article about him must invite new immigrants into Borrow's kingdom.
But Mr. Shorter is not an introductory critic, not one who by his own
skill and charm summons strangers to make the acquaintance of a great
man. He is an inept critic who thrives by attaching his name to great
reputations. Fancy a man of any trifling literary experience, with the
least enthusiasm for literature, writing about style in a style like
this: "Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose
work will live, was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many
lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will,
by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist."
It is a sin so to "style" in a chapter about Edward FitzGerald, who at
the sound of such sentences would have clapped his hands to his ears.
Borrow describes himself in that pugnacious defence of Lavengro which
forms the appendix to "The Romany Rye." "Though he may become
religious, it is hardly to be expected that he will become a very
precise and straitlaced person; it is probable that he will retain,
with his scholarship, something of his gypsyism, his predilection for
the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain
gloves, not white kid, with any friend who may be inclined for a
little old English diversion, and a readiness to take a glass of ale,
with plenty of malt in it, and as little hop as may well be--ale at
least two years old--with the aforesaid friend--when the diversion is
over."
Is not that an irresistible man? Shouldn't you think that there would
have been among his contemporaries two or three hundred thousand good
sports, rooters, heelers, literary and non-literary bookmakers who
would bet on him and back him in any enterprise in which his
adventurous spirit elected to engage? Yet it was not so. He enjoyed
only a short period of popularity after the publication of "The Bible
in Spain." When he died at a ripe old age in 1881, he was not well
known. During his life the only highly distinguished man of letters
who knew and appreciated him was FitzGerald, the exquisite poet and
critic--FitzGerald, whose literary habits were as distant as possible
from Borrow's, whose fine-edged rapier seems utterly alien to Borrow's
short arm jab or his overhand wallop. FitzGerald had a curious
accuracy in spotting what was worth while in his time and in dodging
certain celebrated things that other people thought worth while, and
there is nothing inconsistent in his knowing that Borrow wrote good
English. But looking over Borrow's shoulder at his contemporaries, and
remembering Borrow's ungainly verses, one is amused to find that the
only real literary man facing one with a wink in his eye is
FitzGerald. The others have their backs turned.
Consider also Borrow's posthumous fame. His first biographer is Dr.
Knapp, an American professor of philology. And the modern critics who
praise him are not open-air men, but bookish, library men, whose names
do not suggest the robustly adventurous, Lionel Johnson, Mr.
Watts-Dunton, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Seccombe.
Most literary critics praise him in terms laudatory enough to atone
for the sins of their professional predecessors, whom Borrow held up
to "show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their
broken jaws." His four important books are published in Everyman's
Library; Mr. Birrell says that "we are all Borrovians now"; within
twenty years have appeared three biographical studies, besides Mr.
Shorter's. Yet Dr. Knapp's fundamental biography which was published
in 1898 is out of print; that mysterious and reprehensible entity
known as the public has not demanded a new edition. It is all
consistent with the Borrovian inconsistency. Borrow was proud of being
a gentleman and a scholar, and he was both in all true senses of the
words; but he hated gentility and wrote a hammer-and-tongs chapter
against the genteel; no revolutionist despising the "bourgeois" ever
punched their smug faces with such violent verbal fisticuffs.
He boasts of his fondness for gypsies and prize-fighters and quite
simply asks, "If he had not associated with prize-fighters, how could
he have used his fists?" However, he is an aristocrat and has no
sympathy with radical weavers. Despite his hatred of cant, some
sentences in "The Bible in Spain" have a missionary twang. He drifts
naturally away from the Church of England, yet when he attacks other
ecclesiastical institutions he holds up the Church of England as the
exemplar of religious truth. He scorns all deviation from fact, yet
his biographers have not wholly succeeded in separating what he did
from what he invented.
He was undoubtedly a polyglot, he made metrical translations from
thirty languages, wrote a version of the Gospel of St. Luke in Spanish
Gypsy (the first book ever attempted in any Gypsy dialect), supervised
the printing of the Bible in Manchu-Tartar, made translations from the
English into Manchu-Tartar, Russian and Turkish in good style, as any
of us who has read them can testify. In the person of Lavengro he lost
the stalwart Isopel Berners because he insisted on giving her lessons
in Armenian! For all that, he made mistakes and so gave the scholars
evidence that he was no scholar. He was not. He had an instinct for
language, especially for that language which he knew, as we know it,
probably better than he knew Manchu-Tartar. In his English narratives
we can follow him and praise him or censure him without violating the
severe rule which he laid down: "Critics, when they review books,
ought to have a competent knowledge of the subjects which those books
discuss."
The four books of Borrow which belong to English literature are "The
Bible in Spain," "Lavengro," "The Romany Rye" and "Wild Wales." "The
Bible in Spain" is one of those books that grow out of circumstances;
it was to a large extent thought out and phrased on the scene, amid
the adventures which it narrates; later it was cast into book form. It
grew out of experience, but an artist shaped its growth. Borrow was
sent by the Bible Society to distribute Spanish versions of the Bible.
