was no satirist. A breath of real satire would blow down the whole
delicate fabric of _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_.
Sterne pokes fun at people and things; he banters the extravagance of
private humour; but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself
more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a moment with
Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett,
who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sterne
could not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the
other. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist
except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal,
surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick,
who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old and
young. "Labour stood still as he passed; the bucket hung suspended in
the middle of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even
chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got
out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart.
There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectual
development of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for a
moment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt to
darken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You will
remember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the
business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a country
parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods,"
from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had
spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering
in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a
clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist
for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average
Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment
of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in
which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence
prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human
being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of
those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found
tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more
deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de
Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century
were familiar to him and to him alone in England.
Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his
brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with
one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with
the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the
annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and
there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained
readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is
the source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to the
real merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much
of _Tristram Shandy_ as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth
saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world," he hits the nail on
the head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from that
work. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and
gradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched out
of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclusively on his own
rich store of observations taken directly from human nature. In the
adorable seventh volume of _Tristram_, and in _The Sentimental Journey_,
there is nothing left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of
style.
The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those events
which must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his life
he was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modes
of self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromising
intellectual frailties. It is true that from the very first his
excellences were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which Hazlitt
truly said is "one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature,"
occurs, or rather begins, in the second volume of _Tristram Shandy_. But
the marvellous portraits which the early sections of that work contain
are to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's determination
to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new subjects. Frankly, much
as I love Sterne, I find Kunastrockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect
they have driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoyment of
_Tristram Shandy_.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading Dissenting minister,
the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in answer to a question: "Do I _like_
Sterne? Yes, to be sure I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" That
was the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultivation more
than one hundred years ago. But it was their attitude only on some
occasions. There is no record of the fact, but I am ready to believe
that Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a
godless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse
of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a
different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else
has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating
powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one
moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar of
roses to-day and asafoetida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easy
to define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. Like
Yorick, he had "a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously and
impudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered." As he
"seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without
much ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering his
wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."
So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had
manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie
was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to
defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics
he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality
and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his
readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were
weeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on a
melancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure of
the tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward;
they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the most
impish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in
describing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan."
Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not so
much difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine."
No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to play
fast and loose with moral definitions.
The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness,
the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the
heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such
masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown
in comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Before
the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume
against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out
of Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of
English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal lines
until the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gave
it the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful
inspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul," which leaped
from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventional
restraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired to
declare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century.
His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadays
are often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of his
humour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have been
taught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless
to try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of it
and did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and
carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected
to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like
to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on
this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of
expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops,
allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting.
Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex by
our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in these
matters, but we have agreed not to joke about them. I read the other day
a dictum of one of those young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen:
he prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty years, be
not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but unintelligible. Very proper,
no doubt, only do not let us call this morality, it is only a change of
habits.
Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at irrelevancy. It
is part of his charm, and it is at the same time his most whimsical
habit, never to proceed with his story when you expect him to do so, and
to be reminded by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which
lead you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. He did not
merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them out
and eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of _Tristram_
is devoted to the _attitude_ of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself to
read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump little
hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this is
what makes his books the best conversational writing in the English
language. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talking
at his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle,
penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, with
persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr.
Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.
This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, is
Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical manner
of composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which was
gradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you to
read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way for
Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method of
describing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here to
an audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to a
close consideration of the workmanship of their _metier_. I ask them
where, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been found
before the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been without
it.
To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the last
century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In
Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often
present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have
expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming
down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The
pathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator
of Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all the
books which Stevenson read it was not the _Sentimental Journey_ which
made the deepest impression upon him.
[Footnote 5: Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24th,
1913]
THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of
Poe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed.
Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as without
importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the
statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose
writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not
the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre
of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is
illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the
House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold
Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the
importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best
poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic
artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for
this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories,
that he deserves persistent commemoration.
The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth
century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only
natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections
so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame
of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it
was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated
minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials
were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture
of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not
quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American
letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was
ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation
if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the
son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled
in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now
appears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Boston
itself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" This
Gentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could not
arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. But
that concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, the
Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from
Javan or Gadire.
Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find
himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike
by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism
as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron
and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth
and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic
approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of
letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even
Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind
the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment
Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even
serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of
the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the
stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few
strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon
principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his
recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune
was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those
persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste
in America.
His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from
a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his
manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities,
and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very
little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P.
Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments
were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not
care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn
Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he
closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object
of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to
prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the
Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its
home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of
Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to
enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been
successfully annihilated.
Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he
should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature,
especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the
artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie
Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of
praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so
implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not
favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly
valueless verses."
This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitude
adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as by
Baudelaire, Mallarme and the whole younger school in France, was
obstinately preserved, and has not wholly subsided. It would be a
tactical mistake for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in his
own line to ignore the serious resistance which has been made to it. In
the canonisation-trial of this whimsical saint, the Devil's advocates,
it may be confessed, are many, and their objections are imposing. It is
possible that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings may
have had something to do with the original want of recognition in New
England, but such sources of prejudice would be ephemeral. There
remained, and has continued to remain, in the very essence of Poe's
poetry, something which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers of
verse cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of the art.
To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the first step
towards discovering the actual essence of Poe's genius. His detractors
have said that his verses are "singularly valueless." It is therefore
necessary to define what it is they mean by "value." If they mean an
inculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth; if they mean a
succession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet definite language; if
they are thinking of what stirs the heart in reading parts of _Hamlet_
and _Comus_, of what keeps the pulse vibrating after the "Ode to Duty"
has been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without value. A
poet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less, as they say in the
suburbs, "can be learned," is scarcely to be found in the whole range of
literature. His lack of curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that
evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric
or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of
virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice.
This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is
vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as
innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers
than his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. There is
hardly a phrase in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any
ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth called "chains
of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere.
In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, to
Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who were
endeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of which
they were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see
nothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issued
by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England critics
wanted, patriotically as well as personally, was as little like
"Ulalume" as can possibly be conceived. They defined what poetry should
be--there was about that time a mania for defining poetry--and what
their definition was may be seen no less plainly in the American _Fable
for Critics_ than in the preface to the English _Philip van Artevelde_.
It was to be picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above
all, with moral "truths"; it was to avoid vagueness and to give no
uncertain sound; it was to regard "passion" with alarm, as the siren
which was bound sooner or later to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is
not necessary to treat this conception of poetry with scorn, nor to
reject principles of precise thought and clear, sober language, which
had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by Gray in the
past. The ardent young critics of our own age, having thrown off all
respect for the traditions of literature, speak and write as if to them,
and them alone, had been divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They do
not give themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there are
many mansions.
It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort of Poe's
position resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much as
the forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell.
There is a phrase in one of his own rather vague and "valueless" essays
(for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were accidentally, describes
his ideal in poetry, although it is not his own verse of which he is
speaking. He described--in 1845, when his ripe genius had just brought
forth "The Raven"--the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of dreamy,
wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight." This
shadowy but absorbing and mastering pleasure impregnated his own best
writings to such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlikeness
to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his individuality.
Without precisely knowing it or perceiving his revolution, in an age of
intelligent, tame, lucid and cautiously-defined poetry, Edgar Poe
expressed the emotions which surged within him in numbers that were,
even to excess, "dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable."