Part 13

Then if our habit of judging new poets by old ones still dominates us, let us take any passage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it beside any of the thousand years of English sea poetry.

Denser it grew, until the ship was lost. The elemental hid her: she was merged In mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost, New to the change of death, yet hither urged. Then from the hidden waters something surged-- Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech, A noise like one slow wave on a still beach.

After that, if only for the pleasure of quoting them, recall Swinburne's lines:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote sea-gates, Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.

The wonder of our English tongue is never more resounding than when English poets echo the tumult of the sea. Mr. Masefield is not so much an innovator as an initiate into a great poetic tradition, the tradition of a race of sailors and chantey-makers who began with "The Seafarer" or long before that, and shall not end with "Dauber." The sea is in Masefield's blood and in his personal experience. Who but an English poet would have ended "The Tragedy of Pompey the Great" with a chantey to the tune of "Hanging Johnny"?

SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES

In his sensible little book, "Literary Taste: How to Form It," Mr. Arnold Bennett says: "In attending a university extension lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for."

Of the vast library of scholarly research, the most fatuous section, if one is to judge from the few specimens one happens to have seen, is that which deals with the most important division of literature--poetry; and probably the poet who has suffered the most voluminous maltreatment from two centuries of English, German and American scholarship is Shakespeare. I have been going in an idle way over the notes in "The Tragedie of Jvlivs Caesar," edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr., and "The Tragedie of Cymbeline," edited by the elder Dr. Furness. And I have looked into other volumes of this laborious work, "A New Varorium Edition of Shakespeare." From an enormous mass of commentary, criticism, word-worrying, text-marring and learned guesswork, the editor has chosen what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of his introductions and the good sense of some of his own notes lead one to suppose that he has selected with discrimination from the notes of others. His work is a model of patience, industry and judgment. He plays well in this game of scholarship. But what is the game worth? What is the result?

Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages containing only one play! The text is a literal reprint of the first folio, or whatever is supposed to be the earliest printed version. The clear stream of poetry runs along the tops of the pages. Under that is a deposit of textual emendations full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans. Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. It consists of (a) what scholars said Shakespeare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare meant; (c) what scholars said about what other scholars said; (d) what scholars said about the morality and character of the personages, as (1) they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they are in other historical and fictitious writings; (e) what scholars said about how other people used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what scholars said could be done to Shakespeare's text to make him a better poet. I have not read all these notes and I never shall read them. Life is too short and too interesting.

All the time that I was trying to read the notes, so that I could know enough about them to write this article, my mind kept swimming up out of the mud into that clear river of text. It is an almost perfectly clear river. Some of the obscurities that scholars say are there are simply not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a kind of obscurity in some turbulent passages. Many of the obscurities the scholars put there in their innocence and stupidity, and those obscurities you can eliminate by ignoring them.

The really valuable note is the etymological. Etymology reveals the essential metaphors of words. The modern reader will find that beyond his intellectual front door stand three or four wire entanglements of connotation; by the time a word gets to him it is bruised and ragged. The etymologist clears all those fences for you and delivers a word fresh into your hands. He shows you how other poets have used it. He enriches it with other connotations. He shows it to be even wealthier than it was in the mind of the man who wrote the Shakespearian line. One of the most exciting and poetic books is the Oxford Dictionary. The dated illustrative history of a word, past milestone after milestone of use, is an intellectual epic. The word is root-deep and branch-high with poetry, with the imaginative habits of the race. The etymological note not only clarifies Shakespeare, but spreads behind him (and other poets) a sort of verbal-cosmic background. Etymology brightens the color of words, deepens their significance. That the etymologist is often a duffer, who, in the very act of resolving a word into new chords, writes stiff and stodgy prose, is a perplexing thing in human nature and a very perplexing problem in that appalling institution, Scholarship.

It is impossible for even a vivacious, humorous man like Dr. Furness, an enthusiastic amateur in love with his task, to live in a library of Shakespearian scholarship and not be infected by its diseases. Dr. Furness knows, for example, precisely when "Cymbeline" was written. Shakespeare was forty-six years old. Now, "Cymbeline" is a foolish play; Dr. Johnson said so. And there must be a reason for Shakespeare's deterioration, for Shakespeare, unlike other poets, is not to be allowed to write bad plays and bad lines without a satisfactory explanation. He did not explain himself, but the scholars come to his rescue. Dr. Furness fancies that, though forty-six is not an advanced age, Shakespeare was tired and disillusioned. "There may have crept into Shakespeare's study of imagination a certain weariness of soul in contemplating in review the vast throng of his dream children.... A sufficing harvest of fame is his and honest wealth, accompanied by honor, love, obedience and troops of friends." "I can most reverently fancy that he is once more allured by the joy of creation when by chance there falls in his way the old, old story of a husband convinced, through villany, of his wife's infidelity."

