Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
Had any reason when my brother came.
I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling
Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop,
Or watched him winding close the spiral string
That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought
Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;
Myaëry-picturing fantasy was taught
Subjection to the harder, truer skill
That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,
And by "What is" "What will be" to define.
How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!
At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with
all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes
on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own
strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote
_Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a
book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm,
as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for
several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives
of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to
shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common
eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The
three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed"
of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed
with unfaltering power, and the picture of commonplace English
country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion,
but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left
behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a
very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied,
and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great
water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.
When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can
find not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last
novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than
ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask
one another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated,
her effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works
was gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of
allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes
and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious
pages of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies
and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. Then came _Theophrastus Such_,
a collection of cumbrous and didactic essays which defy perusal;
and finally, soon after her death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible
disappointment to all her admirers, and a blow from which even the
worship of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might have been
repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so
disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life
she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.
On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which
George Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as
was rather rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It
is the inevitable result of "tall talk" about Dante and Goethe that
the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when
the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now,
but it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended upon her
works in her life-time. Another matter which militates against her
fame to-day is her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who
knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem
of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and
the difficulty of belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or
unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by
quite other problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot
and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical
influence. Perhaps another generation will follow us which will be more
patient, and students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never
forget, however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of
perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to the service of
literature, and that she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal
of intellectual ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an
inborn lack of charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental
disposition. After all, to have added to the slender body of English
fiction seven novels the names of which are known to every cultivated
person is not to have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively,
succeeded.
THE FUTURE POET AND OUR TIME
By J. C. SQUIRE
Here is our world in motion.
We see a corner of it through our eyes. A man will march down a street
with a crowd, or watch the politicians' cabs turning into Palace Yard,
or make speeches, or stand on the deck of a scurrying destroyer in the
North Sea, or mount guard in a Mesopotamian desert. A minute section of
the greater panorama passes before him.
In imagination he will, according to his information and his habit of
mind, visualise what he sees as a part of what he does not see: the
human conflict over five continents, climates and clothes, multitudes,
passions, voices, states, soldiers, negotiations. Each newspaper that
he opens swarms with a confusion of events and argument, of names
familiar and unfamiliar--Wilson, Geddes, Czecho-Slovakia, Yudenitch,
Shantung, and ten thousand more. For the eye there is a medley, for
the ear a great din. As far as he can, busy with his daily pursuits, a
man usually ignores it when it does not intrude to disturb him. When
most unsettled, the life of the world is most fatiguing. The spectacle
is formless and without a centre; the characters rise and fall,
conspicuous one day, forgotten the next. The newspapers mechanically
repeat that we are at the greatest crisis of history, and that "a
great drama is being unrolled." We are aware that the fortunes of our
civilisation have been and are in the balance. But we are in the wood
and cannot see it as we see the French Revolution. It is difficult,
even with the strongest effort of imagination, to visualise the process
as history will record it. To pick out those episodes and those persons
that will haunt the imagination of posterity by their colour and force
is more difficult still. An event, contemporaneously, is an event; a
man is a man who eats, drinks, wears collars, makes speeches, bandies
words with others, and is photographed for the newspapers.
Yet we know that a time will come when these years will be seen in far
retrospect as the years of Elizabeth or of Robespierre are now. The
judgments of the political scientist and the historian will be made:
these men will arrange their sequences and their scales of importance.
They will deduce effects and measure out praise and blame. With them
we are not concerned. But others beyond them will look at our time.
We shall have left our legacy for the imagination. What will it be?
Who of contemporary figures may we guess as likely to be the heroes
of plays and the subjects of poems? Which of the multitudinous events
of these years will give a stock subject to Tragedy? Which of the men
whom we praise or abuse will seem to posterity larger than human, and
go with gestures across their stages, clad in an antique fashion? For
to that age we shall be strange; whether our mechanical arts have died
and left us to haunt the memory of our posterity as a race of unquiet
demons, or whether "progress" along our lines shall have continued,
none of our trappings will have remained the same.
But the soul of man will have remained the same. Those elements in
events and persons which fascinate and stimulate us when we are looking
at our past will stir them when they brood on their past, which is our
to-day. And neither contemporary reputation, nor worldly position, nor
conquests in themselves, nor saintliness in itself, can secure for a
man a continued life in the imagination of the race.
