of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has
been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that,
art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that
critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because
art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of
gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the
more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a
vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty,
and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that
expression. Architecture, for instance, and music, are alike based
upon instinctive preferences in human beings, the one for
geometrical form, the other for the combination of vibrations. It
is a law of music, for instance, that the human being prefers an
octave in absolute unison, and not an octave of which one note is a
semitone flat. That is not a rule invented by critics; it is a law
of human perception and preference. Similarly there is undoubtedly
a law which determines human preferences in poetry, though a far
more complicated law, and not yet analysed. The new poet is not a
man who breaks the law, but one who discovers a real extension of
it.
The question then, roughly, is this: Whitman chose to express
himself in a species of poetry, based roughly upon Hebrew poetry,
such as we have in the Psalms and Prophets. If this is a true
expansion of the aesthetic law of poetry, then it is a success; if
it is not a true expansion, but only a wilful variation, not
consonant with the law, it is a failure.
Now there are many effects in Whitman which are, I believe,
inconsistent with the poetical law. Not to multiply instances, his
grotesque word-inventions--"Me imperturbe!" "No dainty dolce
affettuoso I," "the drape of the day"--his use of Greek and Latin
and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt,
his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not
clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept
relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are
ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The
question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind,
but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any kind of mind.
Then too his form constantly collapses, as though he had no fixed
scheme in his mind. There are many poems which begin with an ample
sweep, and suddenly crumble to pieces, as though he were merely
tired of them.
Then again there seem to me to be some simply coarse, obscene,
unpleasant passages, not of relentless realism but of dull
inquisitiveness. They do not attract or impress; they do not
provide a contrast or an emphasis. They simply lie, like piles of
filth, in rooms designed for human habitation. If it is argued that
art may use any materials, I can only fall back upon my belief that
such passages are as instinctively repulsive to the artistic sense
as strong-smelling cheeses stacked in a library! There is no moral
or ethical law against such a practice; but the aesthetic conscience
of humanity instinctively condemns it. When I examine the
literature which has inspired and attracted the minds of humanity,
whether trained or untrained, I find that they avoid this hideous
intrusion of nastiness; and I am inclined to infer that writers who
introduce such episodes, and readers who like them, have some other
impulse in view, which is neither the sense of beauty nor the
perception of art. But if Whitman, or anyone else, can convert the
world to call this art, and to enjoy it as art, then he will prove
that he understands the law of preference better than I do.
But when all this has been said and conceded, there yet remain
countless passages of true and vital beauty, exquisite phrases,
haunting pictures, glimpses of perfect loveliness. His poems of
comradeship and the open air, his pictures of family life, have
often a magical thrill of passion, leaving one rapturous and
unsatisfied, believing in the secrets behind the world, and hoping
for a touch of like experience.
If I may take one poem as typical of the best that is in Whitman--
and what a splendid best!--it shall be "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking," from the book called Sea-drift. I declare that I can
never read this poem without profound emotion; it is here that he
fully justifies his claim to atmosphere and suggestiveness; the
nesting birds, the sea's edge, with its "liquid rims and wet
sands"--what a magical phrase!--the angry moan of the breakers
under the yellow, drooping moon, the boy with his feet in the
water, and the wind in his hair--this is all beyond criticism.
Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have
heard you
Now in a moment I know what I am for,--I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer,
louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,
never to die.
And then he cries to the waves to tell him what they have been
whispering all the time.
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.
This theme, it will be remembered, is worked out more fully in
the Lincoln poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," with
the "Song of Death," too long, alas, to quote here--it would be
delightful even to inscribe the words--which seems to me for
splendour of language, sweetness of rhythm, and stateliness of
cadence--to say nothing of the magnificence of the thought--to be
incontestably among the very greatest poems of the world.
If Whitman could always have written so! Then he need hardly have
said that the strongest and sweetest songs remained to be sung; but
this, and many other gems of poetry, lie in radiant fragments among
the turbid and weltering rush of his strange verse; and thus one
sees that if there is indeed a law of art, it lies close to the
instinct of suppression and omission. One may think anything; one
may say most things; but if one means to sway the human heart by
that one particular gift of words, ordered and melodiously
intertwined, one must heed what experience tells the aspirant--that
no fervour of thought, or exuberance of utterance, can make up for
the harmony of the firmly touched lyre, and the music of the
unuttered word.
V
CHARM
There is a little village here near Cambridge the homely, summer-
sounding name of which is Haslingfield. It is a straggling hamlet
of white-walled, straw-thatched cottages, among orchards and old
elms, full of closes of meadow-grass, and farmsteads with ricks and
big-timbered barns. It has a solid, upstanding Tudor church, with
rather a grand tower, and four solid corner turrets; and it has,
too, its little bit of history in the manor-house, of which only
one high-shouldered wing remains, with tall brick chimneys. It
stands up above some mellow old walls, a big dove-cote, and a row
of ancient fish-ponds. Here Queen Elizabeth once spent a night upon
the wing. Close behind the village, a low wold, bare and calm, with
a belt or two of trees, runs steeply up.
