main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbô.
He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô, 'always surrounded with
grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously
traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic
dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at times
almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as inarticulate for us as the
serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers
seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a
coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Mâtho, maddened with
love, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught
of which they are to die,' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of
Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us,
is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid
person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a
life 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one or
two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into
their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The
illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history,
but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in
their minds.
'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,' Flaubert tells us, of
his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'to
the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,' than in _Madame Bovary_.
The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity,
without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never
archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for
the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by
the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of
thought, which, in _Madame Bovary_, bring with them an instinctively
modern cadence.
_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things.
A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of
the thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistled
through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.' Before the
battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the
Carthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see the
ground undulate in the distance.' Clouds of dust rise and whirl over
the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems,
wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
to see for them.
Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a
style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
into his words from the precision with which they express definite
things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and
order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.
1901.
GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET
Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He has
both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
solutions.
In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
to come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
_Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the
touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!
Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twenty
years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
Earth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _A
Reading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companion
volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
distinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volume
of 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from the
volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
another group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret's
Bridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The Young
Princess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _Roadside
Philosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France,
December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes in
Contribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900.
But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and
benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the
making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost
scientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seen
through a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would be
possible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, in
which, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise,
collected ecstasy of Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy of
the Mænads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living,' but
the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the
sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be
guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the
transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be
compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry
out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other
soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the
abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words
in the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have had
little time left over for singing.
Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; _Modern Love_ requires
reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating
semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A
freshman who heard Mallarmé lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I
understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes
equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one,
clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through
which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass
from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the
right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the
corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless
endeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last,
in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader of
Meredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is not
obvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, not
beautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:
Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate.
It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:
and the totterer Earth detests,
Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
such lines as:
Look I once back, a broken pinion I,
He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
phrase:
Ravenous all the line for speed.
An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
meanings, and to translate as it goes.
Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical
skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample
magnificence:
Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
The house of heaven splendid for the bride;
and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:
With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
Shall on through brave wars waged.
Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place
of
A soft compulsion on terrene
By heavenly,
which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In
another place he speaks of
The posts that named the swallowed mile,
which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems
and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:
Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
Thrill for service to be stamped.
Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
something a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'
To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
what Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
one not lay down this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ of
forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
their wisdom in rejecting it.
1901.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
I
It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was read
for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.
A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyrical
poems, the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'
In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, in
his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
set _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_,
and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
setting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains that
there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
growth of the profoundest poetical genius.
Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_.' In
metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricate
harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.