off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but
is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience
of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “_The Pilgrim’s Progress_.” Well,
I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty
times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most
solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to
read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with
imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible
invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the
things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence
or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the _Progress_ there is
violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a
great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.
(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is
troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered
completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden
on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the
burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He
cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining
light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his
wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and
man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and
children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The
neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How
do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and
mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of
Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket
gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding
it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of
his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their
backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be
dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is
grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in
it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or
vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in
it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as
I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible
attempt to tinkerise the Bible.
One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands
by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and
acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was
very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In
politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,
and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had
familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his
literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_
is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the
drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the
book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained
currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be
explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any
note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of
imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been
familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of
tenderness--tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but
I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first
time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.
It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up
Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious
enthusiast. When I have laid aside the _Spelling-Book_ and the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, and opened the _Faerie Queen_, I feel as though
the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of
Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been
substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had
drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though
the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the
green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere
to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than
escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of
Warwickshire.
And yet, melancholy truth! the _Faerie Queen_ is most unpopular and most
unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand
people who begin the _Faerie Queen_, not ten read half way through it,
and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have
got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached
the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the
rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My _Faerie Queen_ occupies 792
pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and
thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand
words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!
And still it is _unperfite_! I find that although I have owned the book
for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have
read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.
It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of
English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind
with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no
doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river
that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite
beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might
put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial
chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything
like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many
stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the _Faerie Queen_ the poets’
poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one
reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of
Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.
The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a
wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is
half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of
English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you
that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or
dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact
things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended
his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company
of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of
knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous
sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all
the _Faerie Queen_, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast
of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous
persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets--those
rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities--turn themselves
into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful
as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are
moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us
for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.
They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property
of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers
and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,
and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and
friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never
grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties
or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.
The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has
ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a
singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight
when free and catholic and pagan.
After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,
how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath
comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads--
“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”
Or again here--
“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,
The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,
His onely daughter and his onely hayre;
Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,
As bright as doth the morning starre appeare
Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,
To tell that dawning day is drawing neare
And to the world does bring long wished light:
So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”
Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza
redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find
that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even--but Truth! An abstraction! A
whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and
disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a
moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as
the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,
but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen
Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una
as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists
is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.
There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.
The fact is, all the _Faerie Queen_ ought to be quoted except the
blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening
of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a
hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no
other poem--except Shelley’s _Alastor_--do I notice such grievous,
continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As
I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever
knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas
marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome
often. But who can resist this?--
“---- And, when she spake,
Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.
* * * * *
Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even browes.”
I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely
that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are
no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem
to melt together of their own propinquity.
Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day--
“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”
As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they
fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify
one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is
checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying
something about the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, I had
the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to
trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in
distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser--to have it nigh. My
copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It
seems to me I shall never again look into the _Spelling-Book_ or the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit
for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this
pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted
reading of the _Faerie Queen_ at page 473. My intellect is too weak and
my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So
much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.
MY COPY OF KEATS.
The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by
Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf
I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that
time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set
upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
searches for favourite passages.
The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army
regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service
in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following
overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they
outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and
names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back
is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s _Poetical
Works_ in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.
The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover
are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the
arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and
degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
a wheaten straw after the threshing.
In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the
volume I speak of under the head “POETRY--_Pocket Editions_;” described
as “Keats’s _Poetical Works_. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3_s._
6_d._ cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I
alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I
become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the
catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast
upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand--as a poor gentleman
in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of
bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the
bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a
feast his purse denies to his lips.
If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a
shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You
would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,
and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you
would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so
deeply such a preposterous demand.
My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands
more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest
trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and
land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and
when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect
upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt
of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became
limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between
the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh
of a hand waxing old.
Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it
returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from
India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty
years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover
was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,
save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of
startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a
gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the
symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to
shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I
wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of
substantial brown paper.
For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for
the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to
contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.
But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.
What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery
of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!
Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all
friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would
last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised
garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came
after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to
rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,
and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the
paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its
own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.
There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his
circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet
unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men
take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know
a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean
shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;
one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train
without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a
fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;
a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as
a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his
family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my
Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I
gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove
with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I
liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it
would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a
friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not
strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,
“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of
it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the
bidding to a banquet.
So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,
and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and
defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as
verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling
stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and
moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I
may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,
wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as
any man now living--almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with
us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in
the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or
carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to
be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical
points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record
of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the
music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s
song haunting a sea shell?
Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,
the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the
margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give
a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I
remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up
secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still
living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his
work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s
name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all
looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The
precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there
is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we
were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights
of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or
on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text
sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might
buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common
property--“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But
here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic
imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this
volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,
speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in
admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we
had stood humiliated and afeard.
My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many
quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would
I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the
bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are
nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that
embattle the heights of Parnassus.
What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I
remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins
the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny
afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed
down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel
beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we
all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the
long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a
stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn
blossom.
One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His
voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the
better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the
book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,
saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what
he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always
seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.
He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated
passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:
“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”
He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the
grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as
though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the
broad full stream.