Produced by Alfred J. Drake. HTML version by Al Haines.
ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
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edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
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of any works you cite.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeral
such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preserved
paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek,
it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
CONTENTS
1. English Literature: 1-16
2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
3. Browning: 39-51
4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
6. Wordsworth: 89-104
7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
10-12-01
PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
substantive page.
I. ENGLISH LITERATURE
FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and variety
of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively
some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is
so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately)
poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's
well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to
Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness
to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in
the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along
with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters
of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose
style. The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other
beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden,
the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr.
Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great
importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially,
where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of
an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical
distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its
students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of
our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we
are not richer than other people. Great poetry and great prose, it
might be found, have most of their qualities in common. But [5] their
indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just
the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it
is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in
mind. Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose
thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form
the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those
qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the
quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on
language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty--"that
other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the
reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from
being a collection of "purple patches."
Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in
English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic
merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure
primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose structure, or
architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even
generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.
Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which
overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then,
in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers
through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in
the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in
Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against
this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:
such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature
divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
suggestions, upon a survey of them.
[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the
spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper
than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse,
which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's
otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency
(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury
admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the
other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its
French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense
with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable
qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
poetry--the qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such
qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts. A collection of
specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is
a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
development, the product of those very different indispensable
qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal
or superior to all other modern literature--the native, sublime, and
beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English
poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals,
in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.
That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in
the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone
to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold
upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
study of what belongs to the past. Beginning with an elaborate notice
of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets
that his subject is, after all, poetry. The followers of Chaucer, and
the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him--old
Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of
a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who
desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and
varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for
Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained by literary
antecedents.
That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and his followers through the
eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only
because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of
an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods
and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners
themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be
seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele
(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life." The well-known
qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a
collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of
the essayists are grouped under certain heads--"Character Sketches,"
"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like--so as to
diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays
on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like
character to the specimens.
Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
had his subjectivities--into books. What a survival of one long-past
day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"! What truth
to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest!
yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
writes, for instance:
"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge,
hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link."
[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
common in some City churches. Among those who were come only to see or
be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a
picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal
with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely
aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds
what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural
strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its
tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness. To the
unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style! Steele is, perhaps,
the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he
abounds in felicities of impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his
style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat
uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and
unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may
observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside
at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget
themselves.
No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which
was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that
sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual
interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even
with those best able to comprehend its laws. In Mrs. Leicester's
School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten
periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The story of the Odyssey,
abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children--of all ages--will
speak for itself. But the garland of graceful stories which gives name
to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their
assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others
their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circumstance which
strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had,
one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even
of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of
pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very
different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But
one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as
originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb, like
Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision,
unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might
have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the
strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
barriers. And so it happens that these simple stories are touched,
much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power. Dealing
with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they
record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from
anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood
over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of
childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which
children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind
of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart. Let the
reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what
Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his
sister Mary.
The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to
adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr. Saintsbury
is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English
literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age, the
defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is
well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let
its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and
completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way
in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their
own. If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in
a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter. And
there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man;
justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what
he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed
connection with this or that literary age or school. Let us close with
the words of a most [16] versatile master of English--happily not yet
included in Mr. Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the
perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as
idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's:
"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer in
words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing,
but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist,
whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and
his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way
adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker."
17th February 1886
II. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
Amiel's Journal. The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel.
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two
vols. Macmillans.
[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has
already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers
of good literature. Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version
reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof
that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be
done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts,
are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20]
for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not
wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has
prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy
pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position. And certainly there
is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader,
to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer
types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and
practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such
philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and
especially at the present day.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his
parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare
and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him
early. His student days coming to an end, the years which followed,
from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy,
Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to have been the
happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and
there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events.
He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only
feeling after his true literary métier. Those last seven years were a
long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at
the age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal is in 1848.
From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this
Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed
nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have
selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.
With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy
life--melancholy with something not altogether explained by the
somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the
consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from
a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to
cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of
their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a
page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment
which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an
effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things
that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best
French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in
them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.
But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface
of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity
of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate
literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the
modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have
been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education,
than either of them had attained to. So multiplex is the result that
minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their
own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might
think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched
for in vain. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those
varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many
contending persons. The perplexed experience gets the apparent
clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the
disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion. "This
nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has
discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
in me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my
territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten
men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion;
and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently opposed
personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself;
compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct also by each
other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the
man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of
desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about
him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René, even to Werther,
and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do
only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life
followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate,
interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of
life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and
therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature.
Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of
ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its ideal of negation
by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely
take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold,
is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is
also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far
stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of
gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
certainly find a Church.
The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known
in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction.
In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26]
effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to
define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good description of an
effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:
"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm. It
does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun,
as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist
draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely, charged
with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it;
that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child
of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great
world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe.
Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only
reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the
greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the moralist."
It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows,
of Swiss frost:
[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and
peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the
cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their
bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and
the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!" The
weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in
this:
"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
favourable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as
these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to
live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a
minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its
very centre. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange
state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the
empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality
and is conscious of herself."
[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
that; all other studies bring us back to this study." And, in truth,
if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the
moral order. His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the
sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--through
feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the
means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's
curiosity.
And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too
would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would
wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts." Such indications there
certainly are in them. He was [29] meant--we see it in the variety,
the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of
one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on poetry, on
politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and
on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of
those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated
subjects, such as music, and special musical composers--he was meant,
if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best
sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is
itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
constitution of the producer, shaping his work. Of such critical
skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth
century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs. Corneille,
Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and
Wagner--all who are interested in these men will find a value in what
Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent
criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations,
skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative
estimate. Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with
one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he
is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance. A
powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have
looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance,
which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not
exist yet. "Construction," he says--artistic or literary
construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon
will." The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and
above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite
natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and
metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been
rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the
understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect
has produced.
But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely
intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of
opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex
nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my
mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula,
which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.
Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious
metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action"
that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity
lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious utterance to a
cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague
pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I
feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with
him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with
approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt
sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between
"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after
what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the
physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this
touching confession. Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that
metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual
conscience. "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my
back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course,
that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature,
or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it
meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the
very best sort of production.
And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament.
There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of
metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the actual--in
this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which
form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, on
probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense,
he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the
beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those
judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts,
the venerable institutions of the past--with the lives of the saints.
By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could
speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial
condition of rationalistic Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never
replace religion." Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a
religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the Church to which
I belong in heart rise into being?" To many at least of those who can
detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to
all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal,
from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large
hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost
hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we
think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence
which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a
force, an intellectual force, in the world--in the special business of
his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel
of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life
unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan." Bring,
we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your
plan--your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of
your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered
(we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein
not unworthy of Pascal.
And so we get only the Journal. Watching in it, in the way we have
suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and
observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize
with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to
have been but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how excellent a
literary product, after all, the Journal is. And already we have found
that it improves also on second reading. A book of "thoughts" should
be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable
sayings. Here are some of its random offerings:
"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
what you want is a sense of beauty."
"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting--it is we who
correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To
do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world,
while at the same time detaching us from it."
"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
dwell in Him."
"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
the least comprehended."
"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the
artist."
There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of
things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like.
Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel
nursed so jealously did come into evidence. And the [37] reader, we
hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her
work. She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour
which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of
mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the
achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by
giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers
will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion,
not to be forgotten.
17th March 1886
III. BROWNING
An Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons. Cassells.
[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
with "obscurity"--with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
intrinsic difficulty of his matter--it is very probable that an
Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
will add to the number of his readers. Mr. Symons's opening essay on
the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at this
late day. We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised yet
enthusiastic student in literature--in intellectual problems; always
quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement
and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of
the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a
critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his
hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to
his intention, before all things a useful one. Appreciating Mr.
Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to
point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the
dubious portions of his author's work. Not content with his own
excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he guides the reader to
his works, or division of work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and
special study, and giving a great deal of welcome information about the
poems, the circumstances of their composition, and the like, with
delightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest
of a brief but effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he
has added an excellent biography.
Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare." The quantity of his
work? Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a sign
of genius. "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments that
we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to
exhausting them." Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a
multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled
them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
personality. The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that
is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet--a
poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which,
having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences,
must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:--
"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation
are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes,
Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the
wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the
devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low
estate--men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them."
The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet
revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
the universe, a centre of creation." It is always the particular soul,
and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular
soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test--in
which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of the interior,
a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes
conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello,
Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study
except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that.
And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him.
It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and
variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
to modern people the most important, of poets.
So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These
extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and
"Porphyria's Lover"--
"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost
finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with
clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect
lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it
completely."
Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
work. A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an
experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous. But in spite of the
dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists,
Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished
skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself--tender,
manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in his own proper person.
Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic
episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in
which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:--
"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as
well as a poet. Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years,
he decided in the negative. But the latent qualities of painter and
musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest
and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the
language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.
No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. 'Abt Vogler' is
the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. It is not
the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that
it speaks. 'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on
music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A
Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found
of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt
Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born."
It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
there is chilling of sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a poet (and
only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to
modern demands) will have his difficulties. They were a part of the
poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:--
"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never
mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the
hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer
such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
dominoes to an idle man."
"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse
if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop
Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that
some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or,
if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone
are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have
been put in a plainer manner.'"
In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very
likely right. He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly
stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes. It is only to be
regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those
two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
headings. We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
more than justice to The Ring and the Book. The Ring and the Book is
at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style. Yet just here he
rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--