Disraeli--that in order to appreciate the beauty of fairyland we must
make ourselves as little children listening to the wondrous tales of a
nurse. But there seems to be a fallacy contained in this explanation of
the spell. It cannot be contrived. No sedate, crafty, timid old man of
the world can make himself as a little child merely that he may enjoy
certain ancient poetry in a melodious stanza. Nor, on the other hand, is
it obvious that real children, especially children of the modern sort,
possess that ductile _naivete_, that breathless and delicious credulity,
which fairyland demands. I believe, and I speak not without observation,
that children, as a rule, like stories best which deal with such themes
as dogs that run after ducks, and grown up people that tumble out of
motors. They like their tales to be realistic, rather hard, entirely
within their experience. Hans Christian Andersen, in his _eventyr_--so
falsely translated "fairy-tales"--took advantage of this fact and made a
world-wide success by inventing stories in which play-things and
articles of furniture and animals come to life and act on the
conventional principles of society. That is what children like. They
have been so short a time among us that the banalities of experience are
still fresh to them, and nothing so amusing as what is pure
matter-of-fact.
We may be quite sure that _The Faerie Queene_, which is the main classic
of this sort of art in the world's literature, was not written for
children. The ordinary infant would be unspeakably bewildered and bored
by the visit of Duessa to the Lady of Night, and by the exploits of
Arthegal and Talus. It might take a faint pleasure in Una being followed
by the Lion, as Mary was by the little Lamb; and the fight between St.
George and the Dragon (where Spenser appears almost at his worst) might
arrest wondering attention. But what is incomparable in Spenser is
exactly what would fail to amuse a child. We may be quite sure that it
was no audience from the nursery which the poet sought to fascinate. Yet
it is true that his poetry appeals only to the child at heart. What we
have to do is to define for ourselves what we mean by a child at heart,
and we shall soon perceive that the object of our thoughts is not, in
the literal sense, a child at all.
Perhaps youth rather than childhood is the image we require. With the
advance out of infancy into adolescence, the mystery of existence first
becomes palpable and visible to the fingers and the eyes of those who
are born to enjoy it. We fall into an error, however, if we imagine that
it is given to every one who pleases to arrive at this blissful
condition of wonder. The world is very old, and it is troubled about
many things; it is full of tiresome exigencies and solemn frivolities.
The denizens of it are, as a rule, incapable of seeing or conceiving
wonders. If the Archangel Michael appeared at noonday to an ordinary
member of the House of Commons, the legislator would mistake his
celestial visitant for an omnibus conductor. He would rejoice at having
sufficient common sense and knowledge of the world to make so
intelligent an error. But those who are privileged to walk within the
confines of fairyland are not of this class. They are members of a
little clan who still share the adolescence of the world; for, as this
world is, in the main, dusty, dry, old, and given to fussing about
questions of finance, and yet has nooks where the air is full of dew and
silence, so among men there are still always a few who bear no mark upon
their foreheads, and move undistinguished in the crowd, in whom,
nevertheless, the fairies still confide.
It will be a surprise to many, and it may be a painful surprise, to
learn that there are fathers of families, persons "engaged in the City,"
and holding reputable appointments, who faithfully believe in magical
princesses and in fays that dance by moonlight. These persons form the
audience in whom Spenser--as, in other times and other climes, such
poets as Ariosto and Camoens--seek and find their devotees. It is a fact
that there are people of a later age who are still what we call
"children in heart," whose hearts are bold, whose judgment is free,
whose inner eye is limpid and bright. These men and women are sensitive
still, although the searching, grinding wave of the world has gone over
them. They live, in spite of all conventional experience, in a state of
suspended credulity. They are ready for any amazement. They nourish,
persistently, a desire to wander forth beyond the possibilities of
experience, to enjoy the impossible, and to invade the inaccessible.
