it a trivial optimism alone that can hold us back. Without doubt too
many men and women in the world are too optimistic. After the excessive
and artificial strain imposed upon them by the war their spirits have
relapsed, their consciences have grown dull, and they have sat down
for a vacation among the ruins. This is one of the innumerable prices
which mankind pays for the mad luxury of war. But it is still too early
to conclude that civilization is a wreck. Civilization is very old,
and every new exploration among its ancient monuments makes clear that
it is older than we thought before. The Mousterian, the Aurignacian,
the Solutrian, the Magdalenian, the Azilian, the Neolithic ages must
each have seen in its particular downfall the end of mankind; and yet
thousands of years were still to elapse before there followed what we
have till recently called the dawn of civilization. The destruction of
the great Minoan city of Cnossus, Havelock Ellis maintains, may have
been a more memorable event in the history of human affairs than the
catastrophe from which we are trying to recover. To certain types of
mind a view of history so extensive as this is like a first realization
of the vastness of the physical universe. If time is so long and space
so wide we are but momentary and infinitesimal insects whom it is
scarcely worth any one’s efforts, even our own, to preserve. Yet the
advances of civilization have been largely effected through just this
enlarging vision of our natures and our cosmic residence. After the
first despair, not unlike that of a child strayed from the nursery into
a crowd, comes a sense of greater dignity at being part of a structure
so vast, a new hopefulness that what has endured from everlasting will
still endure. The Spanish peasants have a proverb with which they
console themselves when there seems no other consolation: “God is not
dead of old age.” In such a saying Sancho Panza touches Aristotle.
Aristotle could think of a universe without beginning or end, moving
indeed toward no definite point but moving always through successions
of being. Less metaphysical, the peasant knows as truly that rain
follows sunshine and harvest the time for planting, and that in each
new season the old labours come back to be done again.
In the midst of our worst distresses we have need of some such cooling
wisdom. It is, of course, the faith of men who have not hoped for too
specific a mortal or immortal career. We do not hasten to console the
lover who has lost his mistress by telling him that for ages there
will still be love and mistresses. We do not hasten to assure the man
who has just failed of a fortune that though he is poor the sum of the
world’s wealth is still the same. And yet both these things are true.
The truth to be remembered is that in the very world where thrive
the ardours of the lover and the seeker of his individual fortune,
and where tragedy goes with defeat, there exist also such perennial
processes as the patience of the grass and the slow healing of time.
There is a spacious rule of life which has rarely been formulated but
which is probably held by most enlightened men and which better than
any other combines ardour with ripeness of reflection—a rule which in
effect says that though we should work at our appointed tasks as if
everything hung upon success we should afterwards regard each success
or failure as something which really does not matter. Thus only can
we advance with our fullest power; thus only can we free ourselves
from the past when we are done with it, not moaning too loudly over
defeat or being too vainly elated by some little victory. To extremists
such an attitude will seem a frivolous compromise. It is the solemn
hallucination of the hopeful that by ardour and by ardour alone can
the world be saved, and that each defeat of each plan he follows will
mean disaster. It is the cheerful prejudice of the desperate that in
spite of temporary oscillations here and there nothing is really to be
gained by ardours, for when they have cooled the world will continue
its decreed procession down a road paved with ardours flattened under
its solid tread. But between them is that temperate zone where men are
continually warmed by the fires that keep mankind alive and yet draw
from the long records of civilization the wisdom that shows them how to
keep the fire within its bounds, that it may do its work without waste
and destruction.
VII. SHORT CUTS
PETIT UP TO THIRTY
From the inquisitive elder Disraeli, Petit the Poet learned that Lope
de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and he learned it bitterly, for he
was sixteen, and his poetic April lingered. There was great solace in
Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave Petit still two
years to falter in. But what of these cradle rhymes of the Spaniard?
What of the numerous lispings of Pope to nurse and bottle? What of the
spines of satire Bryant put out at three-and-ten, or the _Blossomes_
Cowley bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!
Never mind Pascal and his conic sections, precocious Pliny, or the
well-stuffed Hermogenes—monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip
by while his own virtues lay still under a cloud of youth was a trial
which set Petit brooding full of anger, over the hours he had wasted
in play before he had grown conscious of an imperative function. No
honourable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For
all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill, Petit felt, as
when she cheated him of his destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance
of it. There was some comfort in the excuse which he made to himself,
that these more forward poets had beaten him in the race toward the
Muses merely because they had had an earlier summons. But this comfort
faded when he wondered whether they had not beaten him because their
summons had been more genuine than his. Nor could he be much heartened
by the spectacle of those who had come later into self-knowledge.
Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who
shared it with him. The dying, Petit felt, might lie down comforted
that patriarchs, kings, even the wise and good, were bedfellows; but
the hot thrust of those who looked toward birth wanted none of the
cool medicine which encourages death. Those who had to be about Father
Apollo’s business had little time for beds.
And yet, strenuous as he was for the bright reward, he gave hours to
becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some
lingering disease, he ransacked annals for cases like his own, mad
after a sign which would point to an end of his sullen malady of prose.
He could tell you at a question when his poets had assumed the _toga
poetica_, from Tennyson, covering his slate with blank verse at six
or seven, up through Goldsmith, who scarcely touched pen to verse on
the poetical side of thirty, to Cowper, who at fifty, a few cheerful
bagatelles aside, had only just begun to be a poet. From this learning
of his, more truly a scholar than he knew, Petit took examples,
despair, and vindications. When he thought of poets he thought of
a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless,
quenchless, and himself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village
for the tongue of flame which should mark him of their company. When
he thought how much he lacked their art and scope, Petit despaired;
but whenever despair had a little numbed, he vindicated himself by
instancing those who had slept late in the shell.
Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into
his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have
written some new _Thanatopsis_ at seventeen, but he got only heartache
from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant
had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit
to endure. _Poems by Two Brothers_, Poe’s _Tamerlane_, _The Blessed
Damozel_ (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to
his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s _Ode on
Solitude_, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius,
why not _The Blessed Damozel_? And who would contend with ghosts?
Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found
Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had
led so straight toward it.
Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for
at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one
threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s _Culprit Fay_ mocked him;
Holmes’s _Old Ironsides_ roared at him; Campbell’s _Pleasures of Hope_
enticed him; Milton’s _Nativity_ ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,”
Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a
minor poet and never strive with Milton.”
Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the
great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful
months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before _Alastor_,
fruit of twenty-three.
But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons.
At twenty-two he thought of _Götz von Berlichingen_ and thrust
his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with _Paracelsus_ and
_Endymion_ and Milton’s wistful _On his Being Arrived to the Age of
Twenty-three_. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of _The
Defence of Guenevere_ and _Tamburlaine_ and those cantos of _Childe
Harold_ which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in
a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s
year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember _The Ancient Mariner_,
Collins’s pure _Odes_, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable
_Arcadia_. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say
to _The Strayed Reveller_, _The Shepheardes’ Calender_, and _Poems,
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_? With twenty-eight, _The Lyrical
Ballads_ and _Atalanta in Calydon_ saw his hopes begin a slow decline,
which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past
Johnson’s _London_, Crabbe’s _Village_, Clough’s hospitable _Bothie_,
into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And
Petit was thirty.
Tall Alp after tall Alp behind him, Petit saw before him only a world
of foothills. Yet his journey had been passionate. Now the work he had
done was dead leaves, his energy all burned grass, his aspirations
dust. And dry and bitter in his mouth was the reflection that the
summons might have missed his ear while he had watched his fellows. Had
zeal overreached him, some hidden jealousy undone him? What grief and
rebellion to know himself cause, agent, and penalty of his own ruin! O
black decades to come!
Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.
IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE
I am so distressed to see that the Poet Laureate has failed to produce
an official ode for the British royal wedding that I hardly know
whether to rummage through the archives of the Hanoverians for a
substitute manufactured for some earlier occasion or to manufacture
a new article myself. I think I shall let learning and poetry both
serve me with the help of E. K. Broadus’s agreeable new study of “The
Laureateship.”
Here, for instance, is a part of what the elegant Henry James Pye,
George III’s laureate, wrote when the Princess Charlotta Matilda of
England married Prince Frederick William of Stuttgart:
Awhile the frowning Lord of arms
Shall yield to gentler Pow’rs the plain;
Lo! Britain greets the milder charms
Of Cytherea’s reign.
Mute is the trumpet’s brazen throat,
And the sweet flute’s melodious note
Floats on the soft ambrosial gale;
The sportive Loves and Graces round,
Beating with jocund step the ground,
Th’ auspicious nuptials hail!