The simplest and quietest place imaginable, with a simple and
remote life, hardly aware of itself, flowing tranquilly through it;
yet this little village, by some felicity of grouping and
gathering, has the rare and incomparable gift of charm. I cannot
analyse it, I cannot explain it, yet at all times and in all
lights, whether its orchards are full of bloom and scent, and the
cuckoo flutes from the holt down the soft breeze, or in the bare
and leafless winter, when the pale sunset glows beyond the wold
among the rifted cloud-banks, it has the wonderful appeal of
beauty, a quality which cannot be schemed for or designed, but
which a very little mishandling can sweep away. The whole place has
grown up out of common use, trees planted for shelter, orchards set
for fruit, houses built for convenience. Only in the church and the
manor is there any care for seemliness and stateliness. There are a
dozen villages round about it which have sprung from the same
needs, the same history; and yet these have missed the unconsidered
charm of Haslingfield, which man did not devise, nor does nature
inevitably bring, but which is instantly recognisable and strangely
affecting.
Such charm seems to arise partly out of a subtle orderliness and a
simple appropriateness, and partly from a blending of delicate and
pathetic elements in a certain unascertained proportion. It seems
to touch unknown memories into life, and to give a hint of the
working of some half-whimsical, half-tenderly concerned spirit,
brooding over its work, adding a touch of form here and a dash of
colour there, and pleased to see, when all is done, that it is
good.
If one looks closely at life, one sees the same quality in
humanity, in men and women, in books and pictures, and yet one
cannot tell what goes to the making of it. It seems to be a thing
which no energy or design can capture, but which alights here and
there, blowing like the wind at will. It is not force or
originality or inventiveness; very often it is strangely lacking in
any masterful quality at all; but it has always just the same
wistful appeal, which makes one desire to understand it, to take
possession of it, to serve it, to win its favour. It is as when the
child in Francis Thompson's poem seems to say, "I hire you for
nothing." That is exactly it: there is nothing offered or bestowed,
but one is at once magically bound to serve it for love and
delight. There is nothing that one can expect to get from it, and
yet it goes very far down into the soul; it is behind the maddening
desire which certain faces, hands, voices, smiles excite--the
desire to possess, to claim, to know even that no one else can
possess or claim them, which lies at the root of half the jealous
tragedies of life.
Some personalities have charm in a marvellous degree, and if, as
one looks into the old records of life, one discovers figures that
seem to have laid an inexplicable hold on their circles, and to
have passed through life in a tempest of applause and admiration,
one may be sure that charm has been the secret.
Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of "In Memoriam." I
remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic
gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically,
morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see.
He said, I remember, with a smile: "The story of Milnes Gaskell's
friendship with Hallam was curious. You must know that people fell
in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E-- of whom
Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own
addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his
friendship."
Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost's house at
Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man,
with a flushed face,--Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by
overwork,--who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the
opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.
Odder still, the letters, poems, and remains of Hallam throw no
light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid,
elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been
entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined
with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam's father,
in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, "It did my heart good
to sit by and hear how the son snubbed the father, remembering how
often the father had unmercifully snubbed me."
There is a hint of beauty in the dark eyes and the down-dropped
curve of the mobile lip in the portrait, and one need not quote "In
Memoriam" to prove how utterly the charm of Hallam subjugated the
Tennyson circle. Wit, swiftness of insight, beauty, lovableness--
all seem to have been there; and it remains that Arthur Hallam was
worshipped and adored by his contemporaries with a fierce jealousy
of devotion. Nothing but the presence of an overmastering charm can
explain this conspiracy of praise; and perhaps there is no better
proof of it than that his friends could detect genius in letters
and poems which seem alike destitute of promise and performance.
There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the
same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a
portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint,
and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped
him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly
moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes
under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic,
passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every
gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne.
He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to
grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous
sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage
with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart
was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron,
showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that
period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet
despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy,
dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and
found that there was nothing in it.
The dicta of his that are preserved vibrate between cynicism,
shrewdness, wisdom, and tenderness. "Stop a bit," he said, as the
cabinet went downstairs after a dinner to discuss the corn laws.
"Is it to lower the price of bread or isn't it? It doesn't much
matter which, but we must all say the same thing." Yet, after all,
it is the letters and diaries of Queen Victoria that reveal the
true secret of Melbourne's charm. His relation to his girl-
sovereign is one of the most beautiful things in latter-day
history. Melbourne loved her half paternally, half chivalrously,
while it is evident that the Queen's affection for her gallant and
attractive premier was of a quality which escaped her own
perception. He humoured her, advised her, watched over her; in
return, she idolised him, noted down his smallest sayings,
permitted him to behave and talk just as he would. She lovingly
records his little ways and fancies--how he fell asleep after
dinner, how he always took two apples, and hid one in his lap while
he ate the other.
"I asked him if he meant to cat it. He thought not, and said, 'But
I like to have the power of doing so.' I observed, hadn't he just
as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on
the table? He laughed and said, 'Not the FULL power.'"
Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his
charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy.
