Chapter 7

They that would have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few. For in the minor artist the passionate--the elemental quality--is not often found: he being of his essence the ape or zany of his betters. Tourneur is not a great tragic. _The Atheist's Tragedy_ is but grotesquely and extravagantly horrible; its personages are caricatures of passion; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid; its incidents are absurd when they are not simply abominable. But it is written in excellent dramatic verse and in a rich and brilliant diction, and it contains a number of pregnant epithets and ringing lines and violent phrases. And if you halve the blame and double the praise you will do something less than justice to that _Revenger's Tragedy_ which is Tourneur's immortality. After all its companion is but a bastard of the loud, malignant, antic muse of Marston; the elegies are cold, elaborate, and very tedious; the _Transformed Metamorphosis_ is better verse but harder reading than _Sordello_ itself. But the _Revenger's Tragedy_ has merit as a piece of art and therewith a rare interest as a window on the artist's mind. The effect is as of a volcanic landscape. An earthquake has passed, and among grisly shapes and blasted aspects here lurks and wanders the genius of ruin.

WALTON

The Compleat Angler.

I am told that it is generally though silently admitted that, while Charles Cotton came of a school of fishermen renowned for accomplishment even now, his master and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sense a fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of the philosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of the artist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockney sportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill; his prey was commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for he knew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such base creatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace; and that part of his treatise which has still a certain authority--which may be said, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something of a scientific basis--was not his work but that of 'my most honoured friend, Charles Cotton, Esq.' Again, it is a characteristic of your true as opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto by hunger, he does not eat what he has killed; and it is a characteristic of Walton--who in this particular at least may stand for the authentic type of the cockney sportsman as opposed to the true one--that he delighted not much less in dining or supping on his catch than he did in the act of making it: as witness some of the most charming parts in a book that from one end to the other is charm and little besides. Indeed the truth--(with reverence be it spoken)--appears to be that the _Compleat Angler_ is an expression in the terms of art of the cit's enjoyment of the country.

Master Piscator.

What Walton saw in angling was not that delight in the consciousness of accomplishment and intelligence which sends the true fisherman to the river and keeps him there, rejoicing in his strength, whether he kill or go empty away. It was rather the pretext--with a worm and perhaps a good supper at one end and a contemplative man at the other--of a day in the fields: where the skylark soared, and the earth smelled sweet, and the water flashed and tinkled as it ran, while hard by some milk-maid, courteous yet innocent, sang as she plied her nimble fingers, and not very far away the casement of the inn-parlour gleamed comfortable promises of talk and food and rest. That was the Master Piscator who, being an excellent man of letters, went out to 'stretch his legs up Tottenham Hill' in search of fish, and came home with immortal copy; and that was the Izaak Walton who 'ventured to fill a part' of Cotton's 'margin' with remarks not upon his theory of how to angle for trout or grayling in a clear stream but 'by way of paraphrase for your reader's clearer understanding both of the situation of your fishing house, and the pleasantness of that you dwell in.' He had the purest and the most innocent of minds, he was the master of a style as bright, as sweet, as refreshing and delightful, as fine clean home-spun some time in lavender; he called himself an angler, and he believed in the description with a cordial simplicity whose appeal is more persuasive now than ever. But he was nothing if not the citizen afield--the cockney aweary of Bow Bells and rejoicing in 'the sights and sounds of the open landscape.' After all it is only your town-bred poet who knows anything of the country, or is moved to concern himself in anywise for the sensations and experiences it yields. Milton was born in Bread Street, and Herrick in Cheapside. Yet Milton gave us the _Allegro_ and the _Penseroso_ and the scenery in _Comus_ and the epic; while as for Herrick--the _Night-Piece_, the lovely and immortal verses _To Meadows_, the fresh yet sumptuous and noble _To Corinna Going a-Maying_, these and a hundred more are there to answer for _him_. Here Walton is with Herrick and Milton and many 'dear sons of Memory' besides; and that is why he not only loved the country but was moved to make art of it as well.

HERRICK

His Muse.

In Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay; there is a morning light upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on the eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes; and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. As you walk you are conscious of 'the grace that morning meadows wear,' and mayhap you meet Amaryllis going home to the farm with an apronful of flowers. Rounded is she and buxom, cool-cheeked and vigorous and trim, smelling of rosemary and thyme, with an appetite for curds and cream and a tongue of 'cleanly wantonness.' For her singer has an eye in his head, and exquisite as are his fancies he dwells in no land of shadows. The more clearly he sees a thing the better he sings it; and provided that he do see it nothing is beneath the caress of his muse. The bays and rosemary that wreath the hall at Yule, the log itself, the Candlemas box, the hock-cart and the maypole, nay,

'See'st thou that cloud as silver clear, Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere? Tis Julia's bed!'--

And not only does he listen to the 'clecking' of his hen and know what it means: he knows too that the egg she has laid is long and white; so that ere he enclose it in his verse, you can see him take it in his hand, and look at it with a sort of boyish wonder and delight. This freshness of spirit, this charming and innocent curiosity, he carries into all he does. He can turn a sugared compliment with the best, but when Amaryllis passes him by he is yet so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that 'winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat' which has rippled to such good purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is merely 'a fable, song, a fleeting shade,' he has saved enough of them from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill their laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever maying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and set them for ever where they are.

His Moral.

And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as those younglings of the year she bears with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawny continent.' Herrick is pre-eminently the poet of flowers. He alone were capable of bringing back

'Le bouquet d'Ophelie De la rive inconnue ou les flots l'ont laisse.

He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tender and shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondest metaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves, and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able so well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually 'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the 'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that he dreads to lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regret with which he sees things hastening to their end.

His Piety.

That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his _Noble Numbers_ Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple gallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances and villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than Catholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to be wondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity and earnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitable daintiness of surface.

LOCKER

His Qualities.

Mr. Locker's verse has charmed so wisely and so long that it has travelled the full circle of compliment and exhausted one part of the lexicon of eulogy. As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever the sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerly restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once exquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air: even thus might Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! There is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it gets leave to beam on unperceived. There is humour too, but humour so polite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you in doubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there is a vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to the delight no less than to the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touched with passion, as in _The Unrealized Ideal_ and that lovely odelet to Mabel's pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the least approachable of all.

His Effect.

For as English as she is, indeed, his muse is not to be touched off save in French. To think of her is to reflect that she is _delicate_, _spirituelle_, _semillante_--_une fine mouche_, _allez_! The _salon_ has disappeared,--'Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose'; but she was born with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a buckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with an incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction; and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's very own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end is invariable. 'I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.' Even as in her master's finest song.

BANVILLE

His Nature.

The Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, there is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the '_rire enorme_' of the _Frogs_ and the _Lysistrata_. But it is suspected that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in their way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turned sentences in prose. But their function is purely verbal; they are the raw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being to glorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets and rondels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight- and-twenty members of a fair ballade.

His Art.

It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing of modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rare artist in words and cadences. He writes of 'Pierrot, l'homme subtil,' and Columbine, and 'le beau Leandre,' and all the marionettes of that pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty and propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax as passionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in the process and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he were carving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven's 'Fifth,' or producing _King Lear_ or the _Ronde de Nuit_. He is profoundly artificial, but he is simple and even innocent in his artifice; so that he is often interesting and even affecting. He knows so well what should be done and so well how to do it that he not seldom succeeds in doing something that is actually and veritably art: something, that is, in which there is substance as well as form, in which the matter is equal with the manner, in which the imagination is human as well as aesthetic and the invention not merely verbal but emotional and romantic also. The dramatic and poetic value of such achievements in style as _Florise_ and _Diane au Bois_ is open to question; but there can be no doubt that _Gringoire_ is a play. There is an abundance of 'epical ennui' in _le Sang de la Coupe_ and _les Stalactites_; but the 'Nous n'irons plus au bois' and the charming epigram in which the poet paints a processional frieze of Hellenic virgins are high-water marks of verse. But, indeed, if Pierrot and Columbine were all the race, and the footlights might only change places with the sun, then were M. de Banville by way of being a Shakespeare.

DOBSON

Method and Effect.

His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisite clarity. Of its kind it is as nearly as possible perfect. You think of Horace as you read; and you think of those among our own eighteenth century poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. The epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the noun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect of it all is that 'something has here got itself uttered,' and for good. Could anything, for instance, be better, or less laboriously said, than this poet's remonstrance _To an Intrusive Butterfly_? The thing is instinct with delicate observation, so aptly and closely expressed as to seem natural and living as the facts observed:

'I watch you through the garden walks, I watch you _float_ between The _avenues_ of dahlia stalks, And _flicker_ on the green; You _hover_ round the garden seat, You _mount_, you _waver_. . .