The Muses cease to weave the wreath of war,
But hang their roseate flow’rs on Hymen’s golden car!
Or if this seems a shade heroic and a little old-fashioned, here are
certain lines of Tennyson on the marriage of Princess Beatrice to
Prince Henry of Battenberg:
The Mother weeps
At that white funeral of the single life,
Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears
Are half of pleasure, half of pain—the child
Is happy—even in leaving _her_!
And yet that seems to me to have a touch of insinuation about the fun
of getting away from the royal mother which I should be the last to
intend—though Tennyson cannot have meant it. Let me turn instead to
Thomas Warton and his admirable compliments to a king with the same
name as that of the present husband of England’s queen:
Lo! the fam’d isle, which hails thy chosen sway,
What fertile fields her temperate suns display!
Where Property secures the conscious swain,
And guards, while Plenty gives, the golden grain....
These are Britannia’s praises. Feign to trace
With rapt reflections Freedom’s favourite race!
But though the generous isle, in arts and arms
Thus stands supreme, in Nature’s choicest charms;
Though George and Conquest guard her sea-girt throne
One happier blessing still she calls her own—
and that happier blessing was of course the bride.
I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are
married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets
overtakes me:
This George and Mary Windsor must have lots of sense as well as dust,
to let their only daughter marry a man who is quite ordinary—a man at
least who never had as good a start in life as dad, but is a boy of
their own town, grew up there and there settles down. Well, that is
how it ought to be, and if he sticks to business he will thrive and
prosper till he may stand before kings and queens some day. And what
if the new couple have to work and plan and scrimp and save a few
years till they make their pile and can put on a better style? If they
attempt it nothing loth it will be better for them both. Then hail
the bridegroom and the bride! Let the nuptial knot be tied! Whatever
others may prefer, her for him and him for her!
“MURDERING BEAUTY”
At the Butirki prison in Moscow, say certain Frenchmen who were
formerly there as involuntary guests of the Bolsheviki, there was a
beautiful Lettish girl, at about the remorseless age of fifteen, who
acted as official executioner, shooting her victims expertly in the
back when they had been chosen by lot and led before her. The brawny
Jack Ketch of the old tradition had yielded to a mere flapper, “with
unerring aim and a lust for blood.”
The French will be French! My mind goes back to some thousands of
fine poems and of gallant speeches which have been made by this fine
and gallant race upon the theme of “murdering beauty.” What after
all is so deadly as a lovely eye? It stabs deep with a glint, slays
with a glance, and utterly consumes with a level gaze. There is no
armour proof against it. Whenever beauty walks abroad it leaves its
path strewn with the wrecks of foolish men who have encountered it.
It rises in the morning, like the sun for glory, and kills off a few
swains who are outside its casement when first it looks out at the new
day. It lisps its dutiful orisons, tastes matutinal nectar, and comes
forth to begin its proper business. Walking beside some clear brook
it topples one venturer after another into the sympathetic flood.
On the smooth enamelled green, where daisies pie the meadow, beauty
does its fatal work no less ruthlessly than in secluded arbours or
umbrageous grottoes. Then mounted on its favourite courser it takes
to the hunt, leaving to others the lighter task of bringing down the
boar or catching up with the fox, but itself more deadly among the
human quarry who, though hunters, are at last the hunted. Finally
twilight, the end of the day, candles, spinet, the dulcimer and the
soft recorders, witching sounds and more bewitching silences; but still
beauty goes on its conquering course. Not even midnight dims it. When
beauty has retired from mortal sight, the lover who had not the luck to
come within its range and so be slaughtered, lies disconsolate upon his
couch waiting for another day and another chance to dare the killing
eyes of beauty.
The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants,
they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that
and annihilation than the long night of safety. Leaning out of his
desperate window this or that prisoner, if he beheld some lady walking
in the courtyard, would fix his admiration upon her and bend every
effort to draw in his direction that killing look. Is there not a
story by Kenneth Graham about a headswoman in some courteous region
who became so popular that the whole world masculine swarmed to her
begging to be slain as a tender personal favour? And did they not swarm
so numerously that it embarrassed the land and almost stripped it of
its finest heroes because they chose death by the delicate headswoman
rather than life at any less exquisite hands whatever?
