X.

I don’t know how those two little books got in there. They are Henley’s

“Song of the Sword” and “Book of Verses.” They ought to be over yonder

in the rather limited Poetry Section. Perhaps it is that I like his

work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put them ready to my

hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was very much greater than his

work, great as some of his work was. I have seldom known a personality

more magnetic and stimulating. You left his presence, as a battery

leaves a generating station, charged up and full. He made you feel what

a lot of work there was to be done, and how glorious it was to be able

to do it, and how needful to get started upon it that very hour. With

the frame and the vitality of a giant he was cruelly bereft of all

outlet for his strength, and so distilled it off in hot words, in warm

sympathy, in strong prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating

emotions. Much of the time and energy which might have built an

imperishable name for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it

was not waste, for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed

beneath it. A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature

to-day.

Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best was

the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive lines

more noble and more strong than those which begin with the well-known

quatrain—

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,

I thank whatever Gods there be

For my unconquerable soul.”

It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from a

man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned

again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon’s knife. When he said—

“In the fell clutch of Circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance

My head is bloody but unbowed.”

It was not what Lady Byron called “the mimic woe” of the poet, but it

was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake, whose

proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.

There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the very

extreme from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running to large

sweeping images and thundering words. Such are the “Song of the Sword”

and much more that he has written, like the wild singing of some

Northern scald. The other, and to my mind both the more characteristic

and the finer side of his work, is delicate, precise, finely etched,

with extraordinarily vivid little pictures drawn in carefully phrased

and balanced English. Such are the “Hospital Verses,” while the “London

Voluntaries” stand midway between the two styles. What! you have not

read the “Hospital Verses!” Then get the “Book of Verses” and read them

without delay. You will surely find something there which, for good or

ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare

it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their

monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is

so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the

weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused

such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five

booklets behind him!

However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no

business in this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles of

various sorts. Here are three in a line, which carry you over a

splendid stretch of French (which usually means European) history,

each, as luck would have it, beginning just about the time when the

other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de Monstrelet, and

the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the best

contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a century—a

fair slice out of the total written record of the human race.

Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval

French, which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get

Lord Berners’ almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English, or

you can turn to a modern translation, such as this one of Johnes. A

single page of Lord Berners is delightful; but it is a strain, I think,

to read bulky volumes in an archaic style. Personally, I prefer the

modern, and even with that you have shown some patience before you have

reached the end of that big second tome.

I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea of

what he was doing—whether it ever flashed across his mind that the day

might come when his book would be the one great authority, not only

about the times in which he lived, but about the whole institution of

chivalry? I fear that it is far more likely that his whole object was

to gain some mundane advantage from the various barons and knights

whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left it on record, for

example, that when he visited the Court of England he took with him a

handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless, if one could follow

the good Canon one would find his journeys littered with similar copies

which were probably expensive gifts to the recipient, for what return

would a knightly soul make for a book which enshrined his own valour?

But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be admitted

that the work could not have been done more thoroughly. There is

something of Herodotus in the Canon’s cheery, chatty, garrulous,

take-it-or-leave-it manner. But he has the advantage of the old Greek

in accuracy. Considering that he belonged to the same age which gravely

accepted the travellers’ tales of Sir John Maundeville, it is, I think,

remarkable how careful and accurate the chronicler is. Take, for

example, his description of Scotland and the Scotch. Some would give

the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that is another matter. Scotch

descriptions are a subject over which a fourteenth-century Hainaulter

might fairly be allowed a little scope for his imagination. Yet we can

see that the account must on the whole have been very correct. The

Galloway nags, the girdle-cakes, the bagpipes—every little detail rings

true. Jean-le-Bel was actually present in a Border campaign, and from

him Froissart got his material; but he has never attempted to embroider

it, and its accuracy, where we can to some extent test it, must

predispose us to accept his accounts where they are beyond our

confirmation.

But the most interesting portion of old Froissart’s work is that which

deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time, their deeds,

their habits, their methods of talking. It is true that he lived

himself just a little after the true heyday of chivalry; but he was

quite early enough to have met many of the men who had been looked upon

as the flower of knighthood of the time. His book was read too, and

commented on by these very men (as many of them as could read), and so

we may take it that it was no fancy portrait, but a correct picture of

these soldiers which is to be found in it. The accounts are always

consistent. If you collate the remarks and speeches of the knights (as

I have had occasion to do) you will find a remarkable uniformity

running through them. We may believe then that this really does

represent the kind of men who fought at Crecy and at Poictiers, in the

age when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in

London, and England reached a pitch of military glory which has perhaps

never been equalled in her history.

In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had

presented to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme

romancer, you will find that Scott’s mediaeval knights were usually

muscular athletes in the prime of life: Bois-Guilbert, Front-de-Bœuf,

Richard, Ivanhoe, Count Robert—they all were such. But occasionally the

most famous of Froissart’s knights were old, crippled and blinded.