* * * * *
Contemplate our own past in the light of this conception. Who are the
men of whom poets and playwrights and story-tellers have made fictions
and songs? Augustus Cæsar when he lived was the greatest man in the
world: but who since Virgil has panegyrised him and who--unless some
ingenious psychologist of the second-rate like Browning--would make
a dramatic poem out of him? William Wilberforce was a very good man,
but his deeds and his name have survived his personality, and he will
not be the hero of an epic. The Thirty Years' War was a long and very
devastating war; Gustavus and Wallenstein, in their degree, survive
the purposeless series of its disasters; and of all its events that
which most vividly lives in the memory is the small thing with which
it began: the flinging of two noblemen from a tower. What is it in
things and men that gives them permanently the power of stirring the
imagination and the curiosity of the artist? A quality of splendour and
of power that grows more certain when the dust that was its receptacle
has gone to dust. The artist who shall succeed with a historical
personage may make whatever implicit or even explicit commentary he
likes, but in choosing his subject--or being chosen by it--moral
judgment or scientific estimate will not influence him. He will be the
victim of an attraction beyond the will and beyond the reason. Consider
who are the figures that truly, imperatively, live in the political
story of the past. Not only and not all the Cæsars who fought over the
known world; not only such chivalric souls as saw, and obeyed, the
visions of Domrémy, and died when the echoes of the last horn faded
over Roncesvalles. The Crusades, as a whole, were a great poem, but few
of the Crusaders won more than an ephemeral name in art. Cœur de Lion
has been in our own time the hero of a romance, but no man is likely
again to write of even a Godfrey of Boulogne. The great age of historic
Greece passed and left imperishable monuments, "one nation making worth
a nation's pain," but how few of her soldiers and philosophers recur
to the creative imagination! Those stories and figures from history
and pre-history which do so recur are a strangely assorted collection.
The Trojan War and its leading personages are a fascination and an
inspiration perennially, and among those personages Helen, Hector,
Achilles, Ulysses; but not Paris or the sons of Atreus, who live but as
appendages. Coldly arguing, men may ask now as they asked then, why
the Greeks should take so much trouble to recover a worthless woman,
why a Hector should die to keep her, why ten thousand should perish
in such a cause. But to the imagination Hector, Achilles, Helen, the
divine unreason of that ten years' war, make an appeal that never comes
from worthier struggles and wiser people. That is true also of Antony
and Cleopatra: their story to the historian and the moralist is one of
ruinous folly, to the poet a
Portentous melody of what giants wasting
Near death, on what a mountainous eminence
Still, in the proud contempt of consequence,
The wine of life with jubilation tasting.
The figure of St. Francis has been created and recreated in art; like
those of Nero, Philip II., and Mary Stuart. With the mythical who
are but names we can do what we will; Lear and Hamlet Shakespeare
could cast in the sublimest mould; with the historical we are tied by
the historical, and few are great enough to come through the sieve.
Poets have attempted and failed to make great characters of Becket,
of Wolsey, of Strafford, and Charles I.; their degree of failure has
varied, but they have failed as certainly as Keats would have failed
with King Stephen. The material was not there. Cromwell and Frederick
the Great at least equalled Philip II. in achievement, and excelled him
in intelligence. But Carlyle's two heroes were no true heroes for an
artist; we are too uncertain about Cromwell's inner man, his direction;
for all his battles he could cast no colour over his surroundings; and
as for Frederick there was no tragedy about him--that was left for
his neighbours. A great Cromwell, in one sense, would be an invented
Cromwell; and we cannot invent a Cromwell because of the documents. But
Philip II., the intense, narrow, laborious, dyspeptic bigot, sitting
in a cell of his great bleak prison on the plateau, trying to watch
every corner of the world, and contriving how to scourge most of it; he
was contemptible, full of vices, a failure, but there was that in him
which has compelled the gaze of poets in seclusion from the seventeenth
century down to Verhaeren and Verlaine. He had a virtue in excess.
There was a touch of sublimity about him. The setting counts for much;
monarchs are on pinnacles. But where is Philip IV., except for his
horse-face on the canvases of Velasquez? Where even, as against the
man he beat, is William the Silent, who waged a great fight against
odds and died by the dagger; but was a cool Whig, excessive in nothing
but self-control? He is scarcely alive; but Satan, as Milton saw him,
reigns in hell. We must have splendour of a sort. The normal man loves
a conflagration, though he will lend a hand in putting it out; and if
he is putting it out the inmost heart of him will rejoice if it be
a large fire and there are very few firemen. Vivid force, moral or
non-moral, must be there; a Borgia, though he be as wicked as a Nero,
cannot compete with him before the imagination; he was commonplace and
sordid and there is no response to him.
Such passages and such people kindle us in the records of the past.
How, from this point of view, will the last five years, crowded and
full of strife, look when we are the materials for art?
* * * * *
Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to
the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no
emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and
surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the
great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it--they have tried most
things--but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again.
There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the
collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far
as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures)
there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small
intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance;
and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and
tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which
comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic
struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but
it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly,
so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of
its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the
domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the
entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences,
but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There
have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them
"great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them
disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to
another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There
is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter,
symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels
now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of
despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope,
in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man,
nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing
he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously
struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of
us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there
is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the
kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something
as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of
nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at
bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with
sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle,
with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten.
Something of doubt colours also one's view of America's entry and the
career of President Wilson, in some regards a close analogue to that
of Lincoln. The lines of that story are simple--the watching pose,
the gradual approximation to war, the President's mental struggle,
his decision to throw America's weight into the scale, his manifestos
to the world in the names of liberty, honesty, and kindness, his
determination that the war, if possible, should be the last. But
the man at the centre of this tremendous revolution of events, the
mouthpiece of these great sentiments, has he that last abandonment of
feeling which alone captivates the imagination of those who hold the
mirror up to certain aspects of Nature? Without denying that it may be
a great blessing that he lacks that force, without presuming to know
all about him that may later be revealed, I feel doubtful. Death, more
particularly violent death, before the end, might have enabled artists
to impute to him something that perhaps was not there, to give him the
benefit of the doubt. But very likely for our good, possibly with the
greatest wisdom, he compromised at Paris. A more spontaneous man might
have ruined us all; but if compromise is excellent in politics, it is
of small use to poets. I doubt if the President will take his place
with St. Francis, Philip II., and Nero.
