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SOME DIVERSIONS
OF
A MAN OF LETTERS
BY
EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1920
_First published October 1919_
_New Impressions November 1919; February 1920_
_OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE_
_Northern Studies_. 1879.
_Life of Gray_. 1882.
_Seventeenth-Century Studies_. 1883.
_Life of Congreve_. 1888.
_A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature_. 1889.
_Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S._ 1890.
_Gossip in a Library_. 1891.
_The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance_. 1892.
_Questions at Issue_. 1893.
_Critical Kit-Kats_. 1896.
_A Short History of Modern English Literature_. 1897.
_Life and Letters of John Donne_. 1899.
_Hypolympia_. 1901.
_Life of Jeremy Taylor_. 1904.
_French Profiles_. 1904.
_Life of Sir Thomas Browne_. 1905.
_Father and Son_. 1907.
_Life of Ibsen_. 1908.
_Two Visits to Denmark_. 1911.
_Collected Poems_. 1911.
_Portraits and Sketches_. 1912.
_Inter Arma_. 1916.
_Three French Moralists_. 1918.
TO
EVAN CHARTERIS
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface: On Fluctuations of Taste 1
The Shepherd of the Ocean 13
The Songs of Shakespeare 29
Catharine Trotter, the Precursor of the Bluestockings 37
The Message of the Wartons 63
The Charm of Sterne 91
The Centenary of Edgar Allen Poe 101
The Author of "Pelham" 115
The Challenge of the Brontes 139
Disraeli's Novels 151
Three Experiments in Portraiture--
I. Lady Dorothy Nevill 181
II. Lord Cromer 196
III. The Last Days of Lord Redesdale 216
The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 231
Some Soldier Poets 259
The Future of English Poetry 287
The Agony of the Victorian Age 311
Index 338
PREFACE:
ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE
When Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry, he dedicated his
first chapter to "Differences of Taste in Nations." A critic of to-day
might well find it necessary, on the threshold of a general inquiry, to
expatiate on "Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of standard
in the arts are always taking place, but it is only with advancing
years, perhaps, that we begin to be embarrassed by the recurrence of
them. In early youth we fight for the new forms of art, for the new
aesthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time
or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess. But the years
glide on, and, behold! one morning, we wake up to find our own
predilections treated with contempt, and the objects of our own idolatry
consigned to the waste-paper basket. Then the matter becomes serious,
and we must either go on struggling for a cause inevitably lost, or we
must give up the whole matter in indifference. This week I read, over
the signature of a very clever and very popular literary character of
our day, the remark that Wordsworth's was "a genteel mind of the third
rank." I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum was printed,
and, for the first time, I was glad that poor Mr. Matthew Arnold was no
longer with us. But, of course, the evolutions of taste must go on,
whether they hurt the living and the dead, or no.
Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element of poetic beauty?
The curious fact is that leading critics in each successive generation
are united in believing that there is, and that the reigning favourite
conforms to it. The life of a reputation is like the life of a plant,
and seems, in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch the
seed, admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795, shoot obscurely
from the ground, and gradually clothe itself with leaves till about
1840; then it bursts into blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 is
hung with clusters of the fruit of "permanent" appreciation. In 1919,
little more than a century from its first evolution in obscurity, it
recedes again in the raggedness of obloquy, and cumbers the earth, as
dim old "genteel" Wordsworth, whom we are assured that nobody reads. But
why were "the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of what
gave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to "the best judges"
in 1870? The execution of the verse has not altered, the conditions of
imagination seem the same, why then is the estimate always changing? Is
every form of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely a
graduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave of the sea and
carries "the best judges" with it? If not, who is right, and who is
wrong, and what is the use of dogmatising? Let us unite to quit all vain
ambition, and prefer the jangle of the music-halls, with its direct
"aesthetic thrill."
So far as I know, the only philosopher who has dared to face this
problem is Mr. Balfour, in the brilliant second chapter of his
"Foundations of Belief." He has there asked, "Is there any fixed and
permanent element in beauty?" The result of his inquiry is
disconcerting; after much discussion he decides that there is not. Mr.