Life for them, in spite of the geographers and the disenchanting
encyclopaedias, and that general suffusion of knowledge (upon all of
which we congratulate ourselves)--life, in spite of all these, is still
the vast forest, mapped out, indeed, but by them and theirs untraced.
Persons of this fortunate temperament store up an endless stock of good
faith wherewith to face the teller of wonderful tales. And of all those
to whom they listen, still, after three hundred years, Spenser is the
most irresistible enchanter. It has always been admitted that his poetry
is the most "poetical" that can be met with; that is to say, that it is
the least mingled with elements which are not of the very essence of
poetry. More than all other writers, Spenser takes us out of our
everyday atmosphere into a state of things which could not be foreseen
by any cleverness of our own reflection. He is easily supreme in the
cosmogony of his enchantments. He confessed that his verse was no
"matter of just memory," and it is evident that he did not wish it to
be. He simply resigned himself to the exquisite pleasure of being lost
in the mazes of a mysterious and fabulous woodland.
The poets, in successive ages, have delighted in bearing witness to this
witchery of _The Faerie Queene_. There is no instance of this more
pleasingly expressed, nor more appropriate to our argument, than that of
Cowley, who says, in his delicious essay _Of Myself_: "There was wont
to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she
herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was
wont to lie Spenser's Works. This I happened to fall upon (before I was
twelve years old), and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the
knights and giants and monsters and brave houses, which I found
everywhere there--though my understanding had little to do with all
this--and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the
numbers." We may doubt whether the child Cowley had not more of a man's
taste than the man Cowley had of the heart of a child; but, at all
events, he entered with exactly the proper spirit into that miraculous
country where "birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree."
And it is in this spirit that hundreds of the elect have read the
marvellous poem in successive ages, and will continue to read it until
time itself has passed away.
_The Faerie Queene_ is not "about" any thing. There is nothing of
serious import to be deduced from its line of argument. The subject
wanders hither and thither, awakening fitful melodies in the brain of
its creator, as the wind does on the strings of an AEolian harp. The
music swells and declines, the harmonies gather to a loud ecstasy or
dwindle to a melancholy murmur, under the caprices of a spirit that
cannot be discerned and that seems to be under no intellectual control.
In saying this, I am not ignorant of Spenser's protestation of a moral
purpose, nor do I charge him with the smallest insincerity for having
written that apologetic letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, in which he makes
what he calls "a pleasing analysis" of the way in which the poem
illustrates "the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath
devised." It was necessary that he should have a skeleton of meaning
underneath his elaborate dream, not merely for the sake of contemporary
decency, lest in that strenuous age he should be cast forth as one that
cumbered the ground, but for the sake of his art as well, which needed a
steady basis of material as much as a picture needs its canvas or a
statue its marble.
Moreover, _The Faerie Queene_ must celebrate Queen Elizabeth, just as
"Orlando Furioso" must praise the House of Este. It was in feudal
societies, under the protection of princes, that these romantic
enterprises had to be conducted, if they were conducted at all. There
was a pleasant confusion, like that of coloured strands in a solemn
tapestry, between the laudation of the Sovereign and the celebration of
the virtues. Sometimes the monarch was not so virtuous as the poet could
have wished; sometimes his Court was as little like fairyland as was
humanly possible. That only added to the skill of the poet; that only
added rainbow colours to the fabric of the invention.
Then there was always the allegory, with which, in fact, anything on
earth could be connected, in the course of which not only could no
compliment be excessive, but no attribution could be so certain that it
was not able, under pressure, to be denied. Positive persons, in our
rash age, do much profane the allegory, which, nevertheless, is
essential to all fairy poetry. Without it, what would become of _The
Romaunt of the Rose_, or of _The Dream of Poliphile_; what, even, of the
_Divine Comedy_? Hazlitt merrily says that people "are afraid of
allegory, as if it would bite them.... If they do not meddle with the
allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them." The fact is, persons
who hate fairy poetry make the allegory an excuse for their aversion,
which is like saying that you hate the flavour of olives because they
have stones in them.
