Roberts has strong views on the subject, which he is at no pains to
conceal. For this we are far from blaming him. Indeed, we feel that the
personal note imported by the author's intellectual bias gives some
flavour to a book which, owing to the complete absence of charm or
distinction, would be otherwise insipid. It is a competent, but woefully
uninspiring, piece of work. Above all things, Mr. Roberts lacks
humour--a quality indispensable in a writer on Ibsen. For Ibsen, like
other men of genius, is slightly ridiculous. Undeniably, there is
something comic about the picture of the Norwegian dramatist, spectacled
and frock-coated, "looking," Mr. Archer tells us, "like a distinguished
diplomat," at work amongst the orange-groves of Sorrento on _Ghosts_.
"Ibsen was keenly sensitive to place, and if we would get the
utmost feeling out of his plays we must remember how large a part
was played by fortunate or unfortunate position and circumstances
in contributing to the wonderful 'atmosphere' of the dramas."
That is what Mr. Roberts thinks. A sense of humour would also have saved
him from the one black note of sentimentality in the book:
"Ellida might be Solveig analysed--but analysed with how loving a
touch, how unerring a kindness; it is as if a great surgeon were
operating on a woman he loved."
Such things, we had imagined, could only be written by members of the
Academie francaise.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] "Henrik Ibsen: a Critical Study." By R. Ellis Roberts. (Secker.)
MISS COLERIDGE[3]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1910_]
The greatest art is, in a sense, impersonal. We have no biographies of
Homer and Sophocles, nor do we need them. Of Milton and Keats we know
something; yet, knowing nothing, should we enjoy their work the less? It
is not for what it reveals of Milton that we prize "Paradise Lost"; the
"Grecian Urn" lives independent of its author and his circumstances, a
work of art, complete in itself.
Precisely opposite is the case of Miss Mary Coleridge's poems: they,
when in 1908 Mr. Elkin Mathews produced a more or less complete
edition, excited us, not because, as verse, they were particularly good,
but because they discovered, or seemed to discover, an attractive
character. Indeed, Miss Coleridge's art was anything but exciting: her
diction was not beautiful, her rhythms pleased the ear but moderately,
one looked in vain for that magic of expression which transmutes thought
and feeling into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which
was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its
vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and
cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be
bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry--all these
conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them
beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's poems
was to make acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished
to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her,
and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to
say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather
than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she
feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one
accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed
unchallenged. Miss Coleridge bewitched us with her personality; we knew
that her poems were slight, we felt that they revealed a part of her
only, we had suspicions, but we held our peace. Had we turned to her
novels, in spite of the brilliancy of one of them--"The King with Two
Faces"--our suspicions would have been strengthened. But we did not
turn; or if we did, they forced us into no questioning mood. It was left
for this tell-tale volume of "Gathered Leaves" to press the question
insistently, and to answer it. The spell is broken. We know now both why
the poems are good and why they are not better.
No one will blame Miss Sichel for setting the truth before all things:
clearly, by publishing these stories and essays she supplies an
opportunity of correcting a too flattering estimate; but, foreseeing, no
doubt, that we shall avail ourselves of it, she supplies also a memoir
of fifty pages on which our final estimate is to be based. That this
memoir is a competent piece of work need hardly be said. Miss Sichel's
competence is notorious; as an efficient biographer her reputation is
secure. Not every subject, however, is suited to her pen. Miss Coleridge
did not develop along conventional lines; in fact, she differed so
disconcertingly from the type with which we have grown agreeably
familiar in the "English Men of Letters" series, that, without violence,
she could never have been fitted into the traditional mould. Her
biographer has done the work thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in
the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite
at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archaeologist
might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly
rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest
that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited
in the memoir is not the lady who reveals herself in the poems.
Of the author of the poems we catch a glimpse in the fragments of
letters and diaries which form the penultimate section of the volume.