And there you are. Shakespeare at the age of forty-six is lured by the restless joy of creation into writing "Cymbeline," which is a poor play. It is not up to the mark which Shakespeare's previous masterpieces have set. There is something a little wobbly about this conjunction of surmises. But the scholar is never at a loss. He can deliver immortal Will from his own errors, shield him from the consequences of being at once a god in art and a human man, prone to literary lapses and slovenly work. The masque in the fifth act "is regarded by a large majority of editors and critics as an intrusive insertion by some hand not Shakespeare's." When a large majority of scholars and critics regard a thing as so, it is so. It gets into the books that you have to read to pass college examinations. And if you say that many of the scholars and critics whom you happen to have read or listened to are chumps, when they deal with Shakespeare or any other poet, you are a lost soul.

Some of the notes of the various commentators are suggestive. But many of the notes are sheer impertinences, especially those that attempt to mend the lines.

I would haue left it on the Boord, so soone As I had made my Meale; and parted With Pray'rs for the Prouider.

There is nothing the matter with that. It sounds all right. But the editors have to fill out the short second line, to make it scan. Dr. Furness thinks, justly, that the line needs only "a very timid pause after 'Meale.'" Of course, any reader, any good actor, with an ear on the side of his head, reads all lines with pauses timid or bold as the case requires, and does not make a fuss about it. It is only the scholars that fuss, or poets like Pope, who are entirely out of touch with Shakespeare's free metrical habits.

It is almost inconceivable that grown men with enough interest in poetry to spend their whole lives in Shakespeare's company could have daubed him with such muddy nonsense as one finds in these notes, which are not the worst of scholarly comment but the best, selected by a discriminating man. What a colossal sham it all is!--erected not by charlatans but by men working in good faith and with disinterested devotion to their task.

It is not merely the ignorant idler and the superficial player among books who has got tired of the institution of Shakespeare Improved: Fourteen Thousand Doctors of Philosophy in Session Day and Night, Searching for a Serum to Prevent Spinal Meningitis in the Lines of Shakespeare. Millions Needed to Continue This Humanitarian Work: Fifty Thousand Students Under Instruction in the Art of How Not to Be Poets. Against this amazing institution some of the more independent surgeons have protested. One was the late John Churton Collins, a physician who discovered that the Shakespearean metaphor was not a locally British infection rising from the Avon river, but was brought by the verbal mosquito from Rome and Greece. Collins had a vivid and audacious mind that made him one of the most readable of modern Shakespeareans, and he had, I assume, considerable learning. He says: "Dozens of impertinent emendations have been introduced into Shakespeare's text, because editors have not been aware that the custom of using the same word in different senses in one line, or even twice in contiguous lines, was deliberately affected by the Elizabethan poets." Deliberately affected? Yes, and it came natural to them in a time when language was a little looser and freer than it is after three centuries of increased use and hardened definition both in prose and poetry.

One trouble with much Shakespearean scholarship lies in the assumption that everything that left Shakespeare's hand must have been perfect. Why, he probably used words carelessly and did all kinds of tricks with them, as other geniuses do. Why should we assume that he always wrote a good line? Some of his lines are bad, and it is not necessary for Dr. Pumpernickell to knock out a couple of words or add a couple just to make a line go metrically. These scholars have a split vision. In one note they treat Shakespeare like a god who could not go wrong. In the next note they treat him like a sophomore versifier whose lines have to be corrected. Dr. Furness says that the earliest known text of "Julius Caesar"--that of the First Folio, "is markedly free from corruptions." What corruptions? The printers' or Shakespeare's? Dr. Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a playhouse copy. "Our only recourse is to accept the explanation given by Resch, viz., that these words between Brutus and Messala are an interpolation from a MS. addition which appeared first in a playhouse copy, and which, by mistake, became incorporated in the text." Now, is not that a "soft, downy, pink-cheeked peach of an idea" (Jonson's "Sejanus," act IV., sc. 13, I, 23. Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 1913)? Resch be hanged! What playhouse copy? When? Whose mistake? How incorporated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page are devoted to explaining a difficulty which does not exist.