It is a peculiarity of the romance of fairyland that it never introduces
us to fairies. Nothing is so prosaic as a fairy, seen in the broad light
of Early Victorian illustration. A little being in short skirts and
sandals, standing on one toe on the tip of a rosebud, with a spangle in
her sleek hair and a wand in her taper fingers--nothing is more
repulsive to the Muses. But the whole secret of the great fairy poets is
that they are engaged in searching for fairies without ever suffering
the disenchantment of finding them. There are none, I think, in the
broad pages of Spenser; even, by a beautiful pleasantry, the Fairie
Queene herself being entirely absent throughout the poem, at all events
as we now possess it.
The personages in _The Faerie Queene_, noble and miraculous as they are,
are not of the fairy persuasion at all. They wander through the forests
in the hope of coming upon these supernatural denizens, but they never
succeed in doing so. The Holy Grail appeared far oftener to the Knights
of the Round Table than a real fairy was perceived by Paradel or
Blandamour. These men of chivalry were much interested in the subject,
but, as a rule, they were poorly instructed. It was in the House of
Temperance that Sir Guyon found the book, that hight _Antiquity of
Faeryland_, which seems to have been a sort of _Who's Who_, or _Complete
Peerage_ of the supernatural world. He flew to the perusal of it, and
wherever in it
"he greedily did look,
Offspring of Elves and Fairies there he found,"
but he found no examples on the
"island, waste and void,
That floated in the midst of that great lake,"
(where it is impossible not to believe that Mr. W. B. Yeats would have
been more successful).
A critic has said that nothing is closer to an intensely lyrical song
than a violently burlesque story. The sense of beauty immediately evoked
by the one is suggested, conversely, or in the way of topsy-turvy, by
the other. This principle had been introduced into literature--or at
least into modern literature, for the Greeks had it illustrated in
Aristophanes--a hundred years before the time of Spenser, by the
_Morgante Maggiore_ of Pulci, where Orlando, the pink of romantic
chivalry, comes into collision with certain "immeasurable giants" and
other wild absurdities. The atmosphere of that poem is perfectly
heroic:
Twelve Paladins had Charles in court, of whom
The wisest and most famous was Orlando;
Him traitor Gan conducted to the tomb
In Roncesvalles, as the villain planned to,
While the horn rang so loud, and knelled the doom
Of their sad rout, though he did all knight can do;
And Dante in his Comedy has given
To him a happy seat with Charles in heaven.
But, in another turn, we find this splendid Orlando lifting his sword to
give his beautiful lady, Aldabelle, a smack on the face with the flat of
it. This is burlesque, and Pulci seems to have been the inventor of the
_genre_. He was followed by Boiardo, who wrote of Orlando in love, and
by Ariosto, who described the madness of Orlando, and by a multitude of
other sixteenth century poets, who described, in this epic mixture of
lyricism and burlesque, various other episodes in the life of the hero.
It was from them, from these Italian precursors, whom Spenser had read
so carefully, that he borrowed the ugly and violent elements which he
introduces, so much to the scandal of some critics, into the embroidered
texture of _The Faerie Queene_.
In all this, however, which is very characteristic of the romance of
fairy poetry, we do wrong to be scandalized. The ugly things, like the
misfortunes of Braggadochio and his Squire (in _The Faerie Queene_), and
the fantastic things, like the journey of Alstolfo to the Moon to
recover the wits of Orlando (in Ariosto), are just as necessary to our
pleasure as the description of the Bower of Bliss, or of Angelica's
flight from Rinaldo. They are all part of that desire to escape from the
obvious and the commonplace features of life which inspires this whole
class of poetry. Those who are naturally conscious that life runs at a
dead level desire to heighten it, and whether this is done in the lyric
spirit or in the burlesque, or in both at once, matters very little. The
essential thing is to lift the spirit and quicken the pulse.