He encountered the opposition of allied church and government, was
arrested, put in prison for three weeks, and liberated through the
influence of British officials.
It is not, however, the Bible or his mission that stimulates Borrow's
imagination. Cities and people, meetings on the road, scraps of talk,
sometimes rather long conversations, monologues by Borrow, the
mischances, dangers and excitements of a country at once wild and
anciently civilized, Borrow's opinions about languages, characters,
landscapes and anything else under the Spanish skies--such is the
substance of the book; and the substance is transmitted through a
style that gives little heed to elegance, that walks along like a
healthy man on a tramp. The most eccentric of men, full of strange
languages and odd ideas, Borrow writes English as naturally as he
drinks English ale. There is not a touch of eloquence, not a great
phrase; his descriptions are rather literal records of what was in
front of him and how he liked it than "word-paintings." The dominant
writers of his time were super-eloquent. Borrow does not speak their
language. Perhaps that is why he did not rival them in popular favor,
and also why he seems to us so refreshingly downright.
Borrow, like his master Defoe, has the art of setting all things forth
as if they were matters of fact. Even when his characters talk of
unusual matters, nay, especially when they harangue and gossip about
queer things, their conversation sounds like a transcription from life
and not like invention.
"Lavengro" and its sequel, "The Romany Rye," are properly classified
in Everyman's Library under fiction, and "The Bible in Spain" is
classified as "Travel and Topography." In what proportion
autobiography and fiction are admixed is a question which does not
effect the merits of the books. They all follow about the same method,
and so, too, does "Wild Wales." The episodes are inconsequential, and
the looseness of organization not only permits Borrow unlimited
latitude of subject, but strengthens the Defoe-like illusion of truth;
he never loses the tone of the veracious chronicler who puts things
down in the order of nature and not according to the design of art.
Between adventures and more or less pertinently to them, Borrow
becomes itinerant schoolmaster and gives us instruction in language,
philology, comparative literature, ethics and religion. He is not a
pedant, but a humanist: "It has been said, I believe, that the more
languages a man speaks, the more a man he is; which is very true,
provided he acquires languages as a medium for becoming acquainted
with the thoughts and feelings of the various sections into which the
human race is divided; but in that case he should rather be termed a
philosopher than a philologist."
Borrow need not be read continuously; if he enters upon a discourse
that promises not to interest you, you can turn the pages rapidly
until the eye strikes something more attractive. In his wide variety
is something for everybody. The conversations with the old apple woman
who had read the story of "Blessed Mary Flanders"; the chapters on
pugilism; the talks with tinkers and publicans; the old man who knew
Chinese but could not tell time by the clock; the outrageous attack
upon Walter Scott; the theological arguments with the man in
black--these are some of the choice fragments of what Borrow was
pleased to call a "dream." The general atmosphere is less that of
dreamland than of the broad highway in full sunlight. Since Borrow
died the cult of the open air has increased, and to that as much as to
anything is due the revival of interest in him. He is a great person,
a colossal egotist who in his journeyings takes up the whole road. It
is healthy for a man to be an egotist--especially if he is a colossal
one.
SHELLEY
In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley says that the imagination is the
moral instrument. To be greatly good a man must imagine intensely and
comprehensively. Poetry serves morality not by what it explicitly
teaches, but by its power to awaken and enlarge the mind, to render it
"the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought."
Since poetry strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of the
moral nature of man, "a poet would do ill to embody his own
conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his time
and place, in his poetical creations which participate in neither." A
remarkable book could be made of the best things said in prose by
English poets about poetry. Perhaps one book would not hold so much. A
narrower yet great and imaginative book could be made of what Shelley
said about poetry and what English poets have said about him. Such a
book would explain and exhibit the theory of poetry and the art of
criticism. The very good edition of Shelley in the Regent Library,
(edited by Roger Ingpen) contains some brief "Testimonia" which invite
one to the essays from which they are taken, by Browning, Swinburne,
Francis Thompson.
It is significant that Mr. Ingpen has not quoted from Arnold. If it is
the function of poetry to expand the imagination and make the mind
aware of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought, how did it
happen that Arnold, a genuine poet, missed Shelley utterly? Arnold was
not satisfied with his essay and intended to return to the subject.
That he could do a better thing is proved by his essay on Keats,
which, after he has done with his droning, schoolmasterly defence of
Keats's morals, is eloquent, serene and restrainedly emotional.
