Chapter 7

Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the most distinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and he appealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbe Du Bos had laid down in his celebrated _Reflexions_ (1719) that the poet's art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton.

[Footnote 4: Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the British Academy, October 27th, 1915.]

THE CHARM OF STERNE[5]

It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, at Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment just home from the Low Countries. "My birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us, "was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children." The life of the new baby was one of perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been the widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In the extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment was hurried from place to place--as was that of the father of the infant Borrow a century later--and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys," marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrel about a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughly damaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in barracks in Jamaica.

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than this to encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. His account, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance and disappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how early life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of an April day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a pretty boy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin"; how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know not whether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, we have revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which all his other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no other writer since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimate way than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that succeed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which succeeds the passion of tears. From early childhood, and all through youth and manhood, he had been collecting observations upon human nature in these rapidly alternating moods.

He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail himself, he was no satirist. A breath of real satire would blow down the whole delicate fabric of _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_. Sterne pokes fun at people and things; he banters the extravagance of private humour; but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a moment with Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sterne could not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the other. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick, who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old and young. "Labour stood still as he passed; the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart.

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectual development of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for a moment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt to darken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You will remember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a country parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods," from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century were familiar to him and to him alone in England.

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is the source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to the real merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much of _Tristram Shandy_ as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world," he hits the nail on the head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from that work. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and gradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched out of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclusively on his own rich store of observations taken directly from human nature. In the adorable seventh volume of _Tristram_, and in _The Sentimental Journey_, there is nothing left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of style.

The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those events which must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromising intellectual frailties. It is true that from the very first his excellences were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which Hazlitt truly said is "one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature," occurs, or rather begins, in the second volume of _Tristram Shandy_. But the marvellous portraits which the early sections of that work contain are to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's determination to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new subjects. Frankly, much as I love Sterne, I find Kunastrockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect they have driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoyment of _Tristram Shandy_.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in answer to a question: "Do I _like_ Sterne? Yes, to be sure I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" That was the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultivation more than one hundred years ago. But it was their attitude only on some occasions. There is no record of the fact, but I am ready to believe that Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a godless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar of roses to-day and asafoetida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easy to define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. Like Yorick, he had "a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously and impudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered." As he "seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering his wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were weeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on a melancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure of the tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward; they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the most impish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in describing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan." Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not so much difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine." No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to play fast and loose with moral definitions.

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown in comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal lines until the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gave it the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful inspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul," which leaped from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventional restraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired to declare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century.

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadays are often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of his humour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have been taught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless to try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of it and did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex by our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in these matters, but we have agreed not to joke about them. I read the other day a dictum of one of those young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen: he prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty years, be not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but unintelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us call this morality, it is only a change of habits.

Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at irrelevancy. It is part of his charm, and it is at the same time his most whimsical habit, never to proceed with his story when you expect him to do so, and to be reminded by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which lead you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. He did not merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them out and eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of _Tristram_ is devoted to the _attitude_ of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself to read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump little hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this is what makes his books the best conversational writing in the English language. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talking at his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, with persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, is Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical manner of composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which was gradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you to read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way for Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method of describing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here to an audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to a close consideration of the workmanship of their _metier_. I ask them where, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been found before the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been without it.

To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the last century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator of Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all the books which Stevenson read it was not the _Sentimental Journey_ which made the deepest impression upon him.

[Footnote 5: Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24th, 1913]

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves persistent commemoration.

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" This Gentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or Gadire.

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste in America.

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated.

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly valueless verses."