"Composition" indeed proved the curse of the _Invasion of the Crimea_:
for Kinglake was a slow writer, and composed with his eye on the page,
the paragraph, the phrase, rather than on the whole work. Force and
accuracy of expression are but parts of a good prose style; indeed
are, strictly speaking, inseparable from perspective, balance, logical
connection, rise and fall of emotion. It is but an indifferent
landscape that contains no pedestrian levels: and his desire for the
immediate success of each paragraph as it came helped Kinglake to miss
the broad effect. He must always be vivid; and when the strain told,
he exaggerated and sounded--as Matthew Arnold accused him of
sounding--the note of provinciality. There were other causes. He was,
as we have seen, an English country gentleman--_avant tout je suis
gentilhomme anglais_, as the Duke of Wellington wrote to Louis XVIII.
His admiration of the respectable class to which he belonged is
revealed by a thousand touches in his narrative--we can find half a
score in the description of Codrington's assault on the Great Redoubt
in the battle of the Alma; nor, when some high heroic action is in
progress, do we often miss an illustration, or at least a metaphor,
from the hunting-field. Undoubtedly he had the distinction of his
class; but its narrowness was his as surely. Also the partisanship of
the eight volumes grows into a weariness. The longevity of the English
Bench is notorious; but it comes of hearing both sides of every
question.
After all, he was a splendid artist. He tamed that beautiful and
dangerous beast, the English sentence, with difficulty indeed, but
having tamed, worked it to high achievements. The great occasion
always found him capable, and his treatment of it is not of the sort
to be forgotten: witness the picture of the Prince President cowering
in an inner chamber during the bloodshed of the _Coup d'État_, the
short speech of Sir Colin Campbell to his Highlanders before the Great
Redoubt (given in the exact manner of Thucydides), or the narrative of
the Heavy Brigade's charge at Balaclava, culminating thus--
"The difference that there was in the temperaments of the two
comrade regiments showed itself in the last moments of the onset.
The Scots Greys gave no utterance except to a low, eager, fierce
moan of rapture--the moan of outbursting desire. The
Inniskillings went in with a cheer. With a rolling prolongation
of clangour which resulted from the bends of a line now deformed
by its speed, the 'three hundred' crashed in upon the front of
the column."
C.S.C. and J.K.S.
Dec. 5, 1891. Cambridge Baras.
What I am about to say will, no doubt, be set down to tribal
malevolence; but I confess that if Cambridge men appeal to me less at
one time than another it is when they begin to talk about their poets.
The grievance is an old one, of course--at least as old as Mr.
Birrell's "_Obiter Dicta_": but it has been revived by the little book
of verse ("_Quo Musa Tendis_?") that I have just been reading. I laid
it down and thought of Mr. Birrell's essay on Cambridge Poets, as he
calls them: and then of another zealous gentleman, hailing from the
same University, who arranged all the British bards in a tripos and
brought out the Cambridge men at the top. This was a very
characteristic performance: but Mr. Birrell's is hardly less so in
these days when (to quote the epistolary parent) so much prominence is
given to athleticism in our seats of learning. For he picks out a team
of lightblue singers as though he meant to play an inter-University
match, and challenges Oxford to "come on." He gives Milton a "blue,"
and says we oughtn't to play Shelley because Shelley isn't in
residence.
Now to me this is as astonishing as if my butcher were to brag about
Kirke White. My doctor might retort with Keats; and my scrivener--if I
had one--might knock them both down with the name of Milton. It would
be a pretty set-to; but I cannot see that it would affect the relative
merits of mutton and laudanum and the obscure products of scrivenage.
Nor, conversely (as they say at Cambridge), is it certain, or even
likely, that the difference between a butcher or a doctor is the
difference between Kirke White and Keats. And this talk about
"University" poets seems somewhat otiose unless it can be shown that
Cambridge and Oxford directly encourage poesy, or aim to do so. I am
aware that somebody wins the Newdigate every year at Oxford, and that
the same thing happens annually at Cambridge with respect to the
Chancellor's Prize. But--to hark back to the butcher and
apothecary--verses are perennially made upon Mr. Lipton's Hams and
Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer. Obviously some incentive is needed beyond
a prize for stanzas on a given subject. I can understand Cambridge men
when they assert that they produce more Wranglers than Oxford: that is
a justifiable boast. But how does Cambridge encourage poets?
Calverley.
Oxford expelled Shelley: Cambridge whipped Milton.[A] _Facit
indignatio versus_. If we press this misreading of Juvenal, Oxford
erred only on the side of thoroughness. But that, notoriously, is
Oxford's way. She expelled Landor, Calverley, and some others. My
contention is that to expel a man is--however you look at it--better
for his poesy than to make a don of him. Oxford says, "You are a poet;
therefore this is no place for you. Go elsewhere; we set your aspiring
soul at large." Cambridge says: "You are a poet. Let us employ you to
fulfil other functions. Be a don." She made a don of Gray, of
Calverley. Cambridge men are for ever casting Calverley in our teeth;
whereas, in truth, he is specially to be quoted against them. As
everybody knows, he was at both Universities, so over him we have a
fair chance of comparing methods. As everybody knows, he went to
Balliol first, and his ample cabin'd spirit led him to climb a wall,
late at night. Something else caused him to be discovered, and
Blaydes--he was called Blaydes then--was sent down.
