He prayeth best that loveth best
All things both great and small
—such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly. But
Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary
people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other.
We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and making love, and come to
feel without a word being said what their standards are and so are
steeped through and through with their morality. There can be no more
forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are
represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray
and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the morality of
ordinary intercourse, the morality of the novel, which parents and
librarians rightly judge to be far more persuasive than the morality of
poetry.
And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being said the
criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking, reading, doing has
been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful
though that is, of having been in good company and got used to the ways
of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned
country-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke or singing
his song and then another, we know that though this world resembles, it
is not in fact our daily world. It is the world of poetry. Everything
happens here more quickly and more intensely, and with better order than
in life or in prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part
of the incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in
advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before
words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with that
heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering in the
mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and its
variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the most
impressive of all—the shaping power, the architect’s power. It is the
peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this
quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation. From most
poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers;
some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very equal, very
even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven lines in the
hope that the quality will be contained in them it has escaped.
My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,
Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,
And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,
But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.
In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to set
beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears
ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most
ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make
each other shine; when separated lose their lustre. Thus the pleasure he
gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us,
because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or
observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens,
millers, old peasant women, flowers—there is a special stimulus in
seeing all these common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry
affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see them out of
doors. There is a pungency in this unfigurative language; a stately and
memorable beauty in the undraped sentences which follow each other like
women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their bodies as they
go—
And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.
And then, as the procession takes its way, tranquilly, beautifully, out
from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, grinning, malicious, in league
with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to mock the pomp and ceremonies of
life—witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad
bottom of English humour.
So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind
blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father’s tombstone unmade.
But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of those
ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one age merges in
another and are not able to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for
buying books cheap; next he was off to France and told his mother, “My
mind is now not most upon books”. In his own house, where his mother
Margaret was perpetually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys
the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was always reason on her
side; she was a brave woman, for whose sake one must put up with the
priest’s insolence and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke
into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou proud Squire” were
bandied angrily about the room. All this, with the discomforts of life
and the weakness of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter
places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after
year, the making of his father’s tombstone.
Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare ground. The
Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave cloth was in tatters, and he
had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud woman like
Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the Pastons’ lack of
piety, and other families she heard, of no greater standing than theirs,
spent money in pious restoration in the very church where her husband
lay unremembered. At last, turning from tournaments and Chaucer and
Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold
which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and might now be sold
to defray the expenses of his tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she
had hoarded it and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair.
She grudged it; but there was no help for it. She sent it him, still
distrusting his intentions or his power to put them into effect. “If you
sell it to any other use,” she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust
you while I live.”
But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in the
course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk
in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of
the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in dirty lodgings,
alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to the end for money,
Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural
daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb
was still unmade.
The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up this
frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all collections
of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the
fortunes of individuals. The family will go on whether Sir John lives or
dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often
dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds
itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day
shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes. It is early morning and
strange men have been whispering among the women as they milk. It is
evening, and there in the churchyard Warne’s wife bursts out against old
Agnes Paston: “All the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is
the autumn in Norfolk and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for
clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that
winter and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your
gift.” There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.
But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the
pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of
endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters since.
Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part, does
Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse. “Men cut
large thongs here out of other men’s leather. . . . We beat the bushes
and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . . which is to my
heart a very spear.” That is her eloquence and that her anguish. Her
sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to their will. They jest
rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like
a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two
directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must
have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far
better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious
solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips
of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short it is easy
to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not _Lear_ or _Romeo
and Juliet_, but the _Canterbury Tales_.
Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his turn.
The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the same as
before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness; of
unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the
draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping
straight over land unmitigated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle
covering with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain-faced
Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth, treading out the roads of
Norfolk, and persisting with an obstinate courage which does them
infinite credit in furnishing the bareness of England.
[Footnote 1: _The Paston Letters_, edited by Dr. James
Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.]
_On Not Knowing Greek_
For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our
ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since
we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to
laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and
ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a
tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that
we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn
back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of
Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight
resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?
It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal
literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from
Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European
chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are
floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives, and
later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a
figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters,
its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal
catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has
been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides
was eaten by dogs; Æschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a
cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that
is all.
But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up any play
by Sophocles, read—
Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of
Agamemnon,
and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes
some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it
imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea.
Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of
England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in
this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the
elements of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here the Manor
house, the farm and the cottages; the church for worship, the club for
meeting, the cricket field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into
its main elements. Each man and woman has his work; each works for the
health or happiness of others. And here, in this little community,
characters become part of the common stock; the eccentricities of the
clergyman are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper; the
blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the loves and matings of the
boys and girls. Here life has cut the same grooves for centuries;
customs have arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops and
solitary trees, and the village has its history, its festivals, and its
rivalries.