Balfour deals, in particular, with only two forms of art, Music and
Dress, but he tacitly includes the others with them. It is certain that
the result of his investigations is the singularly stultifying one that
we are not permitted to expect "permanent relations" in or behind the
feeling of poetic beauty, which may be indifferently awakened by Blake
to-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic says that the verse of
Blake is beautiful and that of Hayley is not, he merely "expounds
case-made law." The result seems to be that no canons of taste exist;
that what are called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who make
them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their
legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to
repeal the code. Southey yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southey
again to-morrow, or perhaps Tupper? Such is the cynical _cul-de-sac_
into which the logic of a philosopher drives us.
We have had in France an example of _volte-face_ in taste which I
confess has left me gasping. I imagine that if Mr. Balfour was able to
spare a moment from the consideration of fiscal reform, he must have
spent it in triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the month
of September 1906 this poet closed, after a protracted agony, "that long
disease, his life." He had compelled respect by his courage in the face
of hopeless pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by the
abundance of his benefactions. His career was more than blameless, it
was singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half-paralysed, for a long time
very poor, pious without fanaticism, patient, laborious, devoted to his
friends, he seems to have been one of those extraordinary beings whose
fortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement. It would be
ridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a reason for admiring the
poetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I mention them merely to show that there was
nothing in his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his personal
conditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account for the, doubtless,
entirely sincere detestation which his poetry seemed to awaken in all
"the best minds" directly he was dead.
As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully-Prudhomme was,
without a rival, the favourite living poet of the French. Victor Hugo
was there, of course, until 1885--and posthumously until much later--but
he was a god, and the object of idolatry. All who loved human poetry,
the poetry of sweetness and light, took Sully-Prudhomme to their heart
of hearts. The _Stances et Poemes_ of 1865 had perhaps the warmest
welcome that ever the work of a new poet had in France. Theophile
Gautier instantly pounced upon _Le Vase Brise_ (since too-famous) and
introduced it to a thousand school-girls. Sainte-Beuve, though grown old
and languid, waked up to celebrate the psychology and the music of this
new poetry, so delicate, fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty of
extreme refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty made up
of lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who are now approaching
seventy will not forget with what emotion they listened, for instance,
to that dialogue between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son,
which closes:--
"J' ai laisse ma soeur et ma mere
Et les beaux livres que j' ai lus;
Vous n'avez pas de bru, mon pere,
On m'a blesse, je n'aime plus."
"De tes aieux compte le nombre,
Va baiser leurs fronts inconnus,
Et viens faire ton lit dans l'ombre
A cote des derniers venus.
"Ne pleure pas, dors dans l'argile
En esperant le grand reveit."
"O pere, qu'il est difficile
De ne plus penser au soleil!"
This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh collections--_Les
Epreuves_ (1886), _Les Vaines Tendresses_ (1875), _Le Prisme_
(1886),--was welcomed by the elder Sanhedrim, and still more
vociferously and unanimously by the younger priesthood of criticism. It
pleased the superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted with
enthusiasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their enjoyment.
In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-Prudhomme was a very noble poet
would have been like challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660.
Jules Lemaitre claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols that
France had ever produced. Brunetiere, so seldom moved by modern
literature, celebrated with ardour the author of _Les Vaines Tendresses_
as having succeeded better than any other writer who had ever lived in
translating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of emotion.
That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France competed in lofty praise of the
lyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is perhaps less remarkable than that Paul
Verlaine, whom all the younger schools still look upon as their apostle
and guide, declared, in reviewing _Les Ecuries d'Augias_, that the force
of style of Sully-Prudhomme was excelled only by the beauty of his
detail. It is needless to multiply examples of the unanimous praise
given by the divers schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about
1890. His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of France.
His death startlingly reminded us that this state of things had to be
entirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent of
Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived his
youth, and that he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy
wrecks, _La Justice_ (1878) and _Le Bonheur_ (1898), round which the
feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must be an
academician and hopelessly famous before one dares to inflict two
elephantine didactic epics on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, the
poet undertook to teach the art of verse in his _Reflexions_ (1892) and
his _Testament Poetique_ (1901), brochures which greatly irritated the
young. It is probably wise for academicians, whether poets or the
reverse, to sit beside their nectar, and not to hurl bolts down into the
valley. But, behind these errors of judgment, there they remain--those
early volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite little
masterpieces. Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly persons, any
longer delights in them? The notices which Sully-Prudhomme's death
awakened in the Paris Press were either stamped with the mark of old
contemporary affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as
frigid as the tomb itself. "Ses tendresses sucrees, sirupeuses, sont
vaines en effet," said a critic of importance! Indeed, it would appear
so; and where are the laurels of yester-year?
