an example of art as unconscious as that of the song of some vain, but
for the moment solitary, child. It declares to us that Nature, when we
can bring to it our own appreciation, is the first thing, and that the
idealism of art is the second-best with which we content ourselves
when Nature, with its direct appeal, is in abeyance.
The Shramana accomplished a journey which has few parallels in the
history of travel. He spent three years residing and travelling in the
uplands of Tibet, after the exclusion of strangers had become a
rigorous policy, and before the British punitive expedition had
inspired fear of the long-handed foreigner. He had with him no
organised escort of men and mules such as accompanied Sir Sven Hedin
in his more recent and better advertised expedition. He went alone and
in disguise, as Burton went on his pilgrimage to Mecca; on intimate
terms with the natives as Mr. Doughty was with the Arabs; a mendicant
as Arminius Vambery has been in Asiatic Turkey and Persia. And he had
an advantage which none of these travellers had, one which he did not
scruple to use to the utmost--he was a Buddhist, like the Tibetans,
and not only a Buddhist, but an exceptionally learned priest,
possessed of a knowledge of things holy which he used with a religious
fervour tempered with Odysseian guile. He was no missionary, but he
carried the true Buddhism about with him in Tibet as discreetly as
Borrow carried his Bibles in Spain; and his style has a curious
resemblance to that of our English gipsy. With everyone whom he meets
he converses on religion, philology, love, or the stars, in the gayest
argumentative manner, and these dialogues come as interludes to
adventures as thrilling as any that ever fall to the lot of man. In a
few paragraphs he will dwell on the almost inconceivable perils he
experienced from mountains, floods, storms, and famine, and in the
next he is dryly recording the discourse of a holy lama, the wayside
gossip of robbers, or the passionate advances of a love-sick maiden,
against whose enticements he steeled himself with the fortitude
becoming to his profession. He tells us with what joy he preached the
simpler truths of Buddhism to the attentive nomads, and in the next
page remarks somewhat inconsistently: "I had my own reasons for being
painstaking in these preachings. I knew that religious talks always
softened the hearts of my companions, and this was very necessary, as
I might otherwise have been killed by them.... Fortunately my sermons
were well received by my companions." His whole journey was
necessarily a long and systematic tissue of deception, but when set on
by robbers he disdains to preserve his worldly trash by a concealment
of the truth. When his friends in Lhassa discover that he is not, as
he has been supposed to be, a Chinaman, but a foreigner from Japan, he
begs them to save themselves and send him in fetters to the Dalai
Lama; but sacred meditation and a supernatural voice add themselves
opportunely to the persuasions of his friends, and with this divine
sanction he makes good his escape.
The book, indeed, has a fourfold value; it reveals artlessly and
perfectly the character of the Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, and that is
worth knowing in itself. Secondly, it unfolds the emotional and
intellectual aspects of Japanese Buddhism, showing this religion both
on its theological side and as a practical working influence. Thirdly,
it introduces us to a host of Tibetan persons, one after another,
presenting not a vague, impressionist account of them, but individuals
with whom he lived on intimate equal terms in daily social
intercourse. And in the fourth place it gives us what we may take to
be an authoritative account of the whole social system of Tibet--the
priesthood and religion, administration, finance, trade, and the
relations between the sexes and castes.
Having in 1891 given up the rectorship of a monastery in Tokyo, he
lived for some years as a hermit and devoted himself to the study of
Buddhistic books in the Chinese language. In the course of his studies
he learnt that there were Tibetan translations of the sacred text
which, though inferior in general meaning to the Chinese, were
superior as literal translations. He determined, therefore, to
undertake a journey to the forbidden land and travel there alone as a
mendicant priest. The many presents his friends offered him before his
departure he "declined to accept, save in the form of sincerely given
pledges" (and the sum of 430 yen, mentioned subsequently).
From a fisherman he exacted the promise to discontinue the cruel habit
of catching fish; from a poultry-man he secured a promise not to kill
fowls; and "from immoderate smokers I asked the immediate
discontinuance of the habit that would end in nicotine poisoning.
About forty persons willingly granted my appeal for this somewhat
novel kind of farewell presents." We are reminded of John Wesley's
exhortations to his followers to abstain from the pernicious habit of
drinking tea--"I proposed it to about forty of those whom I believed
to be strong in faith; and the next morning to about sixty more,
entreating them all to speak their minds freely. They did so; and in
the end saw the good which might ensue." In many moments of dire peril
experienced by the Shramana in Tibet, these "effective" gifts, it
seems, "contributed largely toward my miraculous escapes."
