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FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES
BY
ARTHUR SYMONS
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1917
_First published, December 1916._
_Reprinted, January, June 1917._
TO
JOSEPH CONRAD
WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION
CONTENTS
PAGE
SAINT AUGUSTINE 1
CHARLES LAMB 13
VILLON 37
CASANOVA AT DUX 41
JOHN DONNE 80
EMILY BRONTË 109
EDGAR ALLAN POE 115
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 122
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 130
GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET 141
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 153
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 201
A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY 207
LÉON CLADEL 216
HENRIK IBSEN 222
JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 268
TWO SYMBOLISTS 300
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 310
WALTER PATER 316
THE GONCOURTS 336
COVENTRY PATMORE 351
SAROJINI NAIDU 376
WELSH POETRY 390
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt
the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
writing of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.
Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
others. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet
friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
divine.
To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
though all vice is man's.
This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
book, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
certain _naïveté_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic,
geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
no part in that boy, but the sin.'
Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
unto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if any
finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
desirable thing.
That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
of the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
coming and going.
I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
almost be called a kind of æsthetics. They are æsthetics indeed of
renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned
voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
when I love my God.'
Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if
they could heal my infirmities,--a race curious to know the lives of
others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
surface of the mind's action, which we call character, or the surface
emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.
1897.
CHARLES LAMB
I
There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
supreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose out
of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays.'
He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _Rosamund
Gray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
moment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but these
flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour of
the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
morals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'
Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
another, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures of
Ulysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest to
success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father's
Wedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most
beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
the best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.
To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
the letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writes
to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
What began in mischief ends in art.
II
'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
world, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his
deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.
Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
to others to remember him by.
Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not
lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony
itself_--do these things go out with life?'
It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the
most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.
Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He
was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ are
confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.
Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting of
Munden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, the
Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.'
Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
compact,' poetry in substance?
Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--life
awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls,
parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive
prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these all
came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
hills.
And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before.' And to
Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
heart.
III
Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned
his play in Drury Lane:
It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
desirous to please them!
Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite
through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the
tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'
To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'
No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is
supported.
It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
can, after all, never be explained?
IV
Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,
'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to
you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
however partial, can find any story.'
'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'
Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost
exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _Old
China_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
poem.
Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
excesses something of 'the good clerk.'
Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.
And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners,
books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
from the road.
The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike,
was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
intellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intense
delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.
1905.
VILLON
Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets.
One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some
acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in
which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things
have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no
poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence
more simply, than this _personnage peu recommandable, fainéant, ivrogne,
joueur, débauché, écornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles,
escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres_. The most
disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in
which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston
Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better
for worse, finds it necessary to apologise for him when he comes to the
ballad of _La Grosse Margot_: this, he professes, we need not take as a
personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we
are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _la grosse
Margot_ from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one
who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for
its own sake: _la grosse Margot_ in the flesh, _les dames du temps
jadis_ in the spirit,
Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,
Tartes, flaons, oefs frits et pochez,
Perdus, et en toutes façons,
his mother, _le bon royaume de France_, and above all, Paris. _Il a
parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de
campagne. C'est un poète de ville, plus encore: un poète de quartier. Il
n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Geneviève, entre le
Palais, les collèges, le Châtelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les
tripots et les rues où Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne
tiennent leur 'publique école'._ It is in this world that he lived, for
this world that he wrote. _Fils du peuple, entré par l'instruction dans
la classe lettrée, puis déclassé par ses vices, il dut à son humble
origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources éternelles
de toute vraie poésie._ And so he came into a literature of formalists,
like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of
greybeards.
Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on
wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.
1901.
CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY
I
The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
his relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps the
most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality,
one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
are more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _Monte Cristo_, or any of the
imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
longer.
And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and
people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Château of Dux, in Bohemia,
on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
Crébillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
Inquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
most famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break off
abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
at Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs_.