To those who were young when Sully-Prudhomme entered into his
immortality it seems impossible to realise that the glory has already
departed. Gaston Paris celebrated "the penetrating sincerity and the
exquisite expression of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhomme
above all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life, sincere and
dignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great critic compared _La Vote
Lactic_ and _Les Stalactites_ with the far-off sound of bells heard down
some lovely valley in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and the
language were precise; Sully-Prudhomme was a mathematician, and if he
was reproached with anything like a fault, it was that his style was
slightly geometrical. It would be otiose to collect any more tributes to
his genius, as it appeared to all Frenchmen, cultivated or
semi-cultivated, about the year 1880. With an analysis of
Sully-Prudhomme's poetry I am not here concerned, but with the question
of why it is that such an authority as Remy de Gourmont could, in 1907,
without awakening any protest among persons under fifty say that it was
a "sort of social crime" to impose such balderdash as the verse of
Sully-Prudhomme on the public.
It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may think such
prolongation of their severities ungraceful. But a single contrast will
suffice. When, in 1881, Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the French
Academy, expert opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admitting
that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric poet of the
age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent out this question, "Who is
the poet you love best?" and was answered by more than two hundred
writers of verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive; such
poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received votes, all the
great masters received many. But Sully-Prudhomme, alone, received not
one vote. A new generation had arisen, and one of its leaders, with
cruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his own most
famous line:--"N'y touchez pas, il est brise."
It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenon
of the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once a
startling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best poems
of Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with the
remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be
expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman,
but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is
full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great
art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the
much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which
has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation,
and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is not, on
this occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but his critics.
If Theophile Gautier was right in 1867, Remy de Gourmont must have been
wrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in the world of
criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man, which, however
ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it is the fact
that one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that
another whole generation is of the same mind as Remy de Gourmont.
Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his "cold music," comes
in and tells us that this is precisely what we have to expect. All
beauty consists in the possession of certain relations, which being
withdrawn, beauty disappears from the object that seemed to possess it.
There is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are not to demand
any settled opinion about poetry. So Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and
we want the heart to scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no
fixed norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic pleasure
cannot "be supposed to last any longer than the transient reaction
between it" and the temporary prejudice of our senses? If this be true,
then are critics of all men most miserable.
Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very clever people
despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite
certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic.
That eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you
revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It
is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if I were not a
philosopher. But it only shows how right I was to tell, you not to
expect permanent relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is
illusion, and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but only
a variation of fashion."
Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is no standard?
It must be admitted that there seems to be no fixed rule of taste, not
even a uniformity of practice or general tendency to agreement in
particular cases. But the whole study of the fine arts would lead to
despair if we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying
that no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not be able to
produce it, like a yard-measure, and submit works of imagination to it,
once and for all, in the eyes of a consternated public. But when we
observe, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at
another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but
certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary
quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and
unattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but
in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to
it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly
to locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of
the sky. At all events, it appears to me that this is the only theory by
which we can justify a continued interest in literature when it is
attacked, now on one side, now on another, by the vicissitudes of
fashion.
The essays which are here collected deal, for the most part, with
figures in the history of English literature which have suffered from
the changes of fortune and the instability of taste. In every case,
there has been something which is calculated to attract the sympathy and
interest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned with two
distinct but not unrelated branches of his subject, the literary
character and the literary craft. More than fifty years have
passed--like a cloud, like a dream!--since I first saw my name printed
below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that
half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed!
We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond
Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to _The Lotus
Eaters_, and the first _Legende des Siecles_ rejected as unreadable. In
face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it
is on its head or its feet--"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels,"
as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found
in an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and
analysis of the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysis
and this exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is to
sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books.
_August 1919._
THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]
Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh was
beheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold of
Old Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is what
her adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English history a
more shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type than Raleigh.
I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this celebrated freebooter,
and I go behind the modern definition of the word "panegyric" (as a
pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original significance,
which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great assembly of persons,
of the reason why they have been brought together in the name of a man
long dead. Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of time
allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and to define what
Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents.
