remain serenely detached, are rare. These reflections were suggested by a book recently published in New York and entitled _The American Credo_. The authors of this work are those _enfants terribles_ of American criticism, Messrs. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. They have compiled a list of four hundred and eighty-eight articles of faith which form the fundamental Credo of the American people, prefacing them with a very entertaining essay on the national mind:

Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive moments. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos.

To look through the articles of the Credo is to realize that there is a good deal of truth in this statement. Such beliefs as the following—not by any means confined to America alone—are probably at least as old as the Great Pyramid:

That if a woman, about to become a mother, plays the piano every day, her baby will be born a Victor Herbert.

That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great unhappiness.

That it is bad luck to kill a spider.

That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness.

That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have a happy married life.

That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they are to-day.

And most of the others in the collection, albeit clothed in forms distinctively contemporary and American, are simply variations on notions as immemorial.

Inevitably, as one reads _The American Credo_, one is reminded of an abler, a more pitiless and ferocious onslaught on stupidity, I mean Swift’s “_Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in the Best Companies of England_. In three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff, Esq.” I was inspired after reading Messrs. Mencken and Nathan’s work to refresh my memories of this diabolic picture of the social amenities. And what a book it is! There is something almost appalling in the way it goes on and on, a continuous, never-ceasing stream of imbecility. Simon Wagstaff, it will be remembered, spent the best part of forty years in collecting and digesting these gems of polite conversation:

I can faithfully assure the reader that there is not one single witty phrase in the whole Collection which has not received the Stamp and Approbation of at least One Hundred Years, and how much longer it is hard to determine; he may therefore be secure to find them all genuine, sterling and authentic.

How genuine, sterling and authentic Mr. Wagstaff’s treasures of polite conversation are is proved by the great number of them which have withstood all the ravages of time, and still do as good service to-day as they did in the early seventeen-hundreds or in the days of Henry VIII.: “Go, you Girl, and warm some fresh Cream.” “Indeed, Madam, there’s none left; for the Cat has eaten it all.” “I doubt it was a Cat with Two Legs.”

“And, pray, What News, Mr. Neverout?” “Why, Madam, Queen Elizabeth’s dead.” (It would be interesting to discover at exactly what date Queen Anne took the place of Queen Elizabeth in this grand old repartee, or who was the monarch referred to when the Virgin Queen was still alive. Aspirants to the degree of B. or D.Litt. might do worse than to take this problem as a subject for their thesis.)

Some of the choicest phrases have come down in the world since Mr. Wagstaff’s day. Thus, Miss Notable’s retort to Mr. Neverout, “Go, teach your Grannam to suck Eggs,” could only be heard now in the dormitory of a preparatory school. Others have become slightly modified. Mr. Neverout says, “Well, all Things have an End, and a pudden has two.” I think we may flatter ourselves that the modern emendation, “except a roly-poly pudding, which has two,” is an improvement.

Mr. Wagstaff’s second dialogue, wherein he treats of Polite Conversation at meals, contains more phrases that testify to the unbroken continuity of tradition than either of the others. The conversation that centres on the sirloin of beef is worthy to be recorded in its entirety:

LADY SMART. Come, Colonel, handle your Arms. Shall I help you to some Beef?

COLONEL. If your Ladyship please; and, pray, don’t cut like a Mother-in-law, but send me a large Slice; for I love to lay a good Foundation. I vow, ’tis a noble Sir-loyn.

NEVEROUT. Ay; here’s cut and come again.

MISS. But, pray; why is it call’d a Sir-loyn?

LORD SMART. Why, you must know that our King James the First, who lov’d good Eating, being invited to Dinner by one of his Nobles, and seeing a large Loyn of Beef at his Table, he drew out his Sword, and, in a Frolic, knighted it. Few people know the Secret of this.

How delightful it is to find that we have Mr. Wagstaff’s warrant for such gems of wisdom as, “Cheese digests everything except itself,” and “If you eat till you’re cold, you’ll live to grow old”! If they were a hundred years old in his day they are fully three hundred now. Long may they survive! I was sorry, however, to notice that one of the best of Mr. Wagstaff’s phrases has been, in the revolution of time, completely lost. Indeed, before I had read Aubrey’s “Lives,” Lord Sparkish’s remark, “Come, box it about; ’twill come to my Father at last,” was quite incomprehensible to me. The phrase is taken from a story of Sir Walter Raleigh and his son.

Sir Walter Raleigh [says Aubrey] being invited to dinner to some great person where his son was to goe with him, he sayd to his son, “Thou art expected to-day at dinner to goe along with me, but thou art so quarrelsome and affronting that I am ashamed to have such a beare in my company.” Mr. Walter humbled himselfe to his father and promised he would behave himselfe mighty mannerly. So away they went. He sate next to his father and was very demure at least halfe dinner time. Then sayd he, “I this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies, but by the instigation of the devill, went....”

At this point Mr. Clark, in his edition, suppresses four lines of Aubrey’s text; but one can imagine the sort of thing Master Walter said.

Sir Walter, being strangely surprized and putt out of countenance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, “Box about: ’twill come to my father anon.” ’Tis now a common-used proverb.

And so it still deserves to be; how, when and why it became extinct, I have no idea. Here is another good subject for a thesis.

There are but few things in Mr. Wagstaff’s dialogue which appear definitely out of date and strange to us, and these super-annuations can easily be accounted for. Thus the repeal of the Criminal Laws has made almost incomprehensible the constant references to hanging made by Mr. Wagstaff’s personages. The oaths and the occasional mild grossnesses have gone out of fashion in mixed polite society. Otherwise their conversation is in all essentials exactly the same as the conversation of the present day. And this is not to be wondered at; for, as a wise man has said:

Speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition.... The function of conversation is ordinarily regarded as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers and are known to be so by each.... Conversation between persons unknown to one another is apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manœuvres of the dog and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.

XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE

The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back and entitled _Les Baisers_.... The publisher says of it in one of those exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade: “Un volume de vers? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is called _Songs of Love and Life_. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the theme of physical passion.

The author of _Les Baisers_ approaches his amorous experiences with the detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation. Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to imagine that

every spirit as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For of the soul the body form doth take; For soul is form and doth the body make.

He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all parts of the world and at every moment.

This attitude towards _volupté_ is sufficiently old in France to have made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius. It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English literature. It is impossible in English to describe _volupté_ elegantly; it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with, we do not even possess a word equivalent to _volupté_. “Voluptuousness” is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate. From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not the wittily matter-of-fact French way.

In our rich Australian _Songs of Love and Life_ we see the rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,

looking through His hills on you and me, Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.

Or again:

Our passions breathe their own wild harmony, And pour out music at a clinging kiss. Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire, For God Himself is in the melody.

Meanwhile the author of _Les Baisers_, always elegantly _terre-à-terre_, formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine:

Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage.

The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined to the poetess of _Songs of Love and Life_. In certain cases we are all apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and harmony—why the thing which we call beauty should move us at all—goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England, where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and _volupté_. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered to it by experience, at their face value.

XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN!

The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality, a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the notion of spiritual permanence.

Et l’on verra bientôt surgir du sein de l’onde La première clarté de mon dernier soleil.

That is an article of faith from which nobody can withhold assent.

Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know. Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic. There sits the monkey “on the ridge of a building five hundred yards above the ground, holding us like a baby in one of his fore paws.” Will he let go? Will he squeeze us to death? The best we can hope for is to be “let drop on a ridge tile,” with only enough bruises to keep one in bed for a fortnight. But it seems very unlikely that some “honest lad will climb up and, putting us in his breeches pocket, bring us down safe.” However, I divagate a little from my subject, which is the poetry of melancholy.

Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair. All the obvious people will be in it and as many of the obscure apostles of gloom as vague and miscellaneous reading shall have made known to me. A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. For dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing up against life and human destiny at the end of his “Mustapha.”

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, Born under one law to another bound, Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound. What meaneth nature by these diverse laws, Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

Is it the mark or majesty of power To make offences that it may forgive? Nature herself doth her own self deflower To hate those errors she herself doth give.... If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville gloomily denounces them.

Nor shall I omit from my anthology the extraordinary description in the Prologue to “Alaham” of the Hell of Hells and of Privation, the peculiar torment of the place:

Thou monster horrible, under whose ugly doom Down in eternity’s perpetual night Man’s temporal sins bear torments infinite, For change of desolation must I come To tempt the earth and to profane the light. A place there is, upon no centre placed, Deep under depths as far as is the sky Above the earth, dark, infinitely spaced, Pluto the king, the kingdom misery. Privation would reign there, by God not made, But creature of uncreated sin, Whose being is all beings to invade, To have no ending though it did begin; And so of past, things present and to come, To give depriving, not tormenting doom. But horror in the understanding mixed....

Like most of his contemporaries in those happy days before the notion of progress had been invented, Lord Brooke was what Peacock would have called a “Pejorationist.” His political views (and they were also Sidney’s) are reflected in his _Life of Sir Philip Sidney_. The best that a statesman can do, according to these Elizabethan pessimists, is to patch and prop the decaying fabric of society in the hope of staving off for a little longer the final inevitable crash. It seems curious to us, who have learnt to look at the Elizabethan age as the most splendid in English history, that the men who were the witnesses of these splendours should have regarded their time as an age of decadence.

The notion of the Fall was fruitful in despairing poetry. One of the most remarkable products of this doctrine is a certain “Sonnet Chrétien” by the seventeenth-century writer, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, surnamed “le Beau Ténébreux.”

Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste, Ce péché dont l’enfer a le monde infecté, M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été, Et je suis de moi-même une image funeste. L’Auteur de l’univers, le Monarque céleste S’était rendu visible en ma seule beauté. Ce vieux titre d’honneur qu’autrefois j’ai porté Et que je porte encore, est tout ce qui me reste.

Mais c’est fait de ma gloire, et je ne suis plus rien Qu’un fantôme qui court après l’ombre d’un bien, Ou qu’un corps animé du seul ver qui le ronge. Non, je ne suis plus rien quand je veux m’éprouver, Qu’un esprit ténébreux qui voit tout comme en songe Et cherche incessament ce qu’il ne peut trouver.

There are astonishing lines in this, lines that might have been written by a Baudelaire, if he had been born a Huguenot and two hundred years before his time. That “carcase animated by the sole gnawing worm” is something that one would expect to find rotting away among the sombre and beautiful Flowers of Evil.

An amusing speculation. If Steinach’s rejuvenating operations on the old become the normal and accepted thing, what will be the effect on poetry of this abolition of the depressing process of decay? It may be that the poetry of melancholy and despair is destined to lose its place in literature, and that a spirit of what William James called “healthy-mindedness” will inherit its kingdom. Many “eternal truths” have already found their way on to the dust-heap of antiquated ideas. It may be that this last and seemingly most inexorable of them—that life is short and subject to a dreadful decay—will join the other great commonplaces which have already perished out of literature.

The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee: Timor mortis conturbat me:—

Some day, it may be, these sentiments will seem as hopelessly superannuated as Milton’s cosmology.

XV: TIBET