Part 11

In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," dated February, 1896, Hardy lets fall a casual phrase which indicates that he and others had noted his kinship to the French, but that he was not disposed to acknowledge it fully. He seems to say, with that kind of modest pride which distinguishes him, that he found his method for himself, played the game alone. "As it happened," runs the note, "that certain characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story ['Jude'?] were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no French name for them--it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered." What characteristics does he intend? And was there no French name for them in 1871? Or had not the British critics begun to use the French name? Are these characteristics his candor, his logic, his classic finish of phrase, a certain cool stateliness of manner, an impersonal, distant way of treating most tender and poignant subjects, a lucid, ironic view of life, perfect proportion, large intellectual pity and freedom from cant, from sentimentality? These are some of his virtues and they are the virtues of several modern French novelists and some of the Russian pupils of the French.

If the ill reception of "Jude" caused Mr. Hardy to foreswear fiction, then the fools have in a way done us harm by cheating us of two or three great novels. Yet genius takes its revenge on a dull world, especially if it is prosperous genius, too well established to be starved out by the stupidity of an inartistic people. If Hardy had been encouraged to write more novels perhaps we should not have had "The Dynasts." And by and by we shall discover what a loss that would have been. It is the greatest epic that we have been privileged to read since Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And it is the best long poem in English since Morris's "The Earthly Paradise." Though it is cast in scenes and acts it is not a drama except in a vast untechnical sense of the word. But epic it is, creation of an enormous imagination which sweeps the universe and manages a cosmic panorama as commandingly as the same imagination dominates a rural kingdom of farms and desolate heaths. If "The Dynasts" and Hardy's shorter poems lack one thing, that one thing is the magical and haunting line, that concatenation of words which is everlastingly beautiful in the context or detached from it. Morris knew that magic. He was born with it, and no reader of Morris, except a critic, will be deceived by his own denial of his divinity when he said in his honest, off-hand way, sensible as Anthony Trollope, that inspiration is nonsense and verse is easy to write.

"The Dynasts" is an extraordinary poem. It is not French, it is not Greek, it is not like anything else in English. Hardy has discarded Christian mythology. He is not childish enough to revert to the Greek. He has invented a new one. His celestial machinery is as strange an apparition in the heavens as the first aeroplane. His hero, Napoleon, rises above the human stature by which the realistic novelist measures man and becomes not only a tool of destiny but a demigod who seems to understand destiny and share the secrets of that impersonal goddess. Those who are curious about Hardy's philosophy (we like his art; his philosophy may lie down and die on the shelf with the other philosophies) will find the closing chorus of "The Dynasts" significant:

But--a stirring thrills the air Like to sounds of joyance there That the rages Of the ages Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were, Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!

Such is the ultimate word of this artist who so keenly loves beauty, yet, like some neo-Puritan and latter-day ascetic, cannot draw a lovely woman without reminding you that the skull under the cheeks and behind the passionate eyes is not pretty and will probably endure a long time under ground. Is he of like mind with his chorus at last, and does he believe that the Will is going to grow intelligent and make all things fair?

Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the skeletonic grin of life is due to his exceeding sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the world, and so he insists on The Conqueror Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy is a reaction against the saccharine optimism of his contemporaries and of those just before his time. They falsified life in their fictions by making everything come out nicely, thank you, on the last page. He leans over backward from that kind of untruth and comes dangerously near to being as false. As between falsity in one direction and falsity in the other, there is no choice, except that we have had so much of the sweet kind that Hardy is refreshing. He tends to restore the balance.

Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, how life has gone with him, and, if he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go definitely one way or the other. Things sometimes came out well and sometimes not. Hardy is biased in favor of the things that do not come out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good title, but it is a title that implies a thesis, an attitude from which humanity is surveyed. The stories are perfection and they sound true. Hardy is a logician and he will back any tale of his with evidence, even the first story in "Wessex Tales," in the preface of which the authority of physicians is invoked. But when you take all his stories together you find nine failures out of ten human careers, and life has a better batting average than that. No one doubts that the "Fellowtownsmen" got into such horrid confusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, that every shot at happiness was a miss. And "The Waiting Supper" is so convincing that you cannot escape. But the two stories together, regarded for the moment not as the excellent works of art which they are, but as a view of human destiny, weaken each other. One convinces you. The two together make you ask questions about the author.