I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the details of his
career and character, that the central feature of Raleigh, as he appears
to us after three hundred years, is his unflinching determination to see
the name of England written across the forehead of the world. Others
before him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh was the
first man who laid it down, as a formula, that "England shall by the
favour of God resist, repel and confound all whatsoever attempts
against her sacred kingdom." He had no political sense nor skill in
statecraft. For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men of
experience and judgment. But he understood that England had enemies and
that those enemies must be humbled and confounded. He understood that
the road of England's greatness, which was more to him than all other
good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe for the assertion of
English liberty, of English ascendancy, too; and the opportunity of the
moment lay in "those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided," the
fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most eminent as he was
also, in a sense, the most unfortunate.
A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the shadow of a fierce
bird of prey hovering over its victim. Ever since Ferdinand expelled the
Moors out of Granada, Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of
universal empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant system of
European civilisation by every means of brutality and intrigue which the
activity of her arrogance could devise. The Kings of Spain, in their
ruthless ambition, encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish
world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their
vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had
spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing
braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals,
of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused
and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and they
held that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh against
justice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they meant to
inflict upon Europe. It was to be _Spanien ueber alles_.
But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of the
great enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemously
regarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one country
which more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England,
and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any other
enemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood than
after the lives of any other people of Europe." The avowed purpose of
Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England on which the
very existence of the English State depends. The significance of Sir
Walter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with which he perceived and
the energy with which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other noble
Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had been clear-sighted and
had struck hard against the evil tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism,
but no other man before or since was so luminously identified with
resistance. He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight full
upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained in the _Last
Fight of the Revenge at Sea_ of 1591, where the splendid defiance and
warning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters of
the globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured,
as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the
Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be themselves
devoured."
There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not present
Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan age
there were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the
subtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable
wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of these, and to
complain of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither a
violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors
ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He
was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to
excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual
alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself
that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak,"
and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation of his
courage and nobility. For long years his violent and haughty temper made
him the most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire, where
everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes," and he did
not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, we
are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves with
serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from
ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his
protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive
pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong
silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century invented for
exclusive British consumption.
In judging his character we must take into consideration not only the
times in which he lived, but the leaders of English policy with whom he
came into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at the
height of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of Queen
Elizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper of the
monarch something to which his own nature intimately responded. The
Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he was, and she was an Englishman
of Englishmen. We are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of the
homage which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his mother, at the
bravado which made him fling his new plush cloak across a puddle for the
Queen to tread over gently, as Fuller tells us, "rewarding him
afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so
fair a footcloth," or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut on the
glass with their diamond rings. In all this, no doubt, there was the
fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's part there was ambition and the
desire to push his fortunes without scruple. But there was, you may be
sure, more than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between the two
who hated with the most unflagging and the most burning hate the wicked
aggression of Spain. We may be sure that Elizabeth never for a day
forgot that Pope Alexander VI. had generously bestowed the Western world
on the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which might be
extravagant and which might be exasperating, which might, in fact, lead
to outrageous quarrels between his Cynthia and himself, but which, at
least, that Cynthia understood.
But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and had his splendours
behind him, there came another Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. James I. was
the type of the cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes by
staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh will "turn up" by
Wednesday. He was disposed, from the very first, to distrust and to
waylay the plans of Raleigh. We are told, and can well believe it, that
he was "diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncomfortable in the
presence of that breezy "man of desperate fortunes." A very excellent
example of the opposition of the two types is offered by the discussion
about the golden city of Manoa. Raleigh believed, and after all
disappointments continued to be sure, that in the heart of the swamps of
the Orinoco there existed a citadel of magnificent wealth, an emporium
of diamonds and gold, from which Spain was secretly drawing the riches
with which she proposed to overwhelm civilisation. He struggled for
nearly a quarter of a century to win this marvellous city for England.
James I. chopped in with his cold logic, and declined to believe that
any golden mine existed in Guiana "anywhere in nature," as he craftily
said. When Raleigh returned after his last miserable failure in May
1617, the monarch spared no sneer and no reproof to the pirate of the
seas. Of course, the King was right; there was no mine of diamonds, no
golden city. But the immense treasures that haunted Raleigh's dreams
were more real than reality; they existed in the future; he looked far
ahead, and our sympathies to-day, and our gratitude also, are all for
the noble and valorous knight who sailed out into the West searching for
an unknown El Dorado.
It is not so easy to defend the character of our hero against those who,
like Hume, have objected to his methods in the prosecution of his
designs. To Hume, as to many others before and since, Raleigh seemed
"extremely defective either in solid understanding, or morals, or both."