He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, "You
see, those women bothered him so." And when he was superseded by
Peel, he combated the Queen's dislike of her new premier, and did
his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his
first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself
like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause
by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, "For God's sake,
go and talk to the Queen!" When I was privileged to work through
all Melbourne's letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and
magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and
tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate
freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up
to the end.
Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,--he had not the
purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too
contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,--but I know of
no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated
by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some
distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom,
and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and
engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not
the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is
rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a
phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most
sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and
interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same
before, and said it heavily and solemnly.
Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps
most beautiful when there is something of the child about it,
something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think
that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had
the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness.
Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so
interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the
responsibility of it. He was romantically affectionate, and the
tears came very easily at the call of emotion. Such incidents as
that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and
kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what
his intensity of feeling might be.
It is not as a rule the calm and controlled people who have this
attractiveness for others; it is rather those who unite with an
enchanting kind of playfulness an instinct to confide in and to
depend upon protective affection. Very probably there is some deep-
seated sexual impulse involved, however remotely and unconsciously,
in this species of charm. It is the appeal of the child that exults
in happiness, claims it as a right, uses it with a pretty
petulance,--like the feigned enmity of the kitten and the puppy,--
and when it is clouded over, requires tearfully that it shall be
restored. That may seem an undignified comparison for a prince of
the church. But Newman was artist first, and theologian a long way
afterward; he needed comfort and approval and even applause; and he
evoked, together with love and admiration, the compassion and
protective chivalry of his friends. His writings have little
logical or intellectual force; their strength is in their ineffable
and fragrant charm, their ordered grace, their infinite pathos.
The Greek word for this subtle kind of beauty is charis, and the
Greeks are worth hearing on the subject, because they, of all the
nations that ever lived, were penetrated by it, valued it, looked
out for it, worshipped it. The word itself has suffered, as all
large words are apt to suffer, when they are transferred to another
language, because the big, ultimate words of every tongue connote a
number of ideas which cannot be exactly rendered by a single word
in another language. Let us be mildly philological for a moment,
and realise that the word charis in Greek is the substantive of
which the verb is chairo, to rejoice. We translate the word charis
by the English word "grace," which means, apart from its theological
sense, a rich endowment of charm and beauty, a thing which is
essentially a gift, and which cannot be captured by taking thought.
When we say that a thing is done with a perfect grace, we mean that
it seems entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful.
It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done,
easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is
yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or
unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be,
leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the
same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth
doing; and this is where the moral appeal of beauty lies, in the
contagious sort of example that it sets. But when we clumsily
translate the word by "grace," we lose the root idea of the word,
which has a certain joyfulness about it. A thing done with charis
is done as a pleasure, naturally, eagerly, out of the heart's
abundance; and that is the appeal of things so done to the ordinary
mind, that they seem to well up out of a beautiful and happy
nature, as the clear spring rises from the sandy floor of the pool.
The act is done, or the word spoken, out of a tranquil fund of joy,
not as a matter of duty, or in reluctant obedience to a principle,
but because the thing, whatever it is, is the joyful and beautiful
thing to do.
And so the word became the fundamental idea of the Christian life:
the grace of God was the power that floods the whole of the earlier
teaching of the gospel, before the conflict with the ungracious and
suspicious world began--the serene, uncalculating life, lived
simply and purely, not from any grim principle of asceticism, but
because it was beautiful to live so. It stood for the joy of life,
as opposed to its cares and anxieties and ambitions; it was
beautiful to share happiness, to give things away, to live in love,
to find joy in the fresh mintage of the earth, the flowers, the
creatures, the children, before they were clouded and stained by
the strife and greed and enmity of the world. The exquisite quality
of the first soft touches of the gospel story comes from the fact
that it all rose out of a heart of joy, an overflowing certainty of
the true values of life, a determination to fight the uglier side
of life by opposing to it a simplicity and a sweetness that claimed
nothing, and exacted nothing but a right to the purest sort of
happiness--the happiness of a loving circle of friends, where the
sacrifice of personal desires is the easiest and most natural thing
in the world, because such sacrifice is both the best reward and
the highest delight of love. It was here that the strength of
primitive Christianity lay, that it seemed the possession of a
joyful secret that turned all common things, and even sorrow and
suffering, to gold. If a man could rejoice in tribulation, he was
on his way to be invulnerable.
It is not a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and
noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of
"grace" in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a
combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord
by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and
enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh;
so that the word, which had stood for a perfectly peaceful and
attractive charm, became the symbol of righteous persecution, and
flowered in cries of anguish and spilled blood.
We shall take a long time before we can crawl out of the shadow of
that dark inheritance; but there are signs in the world of an
awakening brotherliness; and perhaps we may some day come back to
the old truth, so long mishandled, that the essence of all religion
is a spirit of beauty and of joy, bent on giving rather than
receiving; and so at last we may reach the perception that the
fruitful strength of morality lies not in its terror, its
prohibitions, its coercions, but in its good-will, its tolerance,
its dislike of rebuke and censure, its rapturous acceptance of all
generous and chivalrous and noble ways of living.