In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like either in realistic fiction.

Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger realists and the liberator of British fiction from the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, is not a realist. He is a great romantic, with a taste for pretty girls, moonlight, heroes and dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He is pained by many modern things, especially by modern restorations of ancient buildings. He takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury Plain because he dearly likes that kind of moonlit antiquity. His pronominal substitution of It for He does not achieve a revolution in theology. He manages the destinies of human folk as arbitrarily as any maker of fiction that ever lived. But he never made a story in which he did not convince you that life is overwhelmingly interesting and that nature, girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things to contemplate.

GEORGE BORROW

Any book about George Borrow is worth reading. The two volumes by Dr. Knapp are forbiddingly dense with documentary minutiæ, yet it is a pleasure to loaf through them at least once. Borrow's burly personality makes itself felt in the driest philological note and vitalizes the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, indeed, it vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in his extraordinary books. Mr. Clement K. Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is interesting because it is about Borrow and not in the least because it is by Mr. Shorter. Mr. Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book that should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to "a wider public which knows not Borrow."

Every book about the fighting scholar, every moderately competent article about him must invite new immigrants into Borrow's kingdom. But Mr. Shorter is not an introductory critic, not one who by his own skill and charm summons strangers to make the acquaintance of a great man. He is an inept critic who thrives by attaching his name to great reputations. Fancy a man of any trifling literary experience, with the least enthusiasm for literature, writing about style in a style like this: "Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live, was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist." It is a sin so to "style" in a chapter about Edward FitzGerald, who at the sound of such sentences would have clapped his hands to his ears.

Borrow describes himself in that pugnacious defence of Lavengro which forms the appendix to "The Romany Rye." "Though he may become religious, it is hardly to be expected that he will become a very precise and straitlaced person; it is probable that he will retain, with his scholarship, something of his gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain gloves, not white kid, with any friend who may be inclined for a little old English diversion, and a readiness to take a glass of ale, with plenty of malt in it, and as little hop as may well be--ale at least two years old--with the aforesaid friend--when the diversion is over."

Is not that an irresistible man? Shouldn't you think that there would have been among his contemporaries two or three hundred thousand good sports, rooters, heelers, literary and non-literary bookmakers who would bet on him and back him in any enterprise in which his adventurous spirit elected to engage? Yet it was not so. He enjoyed only a short period of popularity after the publication of "The Bible in Spain." When he died at a ripe old age in 1881, he was not well known. During his life the only highly distinguished man of letters who knew and appreciated him was FitzGerald, the exquisite poet and critic--FitzGerald, whose literary habits were as distant as possible from Borrow's, whose fine-edged rapier seems utterly alien to Borrow's short arm jab or his overhand wallop. FitzGerald had a curious accuracy in spotting what was worth while in his time and in dodging certain celebrated things that other people thought worth while, and there is nothing inconsistent in his knowing that Borrow wrote good English. But looking over Borrow's shoulder at his contemporaries, and remembering Borrow's ungainly verses, one is amused to find that the only real literary man facing one with a wink in his eye is FitzGerald. The others have their backs turned.

Consider also Borrow's posthumous fame. His first biographer is Dr. Knapp, an American professor of philology. And the modern critics who praise him are not open-air men, but bookish, library men, whose names do not suggest the robustly adventurous, Lionel Johnson, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Seccombe.