The only consolation which comes to people of this fatigued and wistful
temperament is that which they receive from a persuasion of the reality
of what is marvellous and incredible. Like the theologians, such readers
believe certain things to be true because it is impossible that they
should be true. They do not ask why, or where, or when, the incidents
happened; they are satisfied with the vision and with all its chimerical
wonders. In their dreams they see Belphoebe hurrying through the
woodland, her hair starred as thick as snow by the petals of the wild
roses her tempestuous flight has shaken down upon it, and they do not
ask what she represents, nor whither she hastens, nor her relation to
fact and history:
And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held,
And at her back a bow and quiver gay,
Stuft with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled
The savage beasts in her victorious play,
Knit with a golden bauldrick, which forelay
Athwart her snowy breast.
Who needs to ask whither Belphoebe goes, or what she means? She is a
vision created for the deep contentment of those in whom the longing for
noble images and uplifted desires and generous, childlike dreams is
perennial.
Critics like to assume that the enthusiasm which breeds this kind of
chivalrous poetry is dead and buried in the classics. They no more
expect to see a new _Faerie Queene_ published than to hear of a new dodo
inhabiting the plantations of the interior of Madagascar. But in
literature it is always unsafe to say that a door is closed for ever; if
we are rash enough to make such an assertion, it is sure to fly open in
our faces. It was a commonplace of criticism ten years ago that the epic
would never reappear in literature, and behold Mr. Doughty presents us
with a _Dawn in Britain_ which is as long as the _Lusiads_ would be if
_Paradise Lost_ were tacked on to the tail of it. Last week I read in a
very positive volume that the Pastoral can never revisit the cold
glimpses of a world that has exchanged its interest in shepherds for a
solicitude about miners and chauffeurs. My instant reflection on
reading that opinion was to wonder how soon a young poet would publish a
fresh set of Bucolics, with the contest of Damaetas and Menalcas set
forth to a new tune upon the Pans' pipes.
For this reason I cannot say that I was astonished, although much
interested, to find a young man--and, I venture to think, a young man of
some genius--reviving the old music of the magic woodland, which had
seemed to be dead, or closed, since the seventeenth century. It is a
wish to make his work a little known to English readers which has led me
to venture on some remarks to-day about the Romance of Fairyland. M.
Albert Mockel is a Fleming, and if M. Octave Mirbeau, in a celebrated
article in the Paris _Figaro_, had not called M. Maeterlinck the Belgian
Shakespeare, I should have been tempted to describe M. Mockel as the
Belgian Spenser. I may go so far as to call him a Belgian Ariosto. M.
Mockel has not enjoyed the same popularity as his eminent countryman;
perhaps he had no Octave Mirbeau to immortalize him with a gorgeous
paradox. But in 1891 M. Mockel, who must then have been very youthful,
published a poem, entitled _Chantefable_, which was enough to inspire
great hopes of his future among not a few judicious readers. He has done
nothing, in my judgment, to justify those hopes so fully as he now has
in the volume he has published, called, _Contes pour les Enfants
d'hier_, with ingenious illustrations by M. Auguste Donnay. These
illustrations are very clever, although they would never have been drawn
had it not been for Aubrey Beardsley's _Morte d'Arthur_ (1893). M.
Donnay is skilful, and he emulates Beardsley's wonderful, pure line,
without always perfectly attaining to it.
But the book itself is of a more classic cast, and deserves longer
attention. Here, to quite a remarkable extent, we find the old
stateliness of the fabulous society, the old ceremonial procession of
wonderful events and incredible people. Here, once more, we enter a
world as audaciously designed as Ariosto's, as intricately splendid as
Spenser's. Here, again, is what a critic of _The Faerie Queene_ has
called "the inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and
incident." The vulgarity of present existence is buried under such a
panoply and magnificence of fable that the grown-up children, the
blessed _enfants d'hier_, can forget and ignore it.
