certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of
rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to Europe, and
which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the
Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that
reflection. There are indeed some classics--one might count them upon
the fingers of both hands--which no transition of taste much raises or
much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer.
But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be
for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently
adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion--and so sincere
while they remain--that we must always approach with extreme care the
criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last
decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual
thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire, and
with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of
judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed
by the process of time, as all other worthy things are moulded and
informed by the process of time. Let us attempt then to stand apart
from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was
present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new
weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own
land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove,
are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity
will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities
arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter)
to be judged in general terms, but in particular--since writing is
like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it,
if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. A
man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron,
but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he _was_, what
his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished
between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could
not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his
analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what
kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able
to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of _largesse_ would
have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would
have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able
to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness; why
the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat
against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had
corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and
the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and
cloyed.
If we so examine Swinburne we shall, as I have said, first notice that
in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is
the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense
communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea.
In this Swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was
peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape
and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it
or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even
neglect his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of
land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the Eighteenth
Century, for instance), in such a time the influence of Swinburne's
work will weaken too.
Next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer
of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern
writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an
organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music
of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general
gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression, and for that
matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always
known. But it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and
conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his
Poetic Art as the chief rule to consider "Music and always Music," was,
in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. Sense
is not sacrificed wholly in any place, it is but rarely imperilled
even by this motive in Swinburne. But one feels that reason has in the
construction no divine place, but is subsidiary--as it is subsidiary in
unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it
is subsidiary (since one should be just even in judging extravagance)
in all the major emotions of the human soul: in love, in combat, in
despair. And in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to
music, is to be discovered the source of another characteristic in the
work: the perpetual repetition. Two men, both sedulous and scholarly
admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory
judgments that Swinburne was unequalled in the range of his vocabulary,
and that Swinburne was, quite beyond parallel, repetitive. Each
judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer as a paradox or
a truism. Yet both are true, and both have an illuminating meaning
when his work is considered. That vast vocabulary (and if you will be
at the pains to note word upon word or to make a short concordance you
will see that the word "vast" is just)--that vast vocabulary, I say,
proceeded from the necessity of satisfying the ear. An exact shade of
length and emphasis were needed; they must be exactly filled, and some
one word out of the thousands upon thousands which the numerically
richest language of our time possesses must be hit upon to do the work.
This surely was the source of that wide range. So also was it the
source of the repetition.
Repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. It is
deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary and an odious
symptom of fatigue. The repetitions of Catullus in their way, the
repetitions of the Hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be; or rather
(for their voluntary quality is obvious) they were exactly designed
to produce a particular effect, and did produce it; the repetition
of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be
neglected. Swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor
of the other; they were the recurrence of a set of words or of single
words which suited the sound in his head. And just as to fit exactly a
void of known form one word exactly fitting must be found (fitting not
reason but the ear) so those which had been found to fit particular
rhythms must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as
naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool and that to
do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the
past. The word in Swinburne was subordinate.
It is a commonplace, and a true one--to pass to another matter--that
the English writers of the later Nineteenth Century (and not the
writers alone) reposed upon the Jacobean translation of the Old
Testament. That unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental
characters in which appear more largely with every process of retreat
from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that
generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous
effect. Swinburne is as full of it as Kipling; the ready-made phrases
of weary political discussion are full of it. The whole national life,
in so far as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it.
Many of Swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the English Psaltry,
and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially
if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character
or even a biblical transcription. Herein, again, as in that effect of
landscape and of air, he is national in every particle of his poetic
being; and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him,
and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics
of his life and of his opinion. The man who in youth was ardent for
a liberty which leant much nearer to anarchy than to the republic,
who ranged, as the fashion was over all Europe, to find subjects for
that mood, in age perpetually sounded a note which had in it something
exaggerated of fury and of protest against whatever might be thought to
be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the national life.
Yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either
field; the passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn
from the untrammelled nature about him which ran through him and made
him write. The convinced and extreme political insistence of his later
verse was drawn from the same source. It was still the surroundings of
his own land that compelled him.
