Chapter 9

Champfleury--novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literary historian--belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and Philothee O'Neddy; but he could remember the production of _les Burgraves_, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the melancholy speech of poor Celestin Nanteuil--the famous 'Il n'y a plus de jeunesse' of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his time: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouviere, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo's; he had lived so near the red waistcoat of Theophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in Paris (under the inspiration of the artist of _la Femme qui taille la Soupe_) in 'un habit en bouracan vert avec col a la Marat, un gilet de couleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d'un jaune assez malseant,' together with 'une triomphante cravate de soie jaune'--a vice of Baudelaire's inventing--and 'un feutre ras dans le gout de la coiffure de Camille Desmoulins.' And having seen for himself, he could judge for himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a humourist and an observer, and he became a 'realist' as soon as he began to write.

The Writer.

His work is an antipodes not only of _Hernani_ and _Notre-Dame_ but of _Sarrazine_ and _la Cousine Bette_ and _Beatrix_ as well. For the commonplace types and incidents, the everyday passions and fortunes, of the _Aventures de Mariette_ and the _Mascarade de la Vie Parisienne_ represent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and the extravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of things trivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, and they purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as it ought to be. But the pupil's point of view is poles apart from the master's; his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order of ideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting; with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plain and sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with using experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with considering fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself. Between an artist of this sort--pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with malice, a little cynical--and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could be little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be the others' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his history should be other than partial and narrow--than at best an achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personality apart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested in everything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the humourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies in romanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.

LONGFELLOW

Sea Poets.

The ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets nor bid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelley discovered it; Heine took it into his confidence, and told it the story of his loves; Wordsworth made it a moral influence; Browning loved it in his way, but his way was not often the poet's; to Matthew Arnold it was the voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugo conferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty things over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret--

'Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me';

Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it, until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and its vehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating, many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been taken with the manner of its melancholy; while to Whitman it has been 'the great Camerado' indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown bird bereft of his mate in whose absence the half of him had not been told to us.

Longfellow.

But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley which Count Arnaldos saw; his only to hear the steersman singing that wild and wondrous song which none that hears it can resist, and none that has heard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster's secret--the word of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music, the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man; and then did he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of them it is a case of _Ego et rex meus_: It is I and the sea, and my egoism is as valiant and as vocal as the other's. But Longfellow is the spokesman of a confraternity; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of that strange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when the first sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irresistible water-world, and so established the foundations of the eternal brotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners and ships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills and crackles, there are blown smells of pine and hemp and tar; you catch the home wind on your cheeks; and old shipmen, their eyeballs white in their bronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in and tell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. He abides in a port; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among the galiots and brigantines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men; he sees the chips flying under the shipwright's adze; he smells the pitch that smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls to singing his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos; and the world listens, for its heart beats in his song.

TENNYSON

St. Agnes' Eve.

In Keats's _St. Agnes' Eve_ nothing is white but the heroine. It is winter, and 'bitter chill'; the hare 'limps trembling through the frozen grass; the owl is a-cold for all his feathers; the beadsman's fingers are numb, his breath is frosted; and at an instant of special and peculiar romance

'The frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes.'

But there is no snow. The picture is pure colour: it blushes with blood of queens and kings; it glows with 'splendid dyes,' like the 'tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings'--with 'rose bloom,' and warm gules,' and 'soft amethyst'; it is loud with music and luxurious with 'spiced dainties,' with lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,' with 'manna and dates,' the fruitage of Fez and 'cedared Lebanon' and 'silken Samarcand.' Now, the Laureate's _St. Agnes' Eve_ is an ecstasy of colourless perfection. The snows sparkle on the convent roof; the 'first snowdrop' vies with St. Agnes' virgin bosom; the moon shines an 'argent round' in the 'frosty skies'; and in a transport of purity the lady prays:

'Break up thy heavens, O Lord! and far, Through all the starlight keen, Draw me thy bride, a glittering star, In raiment white and clean.'

It is all coldly, miraculously stainless: as somebody has said, 'la vraie _Symphonie en Blanc Majeur_.'