But here, again, we find cause for discontent. If private reasons
forbade fullness, was it wise to print scraps? Why tantalize us? In the
letters we should, perhaps, have recaptured the lady we have lost in the
essays and stories; but these fragments, though suggestive, are too
slight to be consolatory: besides, Miss Coleridge was no coiner of
aphorisms and epigrams who could give her meaning in a handful of
sentences. Here is the first "detached thought" in the book:
"'Whom the gods love die young' and whom they hate die old, but
whom they honour, these they take up to their eternal habitations
in the ripe summer time of existence."
One wonders how it came there.
The suspicions which this volume helps to confirm, the melancholy
guesses it answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination,
had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of
her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of
an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not
fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow
another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of
images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to
the logical necessity by which one idea follows another in a
well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged
themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship
to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is
architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid
and intelligible whole--a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could
not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, and lay where
they fell at haphazard; she has bequeathed no castles, but a garden
strewn with quaint figures, where every thought is tagged with gay
conceits. Her short poems are often successful because she could pick at
choice a thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza; but when she
attempted a tale or an essay she gathered a handful of incongruous
oddments and made of them a patchwork.
This first defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and
more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss
Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength
to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination
force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide.
Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat
playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been
making palaces.
Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not
grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was
too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an
imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking
fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from
which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought,
though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what they betray of a
state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who
take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us;
certainly she studied under an excellent master--the author of "Ionica";
yet she could say of the "Bacchae": "The Hallelujah Lasses get drunk on
the wine of the spirit, not the wine of the grape"; and of the "Medea":
"Medea is thoroughly _fin de siecle_; says she would rather go into
battle three times than have a baby once, pitches into men like
anything. But there's too much Whitechapel about her. How are you
to be seriously interested in a woman who has murdered her mother
and boiled her father-in-law before the play begins?"
What is this but the shy jauntiness, the elaborate understatement, of
something small in the presence of something great? That uneasy titter,
caught from time to time as one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to
have heard before in the Arena chapel or at the end of a Bach fugue. It
is the comment of sophisticated refinement that can neither sit still
nor launch out into rapturous, but ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling
who takes refuge in slang or jocularity for fear of becoming natural and
being thought ridiculous. Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and
Culture, so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Medea, and called
the Bacchae "Hallelujah Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek
literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm tempered by taste; but
the "glory that was Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous passions,
the adventurous thought and feeling, were meat too strong for a society
whose happiness depended on gazing at one half of life with closed eyes
and swallowing the other in sugar-coated pills.
So we shall not turn again to "Gathered Leaves," though we shall
sometimes read the poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a less
elusive figure. They will show us a pensive lady, rather well dressed in
the fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a Morris
drawing-room, the white walls of which are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite
pictures, and muses on what her surroundings represent. She is
intelligent and graceful; witty in season, fantastic in measure. Her
mind is ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her age and state;
she searches Canon Dixon's latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last
picture. Her life is an exquisite preoccupation with the surface of
truth and the heart of unreality. Her poems suggest once more the
atmosphere of an age already dead and half-forgotten; of Sunday
afternoons in large rooms with long blinds, behind which men yawn and
cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people
must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of
discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded,
friendly, urbane, and, we are happy to think, already infinitely remote.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] "Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge." With a Memoir
by Edith Sichel. (Constable and Co.)
This review, when first published, gave pain, I know; it gave pain to
friends of Miss Coleridge and to friends of Miss Sichel and to many of
the charming people who were friends of both. The pain, of course, I
regret; but I cannot say that I regret the article. The criticism still
seems to me fair, and I know that it was honest: nevertheless, were Miss
Sichel alive, I should not care to reprint it. But that able and
friendly lady is now dead, and her eulogy has been pronounced by those
who knew her best and could best appreciate her. I, of course, have
criticized her only in her public character, as a writer, and in so
doing have transgressed no law that I, at any rate, can respect. As
Voltaire says, "On doit des egards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que
la verite." To the living, perhaps, I have not always been as civil as
could have been desired; but of the dead I have told no lies that I am
aware of.
