Chapter 16
Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse's _Diversions of a Man of Letters_ are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on "the message of the Wartons." Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to take him by the hand and guide him into saying "the right thing." He writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets the war and is amused. How many readers are there in England who know that Catherine Trotter "published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox," and that "she was then fourteen years of age"? How many know even that she wrote a blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called _Agnes de Cestro_, and had it produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age of nineteen she was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as "one of the fairest of her sex and the best judge." By the age of twenty-five, however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was concerned, and after her tragedy, _The Revolution in Sweden_, the theatre knows her no more. Though described as "the Sappho of Scotland" by the Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as "the wisest virgin I ever knew," her fame did not last even as long as her life. She married a clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. Her later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, "are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one's eyes." Her husband, who was a bit of a Jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though--"a perfect gentleman at heart--'he always prayed for the King and Royal Family by name.'" "Meanwhile," writes Mr. Gosse, "to uplift his spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine." Altogether the essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a playful mood.
The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as "two pioneers of romanticism" is more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse finds in _The Enthusiast_, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, "the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century." He does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist attitude to nature." Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But these were not published for many years afterwards.
The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to the vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion of Disraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters in his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features correctly, so that the facts break through the praise. The truth is Mr. Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best with the pleasure of saying the worst. His books are all the more vital because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel personality.
XIX.--AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBITT
It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. Professor Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution. They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. One suspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution; for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The steps of the process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have the Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from without. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil environment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free--if his genius or natural impulses are liberated. "Rousseauism is ... an emancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex." It is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh. "In the absence of ethical discipline," writes Professor Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_, "the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac." In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have been ready to take Professor Babbitt's indictment more seriously.
Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live according to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes the view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of himself. "If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good." Not that Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. He objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering." It was, perhaps, in reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful announcements of his righteousness. "Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his _Confessions_ in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man."'" Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "No." Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. "True classicism," he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal." The romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. "It is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith."
One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child. Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness" instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a substitute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.
On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks. Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." He admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law." Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." He sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization must rest. He quotes Aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for" the disorderly manner to-day.
His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but from subserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water.
Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. The most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. He himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less noble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the "sense of sin." Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great books of the world, in _Isaiah_ and the Gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies of the field"?
XX.--GEORGIANS
(1) MR. DE LA MARE
Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes! Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs than these.
Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we know:
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come, There, out of all remembrance, make our home: Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound, Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound. Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, There of your beauty we would joyance make-- A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre, Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space, Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, Where two might happy be--just you and I-- Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.
This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_. The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.
Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders:
Flit would the ages On soundless wings Ere unto Z My pen drew nigh; Leviathan told, And the honey-fly.
He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush without realizing that--
All the throbbing world Of dew and sun and air By this small parcel of life Is made more fair.
He bids us in _Farewell_:
Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.
We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.
Now each man's mind all Europe is,
he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims:
O what a deep contented night The sun from out her Eastern seas Would bring the dust which in her sight Had given its all for these!
So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare's, however, could not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men. In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his vision into a fool's song:
Nay, but a dream I had Of a world all mad, Not simply happy mad like me, Who am mad like an empty scene Of water and willow-tree, Where the wind hath been; But that foul Satan-mad, Who rots in his own head....
The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men's bodies--
Dragging cold cannon through a mire Of rain and blood and spouting fire, The new moon glinting hard on eyes Wide with insanities!
In _The Marionettes_ Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from the bitterness of a war-maddened world:
Let the foul scene proceed: There's laughter in the wings; 'Tis sawdust that they bleed, But a box Death brings.
How rare a skill is theirs These extreme pangs to show, How real a frenzy wears Each feigner of woe!
And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:
Strange, such a Piece is free, While we spectators sit, Aghast at its agony, Yet absorbed in it!
Dark is the outer air, Coldly the night draughts blow, Mutely we stare, and stare, At the frenzied Show.
Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud Of deep, immutable blue-- We cry, "The end!" We are bowed By the dread, "'Tis true!"
While the Shape who hoofs applause Behind our deafened ear, Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause"! And affrights even fear.
There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's black-edged indictment of life.
As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the work of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. Thus, _April Moon_, which contains the charming verse--
"The little moon that April brings, More lovely shade than light, That, setting, silvers lonely hills Upon the verge of night"--
is merely Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned into new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare's chief gift to literature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a strange beauty, as in _Alexander_, which begins:
It was the Great Alexander, Capped with a golden helm, Sate in the ages, in his floating ship, In a dead calm.
One finds Mr. de la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the opening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_:
Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot, Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,
where "foot" and "not" are rhymes.
It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la Mare's is not a mere craftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful things passionately, Mr. de la Mare could never have written:
Thou with thy cheek on mine, And dark hair loosed, shalt see Take the far stars for fruit The cypress tree, And in the yew's black Shall the moon be.
Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is his music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is part of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has only to compare Mr. Yeats's _I Heard the Old, Old Men Say_ with Mr. de la Mare's _The Old Men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery. Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. de la Mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives in his first verse to be no more than just articulate:
Old and alone, sit we, Caged, riddle-rid men, Lost to earth's "Listen!" and "See!" Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?"