Indian Summer.

And at four-score the poet of _St. Agnes' Eve_ is still our greatest since the Wordsworth of certain sonnets and the two immortal odes: is still the one Englishman of whom it can be stated and believed that Elisha is not less than Elijah. His verse is far less smooth and less lustrous than in the well-filed times of _In Memoriam_ and the Arthurian idylls. But it is also far more plangent and affecting; it shows a larger and more liberal mastery of form and therewith a finer, stronger, saner sentiment of material; in its display of breadth and freedom in union with particularity, of suggestiveness with precision, of swiftness of handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the later magic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artful-seeming but more ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matter is worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the gold armour of an heroic style. There are passages in _Demeter and Persephone_ that will vie with the best in _Lucretius_; _Miriam_ is worth a wilderness of _Aylmer's Fields_; _Owd Roa_ is one of the best of the studies in dialect; in _Happy_ there are stanzas that recall the passion of _Rizpah_; nothing in modern English so thrills and vibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, as _Vastness_; the verses _To Mary Boyle_--(in the same stanza as Musset's _le Mie Prigioni_)--are marked by such a natural grace of form and such a winning 'affectionateness,' to coin a word, of intention and accomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very often equalled. In _Vastness_ the insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first line to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of 'originality,' no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitable--there is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.

His Mastership.

It is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in a way that to the Tennyson of the beginning was--unhappily--impossible. In those early years he neither would nor could have been responsible for the magnificent and convincing rhythms of _Vastness_, the austere yet passionate shapeliness of _Happy_, the effects of vigour and variety realised in _Parnassus_. For in those early years he was rather Benvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor, the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect too little. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is it to the artist to remark how impatient--(as the Milton of the _Agonistes_ was)--of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet of _Oriana_ and _The Lotus-Eaters_ and _The Vision of Sin_; and how this impatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece of mysticism naked yet unashamed as _The Gleam_--(whose movement with its constancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a little tame)--but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, to wit, _On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria_. In eld, indeed, the craftsman inclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is in the full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experiments which to him are as a crown of glory and to them that come after him--to the noodles that would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayer and study and a life of abnegation--are only the devil in disguise. The Rembrandt of _The Syndics_, the Shakespeare of _The Tempest_ and _Lear_--what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and what else will be the Tennyson of _Vastness_ and _The Gleam_? 'Lord,' quoth Dickens years ago in respect of the _Idylls_ or of _Maud_, 'what a pleasure it is to come across a man that can _write_!' He also was an artist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greater emphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been an exemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completely revealed. There is no fear now that 'All will grow the flower, For all have got the seed'; for then it was a mannerism that people took and imitated, and now--! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, the consummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it that can.

GORDON HAKE

Aim and Equipment.

Dr. Hake is one of the most earnest and original of poets. He has taken nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself, and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character, can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes--the eternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny. It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is from these that its essence is distilled. His talk is not of Arthur and Guinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and Abt Vogler; of 'the drawing-room and the deanery' he has nothing to say; nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the New Renaissance, nothing of Botticelli, nor the ballet, nor the text of Shakespeare, nor the joys of the book-hunter, nor the quaintness of Queen Anne, nor the morals of Helen of Troy. To these he prefers the mystery of death, the significance of life, the quality of human and divine love; the hopes and fears and the joys and sorrows that are the perdurable stuff of existence, the inexhaustible and unchanging principles of activity in man. Now it is only to the few that reduced to their simplest expression the 'eternal verities' are engaging and impressive. To touch the many they must be conveyed in human terms; they must be presented not as impersonal abstractions, not as matter for the higher intelligence and the higher emotions, but as living, breathing, individual facts, vivid with the circumstance of terrene life, quick with the thoughts and ambitions of the hour, full charged with familiar and neighbourly associations. All this with Dr. Hake is by no means inevitable. He loves to symbolise; he does not always care that the symbol shall be appropriate and plain. He prefers to work in allegory and emblem; but he does not always see that, however representative to himself, his emblems and his allegories may not be altogether representative to the world. His imagination is at once quaint and far- reaching--at once peculiar and ambitious; and it is often guilty of what is recondite and remote. In his best work--in _Old Souls_, for instance, and _Old Morality_--the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it has the true epic touch--or at least as much of it as is possible in an age of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the pathetic--when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it is hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in _The Snake Charmer_ when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to be almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by sheer force of superfluous and elaborate suggestiveness. Last of all, in an epoch trained upon the passionate and subtle cadences of the Laureate and the large-moulded, ample, irresistible melodies of Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Hake chooses to deal in rhythms of the utmost naivete and in metrical forms that are simplicity itself.