This is the true history of the passage in question. Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of Stratford got roaring full. He went home on foot to Stratford, a long journey, and found Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom was the poet Davenant. This was very disturbing to Will. He did not know until after his death which twin was Davenant. He was then in that fateful year, 1599-1600, writing his play, "Julius Caesar", and making extensive use of Suetonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. Furness thinks this doubtful, but if you are going to guess, why not guess good and plenty?). Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad morning head. That is why he made that slightly confused passage, which has bothered the scholars ever since.

The following example of how Shakespeare's biography is written is not a parody. It appears in the New York _Nation_ of November 27, 1913, page 513, in a review of Arthur S. Pier's "Story of Harvard."

"Every good story has a prologue, and the story of Harvard has one which by no means should be left out. In Stratford-on-Avon stands the 'Old House in the High Street,' identified by the most eminent of our antiquaries, the late H. F. G. Waters, by certain documentary evidence, as the early home of Katharine Rogers, mother of John Harvard, from whom proceeded the little inheritance that first kindled in the western hemisphere the torch of a liberal culture. For this we have distinct contemporaneous chapter and verse.

"At circumstantial evidence we look askance, but without pressing the matter unduly this may be said--that the families of Rogers and Shakespeare lived in close neighborhood and intimacy at Stratford during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; that the poet knew Katharine Rogers well, as, on the other hand, he knew well Robert Harvard, at length her husband, in his shop at Southwark, in London, hard by the Globe Theatre. So far the conjunction would seem to be inevitable.

"Then looms up a possibility amounting perhaps to a likelihood, that no other than Shakespeare was the intermediary who brought together the Londoner and the fair, well-dowered maid in the remote midlands, that he was a familiar guest in the home in Southwark which he had helped to establish, and that he, the genial family friend, held on his knee the little John Harvard, the first-born in the household.

"Could this touch of their foster-father with the most illustrious name in literature be fairly established (and who can say after the feats of Mr. Waters what scraps may yet be found in the dust-heaps?), Harvard men would indeed have a tradition to prize."

Why not get down to brass tacks? We do not know much about Shakespeare's life. We do not know anything about his manuscripts, or the playhouse versions. We cannot even rely on the printed date of a quarto. We do not know whether a corrupt line was corrupted by Shakespeare or the printer or somebody else. Many emendations consist largely in a kind of scholarly punning. For example: Shakespeare wrote a line that every scholar remembers, for it is a causer of gray hairs and a prodigal spender of the midnight taper: "The blind Rush hath proclaimed his Bowells search." Johnson conjectures that four lines have been omitted. Steev. conj.: For "blind rush," read "mind rush." That is, the impetuousness of his thought makes one aware of how his instinct is struggling for the solution of his difficulties. Malone conj.: "Bowells lurch." Evidently referring to the sea-sickness of Antony after the battle of Actium. Craik conj.: "Rowell's search, meaning that his blind rush, that is headlong rush, is caused or indicated by the speed of his horse into which he has thrust his rowels." Cf. B. Jonson, "Every man out of His Humor"; "One of the rowels catched hold of the ruffle of my boot." Oechelhauser (_Einleitung_, p. 1185): But this must refer to the speed of the intellect going through purely idealistic experiences. There is no question here of either sea or land. Macbeth has not been near the sea and Henry V. has not yet set sail for France. As for horses, it is now well established that there were no horses in England; otherwise why should Richard have cried, "My kingdom for a horse"? If there had been horses, one could surely have bought one, especially a King, for 80 marks, the then ruling price in Schleswig-Holstein; and even the ecstasies of expression would not have made appropriate the offer of an entire kingdom.

So they go "conjing" and "conjing" through desolate miles of notes. In spite of the fact that now and again a genuine bit of historic information, a light of interpretative intuition flashing from a scholar's note, does vivify and elucidate a puzzling line, or a line that you might pass over in an oblivious mood, nevertheless, is it not true that this whole institution of literary theology is a stupid superstition? There are plenty of unsolved problems in Shakespeare, fascinating questions of biography and interpretation to which conjectural answers are legitimate. But for illuminating answers, or partial answers, one has to go outside orthodox scholarship, to Walter Begley, to "The Shakespeare Problem Restated," by George C. Greenwood, to "Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest" by Colin Still, and to other heretical inquirers whom the pundits dismiss as cranks.