I do not know whether it was in this fashion that the prisoners of the
Bolsheviki behaved, but I suspect that something of the sort might
have happened, so true to form does their ancient gallantry seem to
have run. It might have happened; it must have happened. For this is
not, after all, history we are talking about. It is romance, romance
joyfully conscripted in the war against the enemies of the old order
and naturally using the old, old tricks.
CHAIRS
Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about
professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college
or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair
was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our
remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when
they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down
to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on
any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great
who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most
immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having
enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men
quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required
children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children
than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more
chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now
everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even
prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race
has grown sedentary.
What, the moralist inquires, is to be the effect of all this sitting?
Not being very moralistic, I answer calmly that the chief effect is
to make people fatter than they used to be. The vital and sanitary
statistics that are always appearing about the increase of the average
age and height of mankind never have a word to say about the increase
of average weight. But it is clear that the race is heavier and that
chairs have helped to raise the ponderous average. When the race sat on
branches the fat men broke the branches, fell, and broke their necks.
When the race sat on the floor the fat women grew lean by getting up
and down so often. Nor after chairs came in did fatness evolve at once.
To have to move one of those primitive settles a few times a day was
enough to keep weight down; to sit on their oaken planes and angles
was never comfortable enough to make the laziest do it long. Did the
Puritan Fathers and Mothers fatten sitting in the straight-backed
chairs and pews of their age? No, it remained for the padded and
upholstered chair to do the work, for the rocker and the morris chair,
for the sprawling chair of the hotel lobby and the trustees’ room.
Consider what happens. The most strenuous man of business, when he
sinks into a chair in the hotel thinks dimly—if he is literate enough
for that—about “taking mine ease in mine inn” and fattens almost under
the very eye. Yet even this is nothing to the process in the trustee’s
chair. Something drowsy hangs over it; something soft slumbers in it
and infects the sitter. The moment the trustee sits down he feels
his spine agreeably melting; he slips deeper in his seat and listens
to the committee reports as from a muted distance; he has a sense of
power which he realizes it is manners to exercise quietly; he looks
with sleepy disapproval upon plans to raise salaries or cut dividends
or reinvest funds or elect new trustees; he softens till he is scarcely
vertebrate; his bones matter less and less; in time he does not know
which is chair and which is he. The fatness of the chair has struck
upward to his head. As a certain poet of the primitive has it:
Men in chairs
Put on airs.
INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER
If, as it was reported dimly, the war in Ireland reached the Aran
Islands, then there is no spot left untouched in that ancient kingdom
and new free state. The story says the forces of the English Crown
heard those windy western islets harboured men on the run, and went
after them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land. Two
civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic battle, three
wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested. But only the barest
details ever got back to Dublin.
Like enough there were men on the run here and there among the island
cottages. There have always been. Didn’t John Synge when he was on
the islands hear of a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow
of his spade because he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan,
where the natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they
could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the criminal is
universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is because the people, “who
are never criminals yet always capable of crime,” feel that a man would
not do a wrong unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible
passion. But partly, too, it is because “justice” is associated with
the English. How much more than in Synge’s day was that the case in
the day of this episode when “justice” was trying to level Ireland
under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have had to run
to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even in Synge’s day the most
intelligent man on Inishmaan declared that the police had brought crime
to Aran. The Congested Districts Board has done something to modernize
Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very slowly.
A quaint story has come to light about the islands. They were being
used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a place of internment for its
prisoners, though there is, of course, no jail there. And it seems
that when the forces of the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland
and offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it completely,
desiring rather to stay where they were than to go free to any other
part of the British Isles whatever. I see the seed of legends in
this story. Pat Dirane, the old story-teller who made Synge’s day
delightful, is dead now; and Michael (really Martin McDonagh) has
married and come to America. There will be others, however, to carry
on the tradition among a people who still pass from island to island
in rude curaghs of a model which has served primitive races since men
first went to sea; who still tread the sands and invade the surfs of
their islands in pampooties of raw cowskin which are never dry and
which are placed in water at night to keep them soft for the next
day; who make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay
spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed. Old Mourteen
on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the strongest man on the earth
since Samson, and believed in him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the
island versions of _Cymbeline_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, tales
known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the _Gesta Romanorum_.
Michael’s friend sang “rude and beautiful poetry ... filled with the
oldest passions of the world.” How then shall the story die of how men
who were put away on Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that
prison sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the chance was
offered them?
SWEETNESS OR LIGHT