PEACOCK[4]
I
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Feb. 1911_]
In the first place, were these plays worth publishing? With some
hesitation we will admit that they were. Presumably the possessors of
Messrs. Dent's pretty edition, or of any edition for that matter, will
be glad to set this small volume beside the others and thus become
owners of the complete prose works of an English classic. For Peacock is
a classic; otherwise they might well have been allowed to acquire that
portentous dignity which grows like moss on ancient and unprinted MSS.
in the British Museum. Here and there, in the farces, one may discover
examples of truly "Peacockian" wit and style, but these rare gems have
mostly been worked into the novels; while the residue, which includes a
drama in blank verse, has little if any intrinsic value. The earliest
works of Peacock--a brilliant amateur to the last--are as amateurish as
the earliest works of his friend Shelley and as thin and conventional as
the worst of Goldoni. Nevertheless they are readable; so we need not
stay to quarrel with the enthusiastic editor who claims that they are
"replete with fun, written in a flexible style, and bearing the imprint
of a scholarly discrimination."
English prose and humour are certainly the richer for one or two
speeches in this little book, but the service it performs, or can be
made to perform, is greater than that of rescuing a few fragments of
humorous prose or even of filling a gap on our shelves. It sends us back
to perhaps the least known of the great English, writers. The "Life" of
Peacock has yet to be written: an ineffectual memoir by Sir Henry Cole,
some personal recollections by the author's granddaughter Mrs. Clarke, a
critical essay from the versatile but vapid pen of Lord Houghton, the
gossip of Robert Buchanan, and editorial notices by Prof. Saintsbury and
the late Richard Garnett, together afford nothing more than a
perfunctory appreciation. Two writers, indeed, have attempted a more
elaborate estimate: James Spedding, an able prig,[5] reviewed Peacock's
novels in the _Edinburgh_ of January 1839, and more than half a century
later Mr. Herbert Paul contributed to the _Nineteenth Century_ a paper
on the same subject. Unluckily, the judgment of both is vitiated by a
common defect. Both are good journalists, but both are better party men;
consequently, neither can appreciate the attitude of one to whom
collective wisdom was folly, who judged every question in politics,
philosophy, literature, and art on its merits, and whose scorn for those
who judged otherwise was expressed without any of those obliging
circumlocutions that are prized so highly in political life. With the
possible exception of Prof. Saintsbury, not one of Peacock's
interpreters has understood his position or shared his point of view;
did not Dr. Arthur Button Young, the editor of these plays, himself
affirm that
"his stories deal with tangible realities, and not with obscure or
absurd situations, as is the case with those of many novelists....
For this reason alone they deserve to be widely known, as also
their author, for having helped to raise the tone of novel-writing
at a critical juncture in its development, by introducing into his
tales instruction and information"?
It is only fair to add that this bit of criticism occurs in his
"Inaugural Dissertation presented to the Philosophical Faculty of
the University of Freiburg im Breisgau for the Asquisition of the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy."
In calling Peacock a great writer we have raised a claim that needs some
support. His exquisite style with its Tacitean flavour, the perfection
of his lyrics, his wit, and that intellectual brilliancy which sparkles
from all the facets of his satire, parody, and epigram, suffice to
endear him to the small, fastidious world whose approval is best worth
having, and also, perhaps, to justify our opinion. But, unless we
mistake, the appeal of his novels goes farther than the frontiers of
good taste. Peacock's mind was original; he thought about many things
and he did his own thinking. He is the other side to every question; his
way of looking at life is a perpetual challenge; and a man without a
vestige of humour or taste may read him with profit for his point of
view.