The scholars do not confine their thick-headed learning to old poets whose language is strange and who are made clearer by a note here and there. For some stranger reason scholars are hired to edit the modern poets in the popular series, those valuable and inexpensive reprints which help to spread poetry over the face of the earth and make it accessible to increasing numbers of readers. I pick up the "Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with introduction and notes by Charles Bell Burke, Ph.D., professor of English in the University of Tennessee. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Classics. I come upon "A Green Cornfield," a lovely lyric that must have made Shelley look down with interest "from the abode where the eternal are." There is reference to a note. I turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile? Consult Genung's 'Working Principles of Rhetoric,' p. 79, 2, example." I will not consult Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my school never to consult Genung while they are reading poetry.

I commend to those hard-working young men and women in the universities who are now studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sentences from Mr. Max Eastman's "Enjoyment of Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all education is the fact that those who elect to be teachers are scholars. They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other values, but as a value in itself; and hence they put an undue emphasis upon what is formal and nice about it, leaving out what is less pleasing to the instinct for classification but more needful to the art of life. This misfortune is especially heavy in the study of literature. Indeed the very rare separation of the study of literature from that of the subjects it deals with suggests the barren and formal character of it. As usually taught for three years to postgraduates in our universities, it is not worth spending three weeks upon."

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH WRITERS

"Though I may have lost the habit of reading," says Mr. Moore, "I have acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts." It must be a great pleasure to be Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and opinions that the mind excogitates, and to be able to phrase them with beautiful precision. The mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract other minds and to interest even those that are antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not persuade you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he provokes you to examine your own. He is stimulant, irritant, but there is no depressant reaction from him. One can stand a large dose of him, both of his exquisite fiction and of his repetitive reminiscences, which may or may not be fiction.

There is a remark ascribed to Lady Gregory: "Some men kiss and do not tell; George Moore does not kiss, but he tells." It is the business of the writer of fiction to "tell," and it makes little difference to the reader who reads for fun whether the gallant adventures are biographical or not. Early in his literary career Mr. Moore tried the confessional form of narrative and succeeded masterfully. The young man who "confessed" twenty-five years ago grew older, and in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" looked back upon his youth from the quiescence of middle age. Mr. Moore says that "if the reader of 'Vale' be wishful to know what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume entitled 'Memoirs of My Dead Life,' but he need not read this novel to follow adequately the story of 'Vale.'" So the "Memoirs" is fiction. What, then, is "Hail and Farewell"? Simply an extension of the autobiographic novel, it includes real persons living and dead and calls them by their names, but it is as obviously a "made-up" book as anything in literature. It is the work of an artist and critic, the artist who gave us two masterpieces, "Esther Waters" and "Evelyn Innes," and the critic, who, apropos books and pictures, writes, if not with infallible judgment, ever with an unfailing sense of beauty.

Mr. Moore's lady-loves have not, according to his own testimony, direct and unconscious, been the most interesting affairs of his life. He writes better about Manet than about an amatory encounter of yesteryear. The women of his "regular" novels are more vivid than the women who perturb his mature reminiscences. He says that the critics complain that "instead of creating types of character like Esther Waters," he is wasting his time describing his friends, "mere portrait painting," and he asks an argumentative question: "In writing 'Esther Waters' did I not think of one heroic woman?"

For once the critics are on the right side. Lady Gregory is interesting in her own person and her own work, but Mr. Moore can never make her so interesting in a book as he has made Esther and Evelyn. And the ladies of his experience are more alive when he uses them as matter for fiction than when he sits behind a cigar dictating memories. That in creating Esther he was thinking of an heroic woman is his concern, not ours. His private kisses undoubtedly taught him something of the art of making fictitious kisses public; they furnished him, as such experiences furnish every author, with the story which as an artist he was to "tell." But his purely personal revelations are not startling. Ladies flit into his memory, receive the most delicate literary treatment and flit out again. Nothing unusual happens at Orelay or anywhere else, and what happens is handled finely, timidly even, with what may have been audacity in 1890, but no longer strikes us as valiantly candid. The introduction to "Memoirs of My Dead Life" now seems much ado over little; it is out of proportion and is a wobbly piece of thinking such as Mr. Moore's Irish born and French trained mind is seldom guilty of. The "Memoirs" and "Hail and Farewell" are to be enjoyed and admired. Even an Irishman ought not to find in them occasion for more than a contest of wit.