There is one last thing to be said: the work has been called pagan. It
is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. Those who
attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan
world. By pagan we mean that long, long manhood of Europe (a thousand
years long to our knowledge--how much longer we know not) in which the
mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the
Mediterranean. Swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a
foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the North. The sea
of the Atalanta in Calydon is an English sea. All that attitude in him
was reaction and a protest. It was full of yearning: now pagan paganism
was not full of this. The very earliest moment in which a protest of
that kind is to be found is the Fourth Century. For the transformation
between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our
race in the first four centuries of the Roman Empire a yearning which
must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted an assuagement
of it or have passionately protested against that assuagement, or
have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than
profoundly influenced by it. What is called "paganism" since that
change came is not of marble and is not calm: it is a product, not of
the old time, but of the new.
ON A PROPHET
Years ago in the county of Kent a gentleman of means, culture and
lineage begged me to make the acquaintance of a certain neighbour of
his who dwelt in a little cottage called (by the wrath of God) "The
Hollies"--and, indeed, a holly-tree of no small size, but one only,
grew beside his door. This cottage was cubical in formation with the
exception of the roof, which was a pyramid, and it was built of brick
with the exception of the roof, which was of slate. Its name, "The
Hollies," was painted outside upon the gate. This is all I have to say
about the cottage.
The man who dwelt within it came that very evening to dine at the
Squire's, and was what you will call obviously a gentleman. He
was not a gentleman in any cryptic or mystical sense; he was not
the Adumbration of a gentleman; he was not the Platonic Idea of a
gentleman; he was not the Gentleman used loosely as a term for a good
man; he was not rich; he spoke perfectly; he was very stupid. Much more
than this, he was a Prophet.
The learned have observed (or at least the only ones among them who
count have persistently observed) that it is in the nature of barbaric
peoples to accept whatever is told them with sufficient assurance,
conviction and simplicity, but especially if it regard the future. On
this account (the learned say) he who will prophesy with flame shall
certainly among barbarians become a founder. Now it is sufficiently
certain that this type of man, so successful among the primitive, and
perhaps also among the decayed, continues through all ages and in all
societies, though varying perhaps in proportion, and certainly varying
enormously in the source of his information according to the generation
in which he lives, is here to-day; and this man was one of him.
At first I did not know in what a Presence I stood--or rather sat--for
he was very modest, if indeed it be modest to make no noise in the
eating of soup, to frown heavily, and never to speak a word. There were
but three of us there, the Squire, myself, _et Rex Meus_ the Prophet.
Having seen little of the world I much desired to hear what he would
say; although he was still what politicians call young he seemed old
to me, because he had a full beard, and because life had already
wearied him, a thing incomprehensible to boys. The Squire watched him
with a good deal of admiration and of fear, until at last he said,
"There won't be any war." Here let me tell you that these words were
pronounced in the year 1888, and a little before the bursting of the
spring upon the Kentish Weald.
Nor was there one. There was no war about that time.
Those who read these lines, I am quite certain, will find them a shock.
We live in a time when war is so struck with doom that it is putting on
speed, as it were, to make a fine ending. War is out of our manners; we
can tolerate it no more. Every year is a new reconciliation, and a new
treaty in the federation of all mankind except those who have neglected
their armament, and in general we are forgetting war. But there have
been wars, and of some calibre--hefty and noisy wars since you and I
were boys. Now in 1888 there was no war. So the Prophet was right.