It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles
here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists.
We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of
stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and
sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is
instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known
to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street,
not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble;
inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue
peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the
slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy
of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.
That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the
lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the
most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses
in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door bandying words like
village women, with a tendency, as one might expect, to rejoice in
language, to split phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory.
The humour of the people was not good natured like that of our postmen
and cabdrivers. The taunts of men lounging at the street corners had
something cruel in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek
tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality: Is not Pentheus,
for example, that highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the
_Bacchæ_ before he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and
Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows
crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking
to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant
southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The
poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be
read for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic,
familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an
audience of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears and eyes eager
and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat
too long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and
naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and
Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund of
emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by each
new poet.
Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but would
at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our weakness and
distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius was of the
extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design which, if it
failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not in the gentle
blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it succeeded, would cut
each stroke to the bone, would stamp each finger-print in marble. His
Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can
only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to
the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints,
repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly
bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of
despair, joy, hate
οἲ ‘γὼ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ὲν ἡμέρᾀ.
παῖσον, εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν.
But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus, with a
thousand differences of degree, that in English literature Jane Austen
shapes a novel. There comes a moment—“I will dance with you,” says
Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in
itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the
whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the
same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures
are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her
modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means
death.
But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of
Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It is
partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns and
twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which,
characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her,
outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet, as she
herself knows (“my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted
and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made to witness
her mother’s vileness and denounce it in loud, almost vulgar,
clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we know in
the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess.
“δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν,” she says—“there is a strange power in
motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes
kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy—“strike
again”. No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight before the
audience on the hillside were alive enough, subtle enough, not mere
figures, or plaster casts of human beings.
Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they
impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and
varied emotions than in the whole of the _Electra_. But in the _Electra_
or in the _Antigone_ we are impressed by something different, by
something perhaps more impressive—by heroism itself, by fidelity
itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws
us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original
human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse
him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some
other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the
way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which
everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily
and more directly than we understand the characters in the _Canterbury
Tales_. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human
species.
It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman,
these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who
stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places,
twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from
impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising
companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of
others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in
Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down
to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment
of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of
the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been
worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song
echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For
the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him.
Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy tawny bodies at
play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on
granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then
suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra,
as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her
any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with
grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem
divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb”.
And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the
insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks
thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek;
we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of
excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of
expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s
character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been
stated and must eternally endure.
Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the particular
to the general must of necessity be, with the actors standing there in
person, with their bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made
use of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare, where there is
more of poetry than of action, are better read than seen, better
understood by leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with
all its associations and movements, visible to the eye. The intolerable
restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could
be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action,
could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is
this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active
part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in
the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to
speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
Always in imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves
and the author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself
felt. For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and
madmen supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always
devising some substitute—Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding
coming out and addressing the world before his curtain rises. So to
grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the utmost importance.
One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and
apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and
commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and
give them their relation to the play as a whole.
We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course is exactly what we
cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities,
must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that
Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the
play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some
place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings
of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love unconquered in fight.
Lovely, lofty, and serene his choruses grow naturally out of his
situations, and change, not the point of view, but the mood. In
Euripides, however, the situations are not contained within themselves;
they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of suggestion, of questioning; but
if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled
rather than instructed. At once in the _Bacchæ_ we are in the world of
psychology and doubt; the world where the mind twists facts and changes
them and makes the familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable.
What is Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s duty to them,
and what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus
makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the
straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it in
order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I have so
much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together two
apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them together,
you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I might have given
you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore suffers less than
Sophocles and less than Æschylus from being read privately in a room,
and not seen on a hillside in the sunshine. He can be acted in the mind;
he can comment upon the questions of the moment; more than the others he
will vary in popularity from age to age.
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves,
and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions
far flung and unanswered, Æschylus makes these little dramas (the
_Agamemnon_ has 1663 lines; _Lear_ about 2600), tremendous by stretching
every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors,
by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the
scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as
to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap
through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks
of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give
out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey
the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting
them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively
what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other
words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we
cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for
instance—
ὀμμάτων δ ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ’ Ἀφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which
in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds
without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by
prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run
up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning
that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Æschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that
people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some
mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides
will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a
small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running
use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but
the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing
has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough
to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
For none of these dramatists had the license which belongs to the
novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of
modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can
only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes
two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the
ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and
however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness
of metaphor could have saved the _Agamemnon_ if either images or
allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the
naked cry
ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ. ὢ ’πολλον, ὢ ’πολλον.
Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.
But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold descended
on the hillside. There must have been some place indoors where men
could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats,
where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their
ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the
life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had
eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy
ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up,
fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly
stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole
company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting
process; to contract painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge
what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the
dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into
truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is virtue
knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless
questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail, even if he
does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better. For as the
argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing
on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of
reaching it. That all can feel—the indomitable honesty, the courage,
the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit
where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest
felicity of which we are capable.
Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of mind of
a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been revealed.
But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is
not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is a winter’s
night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s house; the girl is playing the
flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on sandals; he has stopped in
the hall; he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Socrates has
done; he is bantering Alcibiades; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it
round “this wonderful fellow’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares
not for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can imagine all
external possessions, whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any
other thing for which the multitude felicitates the possessor. He
esteems these things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among
men, making all the objects of their admiration the playthings of his
irony. But I know not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images
which are within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen
them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and
wonderful, that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be
obeyed even like the voice of a God.” All this flows over the arguments
of Plato—laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the
hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising.
Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our
faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the
frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker
found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep
instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the
cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to
turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of
living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things
are permanently more valuable than others.
So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of us.
For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of that,
by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the
atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the
coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and grace, and then
contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting, expands and soars in
that higher air which is generally reached only by the more extreme
measures of poetry—it is this art which plays upon us in so many ways
at once and brings us to an exultation of mind which can only be reached
when all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy to the
whole.
But we must beware. Socrates did not care for “mere beauty”, by which he
meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as much as the
Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or listening to
argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we are to break off
sentences and appreciate them apart from the context. For them there
were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Sayings from George
Eliot. The writer had to think more of the whole and less of the detail.
Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck
them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts.
Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do
the English. There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature
which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of
printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of
the prettiness of detail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to
look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe
for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an
age like our own. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our
emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before
we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only
poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of
Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be
direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being
sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet
being dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die nobly is the
chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot;
for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of
praise that grows not old”. They could march straight up, with their
eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions stand still and
suffer themselves to be looked at.
But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it
was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut on a
tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue of
Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds upon some
tremendous metaphor in the _Agamemnon_ instead of stripping the branch
of its flowers instantly as we do in reading _Lear_—are we not reading
wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading
into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack? Does not the
whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They
admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the
maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a
vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the
young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings;
the grove has only to be called ἄβατον, “untrodden”, and we
imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we
are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the
reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of
a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps
misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole
fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now
dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a
page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals
by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless it is
the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which
perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the
expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek.
πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἕρως
ἅψηται
. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined,
becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love.
Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then,
spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing,
shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves
which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us of our own
emotions, _thalassa, thanatos, anthos, aster_—to take the first that
come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet
fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the depths Greek is
the only expression. It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations.
Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is
necessarily full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says
“wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can
the subtler stress, the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even
by the most skilful of scholars—
. . . thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb
is not
ἅτ’ ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ,
αἰ, δακρύεις.
Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this
important problem—Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a
passage in the _Odyssey_ where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if
Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our
merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though
Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English.
Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we
laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that
burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The
French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so
different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure
that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus
humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when
we turn from Greek to Elizabethan literature it seems, after a long
silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.
These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted
and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the
unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature;
it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no
forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many
men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one.
Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which
permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Æschylus, or Racine, or
Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on
to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means
that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass
the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have
Sappho with her constellations of adjectives, Plato daring extravagant
flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and
contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and
quietly, apparently motionless, and then with a flicker of fins off and
away; while in the _Odyssey_ we have what remains the triumph of
narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of
the fortunes of men and women.
The _Odyssey_ is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive
story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly
in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens
next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty,
subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the
sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little
hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is
true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though
everything is made by hand, are not closely kept at work. They have had
time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an
ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at
once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room;
Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions
seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful,
have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than
children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little
islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in
their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more
aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of
life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own
standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of
existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when
we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and
its consolations, of our own age.
_The Elizabethan Lumber
Room_
These magnificent volumes[2] are not often, perhaps, read through. Part
of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book
as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a
lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments,
huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for
ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the
dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness
to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while
outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.
For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, elephants’ teeth,
wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of
priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of
innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by “apt young men”
from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself.