Most literary critics praise him in terms laudatory enough to atone for the sins of their professional predecessors, whom Borrow held up to "show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws." His four important books are published in Everyman's Library; Mr. Birrell says that "we are all Borrovians now"; within twenty years have appeared three biographical studies, besides Mr. Shorter's. Yet Dr. Knapp's fundamental biography which was published in 1898 is out of print; that mysterious and reprehensible entity known as the public has not demanded a new edition. It is all consistent with the Borrovian inconsistency. Borrow was proud of being a gentleman and a scholar, and he was both in all true senses of the words; but he hated gentility and wrote a hammer-and-tongs chapter against the genteel; no revolutionist despising the "bourgeois" ever punched their smug faces with such violent verbal fisticuffs.

He boasts of his fondness for gypsies and prize-fighters and quite simply asks, "If he had not associated with prize-fighters, how could he have used his fists?" However, he is an aristocrat and has no sympathy with radical weavers. Despite his hatred of cant, some sentences in "The Bible in Spain" have a missionary twang. He drifts naturally away from the Church of England, yet when he attacks other ecclesiastical institutions he holds up the Church of England as the exemplar of religious truth. He scorns all deviation from fact, yet his biographers have not wholly succeeded in separating what he did from what he invented.

He was undoubtedly a polyglot, he made metrical translations from thirty languages, wrote a version of the Gospel of St. Luke in Spanish Gypsy (the first book ever attempted in any Gypsy dialect), supervised the printing of the Bible in Manchu-Tartar, made translations from the English into Manchu-Tartar, Russian and Turkish in good style, as any of us who has read them can testify. In the person of Lavengro he lost the stalwart Isopel Berners because he insisted on giving her lessons in Armenian! For all that, he made mistakes and so gave the scholars evidence that he was no scholar. He was not. He had an instinct for language, especially for that language which he knew, as we know it, probably better than he knew Manchu-Tartar. In his English narratives we can follow him and praise him or censure him without violating the severe rule which he laid down: "Critics, when they review books, ought to have a competent knowledge of the subjects which those books discuss."

The four books of Borrow which belong to English literature are "The Bible in Spain," "Lavengro," "The Romany Rye" and "Wild Wales." "The Bible in Spain" is one of those books that grow out of circumstances; it was to a large extent thought out and phrased on the scene, amid the adventures which it narrates; later it was cast into book form. It grew out of experience, but an artist shaped its growth. Borrow was sent by the Bible Society to distribute Spanish versions of the Bible. He encountered the opposition of allied church and government, was arrested, put in prison for three weeks, and liberated through the influence of British officials.

It is not, however, the Bible or his mission that stimulates Borrow's imagination. Cities and people, meetings on the road, scraps of talk, sometimes rather long conversations, monologues by Borrow, the mischances, dangers and excitements of a country at once wild and anciently civilized, Borrow's opinions about languages, characters, landscapes and anything else under the Spanish skies--such is the substance of the book; and the substance is transmitted through a style that gives little heed to elegance, that walks along like a healthy man on a tramp. The most eccentric of men, full of strange languages and odd ideas, Borrow writes English as naturally as he drinks English ale. There is not a touch of eloquence, not a great phrase; his descriptions are rather literal records of what was in front of him and how he liked it than "word-paintings." The dominant writers of his time were super-eloquent. Borrow does not speak their language. Perhaps that is why he did not rival them in popular favor, and also why he seems to us so refreshingly downright.

Borrow, like his master Defoe, has the art of setting all things forth as if they were matters of fact. Even when his characters talk of unusual matters, nay, especially when they harangue and gossip about queer things, their conversation sounds like a transcription from life and not like invention.

"Lavengro" and its sequel, "The Romany Rye," are properly classified in Everyman's Library under fiction, and "The Bible in Spain" is classified as "Travel and Topography." In what proportion autobiography and fiction are admixed is a question which does not effect the merits of the books. They all follow about the same method, and so, too, does "Wild Wales." The episodes are inconsequential, and the looseness of organization not only permits Borrow unlimited latitude of subject, but strengthens the Defoe-like illusion of truth; he never loses the tone of the veracious chronicler who puts things down in the order of nature and not according to the design of art. Between adventures and more or less pertinently to them, Borrow becomes itinerant schoolmaster and gives us instruction in language, philology, comparative literature, ethics and religion. He is not a pedant, but a humanist: "It has been said, I believe, that the more languages a man speaks, the more a man he is; which is very true, provided he acquires languages as a medium for becoming acquainted with the thoughts and feelings of the various sections into which the human race is divided; but in that case he should rather be termed a philosopher than a philologist."