The excellent historians of the eighteenth century could not make up
their minds whether he was a hero or an impostor. Did he believe in the
Guiana mine, or was he, through all those strenuous years, hoodwinking
the world? Had he any purpose, save to plunder the Spaniard? Perhaps his
own family doubted his sanity, for his son Walter, when he charged the
Spanish settlement at San Thome, pointed to the house of the little
colony and shouted to his men: "Come on, this is the true mine, and none
but fools would look for any other!" Accusations of bad faith, of
factious behaviour, of disloyal intrigue, were brought up against Sir
Walter over and over again during the "day of his tempestuous life,
drawn on into an evening" of ignominy and blood. These charges were the
"inmost and soul-piercing wounds" of which he spoke, still "aching,"
still "uncured."
There is no need to recount to you the incidents of his life, but I may
remind you that after the failure of the latest expedition to South
America the Privy Council, under pressure from the Spanish Ambassador,
gave orders to Sir Lewis Stukeley to bring the body of Sir Walter
Raleigh speedily to London. This was the culmination of his fall, since,
three days after Raleigh landed at Plymouth, the King had assured Spain
that "not all those who have given security for Raleigh can save him
from the gallows." His examination followed, and the publication of the
_Apology for the Voyage to Guiana_. The trial dragged on, while James
I., in a manner almost inconceivable, allowed himself to be hurried and
bullied by the insolent tyrant Philip II. If the English King did not
make haste to execute Raleigh the Spaniards would fetch him away and
hang him in Madrid. In these conditions, and clutching at life as a man
clutches at roots and branches when he is sliding down a precipice, the
conduct of Raleigh has given cause to his critics to blaspheme. He
wriggled like an eel, he pretended to be sick, he pretended to be mad,
in order to protract his examination. He prevaricated about his mine,
about the French alliance, about the Spanish treaties, about his stores
and instruments. Did he believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire of
the Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold lying hidden
in the hard white spar of El Dorado? We do not know, and his own latest
efforts at explanation only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really a
little mad at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement on
land and sea of the triumphant wealth of Spain.
Let us never overlook that the master-passion of his whole career was
hatred of this tyrannous prosperity of England's most formidable rival.
He acted impulsively, and even unjustly; there was much in his methods
that a cool judgment must condemn; but he was fighting, with his back to
the wall, in order that the British race should not be crowded out of
existence by "the proud Iberian." He saw that if Spain were permitted to
extend her military and commercial supremacy unchecked, there would be
an end to civilisation. Democracy was a thing as yet undeveloped, but
the seeds of it were lying in the warm soil of English liberty, and
Raleigh perceived, more vehemently than any other living man, that the
complete victory of Spain would involve the shipwreck of England's hopes
of future prosperity. Nor was he exclusively interested in England,
though all his best hopes were ours. When he had been a lad at Oxford he
had broken away from his studies in 1569 to help the Protestant princes
as a gentleman volunteer in France, and he took part in the famous
battle of Jarnac. He is supposed to have fought in France for six years.
From early youth his mind was "bent on military glory," and always in
opposition to Spain. His escape from the bloody Vespers of Saint
Bartholomew had given him a deep distrust of the policy of Rome. The
Spaniard had "abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of
Flanders. Sir Walter Raleigh dreamed that by the combination in arms of
England, France, and the Low Countries, the Spaniards "might not only be
persuaded to live in peace, but all their swelling and overflowing
streams might be brought back into their natural channels and old
banks."
Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against "the continuance of
this boundless ambition in mortal men." The rulers in Madrid,
transported by their own arrogance, had determined to impose their
religion, their culture, their form of government, on the world. It was
a question whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy of
England and France would not be crushed beneath the heel of Spain.
Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything, to imperil his own soul, to
prevent that. He says you might as well "root out the Christian religion
altogether" as join "the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to
prevent "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men," he
lent himself to acts which we must not attempt to condone. There is no
use in trying to explain away the facts of his cruel and even savage
fanaticism in Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always apt
to be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. But even his Irish
career offers aspects on which we may dwell with pure pleasure. Nothing
could be more romantic than those adventures, like the feats of a
paladin of the Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood of
Lismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord and Lady Roche from
their breakfast-table in their own castle of Ballyinharsh, and how he
rode with them up ravines and round precipices in that mad flight from
their retainers, is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas
_pere_.
Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the name fits him
well, even though his flock were less like sheep than like a leash of
hunting leopards. His theory was that with a pack of small and active
pinnaces he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons
without their being able to hit back. He was, in contradistinction to
many preceding English admirals, a cautious fighter at sea, and he says,
in a striking passage of the _History of the World_, written towards the
end of his career, "to clap ships together without any consideration
belongs rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must have taken the
keenest interest in the gigantic failure of the Felicissima Armada in
1588, but, tantalisingly enough, we have no record of his part in it. On
the other hand, the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the _Relation of
the Action in Cadiz Harbour_ and the incomparable _Report on the Fight
in the Revenge_, supply us with ample materials for forming an idea of
his value as a naval strategist. Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldys
the antiquary, speaks of him as "raising a grove of laurels out of the
sea," and it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his highest
effect of prominence. It was at sea that he could give fullest scope to
his hatred of the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He had to be at once a
gamekeeper and a poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests of
English shipping against privateers and pirates, while he was persuaded
to be, or felt himself called upon to become, no little of a pirate
himself. He was a passionate advocate of the freedom of the seas, and
those who look upon Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should read
his little book called _Observations on Trade and Commerce_, written in
the Tower, and see what sensible views he had about the causes of the
depression of trade. These sage opinions did not check him, or his
fleets of hunting-pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowing
plate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and sandalwood and
ebony, which came swinging up to the equator from Ceylon or Malabar. The
"freedom of the seas" was for Raleigh's ship, the _Roebuck_; it was by
no means for the _Madre de Dios_. We find these moral inconsistencies in
the mind of the best of adventurers.
A sketch of Raleigh's character would be imperfect indeed if it
contained no word concerning his genius as a coloniser. One of his main
determinations, early in life, was "to discover and conquer unknown
lands, and take possession of them in the Queen's name." We celebrate in
Sir Walter Raleigh one of the most intelligent and imaginative of the
founders of our colonial empire. The English merchantmen before his time
had been satisfied with the determination to grasp the wealth of the New
World as it came home to Spain; it had not occurred to them to compete
with the great rival at the fountain-head of riches. Even men like Drake
and Frobisher had been content with a policy of forbidding Spain, as the
poet Wither said, "to check our ships from sailing where they please."
South America was already mainly in Spanish hands, but North America was
still open to invasion. It was Raleigh's half-brother, Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, who first thought of planting an English settlement in what is
now the United States, in 1578. But Gilbert had "no luck at sea," as
Queen Elizabeth observed, and it was Raleigh who, in 1584, took up the
scheme of colonisation. He did not drop it until the death of Elizabeth,
when, under the east wind of the new _regime_, the blossom of his
colonial enterprises flagged.
The motion for the ceremony of to-day originated with the authorities of
an important American city, which proudly bears the name of our
adventurer. The earliest settlement in what are now the United States
was made at Roanoke, in Virginia, on a day which must always be
prominent in the annals of civilisation, August 17th, 1585. But this
colony lasted only ten months, and it was not until nearly two years
later that the fourth expedition which Raleigh sent out succeeded in
maintaining a perilous foothold in the new country. This was the little
trembling taper to which his own name was given, the twinkling spark
which is now the flourishing city of Raleigh in North Carolina. We may
well marvel at the pertinacity with which Sir Walter persisted, in the
face of innumerable difficulties, in sending out one colonising fleet
after another, although, contrary to common legend, he himself never set
foot in North America. It was fortunate that at this period of his
career he was wealthy, for the attempts to plant settlements in the vast
region which he named Virginia cost him more than L40,000. We note at
all turns of his fortune his extraordinary tenacity of purpose, which he
illustrated, as though by a motto, in the verses he addressed to a
comrade towards the end of his imprisonment in the Tower:--
"Change not! to change thy fortune 'tis too late;
Who with a manly faith resolves to die
May promise to himself a lasting State,
Though not so great, yet free from infamy."
So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the Hoe of Plymouth
twenty years before, a gallant figure of a man, bedizened with precious
stones, velvets, and embroidered damasks, shouting his commands to his
captains in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutely
gazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his eyes.
We come to the final scene which we are here to-day to commemorate.