Shelley phrased many of the revolutionary ideas that were current in
his time. Arnold's timid school-bred culture was impervious to any
sort of revolutionary idea. Shelley's ideas did not impress him; he
thought Shelley a wonderful singer, but a singer without a solid body
of thought. Now, Shelley was the most full-minded poet of his time. He
knew more about what ought to be done with the world than any of his
contemporaries. That he failed to free Ireland and that the French
revolution was a disaster are a reflection on other people's
intelligence, not on his. It is not at all derogatory to a man's ideas
that for centuries and centuries after him the world fails to come up
to his teachings. If an angel is ineffectual that is not the angel's
fault. Indeed a too readily effectual angel would be rather a
journalist than a seer.
That the bulk of mankind is ages behind the best of its poets and
seers might possibly be explained by the fact that the bulk of mankind
simply has not met their thoughts. But how shall one explain the fact
that artistic children of culture, who have had opportunity to read,
who respond to the beauty of seers and poets, remain at the tail of
the intellectual procession, are not abreast of long dead poets like
Shelley, and let the leaders of their own day sweep past them
unapprehended, unguessed? The thing that makes one impatient of the
privilege of culture is that many of those who have enjoyed it do not
lead; they drag mankind back. In "Winds of Doctrine," by Mr. George
Santayana, the mind of the present age is likened to "a philosopher at
sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail." When you
make a generality about the mind of today, you are perfectly safe, for
nobody can dispute you. Nobody knows what the mind of today is doing.
It is doing so many things that no one of us can keep track of it. But
when a man writes himself down in a book, you can tell what his mind
is doing--in that book. I should liken Mr. Santayana to a philosopher
who, really wanting to sail, had forgot to cast off and was still
lashed to the dock with a spanking wind blowing out to sea.
It is no wonder that Whitman, revolutionary in substance and form,
perplexes the genteel and the cloistered. But it is a wonder that
Shelley, whose form is classic and whom a century has transformed from
demon to angel, does not reach them. A striking example of critical
and philosophic blindness is Mr. Santayana's essay on Shelley. Mr.
Santayana is a poet, and in this essay he says beautiful poetic
things. He is not stupid as Arnold was, for once in his life. But he
misses Shelley. He understands what Shelley was related to before
Shelley, for example, Plato, but he does not know the relation of
Shelley to his time or to the world since Shelley. What Mr. Santayana
says is lucid in phrase but quite hopelessly confused in thought. He
says that Shelley was "a finished child of nature, not a joint
product, like most of us, of nature, history and society." That is not
true of Shelley or any other human being in recorded history. It is
worse biography than Dowden's, and it seems that so old a critic as
Taine might have saved a man from writing such nonsense in the year
1912. Mr. Santayana says that "Shelley was not left standing aghast,
like a Philistine, before the destruction of the traditional order."
That is naive. Of course Shelley was not left standing aghast; he was
trying his best to destroy the traditional order; he was butting his
beautiful head against it. He did not budge the traditional order. One
reason is that most people have impoverished imaginations, that the
world can't do what Tolstoy thought would save it, stop and think for
five minutes. Another little reason is that there are too many
conservatives like Mr. Santayana teaching the young men of the world.
Yet Mr. Santayana says that Shelley was "unteachable"!
Shelley believed that a man would do ill to embody his own conceptions
of right and wrong in his poetry. Yet every man, poet or not, who
writes at all and is not a hypocrite, embodies his conceptions of
right and wrong in all his utterances. Shelley was intensely personal
in his poetry. His sky-larking, star-sweeping way of expressing
himself takes us out of range of his individual opinions. He spoke
heart-near things in splendid distances and tried to pull the far
skies down into sodden British hearts. The revolt, the defeated revolt
of his own times, near to him as the news of the daily papers, he
allegorized as the rebellion of a mythological Islam, and he flung the
stars reeling through Spenserian stanzas. No essayist has risen fully
to Shelley's poetic stature and comprehended him except another great
poet, Francis Thompson. Speaking his own convictions, as every man,
poet, critic, or even an academic voice of reason must and should
speak his convictions, Thompson begins his essay by pleading for a
reunion between his church and the art of poetry. So much of his essay
seems to me interesting but not closely relevant to Shelley. After
this introduction Thompson soars into the greatest essay that has ever
been written on an English poet by an English poet.
Most poets, with their wonderful ears, of course write good prose.
Francis Thompson has a fine essay on the prose of poets. Even
Browning, who wrote little prose except the extraordinary
parenthetical letters, was so clarified by Shelley that in his essay
he discovered a fairly fluent and readable style.
Shelley is primarily neither philosopher nor revolutionist, but lyric
poet. Yet to treat him only as a lyric poet is to forget his great
drama, "The Cenci," which can hold up its head undiminished beside the
Elizabethans. That idiotic British officialdom does not, or did not at
last accounts, allow its performance on the regular stage, is perhaps
only one more proof of how little impression Shelley's austere
anarchism made on practical British morality. "The Cenci" is austere;
for Shelley, it is athletically economical. The last speech of
Beatrice is an unexcelled emotional climax. Yet even in this play we
find that "intensely personal" note of Shelley; it speaks all his
heart against all injustice. The play learned many lessons from the
Elizabethans. It is not far wrong to call these lines Shakespearean:
My wife and children sleep;
They are now living in unmeaning dreams;
But I must wake, still doubting if that deed
Be just which was most necessary. O,
Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fire
Is shaken by the wind and on whose edge
Devouring darkness hovers!