The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the
river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. “The
Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships
thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mariners they shouted
in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof.” Then, as
the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the
hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his
friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly
England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships
sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and
serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too
was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs
of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their
God against the God of the Turks, who “can speake never a word for
dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . .
But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God
indeed. . .” God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir
Humphrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they
sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the
North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland’s men,
hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight,
licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and
worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and
claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. “Sir
William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son,
until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.”
But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk,
or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold
strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One
expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of
uncounted riches lay only a little further up the coast? What if the
known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When,
after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of
the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands,
startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the
trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or
sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw,
far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on
their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for
the Spanish King.
These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country
to decoy “the apt young men” lounging by the harbour-side to leave their
nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the
bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of
English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it
is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from
which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of
producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have
failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose
crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily consumed by the
gallows”. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by
the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds
of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs,
“without which our life were to be said barbarous”, have all come to
England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the
immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for
the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen
surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they
could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in
the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated
company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter
from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw
the Emperor “sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head,
and a staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the ceremony that
he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English
merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and
stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by
millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these
centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the
glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was
bravely dressed for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of
red cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk”. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were
eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns and lumps of
ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and
“debates” of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into
vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere
off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild
beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board
to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed
profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later
the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to
his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again,
the savages lived together in perfect chastity.
All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the
adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being
acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize
upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate those
frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon
with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys,
for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and
died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some
silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf lay between the spartan
domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the
Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their
time reading histories, or “writing volumes of their own, or translating
of other men’s into our English and Latin tongue”, while the younger
ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the
enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into
existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and
lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse
and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan
literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities,
and references to that America—“O my America! my new-foundland”—which
was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories
of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in
fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.
But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the
sea and the voyages, of the lumber-room crammed with sea beasts and
horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire
the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so
beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep
the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without
these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable
catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich
draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how
exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing
a passage from Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_ with one from Montaigne’s
Essays.
He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent
with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music,
and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending
no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue;
even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by
hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which if one should
begin to tell them the nature of the _Aloës_ or _Rhubarbarum_ they
should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at
their mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the best
things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear
the tales of Hercules. . . .
And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney’s prose is an
uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid
phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long
accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial,
unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself
flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with
this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers
and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and
crevices which poetry can never reach; of cadences different but no less
beautiful; capable of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose
entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the
ancients met death:
. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs
occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul
propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation
ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais
entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires,
et la musique, et des vers amoureux.
An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared
with the French are as boys compared with men.
But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of
youth have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney
shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and
naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to
perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the
discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of
self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic
passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found.
The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on
the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer
interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.
_Cler_. A box of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man
can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has painted, and
perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes
her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear
it) on the subject. [Page sings]
Still to be neat, still to be drest &c.
_True_. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good dressing
before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate
garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often
counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show
them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand,
discover it often: practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth,
repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.
So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s _Silent Woman_, knocked into shape by
interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into
stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and
the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing
consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the
mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression
and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His
immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists,
autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades
of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men
with men to their lonely life within. “The world that I regard is
myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for
the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my
recreation.” All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked
the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel sometimes a hell within
myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.”
In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. “I am in the
dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.”
The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes
about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the
greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted
all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life
are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot
that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of
them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens
before his imagination. “We carry with us the wonders we seek without
us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo of wonder
encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the
flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in
the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed
with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own
qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from
nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself.
“For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a
friendly aspect to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws, the
customs and policies of several states, the names of all the
constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so
sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this
little figure walking that “methinks I do not know so many as when I did
but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than
Cheapside”.
He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the
highest altitudes he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the
details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes
large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes.
He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept
maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the
spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of
the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most
things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when
we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was
a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime
speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man,
whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we
smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile
broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the
astonishing conjectures of the _Religio Medici_. Whatever he writes is
stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of
impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish
colours that, however hard we try, make it difficult to be certain
whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the
presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest
lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with
ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses
full of emerald lights and blue mystery.
[Footnote 2: _Hakluyf’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels,
and Discoveries of the English Nation_, five volumes, 4 to, 1810.]
_Notes on an Elizabethan
Play_
There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in English
literature, and chief among them that jungle, forest, and wilderness
which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to be
examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare who has had the light on
him from his day to ours, Shakespeare who towers highest when looked at
from the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays of the lesser
Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,—to
adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an
upsetting experience which plies him with questions, harries him with
doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For
we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces
of a bygone age how great a power the body of a literature possesses to
impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but
takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles
which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact,
splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield
our ground or stick to our guns.