LANDOR

Anti-Landor.

To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and has always seemed more or less shadowy and unreal. To begin with, he wrote for himself and a few others, and principally for himself. Then, he wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more comprehensible. It is probable too that even among those who, inspired by natural temerity or the intemperate curiosity of the general reader, have essayed his conquest and set out upon what has been described as 'the Adventure of the Seven Volumes which are Seven Valleys of Dry Bones,' but few have returned victorious. Of course the Seven Volumes are a world. But (it is objected) the world is peculiar in pattern, abounding in antres vast and desarts idle, in gaps and precipices and 'manifest solutions of continuity,' and enveloped in an atmosphere which ordinary lungs find now too rare and now too dense and too anodyne. Moreover, it is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble and suggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, all more or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument, all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumental skittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principal characteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcome of a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest is a matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic and dramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms. This is the opinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense of injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have found Landor a continent of dulness and futility--have come to consider the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' writer; and for my part I find it impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with them that hesitate to accept him for anything else.

His Drama.

Again, to some of us Lander's imagination is not only inferior in kind but poverty-stricken in degree; his creative faculty is limited by the reflection that its one achievement is Landor; his claim to consideration as a dramatic writer is negatived by the fact that, poignant as are the situations with which he loved to deal, he was apparently incapable of perceiving their capacities: inasmuch as he has failed completely and logically to develop a single one of them; inasmuch, too, as he has never once succeeded in conceiving, much less in picturing, such a train of conflicting emotions as any one of the complications from which he starts might be supposed to generate. To many there is nothing Greek about his dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that quality of 'Landorian abruptness' which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.

HOOD

How Much of Him?

Hood wrote much for bread, and he wrote much under pressure of all manner of difficulties--want of health and want of money, the hardship of exile and the bitterness of comparative failure; and not a little of what he produced is the merest journalism, here to-day and gone to-morrow. At his highest he is very high, but it was not given to him to enjoy the conditions under which great work is produced: he had neither peace of body nor health of mind, his life from first to last was a struggle with sickness and misfortune. How is it possible to maintain an interest in all he wrote, when two-thirds of it was produced with duns at the door and a nurse in the other room and the printer's-devil waiting in the hall? Of his admirable courage, his fine temper, his unfailing goodness of heart, his incorruptible honesty, it were hard to speak too highly; for one has but to read the story of his life to wonder that he should have written anything at all. At his happiest he had the gift of laughter; at his deepest and truest the more precious gift of tears. But for him there were innumerable hours when the best he could affect was the hireling's motley; when his fun and his pathos alike ran strained and thin; when the unique poet and wit became a mere comic rhymester. Is it just to his memory that it should be burdened with such a mass of what is already antiquated? But one answer is possible. The immortal part of Hood might be expressed into a single tiny volume.

Death's Jest-Book.

Thackeray preferred Hood's passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hood had an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, of remote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous and unexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purely intellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. The wonderful jingle called _Miss Kilmansegg_--hard and cold and glittering as the gold that gleams in it--abounds in capital types of both. But for an example of both here is a stanza taken at random from the _Ode to the Great Unknown_:--

'Thou _Scottish Barmecide_, feeding the hunger Of curiosity with airy gammon; Thou mystery-monger, _Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon_ _That people buy and can't make head or tail of it_,'

and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimen of oddness of analogy--the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which the intellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit are that conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam 'it sounded like a wooden d---n,' and that mad description of the demented mariner,--

'His head was _turned_, and so he _chewed_ _His pigtail_ till he died,'--