Part 10

NORSE IN ENGLISH.—Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious attempt to recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William Morris was most powerfully and directly influenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says that “no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth; none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a place in our memories, and a home in our hearts.” It will not do, however, for (let me whisper it) who reads Morris’s poetry to-day? Has he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is justice—reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so on—the stuff of epic poetry—are relegated nowadays to the police court. Moreover, the Norse mythology is not only “pagan” in the sense of being non-Christian, it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the _Mahabharata_, or the Egyptian mythology of the _Book of the Dead_. We can never return to it without committing an act of regression, since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian” world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we may not return. Let it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now that it is no longer possible in life.

THE COMEDY OF IT.—Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to bring it into popularity will succeed where the prior efforts of Meredith have failed. The reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy demands “a society of cultivated men and women, wherein ideas are current and perceptions quick”—a condition certainly not now existing—but the absence of three qualities, each of which, unfortunately, blooms luxuriantly among us—“sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalianism.” Comedy, the play of the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one of these three vices. If you sentimentalise, play is over, and equally it is over if you are shocked, or if you carry the _suggested_ humour of the situation too far. But one of these things the ordinary English man or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it comes about that “play,” the sparkle of common sense, is so rare among us.

Meredith certainly worked very hard to instil Comedy into the English mind. His essay is a classic, and our only classic on the subject. And he may be said to have written the whole of his novels in order to illustrate his idea. Meredith’s novels are much more than a mirror held up in Nature; they are a model held up to human nature; and, from this point of view, they are only an appendix to the _Essay on Comedy_. The serious way in which Meredith’s novels are read, however, is an evidence of his failure, and it would be interesting to hear his secret comment on the critics who acclaim him as the grand portrait-painter of women. Did Meredith even set himself to draw a woman? Was his art not rather to “draw out” a woman from the imperfect society his times provided him? Were not his “portraits,” in fact, constructive criticisms of the women he knew? I put these opinions into interrogation out of mere courtesy, for there is really no doubt whatever about them. Meredith drew women still to be, as he hoped they would become.

“To love comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” That is an almost complete summary of the conditions of the comic spirit; but there must be added the “sense of society,” the social sense, which is quite as important. This also introduces a considerable difficulty for us, since if “our English school had not clearly imagined society” in 1877, when Meredith wrote, it is less than ever probable to-day. In 1877, such people of intelligence as were living in England were still more or less homogeneous in their general views about life. They were not eighteenth century—the century of our highest English social culture; but they were not yet what we have subsequently become, discrete and warring atoms of intellectuality. It was possible when Meredith was alive for a group of people to meet, and to create something remotely resembling a salon. The hope of realising a “salon spirit” was not entirely dead. To-day nothing is more improbable than even an attempt to restore a salon. Not only would nobody undertake to do it, but to nobody would it occur that its restoration is highly desirable. But the salon is, as it were, the foyer of the theatre of Comedy, as the theatre of Comedy is itself the foyer of the Civilised Life of Brilliant Common Sense; and if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly certain that the greater mysteries are beyond us. We may continue, however, to “hope for good,” since that also is an essential of Comedy.

THE EPIC SERBS.—_Kossovo: the Heroic Songs of the Serbs_, translated by Miss Helen Rootham, has now been published for some months. If there is any “epic sense” alive in this country, it must surely be gratified by the appearance of these Serbian ballads, which are much more truly epic fragments than ballads as we understand the term. In the ballad proper the prevailing note is tragedy—sometimes individual, sometimes family, sometimes clan; but in the Serbian, as in the Homeric, the tragedy expressed in the popular poetry is more spacious even than the nation; the nation becomes the race, and the race symbolises a psychological power, which may very well be called a god—a suffering god. Grimm said of these ballads that there had been “nothing since Homer to compare with them; they were the best of all times and nations.” Goethe compared them to the _Song of Songs_. Certainly there is something Homeric in them; and since they are sung to-day, they can be regarded as unique. Long dwelling on them, with a view to discovering their innermost secret, convinces me, however, that they differ from the Homeric mood in their comparative hopelessness. Mr. Baring says in his Introduction that these Serbian ballad-writers “saw the world with the eyes of a child and the heart of a man.” “Child” is a word of multiple _entente_; and the difference between the Homeric and the Serbian “childhood” is that the latter appears doubtful whether it can grow up. Homer, we know, occasionally let fall a sad regret that his splendid heroes should still be children; and in the plays of Æschylus the high philosophical meditations of Homer are considerably elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there does not appear to me any sign of the _mind_ of a man, however much of the heart there may be. No Serbian Plato will ever find in them such a text as the Greek Plato found in Homer. It is not to be wondered at. Serbia has always been on the frontier of European civilisation, and perpetually in the trenches. Since 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but unsubmissive captivity, and her deliverance from alien bondage is only an event of yesterday. But if the elements of the future are contained in the quintessence of these ballads, there is no sight of a new Athens in them.