Before he could begin the most arduous part of his journey it was
necessary that he should serve an apprenticeship of no less than three
years in Darjeeling and Nepaul, studying the Tibetan language and
grammar, and Tibetan Buddhism, befriending beggars with the double
object of bestowing charity and gaining information, and ascertaining
the possible routes across the Himalayas. Then one day he was
conducted to the summit of a lofty and unguarded pass, whence, on July
4, 1900, with his luggage on his back, alone, he stepped on to the
soil of Tibet, and entered upon an unknown and apparently interminable
wilderness.
In his wanderings over mountains, deserts, and rivers there was no
form of hardship and danger which he had not to encounter. Now he
spent a night in the open, nearly frozen by snow, the pain of the cold
being interrupted only by the abstraction of "meditation" and the joy
of composing _utas_ (short poems). Now he was nearly drowned in
fording a river, from which he was saved at the moment he was
expressing a desire to be born again. Now he was overtaken by a
sandstorm, now bereft of his money, now nearly perishing of hunger.
But from every danger he emerged triumphant. When he approached the
tents of nomads or pilgrims and had pointed his staff at the
threatening dogs, he was generally received with hospitality, and on
one occasion he fell in with a party of robbers who were undergoing a
period of penance at Manasarova, and made him their guest for two
months. They approach the sacred peak of Kailasa:
It inspired me with the profoundest feelings of pure reverence,
and I looked up to it as a "natural mandala," the mansion of a
Buddha and Bodhisattvas. Filled with soul-stirring thoughts and
fancies I addressed myself to this sacred pillar of nature,
confessed my sins, and performed to it the obeisance of one
hundred and eight bows. I also took out the manuscript of my
"twenty-two desires," and pledged their accomplishment to the
Buddha. I then considered myself the luckiest of men, to have
thus been enabled to worship such a holy emblem of Buddha's
power and to vow such vows in its sacred presence, and I mused:
Whate'er my sufferings here and dangers dire,
Whate'er befalls me on my onward march,
All, all, I feel, is for the common good
For others treading on Salvation's path
The night of my performance of these devotional practices must
have been a matter of wonder and mystery to my companions. They
had been watching me like gaping and astonished children, and
were all intensely curious to know why I had bowed so many
times, and read out such strange Chinese sentences. I was glad
to explain to them the general meaning of my conduct and they
seemed to be deeply struck with its significance. They said they
had never known the Chinese Lamas were men of such Bodhisattvic
mind! The upshot was that they asked me to preach to them that
night, a request to which I was very glad to accede. The
preaching which followed, which I purposely made as simple and
as appealing to the heart as possible, seemed to affect them
profoundly, and to make the best possible impression on them; so
much so that they even shed tears of joy. The preaching over,
they said in all sincerity that they were glad of companionship,
and even offered to regard me as their guest during the two
months which they intended to spend in pilgrimage to and round
the Kang Rinpoche. They thought that their pilgrimage over such
holy ground, while serving such a holy man as I now was to them,
would absolve them completely from their sins.
It was during this pilgrimage that there occurred the tender episode
already alluded to, from which the Shramana, though "neither a block
of wood, nor a piece of stone," emerged even more creditably than John
Wesley when similarly tempted in Georgia.
I can give no account here of his arrival in Lhassa, the reputation he
gained as a "Chinese" physician, his kindly reception by the Dalai
Lama, or his intimate friendships with the apothecary and the
ex-Minister of Finance. He gives a vivid picture of the life of the
different classes of priests and monks, and the corrupt state of the
Tibetan hierarchy. He describes the rudimentary system of education,
the harsh and haphazard administration, the brutality of punishments,
the system of espionage, the free position of women and the practice
of polyandry, the filthy personal habits of the people, their
superstitions, their occupations, their festivals. I do not dwell upon
these matters, partly because many of the features described are
common to other oriental countries, but mainly because I am here
considering the peculiar excellence of the book as a book of travel, a
"human document"--as the phrase goes--a record of experience which has
taken the stamp of a most interesting personality.
VIII
FRANCIS THOMPSON
In _The Blue Bird_ of Maeterlinck we are told of a child who puts on a
magic hat and turns a fairy diamond and sees all that was ugly and
sordid transformed into something transcendently beautiful. There was
no need for Francis Thompson to find a magic hat; the poetic instinct
which was always with him gave him the insight into another poet's
nature; he saw through, around, and beyond those unlovely passages in
the life of Shelley which made Matthew Arnold, for once so strangely
an adherent of Mrs. Grundy, exclaim, "What a set! What a world!" There
are few appreciations in the English language comparable to his essay
on Shelley. Fixing his eyes on what seems to him essential in the man,
Thompson finds that everything else explains itself to the observer
who will see with the poet, who can understand his sufferings, and
imagine his delights. And so his essay is no ordinary study in
criticism. He sets himself, indeed, as Pater would have done, to find
what it is that makes the specific worth of the poet. But there is no
laborious calculating of values; rather a lavish pouring forth of the
just meed of praise, an interpretation, a vindication of Shelley, like
Swinburne's vindication of Blake, in language less passionate,
perhaps, but more perfect in its melody, and more significant in its
imagery, responding to its theme with tremulous beauty.