The Squire was interested and humble, and being a plain man he asked
why there would be no war, for it was imagined at that moment by eight
or nine newspaper men that some war or other was going to break out;
but what war I forget after such a lapse of time. The Prophet was a
true prophet, by which I do not mean that he prophesied truth, but
only that he was in keeping with all that I have ever read of his
breed; he shook his doormat of a head and wagged his beard, smiling,
as bearded men do, with the eyes only, and would give no reasons;
and, indeed, there was no war. But as the dinner went on he talked of
other things; he prophesied a Parliament in Dublin "within ten years,"
and, new as I was to the world, I could but note how much of his
conversation worked within fixed frames and limits, as should beseem
a prophet. Some things were going to happen "within five years," some
"within twenty years," some--and the leap was indeed splendid--"within
fifty years." Among these last I dimly remember was the spread of a
universal language, which I think he called "Anglo-Saxon"; and there
was something or other about the birth-rate which escapes me now, but
which I can remember to have appalled me at the time, for it was a
destruction of all I loved and revered in Europe.
The dinner went on, and as he got more food and wine into him he
prophesied less--for fasting is the mother of prophecy. He was still
assertive, he was still sure; his talk was still of public men, of
continents, of armies, of battle and of sudden death, but the future
entered less into it, and the present more. He became not so much a
prophet, but, if I may use the word quite gently, more of a liar. I
can remember vividly now, after so many years, how he stood in the
hall of that great house, all wrapped up to go through the park to
"The Hollies." I looked at his large frame and masterful demeanour. I
remembered all that he had said, both of things distant from me and of
things to come, and I admired such eyes in the brain.
It was ten years before I met him again. I am wrong--it was nine. I met
him upon a steamboat in the North Sea, and he remembered me. We looked
over the side of the ship and talked about America and Spain. As to
the chance of war he waved it all away with his hand. It might come or
it might not [the truth was, it was too near for his type of vision],
but what would come _after_, whether the war was fought or not, was
quite clear. "America," he said, "would learn that she could fight a
European Power." It seems that having learnt this, all sorts of things
would happen, and there would be banging and bingeing to some tune.
The earning of one's living, the weight and dullness which come upon
the mind from seeing too many places and knowing too many men, left my
impression less vivid. For, as it says in the song--
Ki moulte y resve mainte a vu:
Ki pleure trop a trop vescu.
But anyhow there remains to me the impression of that conflict between
the Old World and the New which I was destined to experience, and
which I in no way desired. He had been following French politics also,
and he told me--not by way of prophecy, but as a revelation of inner
truth--why it was that Germany had not declared war upon France and
taken Paris in the autumn of the preceding year. I talked to him,
therefore, of the 75mm. gun. He did not shirk it. He talked of it as
one who knew; and as I heard him my mind grew aged. I left him in a
port of Holland after luncheon, and the last I remember of him on that
occasion was a slight gesture of his from the wrist only (for he was a
dignified man) explaining how all that I saw, the port, the shipping,
the docks, everything, would be German "within ten years."
I met him again several times in the succeeding waves of our century.
I met him just before the Boer War, and a little after Colenso. He
prophesied only upon one matter upon these occasions, and that was
the length of the conflict, which, with an exact discrimination,
he invariably placed within "six months" of the day upon which he
addressed me, and the third time he assured me of this thing was in the
month of February 1902, and that time he was right.
Since then I have met him continually, for he knows less people than
he used to do, and he has fallen into a routine of old friends. The
Squire is dead, and he only goes down to "The Hollies" now and again.
It is his pleasure still to foresee. The war over, he bought Consols.
He was careful to explain that he was no fool. They were at 97. They
would fall, of course; he was not buying for immediate rise. In part
of this anticipation he was not disappointed, but in another part he
was. He was in a fume for some little time about an approaching war
with Russia upon the frontiers of India, and again he would return to
that recurrent theme of his life, the destruction of all limitrophous
civilisations by the organised might of Germany. But his chief concern
was the march of China upon Europe, which, as he clearly foresaw,
could not be long delayed. "That," he said, with a sort of Christian
enthusiasm, "would bind us all together once more!"
Whether it be a labour to prophesy or no, his hair had certainly grown
white in the pursuit of his vocation, and when I last saw him (which
was a little after the Epiphany in Rugby Station, waiting for the
train to Carlisle) we spent ten minutes together, and he told me with
unabated gladness that war would break out in the Balkans "when the
snow melted." I asked him at what time this change came about in the
Balkans, but he did not know.