* * * * *

Across the room _in loops of flight_ I watch you wayward go; * * * * * Before the bust you flaunt and flit-- * * * * * You _pause_, you _poise_, you _circle up_ Among my old Japan.'

And all the rest of it. The theme is but the vagaries of a wandering insect; but how just and true is the literary instinct, how perfect the literary _savoir-faire_! The words I have italicised are the only words (it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion; and yet how quietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they are set to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect! In writing of this sort there is a certain artistic good-breeding whose like is not common in these days. We have lost the secret of it: we are too eager to make the most of our little souls in art and too ignorant to do the best by them; too egoistic and 'individual,' too clever and skilful and well informed, to be content with the completeness of simplicity. Even the Laureate was once addicted to glitter for glitter's sake; and with him to keep them in countenance there is a thousand minor poets whose 'little life' is merely a giving way to the necessities of what is after all a condition of intellectual impotence but poorly redeemed by a habit of artistic swagger. The singer of Dorothy and Beau Brocade is of another race. He is 'the co-mate and brother in exile' of Matthew Arnold and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_. Alone among modern English bards they stand upon that ancient way which is the best: attentive to the pleadings of the Classic Muse, heedful always to give such thoughts as they may breed no more than their due expression.

BERLIOZ

The Critic.

One of the very few great musicians who have been able to write their own language with vigour and perspicuity, Berlioz was for many years among the kings of the feuilleton, among the most accomplished journalists of the best epoch of the Parisian press. He had an abundance of wit and humour; his energy and spirit were inexhaustible; within certain limits he was a master of expression and style; in criticism as in music he was an artist to his finger-ends; and if he found writing hard work what he wrote is still uncommonly easy reading. He is one of the few--the very few--journalists the worth of whose achievement has been justified by collection and republication. Louis Veuillot has been weighed in this balance, and found wanting; and so has Janin prince of critics. With Berlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as a student of life; if you are interested in life and music both he is irresistible. The _Memoires_ is one of the two or three essays in artistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto's story of himself and his own doings; the two volumes of correspondence rank with the most interesting epistolary matter of these times; in the _Grotesques_, the _A Travers Chants_, the _Soirees de l'Orchestre_ there is enough of fun and earnest, of fine criticism and diabolical humour, of wit and fancy and invention, to furnish forth a dozen ordinary critics, and leave a rich remainder when all's done. These books have been popular for years; they are popular still; and the reason is not far to seek. Berlioz was not only a great musician and a brilliant writer; he was also a very interesting and original human being. His writings are one expression of an abnormal yet very natural individuality; and when he speaks you are sure of something worth hearing and remembering.

A Prototype.

Apart from Cellini's ruffianism there are several points of contact between the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of an opera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with his subject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness of temper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, the passion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what is little and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of the Florentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of the _Debats_, the author of the _Grotesques de la Musique_ and the _A Travers Chants_, and the Benvenuto who, as Il Lasca writes of him,

'Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzale Delle cose malfatte dicea male.'

Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiates upon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with much the same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the rapture of conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty of _Divinites du Styx_ or the adagio of the so-called _Moonlight Sonata_. It is written of Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari's attack upon that cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call 'the marvel of beautiful things,' that if he had lived to see the result,

'Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle; _E saltando_, _e correndo_, _e fulminando_, S' andrebbe querelando, E per tutto gridando ad alta voce _Giorgin d'Arezzo meterebbe in croce_, Oggi universalmente Odiato della gente _Quasi publico ladro e assassino_';

and you are reminded irresistibly of Berlioz betrampling Lachnith and the ingenious Castil-Blaze and defending Beethoven against the destructive pedantry of Fetis. And, just as the _Vita_ is invaluable as a personal record of artist-life in the Italy of the Renaissance, so are the _Memoires_ invaluable as a personal record of the works and ways of musicians in the Paris of the Romantic revival. Berlioz is revealed in them for one of the race of the giants. He is the musician of 1830, as Delacroix is the painter; and his work is as typical and as significant as the _Sardanapale_ and the _Faust_ lithographs.

His Theory of Autobiography.