Mr. Wyndham, I think, did not go far from the truth when he said that
this "is the most important contribution to pure letters written in
English during the last twenty years." For in a certain sense it seems
to reach an even greater height than Thompson's poetry. For whilst he
has written exalted poetry, thought-compelling poetry, magnificent in
diction and appealing to the deeper emotions, there is in this essay a
simplicity which was often lacking in the former, and a passionate
pleading which combines the cogent lucidity of a Newman with the
other-worldness of a St. Francis. If it has a fault, it is that of
being too rich in its imagery, too lavish of its judgments, too
overbearing in its vision of beauty, so that some critics will say
that it is too poetical for prose. It is, indeed, the prose of a poet,
and such as only a poet would or could write; but its harmony, its
structural balance, its masterly transitions are, save in a few cases,
those which are proper to prose.
There is, perhaps, something a little forced in the opening passage in
which he commends the services of poetry to the charity of the Church,
paragraphs which were designed to conciliate the editor of the _Dublin
Review_. He passes to consider the defect which has "mildewed" all the
poetry written since Shelley, "the predominance of art over
inspiration, of body over soul." Not, he holds, that inspiration has
been lacking--"the warrior is there, but he is hampered by his
armour." "We are self-conscious to the finger-tips; and this inherent
quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity,
ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be born to us
of the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among us no
reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children
cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially
a child."
"To the last," he exclaims, "he was the enchanted child." And he
explains what he means in words that may seem fantastic: "It is to
have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to
believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief." And
he suggests that "Shelley never could have been a man, for he never
was a boy. And the reason lay in the persecution which over-clouded
his school days." He was a grown-up child when he sailed his paper
boats on the Isis, when in his loves he gave way to that "straying,
strange and deplorable, of the spirit," when he rebelled petulantly
but not ungenerously against the order of the world, and when he
soared with the cloud or the skylark like the "child-like peoples
among whom mythologies have their rise." In his poetry "he is still at
play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and
his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The
universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.
He is gold-dusty with his tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright
mischief with the moon."
And, in the same, full way, Thompson explains in what sense Shelley
was a poet of Nature; in what manner images poured naturally from his
lips as they ought to have done, but never did, pour from the lips of
the metaphysical poets; by what "instinctive perception of the
underlying analogies, the secret subterranean passages, between matter
and soul," he was able to make such imaginative play with
abstractions; and, finally, how in his shorter poems he "forgets for a
while all that ever makes his verse turbid; forgets that he is
anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he is anything but a
child." And all the time the essayist is dropping phrases which surely
are unforgettable, striking us alike by their truth and their
pregnance--"this beautiful, wild, feline poetry, wild because left to
range the wilds."--"His Muse has become a veritable Echo, whose body
has dissolved from about her voice."--"He stood thus at the very
junction-lines of the visible and the invisible, and could shift the
points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing
with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse."
Even to-day, five years after his death, Thompson has not attained the
full fame which he merits. It is true his very first book won the
highest praise from critics no less distinguished than Coventry
Patmore, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Mr. H.D. Traill, and long before his
death it was no small circle of admirers who looked eagerly for each
new poem from his pen.
Yet his genius is not of that kind which instantly communicates itself
to a generation. Living apart in a spiritual atmosphere of his own,
his heart divested of the desires which form half the life of most
men, his gaze was fixed on the inner mysteries of the spirit and on
those outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty. The very language
he used was as far remote as possible from "the brutish jargon we
inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and
pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his
poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in
the language and literature of their day. And those subtler minds who
instantly perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his
imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals,
such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his
thought and theirs. Like them, it is true, he turned his back on the
delusive splendours of the world; he accepted and expressed in song
the divine ordinance of the universe. But he was afflicted with the
pain of modern doubt; fear and speculative curiosity struggled with
his faith; sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world, so far
from proving the divine beauty, seemed to him as a possible refuge in
his vain flight from the "Hound of Heaven."
He cannot be allocated to a single school. In his reading he had
ranged through the poets of all ages, and he had assimilated a mighty
variety of emotions, and we may see how his form shows the influence
now of one poet, now another--Milton, Cowley, Shelley, Hood, Poe, and
Rossetti--yet each influence, as it came upon him, was passed through
the crucible of his own defined temperament, and the resultant is
wholly his own, a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion,
yet fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all
the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were
open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his
blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of
spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic;
the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with
the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that habit
of symbolism with which Rossetti and his school have made us familiar.