ON BELIEVING
Whenever one studies, even superficially, any generation of men who
have acted in the past and of whose actions there is some considerable
record, that, I think, which most strikes the curious student is the
nature of the things which were taken for granted during the period.
Very much might be written--whole books--upon the effects which this
has upon history. Innumerable points arise as one considers it. For
instance, there is no case I can remember of the things which were
taken for granted existing in the same plenitude of record as the
other things of history. The men of the Ninth Century did not sit down
formally and tell us that they looked at the world in such and such a
fashion. We have to glean and to pick out their standpoint by working
parallel, noting unconscious expressions and side effects. It is like
watching a man speaking on some matter of minor interest and trying to
define through his tone and gesture the standpoint from which not only
that minor interest, but every other, is regarded by his mind.
Perhaps nothing is more subject to close scrutiny to-day, is more
suspected, and has more difficulty in establishing itself than an
unusual physical experience, especially if there be about it a
suspicion of connection with the nature and destiny of the human soul.
There are certain periods in human history--the end of the Roman Empire
is one of them; the beginning, or at least the very early dawn, of
the Middle Ages was another--when marvels of this kind were sought
after and met, as it were, half way by the mind of the time. The
marvellous ran through the spirit of those generations very much as the
accumulation of the ascertained, common and often unimportant, fact
runs through the spirit of our time. They accumulated legend and what
must, in the vast majority of cases, have been even falsehood with the
same readiness with which we accumulate columns of statistics. They
believed certain types of things to be true, and that belief led them
to accept very much of the same nature on which they had no proof.
A very excellent example of the changes which take place from one
generation to another in this respect may be discovered by any one who
will set himself out to answer this question: "What did Englishmen
in the middle and end of the Twelfth Century think about property in
land?" Note the conditions of the problem. Land was the all-important
thing of the time. It was the one thing on which men left records which
they were determined should be minute, accurate and permanent. Yet
there is no scholar at once so learned and so wise that he can with any
exactitude answer the question. And it is evident that the fascination
of the subject chiefly lies in the limitless field which it opens for
discussion. There are those--excellent scholars--who will have it that
the Englishmen of that time thought of land fundamentally as something
common to the community. There are others--scholars of perhaps equal
standing--who will have it that the Roman conception of absolute
ownership had survived in nearly all its original simplicity. Between
these two extremes scholarship may range at will; and however certain
one may be individually that one's own point of view is right, one will
never be able to marshal proof which shall certainly convince, and
finally convince, the whole of the learned world. The men of that time
believed something about land. They never set it down, they took it for
granted; and we can only judge of what that belief was by its secondary
effects. It sounds amazing, but it is true.
Another character of this unseizable spirit of the time is the
distortion it appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it
through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time--our own.
No one can read the history of the French Revolution without perceiving
that certain doctrines of comparatively little effect upon the material
circumstance of men so entirely filled the whole mental atmosphere
of the great bulk of the French people, and certainly of a very large
proportion of Western Europe in general, as to mould the whole of
thought. We can name those doctrines, we can talk of "equality"--a
dogma which may be true or false, but is certainly transcendental;
we may talk as they talked about "liberty," but that does not give
us any conception of the colour, smell, atmosphere, of the thing
that drove them. And unless the reader is in touch with that evasive
and central thing in the period it becomes an inexplicable welter:
the inexplicable welter which so many of our school and university
text-books make of it. A man (apparently a poor orator) moves men to
frenzy--Robespierre. Another, a somewhat over-refined scientist of
good birth and excellent balance of mind, is the first to propose the
total dissolution of all the most ancient organs of the State and the
destruction of the Monarchy. A third, an honest little lawyer, anxious
to keep his little family, appears like a tiger ravening for blood.
A fourth, a linendraper in Limoges, is put at the head of an army of
85,000 men and wins one victory after another. It is an amazing dance
of impossible results following upon incredible causes--unless one has
the spirit; and if one has it, as Michelet had it, the whole thing can
be presented, not only in proportion and in orders, but actually with
splendour.