Peacock belongs to no school or age. He has been called a man of the
eighteenth century living in the nineteenth; nothing could be farther
from the truth. He loved the sense and dignity of the Augustans, just as
he loved the fire and romance of the Renaissance, and the mysterious
gaiety of the Middle Ages; but he could have criticized any of them with
as good a will as he criticized the age of machinery and "the march
of mind," and, had he been born in any one of them, would doubtless
have done so. He was a student of bardic poetry who yet admired
Ariosto; his passion for classical literature was uncommonly wise and
sincere; he read Sophocles for pleasure. So remote was he from the
eighteenth-century Grecians that he could perceive and enjoy the
romantic element in Greek life and art; yet it is a mistake to call him
a Greek. An Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the
noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that
nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant,
prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good
things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and
to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can
see it in his verse. A touch of gloating and uninquisitive wonder, a
suspicion of sentiment for sentiment's sake, the ghost of an appeal
from the head to the heart, from the certainty of the present to the
mystery of the past and the future, betray the descendant of Shakespeare
and Sterne. The very culture that he inherited from a Graeco-Roman
civilization, his bookishness, his archaeology, his conscious Paganism,
would have looked queer in an Athenian of the fifth century B.C. The
author of "Love and Age" was no Greek; but he was Greek enough to stand
out above his fellows, from whom he is most honourably distinguished by
his Athenian open-mindedness.
That Peacock cultivated prejudices is not disputed; for instance, he
could not abide tobacco-smoke, Lord Brougham, or the Great Exhibition of
1851. But his prejudices were as peculiar to himself as were the
principles of Sir Thomas Browne. They were not the prejudices of his age
and state, neither were they of the kind that is fatal to free thinking
and plain speaking. Unlike the popular dogmas of the muscular Christians
and their rivals the muscular agnostics, his whims and fancies were
superficial and involved no intellectual confusion. He compelled no one
to build on unproved hypotheses, nor would he suffer himself to be
compelled. Though sceptical about progress and mistrustful of democracy,
to the end of his life he disliked the Conservative party; and perhaps
his finest flights of sarcasm occur in "The Misfortunes of Elphin,"
where he ridicules Canning's florid rhetoric in defence of the
Constitution.
"'Reports have been brought to me [says Elphin], that the
embankment, which has been so long entrusted to your care, is in a
state of dangerous decay.'
"'Decay,' said Seithenyn, 'is one thing, and danger is another.
Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am
free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not
altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most
sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it
keeps out the water from the land, and it lets in the wine upon the
High Commission of Embankment. Cupbearer, fill. Our ancestors were
wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we should be
so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it.'
"'The stonework,' said Teithrin, 'is sapped and mined: the piles
are rotten, broken, and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are
leaky and creaky.'
"'That is the beauty of it,' said Seithenyn. 'Some parts of it are
rotten, and some parts of it are sound.'
"'It is well,' said Elphin, 'that some parts are sound: it were
better that all were so.'
"'So I have heard some people say before,' said Seithenyn;
'perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable
sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But
I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are
sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it
were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the
soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is
balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as
innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and
clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling
and battling against it. I would not be so presumptious as to say,
I could build anything that would stand against them half an hour;
and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of
modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has
stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let
it alone. It is well: it works well: let well alone. Cupbearer,
fill. It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive
reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die.'"
Peacock's attitude towards women affords an example of the liberality
of his views and of his isolation. It shocked Victorian sentimentalists,
and would probably infuriate the more austere feminists of to-day. His
heroines, like all his characters, are roughly and extravagantly
sketched; what makes them peculiar is that they are sometimes almost
alive. Stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence, craven submissiveness or
insipid resignation, he did not commend in women: on the contrary,
intellect, wit, gaiety, spirit, and even a first in the Classical Tripos
seemed or would have seemed desirable and ladylike attributes to the
creator of Anthelia Melincourt and Morgana Gryll. What was called
"womanliness" in the forties displeased him; but he liked women to be
feminine, and knew that distinguished women have ever been distinguished
as women.