ERNEST DOWSON.—Mr. Arthur Symons’s Introduction to the reprinted _Poems and Prose_ of the late Ernest Dowson has all the characteristics of the age to which both he and Dowson belonged. It is delicately appreciative, and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for instance, that Dowson was small enough to be overwhelmed by experiences that would have been nourishing food to a great man. But the style and manner of passing judgment almost completely contradict the matter of the judgment itself, and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be literature; least of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his whole school seem to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the same style as the work criticised. Thus we find him saying of Dowson: “all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius”—words and phrases which might have been written by Dowson himself. They are apologiastic of the person when what we ask of criticism is judgment of the quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identification of genius with disaster and suicide they are almost an incentive to the little artists to trade on their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons knew Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but his bedside manner with ailing geniuses would have been anything but tonic.

It is symptomatic of Dowson’s state of mind, though Mr. Symons misses the subtlety of it, that he was always repeating Poe’s line: “the viol, the violet, and the vine.” A special affection for labials and liquids is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say infantilism; and stylists with any ambition to excel, and to develop both themselves and their style, will be wise to watch their “v’s” and “m’s” and “l’s,” in fact, their labials and liquids generally. Dowson wallowed in liquids and labials to the end of his short life; his vocabulary never grew up, and I have no doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best lines, he would have pointed, not to the notorious “Cynara,” which is sufficiently pretty-pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as originality permits:—

Violets and leaves of vine For Love that lives a day.

“One is essentially of the autumn,” he wrote of himself. But that is not true, for Dowson was not ripe, but (I say it of course with respect) rotten. He remained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he should have been out in the world creating sensations. Life never got beyond his lips.

A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION.—The writers of the _Venture_, a literary magazine published from Bristol, and written chiefly by members of the Postal Service, are sincere in that they are manifestly striving to acquire a good English style; and they are modest in that they do not pretend to have attained to it. Even better, and unlike so many current “stylists,” they do not say that the unreachable grapes are sour, while those only which they can pluck are the perfect fruit; in other words, they do not try to pass off their defects as new beauties of style. Their models are good, and their exercises are promising. The introductory note contains, however, a little cant, rather out of key with the prevailing mood of the journal. It demands “stalwart criticism,” not for itself only, but for literature in general. The _London Mercury_ appeared before the world in the same austere attitude, calling in prophetic tones for sterner criticism, more outspoken criticism, criticism that should both say and mean something, criticism, in short, of the kind which has for years ensured the ostracism of precisely that kind of critic. It is the easiest thing in the world to demand such criticism, and very popular on one condition—that it be never actually provided. For the fact is that the criticism in question is really killing; and how many of those who ask for stern criticism would welcome their own extinction?

Special attention is directed to the longish poem by Mr. Francis Andrews. It is entitled “Mother,” and the opening stanza is as follows:—

You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world The tinted woods o’ the hill and the white road wending, And among the nearer boughs whereon my stars were hung The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled.

Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. It is a very dangerous subject that Mr. Andrews has chosen. The temptation to indulge in “sob-stuff” in reflecting on “Mother,” is well-nigh irresistible, since the sentiment goes back to the childhood not only of the individual, but of the race, and probably earlier. It is almost inextricably mingled with the tears of things. But tears are not a proper accompaniment of poetry or of beauty. The mission of Art is to dry all tears, and the utmost severity and serenity are needed in dealing with a profoundly emotional subject exactly to keep the tears from welling into it. That Mr. Andrews has not succeeded is evident from the opening stanza which I have just quoted. It is almost drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm which is nearly a lullaby in reverie, and let us ask ourselves whether it is not calculated, quite apart from the words, to throw the reader backwards into his mother’s arms. “Which once enclosed my world,” “and the white road wending,” “whereon my stars were hung,” “the blown and shifting wraith of blue smoke curled”—these are sentimental rhythms, and their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of the past rather than a meditation or contemplation of the future. The mood is backward-looking, and not forward-looking, an indulgence and not an effort of spirit. It is quite in accordance with the diagnosis that a concluding stanza of the poem should repeat the opening stanza, since there is no release in a mood of this kind. In great reveries it will be observed that the movement is forward and upwards. The action starts from a profound sentiment, but it works its way upward to a triumphant assertion of spiritual realisation. Look, for instance, at _Lycidas_ or _Adonais_, both sentimental in origin, but both exalted in conclusion. There the song springs from a dewy bed, drenched with tears, but it mounts and mounts until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps well to the ground, and, as I have said, his concluding stanza is only a slight variation of the prelude. The influence of Kipling is to be discerned at work, especially Kipling’s “Envoi,” beginning, “There’s a whisper down the field.” Kipling is another of the writers whose sentiment is still tied to his mother’s apron-strings; and his “Envoi” and “Mother o’ Mine” are almost as poisonous to poetry as Meredith’s “Love in the Valley.” We need not be averse to sentiment as such, but the most careful discrimination between the nest and the sky is essential to an æsthetic use of it. Let us start in sentiment, by all means, but let us rise from it as quickly as possible.

THE NEWEST TESTAMENT.—Various attempts have been made from time to time to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length of life is destined for the latest attempt, _Sayings and Stories_, a translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,” and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent” of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact, to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.

It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says, “for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,” the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”; and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally, is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed. “Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English, at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth. Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors, since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was _this_ the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution, again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an “Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to touch bottom.

NOTHING FOREIGN.—It is better for a nation to “import” art than to go without it altogether; and it is the _duty_ of its critics to stimulate home-production by importing as many as possible of the best foreign models. That home-production may fail to find itself encouraged to the point of creation is perfectly possible; inspiration may continue to be wanting; but of the two states of no home-production and no imports and no home-production and imports, the latter is to be preferred.

“Foreign” is a word that should be employed with increasing discrimination, and, most of all, by English writers. There is an English genius the perfect flower of which we have still to see; for perfect English has never yet been written. But nothing foreign ought to be alien to a race as universal in character and mentality as the English; and in the end, the perfection of the English genius is only possible in a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. Two tendencies equal and opposite are at work in this direction, and have always been in English history. On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would certainly result in the complete loss of essential national characteristics. On the other side, and usually balancing the first, we find an ever-present tendency towards insularity and æsthetic chauvinism, the excess of which would undoubtedly result in a caricature of the English genius—the development of idiosyncrasies in place of style. Somewhere between these two tendencies the critic of English art must fix his seat, in order that his judgment may determine, as far as possible, the perfect resultant of the blend of opposites. It is a matter, too, of time as well as of forms of culture. Not only are not all times alike, but there is a time for import and a time for export and a time for “protection”; but, equally, there is room for discrimination in the kind of art that may wisely be imported or exported. In general, we should import only what we need and export only what other nations need, and thus, in the old mediæval sense, traffic in treasure. Thus guarded, nothing but good can come of the greatest possible international commerce of the arts.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—Psycho-analysis is not the last word in psychological method; and a great deal more of experiment is needed. Freud’s theory of dreams, for instance, is excellent pioneer work in a field hitherto left more or less uncultivated, but it is very far from being exhaustively explanatory of the facts. Suppose it were possible to _control_ dreams—in other words, to dream of what you will—would not the theory of Freud that dreams are subconscious wish-fulfilments stand in need of amendment? But to control dreams is not an utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental work has been done in this direction to prove that the gate of dreams is open to the intelligent will. And there is warrant for the attempt in a good deal of mystical literature. I was reading only recently the poems of Vaughan the Silurist, and what should I come across but the following passage:

Being laid and dress’d for sleep, close not thy eyes Up with the curtains; give thy soul the wing In some good thoughts; so when the day shall rise And thou unrak’st thy fire, those sparks will bring New flames; besides, where these lodge, vain heats mourn And die; that bush where God is shall not burn.

Vaughan’s lines are not great poetry, but they contain a useful psychological hint.