Borrow need not be read continuously; if he enters upon a discourse that promises not to interest you, you can turn the pages rapidly until the eye strikes something more attractive. In his wide variety is something for everybody. The conversations with the old apple woman who had read the story of "Blessed Mary Flanders"; the chapters on pugilism; the talks with tinkers and publicans; the old man who knew Chinese but could not tell time by the clock; the outrageous attack upon Walter Scott; the theological arguments with the man in black--these are some of the choice fragments of what Borrow was pleased to call a "dream." The general atmosphere is less that of dreamland than of the broad highway in full sunlight. Since Borrow died the cult of the open air has increased, and to that as much as to anything is due the revival of interest in him. He is a great person, a colossal egotist who in his journeyings takes up the whole road. It is healthy for a man to be an egotist--especially if he is a colossal one.

SHELLEY

In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley says that the imagination is the moral instrument. To be greatly good a man must imagine intensely and comprehensively. Poetry serves morality not by what it explicitly teaches, but by its power to awaken and enlarge the mind, to render it "the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." Since poetry strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of the moral nature of man, "a poet would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his time and place, in his poetical creations which participate in neither." A remarkable book could be made of the best things said in prose by English poets about poetry. Perhaps one book would not hold so much. A narrower yet great and imaginative book could be made of what Shelley said about poetry and what English poets have said about him. Such a book would explain and exhibit the theory of poetry and the art of criticism. The very good edition of Shelley in the Regent Library, (edited by Roger Ingpen) contains some brief "Testimonia" which invite one to the essays from which they are taken, by Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson.

It is significant that Mr. Ingpen has not quoted from Arnold. If it is the function of poetry to expand the imagination and make the mind aware of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought, how did it happen that Arnold, a genuine poet, missed Shelley utterly? Arnold was not satisfied with his essay and intended to return to the subject. That he could do a better thing is proved by his essay on Keats, which, after he has done with his droning, schoolmasterly defence of Keats's morals, is eloquent, serene and restrainedly emotional. Shelley phrased many of the revolutionary ideas that were current in his time. Arnold's timid school-bred culture was impervious to any sort of revolutionary idea. Shelley's ideas did not impress him; he thought Shelley a wonderful singer, but a singer without a solid body of thought. Now, Shelley was the most full-minded poet of his time. He knew more about what ought to be done with the world than any of his contemporaries. That he failed to free Ireland and that the French revolution was a disaster are a reflection on other people's intelligence, not on his. It is not at all derogatory to a man's ideas that for centuries and centuries after him the world fails to come up to his teachings. If an angel is ineffectual that is not the angel's fault. Indeed a too readily effectual angel would be rather a journalist than a seer.

That the bulk of mankind is ages behind the best of its poets and seers might possibly be explained by the fact that the bulk of mankind simply has not met their thoughts. But how shall one explain the fact that artistic children of culture, who have had opportunity to read, who respond to the beauty of seers and poets, remain at the tail of the intellectual procession, are not abreast of long dead poets like Shelley, and let the leaders of their own day sweep past them unapprehended, unguessed? The thing that makes one impatient of the privilege of culture is that many of those who have enjoyed it do not lead; they drag mankind back. In "Winds of Doctrine," by Mr. George Santayana, the mind of the present age is likened to "a philosopher at sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail." When you make a generality about the mind of today, you are perfectly safe, for nobody can dispute you. Nobody knows what the mind of today is doing. It is doing so many things that no one of us can keep track of it. But when a man writes himself down in a book, you can tell what his mind is doing--in that book. I should liken Mr. Santayana to a philosopher who, really wanting to sail, had forgot to cast off and was still lashed to the dock with a spanking wind blowing out to sea.