It would be tedious to retell briefly, in poor words, the brilliant
stories which owe so much to the solemn and highly-coloured language in
which they are deliberately narrated. But I cannot refrain from giving
an outline of the last of them, _The Island of Rest_. In M. Mockel's
gallery there is no more magnificent figure than that of Jerzual, Prince
of Urmonde. We may call him the Roland of our Belgian Boiardo. All the
world is aware of the mysterious end of Prince Jerzual; he went away
over the waves of the sea, and nothing was ever heard of him again. But
only M. Mockel knows what happened, and he has now consented to reveal
it.
Jerzual had loved the ineffable Alise, Princess of Avigorre, and to
secure her love he had vowed that he would offer her the suzerainty of
the Heights, a mysterious country surrounded by peaks of silver and
crystal. Unfortunately, though he searched the habitable globe, the
whereabouts of this marvellous region escaped him. One day, in despair,
as he rode his magic horse, Bellardian, he came to the edge of a cliff,
where the ocean stretched at his feet. Tired of his vain adventures,
Jerzual flung the reins on the mane of Bellardian, and spurred him
onward. The obedient steed leaped the cliff, and descended on the
surface of the waters, which undulated gently beneath him, but bore up
both horse and rider. They galloped over the calm sea for hours and
hours, for days and days, until at last a fairy island appeared on the
horizon, and displayed, as they approached, a silver zone of pure peaks,
lifted like a tiara high over the ring of green and golden verdure. This
was the land of Jerzual's desire, but neither the white Bellardian nor
his incomparable master succeeded in landing upon that exquisite shore
without prolonged adventures, which it is not my business to recount.
Suffice to say, that they sank in safety on the sands at last.
How they were discovered there by Aigueline, the cruel daughter of the
Sea, and sole inhabitant of the island; how the heart of Jerzual
fluctuated in the terrible dilemma between his present good fortune and
his duty to the Princess; how staunch and uplifted poor Bellardian was,
and how strange and pitiful his fate; how the enchantments of Aigueline
were broken at last; and how, when the disillusioned Jerzual walked in
frenzy upon the sands of the island shore, he saw the shallop of the
Princess of Avigorre sail by, with banners flying from it which were not
his, but those of his rival, Ellerion, Prince of Argilea; this, and much
more, and all of it equally gorgeous and convincing, must be read in the
delightful pages of M. Mockel's _Contes pour les Enfants d'hier_.
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD WOLSELEY
There is at present no record of Lord Wolseley, who died just too
recently to be included in the latest Supplement of the _Dictionary of
National Biography_. His memory loiters in the limbo which always
surrounds the famous dead for a few years after their decease. Then
follow, in due course, the official Life and the selected
correspondence; and so finally the monument is unveiled for the pigeons
of the Press to perch upon. To my friends, Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir
George Arthur, have been entrusted the duty of arranging the memoirs of
our greatest modern soldier, and their work will be formidable, for the
Great War, of which Wolseley, in flashes of genius, had prescience, has
swept over us, and has confused the landmarks of our memories. I feel
sure that they will bring judgment and discretion to their task, which
is a noble one. But they will certainly, and properly, be inclined to
concentrate their effort on the military aspects of their subject, since
Lord Wolseley was a soldier before everything else, and so completely a
soldier that other aspects must be dwarfed in contemplation of his
military glory. These may easily, indeed, be excluded altogether, and I
therefore venture to recall, before it is too late, certain scenes which
I observed during a prolonged and delighted acquaintanceship, in which
the sword ceased to be "vambrashed," as the Elizabethans used to say,
and in which the great general was simply an amateur of letters, eager
to talk about books and even ambitious to write them. I shall not fall
into the error of describing him as a great author, but I think that it
may be amusing to preserve some intellectual sketch of a character
essentially imposing in very different surroundings.