Little honour to the rulers of England in 1618 redounds from it, and yet
we may feel that it completed and even redeemed from decay the character
of Raleigh. This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to round
off the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a career of romantic
violence, and to stamp it with meaning. If Raleigh had been thrown from
his horse or had died of the ague in his bed, we should have been
depressed by the squalid circumstances, we should have been less
conscious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. His failures and
his excesses had made him unpopular throughout England, and he was both
proud and peevish in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he
was "nothing indebted" to the world, and again that, "the common people
are evil judges of honest things." But the thirteen years of his
imprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he had
been and only recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing but
that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in resisting the
brutality and avarice of the Spaniard.
Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination at Westminster,
and the condemnation by his venal judges at the order of a paltry king.
It became known, or shrewdly guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a
hectoring alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or sent
alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was a cowardly and
ignominious submission of the English Government to the insolence of
England's hereditary enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failed
completely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who slew more men
at his death than in all his life. Samuel Pepys, who had some fine
intuitions at a time when the national _moral_ was very low, spoke of
Raleigh as being "given over, as a sacrifice," to our enemies. This has
been, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popularity, and it
is the reason of the emotion which has called us together here three
hundred years after his death upon the scaffold.
[Footnote 1: Address delivered at the Mansion House, October 29th, 1918,
on occasion of the Tercentenary of Sir Walter Raleigh's death.]
THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE
Among the "co-supremes and stars of love" which form the constellated
glory of our greatest poet there is one small splendour which we are apt
to overlook in our general survey. But, if we isolate it from other
considerations, it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created and
introduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with statistical
finger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall discover, not
perhaps without surprise, that these contain not fewer than fifty
strains of lyrical measure. Some of the fifty, to be sure, are mere
star-dust, but others include some of the very jewels of our tongue.
They range in form from the sophisticated quatorzains of _The Two
Gentlemen of Verona_ (where, however, comes "Who is Silvia?") to the
reckless snatches of melody in _Hamlet_. But all have a character which
is Shakespearean, and this regardless of the question so often raised,
and so incapable of reply, as to whether some of the wilder ones are
Shakespeare's composition or no. Whoever originally may have written
such scraps as "They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and "Come o'er the
bourne, Bessy, to me," the spirit of Shakespeare now pervades and
possesses them.
Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many other matters.
Of course, the idea and practice of musical interludes in plays was not
quite novel. In Shakespeare's early youth that remarkable artist in
language, John Lyly, had presented songs in several of his plays, and
these were notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called
"their labouring beauty." We may notice that Lyly's songs were not
printed till long after Shakespeare's death, but doubtless he had
listened to them. Peele and Greene had brilliant lyrical gifts, but they
did not exercise them in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel of
Rosalynde (1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we could
willingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory. But while I think it
would be rash to deny that the lyrics of Lodge and Lyly had their direct
influence on the style of Shakespeare, neither of those admirable
precursors conceived the possibility of making the Song an integral part
of the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's invention, and
he applied it with a technical adroitness which had never been dreamed
of before and was never rivalled after.
This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine poet, and
has never yet, perhaps, received all the attention it deserves. We may
find ourselves bewildered if we glance at what the eighteenth-century
commentators said, for instance, about the songs in _Twelfth Night_.
They called the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown "absurd" and
"unintelligible"; "O Mistress mine" was in their ears "meaningless";
"When that I was" appeared to them "degraded buffoonery." They did not
perceive the close and indispensable connection between the Clown's song
and the action of the piece, although the poet had been careful to point
out that it was a moral song "dulcet in contagion," and too good, except
for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics
neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away,
Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not
really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant
dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of
the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of _Twelfth Night_ is burdened
with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each
change of scene some unseen hand is overheard touching a harp-string.
The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive, dramatically, to relieve this
musical tension at its height.
Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case of _A
Winter's Tale_, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where
the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here
again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When
daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one
bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung
by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense"
could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men
were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human
and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the
drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of
Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical
balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden
sentimentality, like the Clown's
"Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"
It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that the
firm hand of the creator of character reveals itself.
But it is in _The Tempest_ that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer of
songs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, and
among them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written.
What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately
fairy-like than Ariel's First Song?
"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd,--
The wild waves whist."
That is, not "kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctuators pretend,
but, parenthetically, "kissed one another,--the wild waves being silent
the while." Even fairies do not kiss waves, than which no embrace could
be conceived less rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowe
here, from _Hero and Leander_,
"when all is whist and still,
Save that the sea playing on yellow sand
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land!"
But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written the lyrical
parts of _The Tempest_. This song is in emotional sympathy with
Ferdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic, not a piece of pretty verse
foisted in to add to the entertainment.