whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
thematic outline itself emerges.
In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
well requited.
[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
_Ronsard_
Ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very
long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,
half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it
can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has
crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and
better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French,
based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman
who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to
them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.
Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him
more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is
something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard
against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving
like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must
regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great
historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and
the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.
Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible
thread of development in either. They are equable, constant
imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a
safe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The
nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are
steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less
well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give
himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure
restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.
All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.
Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
pétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by
some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one
reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard
to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les
Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.
When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular
kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely
the chances of a shock of surprise.
[Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par
Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]
With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of
his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of
this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern ear
can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of
'Petite Nimfe folastre,
Nimfette que j'idolastre....'
One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with
Villon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even with
Clement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of the
artist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle to
speculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory had
he read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something
very different from Ronsard's
'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers,
Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde,
Heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde,
S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....'
For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. So
many of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall
charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we share
his enjoyment.
The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless
allied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, which
differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the
fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and
if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting
us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own.
His interruptions of a verse with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, que
j'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard's
flea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of
irresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. He
does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides
has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There is
nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. We
are in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging it
is!
'Vous ne le voulez pas? Eh bien, je suis contant ...'
'Hé, Dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pensé
Qu'un seul départ eust causé tant de peine!...'
or the still more casual
'Un joïeus deplaisir qui douteus l'épointelle,
Quoi l'épointelle! ainçois le genne et le martelle ...'
Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make more
profitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity of
dramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard had
no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, could
touch cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand,
Ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us
emotionally, but to compel us to listen. His unexpected address to
himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method
for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that
might thus be attained is never fully worked out.
'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?... quand la paleur
Qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière
Nous perd le sentiment?...
The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.
Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
again. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days,
or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus--with an
unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted
on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost
say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it
not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that
the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the
honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that
would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to
distinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What charming things Ronsard has to
say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard
embonpoint de ce sein,'--
'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...'
And though he assures Hélène that she has turned him from his grave
early style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonné,' the
difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is
precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper's
daughter. As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive
thing that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to
whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. It was
the complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:--
'De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue,
Pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet,
Ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict
Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.'
That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion.
It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image
is too precise to be interchangeable. This may be a reason why it was
applied to a lady _hors concours_ for Ronsard.
But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of
Ronsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two--the gift of convinced
commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuine
commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of
a lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things
that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner
conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would
underscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a
minor Horace.) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range from
the familiar 'Le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of
'plus heureus celui qui la fera
Et femme et mère, en lieu d'une pucelle.'
His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led him
to belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnets
from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life came
easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged
that he was 'saoûl de la vie.' It is not surprising, therefore, that his
remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a
delightful tune:--
'Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....'
In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:--
'Seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....'
But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see how
infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan
than the great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to last
Ronsard was an amateur.
[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
_Samuel Butler_
The appearance of a new impression of _The Way of all Flesh_[10] in Mr
Fifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion to
consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining
story. Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most
obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been
overwhelmed with superlatives. The case is familiar enough and the
explanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly worth while to give it.
The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated
novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'one
of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell heavily
against it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to
beat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique
about it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knack
of being _sui generis_. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the
diminution of its contemporaries.
[Footnote 10: _The Way of all Flesh_. By Samuel Butler, 11th
impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield.)]
Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why
the praise of _The Way of all Flesh_ should be circumspect. Samuel
Butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel was
written intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. In
the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have
Mr Streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfied
with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to
revise it.' We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish
the book. The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler from
publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at
his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. His only
reason for abandoning _The Way of all Flesh_ was his own dissatisfaction
with it. His instruction that it should be published in its present form
after his death proves nothing against his own estimate. Butler knew, at
least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. He
did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of
them.
But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable
good things and a great novel. The most important is that a great novel
does not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out the
plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In _The Way of all
Flesh_, however, a _compère_ is always present whose business it is to
say good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the
asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being
a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of
the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught
him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in
hand. His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they
are sympathetic to the modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about all
that is left to us, and Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little
more placid, like our own. We share his ethical likes and dislikes. As
an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night
at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play.
But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _The Way of all
Flesh_ is a _roman à thèses_. Not that there is anything wrong with the
_roman à thèses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its
having to be obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a
_compère_ should be present all the while, provided that he does not
take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must
afford, by arguments outside it. But what happens in _The Way of all
Flesh_? We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges,
gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it
is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is
blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St
Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good to
them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is given in
Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--
'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were
gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something
else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the
fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who
could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be
able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not
venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who
were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he
almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for
he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that
lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had
the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had
mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found.
'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'
With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and
then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not
better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were
inevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to his
challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'
In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to
the challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It is
mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of
life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on
the bank with a £70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head
goes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if Ernest
Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he
did not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay
figure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butler
also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks
down after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably
unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in
texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a man
has an intense non-existence.
After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' is
concerned, Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest does
not materialise, the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be instead
it is not a great novel, nor even a good one. So much established, we
may begin to collect the good things. Christina is the best of them. She
is, by any standard, a remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round'
Christina. Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. He can
produce her in either way. She lives as flesh and blood and has not a
little of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'If it
were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the whole
phrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex is really a
bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of
Christina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there
are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels that
contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who
is really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by
the non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.
Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a
skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of
Roughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the
shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he
reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. The
glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening
party we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his
name was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which
contains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty years
before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curious
may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom
so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation
which Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it a
felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our
duty to believe the worst. The particularity of our attitude to Butler
appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with
Ernest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been for
him, we believe, _The Way of all Flesh_ might have appeared in 1882; it
might have short-circuited _Robert Elsmere_.
[JUNE, 1919.
* * * * *
We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore
have thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at the
thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the
compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped
should become vague and incoherent and dull. It is a pity to purchase
enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that
we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are
interested than an exact record of his phases.
The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with
biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion
of the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their
wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got
in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his
libation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too much
and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones
has been similarly turned to derision--after all, Butler was not a
great man--we feel that something analogous has happened. This laborious
building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. He had made
himself a cosy habitation in the _Note-Books_, with the fire in the
right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism.
In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he
looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.
[Footnote 11: _Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon'_ (1835-1902): _a
Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]