Sometimes his pregnant phrases, his literary imagery, his stately,
sweeping rhetoric, and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us
to compare him with Virgil rather than with any modern poet.
Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-mother-like,
To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st,
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,
I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,
Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off
The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun,
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.
But those last lines:
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.
we cannot compare with any model. They stand by themselves,
unsurpassable, lines such as are only to be found here and there even
in the great poets.
The more one reads this poetry of Thompson's the more one discovers
that it is something essentially individual. Harmonies that one may
miss on a first reading become more apparent and more insistent as one
reads again, and the exquisite, haunting melody of his verse pursues
us, and its faultless, rich rhythms seem to create new patterns of
form. One may miss not a little of his thought, because the engrossing
beauty of the language lays hold of the senses. In almost every poem
one finds some lingering phrase:
Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.
Or:
The little sweetness making grief complete.
Often he shows that exact sense of lyrical fitness which Milton
pre-eminently possessed, and, second only to him, Shelley. We see it
in the passage which begins:
Suffer me at your leafy feast
To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest,
And watch your mirth,
Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth.
_The Hound of Heaven_, I think, has rightly been pronounced his
greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of
imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest
depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of
his mind's flight. But next to that I would put _The Making of Viola_,
a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his sister Christina, could
have written:
I
_The Father of Heaven._
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Twirl your wheel with silver din;
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Spin a tress for Viola.
_Angels._
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola!
II
_The Father of Heaven._
Weave, hands angelical,
Weave a woof of flesh to pall
Weave, hands evangelical--
Flesh to pall our Viola.
_Angels._
Weave, singing brothers, a
Velvet flesh for Viola!
III
_The Father of Heaven._
Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes,
Wood-browned pools of Paradise--
Young Jesus, for the eyes,
For the eyes of Viola.
_Angels._
Tint, Prince Jesus, a
Dusked eye for Viola!
It may be that he will always be a poet for the few; that his
mystical, esoteric spirit, finding its proper expression in baffling
imagery and elusive, other-worldly rhythms, will never be wholly
congenial to the many. But his place is assured; for he had no traffic
with the things of a day or the language of a day. The beauty which
haunts his prose and his verse is of that universal order which can
hardly fade by the mere passing of time. Only a change in the human
spirit can make it dim.
NOTE
Many of the foregoing chapters are based upon articles which
have been published in periodicals. My thanks are due to the
Editors of the following journals, which I name in the order of
my indebtedness:--_The English Review_, _The Nation_, _The Daily
News_, _The North American Review_, _The British Review_, and
_The Athenæum_.
THE COMPLETE DRAMATIC WORKS OF
=Gerhart Hauptmann=
AUTHORIZED EDITION IN SIX VOLUMES
It is generally conceded that Gerhart Hauptmann is the most notable
dramatist of the present day. His work combines literary,
psychological and dramatic interest in greater measure than that of
any other contemporary writer, and the award of the Nobel prize in
literature was a public recognition of his genius.
An authorized translation of his dramas makes it possible at last for
English people to study and enjoy Hauptmann. Excellent translations of
a few plays had already been made and these, by arrangement with the
respective translators, will be adapted to the present edition, but
new translation will be made whenever it seems necessary in order to
maintain the highest standard. The editor of the edition is Professor
Ludwig Lewisohn. He supplies a general introduction to Hauptmann's
works in Volume I, and a briefer introduction to each succeeding
volume.
CONTENTS
Volume I
_Social Dramas_
Before Dawn
The Weavers
The Beaver Coat
The Conflagration
Volume II
_Social Dramas_
Drayman Henschel
Rose Bernd
The Rats
Volume III
_Domestic Dramas_
The Reconciliation
Lonely Lives
Colleague Crampton
Michael Kramer
Volume IV
_Symbolic and Legendary Dramas_
Hannele
The Sunken Bell
Henry of Aue
Volume V
_Symbolic and Historical Dramas_
Schluck and Jau
And Pippa Dances
Charlemagne's Hostage
Volume VI
_Later Dramas in Prose_
The Maidens of the Mount
Griselda
Gabriel Schilling's Flight
_Each Volume Crown 8vo. Price Five Shillings net_
_TWO NEW VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES_
WALT WHITMAN
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
BASIL DE SELINCOURT
WALTER PATER
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
EDWARD THOMAS
Each Volume Demy Octavo. With a Frontispiece
Portrait in Photogravure.
Price 7s. 6d. net.
_UNIFORM WITH "PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS"_
DRAMATIC PORTRAITS
By P.P. HOWE