H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA
Utopias fall into two classes, the local and the chronological. That
is, some are removed from present fact by geographical transition to a
country apart from us in space, a magic island, a realm undiscovered
until the romancer found it and assumed it to be extant in the
romancer's year of grace; others are sundered from present fact by
being thrown forward into the future or backward into a time that
precedes recorded history. The desirable land within the limits of
present time and the known surficial limits of the globe is obviously
not convincing. One fears that it may be rediscovered and invaded by
an imperial fleet or an inquisitive scientific expedition. Crusoe's
island is no longer remote. The geographers have plotted the planet
and have snared every conceivable no-man's-land in the meshes of
realistic lines of latitude and longitude.
The ideal civilization which plays ducks and drakes, not with space,
but with time, is safer. Nothing can dislodge it or disprove it or in
any wise proceed against it--except by force of superior imagination.
For nobody knows what may happen in the future. That is why all the
theological heavens are sublimely ramparted against attack.
Bellamy placed his ideal civilization within the impregnable security
of a time as yet unborn. His conception was original and in its way
was more realistic than the timeless abstraction of Plato and More,
and the Nowhere from which Morris sent news. The fundamental scheme of
portraying a future upon this earth was so fascinating that Bellamy's
book enjoyed a success out of all proportion to its literary skill or
its sociological insight. He had a first-rate plan, but with what
unfanciful and rigidly precise lines he filled it in! His style is
stiff and his future is ossified.
Mr. H. G. Wells took the idea of describing an imagined tomorrow and
made of it a stimulating romance. In saying that he took the idea one
does not mean to imply that he borrowed the scheme of "Looking
Backward" or of any other book. The notion of criticizing today from
the height of a postulated tomorrow was probably born and raised
before Bellamy. My bibliography is imperfect, but I seem to remember
that an Assyrian conceived the notion and inscribed his reflections on
a ton of brick. The important thing is the kind of future a man
imagines and the way he gets there and the justice of his backlook on
the world as it is. Wells's "The World Set Free" is the most
vision-expanding book of its kind--if there be a kind--that I have
ever quarrelled with and been delighted by. It justifies the last word
of its title. It does not cramp the growth of the race between a set
of rules. It spreads the lines of development out at a generously wide
angle. It bids humanity spring from what it is. It makes no
desperately impossible demands upon our common nature. Indeed, with a
cunning hidden plea, not evident at first glance, Mr. Wells draws the
world council, which gathered together the shattered nations and gave
them the first good government they had ever known, as a collection of
ordinary men, with only one or two inspiring geniuses. The idea--a
very important idea--is that any of us duffers could do it if we had
to, and if we were only jolted out of a few little private interests
and superstitions.
The value of a Utopia is not so much the description of a desirable
and convincingly attainable state as in the reflex description of an
undesirable state--the state in which we live. To show how the "new
civilization" was unhampered by political intrigue and financial
considerations is to show how obstructive is the present system of
politics and ownership. "Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the
bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers,
man the curious learner and man the creative artist, come forward to
replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble
adventure." In "those" times, that is the present seen from the year
2000, many of the homes were entirely "horrible, uniform, square,
squat, ugly, hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some
respects quite filthy; only people in complete despair of anything
better could have lived in them." In "our" time, that is about 2000,
the last stupid capitalist who wanted millions for an invention he had
stolen was laughed out of court. People do not struggle to get,
because they do not run the risk of starvation and wage slavery; they
produce as artists, because man likes to do things with his head and
his hands. In our times we understand that Bismarck, to take a salient
example, was not an admirable man but a gross person, and that the age
that produced him, made him a ruler, and paid him respect, was a dull,
stupefied, vicious age. The time when people were taking pills for all
kinds of ailments, were being killed by the slow process of the slum
or the swift process of the ill-managed railroads, is past the
imagination of "our" time to conceive.
From such a past the world is set free. The people of that past day
might have set themselves free, but they were too stupid; the workmen
were debased, timid and without imagination, the capitalists had to be
intent on property and dividends lest they fall to the unpropertied
condition of workmen; lawyers, clergymen, popular novelists like Mr.
Wells, editors, journalists, and other professional parasites did not
dare utter even such vision as they had, or did it for money under
convenient restrictions. It was an unthinkably rotten period in the
history of the world. Only a few kickers knew how rotten it was, or
had courage to express their sense of the prevalent putrescence.