* * * * *
There will survive from the war, and from the other events of our
day, certain episodes which will, as by accident, draw the notice of
artists and be, as we speak, immortalised. A few of the countless
heroic and self-sacrificing actions which men have performed in every
country and by every sea will be snatched from oblivion. Tragedians,
in all probability, will brood on the story of Miss Cavell. The names
of a subaltern and an airman, fortuitously selected, will live as live
those of Hervé Riel and Pheidipiddes. But this is not what we call
history. I think that the Rupert Brooke legend will develop. He was
beautiful and a poet, and he died in arms, young. He had wandered to
the islands of the Pacific, and his comrades buried him in an island
of the Ægean. About him they will write poems, plays even, in which,
their colour given by actions and sayings which are recorded, he will
pass through experiences which were never his, and thoughts will be
imputed to him which possibly he never had. Two older artists have
taken a more prominent part in the war and its politics, a part that
may indisputably be called political. Of Paderewski I know nothing,
except that a man's progress could not easily have a setting more
superficially romantic; the strength of the man may be guessed at
by stray tokens. A person of whom fame in art may more certainly be
predicted is d'Annunzio, a man not in every way admirable, but of
a demoniacal courage, who has crowned a career full of flamboyant
passages with actions that, as a spectacle, are magnificent: orations
pulsating with ardour for the glory and power of the Latin genius,
words that were pregnant of acts, and following these, after years
of reckless flying, the sudden theatrical stroke at Fiume. As a
"character" he justified himself by that lawless blow; his rhetoric
finally proved itself the rhetoric of real passion, a lust for violent
life, self-assertion at the risk of death, the flaunting of the Italian
name; and, felt as such, it has moved a whole army and a whole people.
Whatever the results of analysis applied to his character or the
ultimate outcome of his splendid panache, he cannot but become, to the
artists of one nation at least, a hero, the material for romance.
There may be others. But, projecting myself as well as I am able, I
cannot see on the larger stage, amid the great fortunes of peoples
and their rulers, more than two subjects on which I think we may be
positive that they will pass into the company of material to which
artists return and return, subjects which already outline themselves
with some clarity to the imagination and have the air of greatness.
One is the fall of the German Empire. Were it shortly to be restored,
the force with which its calamities will appeal to us would be
diminished: for an end must be an end. But if what seemed to happen
really has happened there is a spectacle there which will appear
more prodigious and more moving as time goes on--that triply-armed
vainglorious kingdom pulling the world down on itself; the long,
desperate, ruthless fight against enemies ultimately superior; the
"siege"; the quality, proud and assured if barbaric, of the Prussian
spirit which filled the ruling caste and determined at once its fight
and its fall. The tale is tragic, and almost epic; the persons are
not yet revealed who shall be capable of being made, on the stage
or in books, the instruments for telling it. Certainly, though men,
misguidedly, will attempt to make Wilhelm II. sustain an artistic
load to which he is not equal, the Kaiser will make no great hero or
hero-villain. Possibly in some Hindenburg or other general will be
found the strength, the simplicity of belief or resolve, which make
a great figure; or possibly this will be of the tragedies in which
the individual humans are all pigmies subordinate to the main theme.
Elsewhere, I think, is to be found a man who has about him the certain
atmosphere of imaginative life. He is Vladimir Ulianoff, Lenin.
I talked a few weeks ago with a Russian in exile, a Conservative, an
official of the old regime, and (I think) a Baltic Baron. He was not,
therefore, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or to Lenin; he hated, though
he understood, them and he loathed him. "Lenin has ruined Russia," he
said, taking no pains to conceal his desire that Lenin should die.
Then the imaginative man in him awoke, as it has a way of doing in
intelligent Russians of all kinds, and he suddenly added vehemently:
"But a hundred years hence a Hero of Legend, like Peter the Great and
the Prince who first introduced Christianity into Russia."
I felt immediately that he had spoken not merely a truth, but an
obvious one. Englishmen may have all sorts of opinions about Lenin;
few have heard much beyond rumour of him, but even those who are most
avowedly ignorant of him or most leniently inclined to him would
scarcely like to find him in their midst. Yet there is that flavour of
vitality, of greatness, about him that is lacking in many who have
caused misery to none and even in some of the most potent benefactors
of mankind. We feel it almost unconsciously; the recognition of it is,
as it were, instinctive; a picture of him, growing from stray scraps
of news and rumour, has been forming in our minds, a picture almost
from the first differentiated from that, say, of his equally active
colleague, Trotsky. Trotsky, one feels, might disappear to-morrow and
leave but a name and some wreckage. But the other man, if he be not in
the line of Tolstoi (as some of his adherents seem to suppose him to
be), is in the line of the great oriental despots, of Tamerlane and
Genghiz Khan.