Chandos, the best lance of his day, must have been over seventy when he

lost his life through being charged upon the side on which he had

already lost an eye. He was well on to that age when he rode out from

the English army and slew the Spanish champion, big Marten Ferrara,

upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth and strength were very useful, no

doubt, especially where heavy armour had to be carried, but once on the

horse’s back the gallant steed supplied the muscles. In an English

hunting-field many a doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated

in his familiar saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game.

So it was among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could

still carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms,

and, above all, their cool and undaunted courage.

Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the knight

was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little quarter in

his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed. But with all his

savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable boy

playing a dreadful game. He was true also to his own curious code, and,

so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial and sympathetic,

even in warfare. There was no personal feeling or bitterness as there

might be now in a war between Frenchmen and Germans. On the contrary,

the opponents were very softspoken and polite to each other. “Is there

any small vow of which I may relieve you?” “Would you desire to attempt

some small deed of arms upon me?” And in the midst of a fight they

would stop for a breather, and converse amicably the while, with many

compliments upon each other’s prowess. When Seaton the Scotsman had

exchanged as many blows as he wished with a company of French knights,

he said, “Thank you, gentlemen, thank you!” and galloped away. An

English knight made a vow, “for his own advancement and the exaltation

of his lady,” that he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and

touch with his lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most

characteristic of the times. As he galloped up, the French knights

around the barrier, seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon

him, and called out to him that he had carried himself well. As he

returned, however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe

upon the side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him. Here

ends the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher

had a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not

stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy, meet

so plebeian an end.

De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional than

Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones out of

that quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course Quentin

Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The whole

history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold, the

strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the barber

and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage cruelty

and of slavish superstition—it is all set forth here. One would imagine

that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of strange

qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and yet like

causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski’s “Life of Ivan

the Terrible,” and you will find that more than a century later Russia

produced a monarch even more diabolical, but working exactly on the

same lines as Louis, even down to small details. The same cruelty, the

same superstition, the same astrologers, the same low-born associates,

the same residence outside the influence of the great cities—a parallel

could hardly be more complete. If you have not supped too full of

horrors when you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author’s

account of Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of monarchs!

Blood and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons. And

there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which

gives it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the

Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent rule

in Russia.

Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder has

as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It is

Washington Irving’s “Conquest of Granada.” I do not know where he got

his material for this book—from Spanish Chronicles, I presume—but the

wars between the Moors and the Christian knights must have been among

the most chivalrous of exploits. I could not name a book which gets the

beauty and the glamour of it better than this one, the lance-heads

gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale fires glowing on the crags,

the stern devotion of the mail-clad Christians, the debonnaire and

courtly courage of the dashing Moslem. Had Washington Irving written

nothing else, that book alone should have forced the door of every

library. I love all his books, for no man wrote fresher English with a

purer style; but of them all it is still “The Conquest of Granada” to

which I turn most often.

To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are two

exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are a

brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has only

two books. This green-and-gold volume contains both the works of the

Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady Wilde. The

first is “Sidonia the Sorceress,” the second, “The Amber Witch.” I

don’t know where one may turn for a stranger view of the Middle Ages,

the quaint details of simple life, with sudden intervals of grotesque

savagery. The most weird and barbarous things are made human and

comprehensible. There is one incident which haunts one after one has

read it, where the executioner chaffers with the villagers as to what

price they will give him for putting some young witch to the torture,

running them up from a barrel of apples to a barrel and a half, on the

grounds that he is now old and rheumatic, and that the stooping and

straining is bad for his back. It should be done on a sloping hill, he

explains, so that the “dear little children” may see it easily. Both

“Sidonia” and “The Amber Witch” give such a picture of old Germany as I

have never seen elsewhere.

But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in whom

I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who is, if I

mistake not, young and with his career still before him. “The

Forerunner” and “The Death of the Gods” are the only two books of his

which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of Renaissance Italy

in the one, and of declining Rome in the other, are in my opinion among

the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that as I read them I was

pleased to find how open my mind was to new impressions, for one of the

greatest mental dangers which comes upon a man as he grows older is

that he should become so attached to old favourites that he has no room

for the new-comer, and persuades himself that the days of great things

are at an end because his own poor brain is getting ossified. You have

but to open any critical paper to see how common is the disease, but a

knowledge of literary history assures us that it has always been the

same, and that if the young writer is discouraged by adverse

comparisons it has been the common lot from the beginning. He has but

one resource, which is to pay no heed to criticism, but to try to

satisfy his own highest standard and leave the rest to time and the

public. Here is a little bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see, beside my

bookcase, which may in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to some

younger brother—

“Critics kind—never mind!

Critics flatter—no matter!

Critics blame—all the same!

Critics curse—none the worse!

Do your best— —— the rest!”