Nobody can say what splendid effect this might have had upon his
poetry. But he changed his name and went to Cambridge. And Cambridge
made a don of him. If anybody thinks this was an intelligent stroke,
let him consider the result. Calverley wrote a small amount of verse
that, merely as verse, is absolutely faultless. To compare great
things with little, you might as well try to alter a line of Virgil's
as one of Calverley's. Forget a single epithet and substitute another,
and the result is certain disaster. He has the perfection of the
phrase--and there it ends. I cannot remember a single line of
Calverley's that contains a spark of human feeling. Mr. Birrell
himself has observed that Calverley is just a bit inhuman. But the
cause of it does not seem to have occurred to him. Nor does the
biography explain it. If we are to believe the common report of all
who knew Calverley, he was a man of simple mind and sincere, of quick
and generous emotions. His biographers tell us also that he was one
who seemed to have the world at his feet, one who had only to choose a
calling to excel in it. Yet he never fulfilled his friends' high
expectations. What was the reason of it all?
The accident that cut short his career is not wholly to blame, I
think. At any rate, it will not explain away the exception I have
taken to his verse. Had that been destined to exhibit the humanity
which we seek, some promise of it would surely be discoverable; for he
was a full-grown man at the time of that unhappy tumble on the ice.
But there is none. It is all sheer wit, impish as a fairy
changeling's, and always barren of feeling. Mr. Birrell has not
supplied the explanatory epithet, so I will try to do so. It is
"donnish." Cambridge, fondly imagining that she was showing right
appreciation of Calverley thereby, gave him a Fellowship. Mr. Walter
Besant, another gentleman from Calverley's college, complained, the
other day, that literary distinction was never marked with a peerage.
It is the same sort of error. And now Cambridge, having made
Calverley a don, claims him as a Cambridge poet; and the claim is
just, if the epithet be intended to mark the limitations imposed by
that University on his achievement.
"J.K.S."
Of "J.K.S.," whose second volume, _Quo Musa Tendis?_ (Macmillan &
Bowles), has just come from the press, it is fashionable to say that
he follows after Calverley, at some distance. To be sure, he himself
has encouraged this belief by coming from Cambridge and writing about
Cambridge, and invoking C.S.C. on the first page of his earlier
volume, _Lapsus Calami_. But, except that J.K.S. does his talent some
violence by constraining it to imitate Calverley's form, the two men
have little in common. The younger has a very different wit. He is
more than academical. He thinks and feels upon subjects that were far
outside Calverley's scope. Among the dozen themes with which he deals
under the general heading of _Paullo Majora Canamus_, there is not one
which would have interested his "master" in the least. Calverley
appears to have invited his soul after this fashion--"Come, let us go
into the King's Parade and view the undergraduate as he walks about
having no knowledge of good or evil. Let us make a jest of the books
he admires and the schools for which he is reading." And together they
manage it excellently. They talk Cambridge "shop" in terms of the
wittiest scholarship. But of the very existence of a world of grown-up
men and women they seem to have no inkling, or, at least, no care.
The problems of J.K.S. are very much more grown-up. You have only to
read _Paint and Ink_ (a humorous, yet quite serious, address to a
painter upon the scope of his art) or _After the Golden Wedding_
(wherein are given the soliloquies of the man and the woman who have
been married for fifty years) to assure yourself that if J.K.S. be not
Calverley's equal, it is only because his mind is vexed with problems
bigger than ever presented themselves to the Cambridge don. To C.S.C.,
Browning was a writer of whose eccentricities of style delicious sport
might be made. J.K.S. has parodied Browning too; but he has also
perpended Browning, and been moulded by him. There are many stanzas in
this small volume that, had Browning not lived, had never been
written. Take this, from a writer to a painter:--
"So I do dare claim to be kin with you,
And I hold you higher than if your task
Were doing no more than you say you do:
We shall live, if at all, we shall stand or fall,
As men before whom the world doffs its mask
And who answer the questions our fellows ask."
Many such lines prove our writer's emancipation from servitude to the
Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many
young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a
puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after
all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emancipation has come
somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet,
and it is quite likely that when he sounds them he may astonish the
world rather considerably. Now, if we may interpret the last poem in
his book, he is turning towards prose. "I go," he says--
"I go to fly at higher game:
At prose as good as I can make it;
And though it brings nor gold nor fame,
I will not, while I live, forsake it."
It is no disparagement to his verse to rejoice over this resolve of
his. For a young man who begins with epic may end with good epic; but
a young man who begins with imitating Calverley will turn in time to
prose if he means to write in earnest. And J.K.S. may do well or ill,
but that he is to be watched has been evident since the days when he
edited the _Reflector_.[B]