At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by the
extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and
our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed, is, speaking
roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called Smith, who
succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood importers, timber
merchants and coal exporters, was well known in political, temperance,
and church circles, did much for the poor of Liverpool, and died last
Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell Hill. That
is the world we know. That is the reality which our poets and novelists
have to expound and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan play
that comes to hand and read how
I once did see
In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.
Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool? And the groves of
Elizabethan drama echo “Where?” Exquisite is the delight, sublime the
relief of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the
jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend
their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women,
as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest
profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they fall
imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. But
soon the low, the relentless voice, which if we wish to identify it we
must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English literature, and
French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to stimulate and
enchant these old plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably
dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on the alert
through five acts or thirty-two chapters must somehow be based on Smith,
have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it
pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose that a man
because his name is Smith and he lives at Liverpool is therefore “real”.
We know indeed that this reality is a chameleon, quality, the fantastic
becoming as we grow used to it often the closest to the truth, the sober
the furthest from it, and nothing proving a writer’s greatness more than
his capacity to consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he
touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of gossamer. Our
contention merely is that there is a station, somewhere in mid-air,
whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the
great artist is the man who knows where to place himself above the
shifting scenery; that while he never loses sight of Liverpool he never
sees it in the wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then,
because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to
fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise
above life they soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible
for long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry, and a cloud
landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans
bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to
work.
Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is of a
different quality altogether from the boredom which a nineteenth-century
play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The riot of images,
the violent volubility of language, all that cloys and satiates in the
Elizabethans yet appears to be drawn up with a roar as a feeble fire is
sucked up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an intermittent
bawling vigour which gives us the sense in our quiet arm-chairs of
ostlers and orange-girls catching up the lines, flinging them back,
hissing or stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the Victorian
age is evidently written in a study. It has for audience ticking clocks
and rows of classics bound in half morocco. There is no stamping, no
applause. It does not, as, with all its faults, the Elizabethan audience
did, leaven the mass with fire. Rhetorical and bombastic, the lines are
flung and hurried into existence and reach the same impromptu
felicities, have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness,
which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom in our day the deliberate,
solitary pen. Indeed half the work of the dramatists one feels was done
in the Elizabethan age by the public.
Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the
public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay the
greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us—the plot; the
incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions which
presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public
actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with
the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen; undoubtedly a
play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we have a right to
demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly possible) that
what happens shall have an end in view. It shall agitate great emotions;
bring into existence memorable scenes; stir the actors to say what could
not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can fail to remember the plot
of the _Antigone_, because what happens is so closely bound up with the
emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one
and the same time. But who can tell us what happens in the _White
Devil_, or the _Maid’s Tragedy_, except by remembering the story apart
from the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans,
like Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and
the violence which those plots demand so terrific, that the actors
themselves are obliterated and emotions which, according to our
convention at least, deserve the most careful investigation, the most
delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is
inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no
characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences whom we know so little
that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine
in those early plays—Bellimperia in the _Spanish Tragedy_ will serve as
well as another—and can we honestly say that we care a jot for the
unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill
herself in the end? No more than for an animated broomstick, we must
reply, and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of
broomsticks is a drawback. But the Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude
forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the
formidable framework which greater dramatists could modify, but had to
use. Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert;
Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. “This man”, says Mr.
Havelock Ellis, “writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but
as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy
the fibres of their hearts.”
The play—_’Tis pity she’s a Whore_—upon which this judgement is
chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella spun from pole to
pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First, her brother tells
her that he loves her; next she confesses her love for him; next finds
herself with child by him; next forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is
discovered; next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and
brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings which such crises
and calamities might be expected to breed in a woman of ordinary
sensibility might have filled volumes. A dramatist of course has no
volumes to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can illumine; he
can reveal enough for us to guess the rest. But what is it that we know
without using microscopes and splitting hairs about the character of
Annabella? Gropingly we make out that she is a spirited girl, with her
defiance of her husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian
song, her ready wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we
understand the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches
her conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her.
She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach.
Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood,
nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the
English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she
is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this
we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the
play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been
accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we have not
expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with prose, and the
play, after all, is poetry.
The play is poetry we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to
obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so
far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as
we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences emerge;
the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play; the
emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and
gradually massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion concentrated,
generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what
phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!
O, my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.
or
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.