PART IV: CERTAIN FOREIGNERS

I. MONTAIGNE 191

II. NEKRASSOV 211

III. PUSHKIN 226

IV. LÈRMONTOV 241

V. GOGOL 258

VI. TURGENEV 263

VII. GONCHAROV 270

VIII. DOSTOIEVSKY 274

IX. TOLSTOY 284

X. TCHEKOV 292

INTRODUCTION

From reviews that I have read of earlier books of mine I have at last

learnt wisdom. It seems that I must be explicit about my intentions in a

preface in order to save the critics the trouble of reading the book

through.

Now it must be remembered that literary critics are men of intelligence

who have read everything and damned most things. Very few indeed are the

books which they allow to be worth the trouble that must have been taken

to write them.

And it is certainly true that we suffer from a flood of reading matter

which serves no more purpose than a packet of the cheapest cigarettes or

a cocktail.

We have not troubled to acquire a critical sense. We accept what we see

on the bookstalls and buy books almost entirely from the attractiveness

of their wrappers. But there ought to be a mean between a ferocious

disdain of all modern writing and a surfeiting on all that is published.

The majority of men and women are very much like myself, I imagine. They

read with equal interest a modern novel, say, of Sheila Kaye-Smith, an

exposition of the Relativity Theory like Eddington's _Space, Time and

Gravitation_, E. V. Lucas's essays, Henri Fabre and Trotter, and at the

same time keep harking back to reread _Don Quixote_, _Tristram Shandy_,

Shelley and other favourites among the classics.

Even so, they are apt to miss much that is readable ... and from my

correspondence I gather that I have many times been lucky enough to

introduce an author to a new reader, as a result of which an undying

friendship between the two has been caused.

Merely to turn over the following pages will not give the critic any

clue why I chose the writers and books that I have chosen.

In point of fact, it just happens that these are the people who have

attracted me sufficiently in my reading during the last year to jot down

not so much why I found them attractive as what I found attractive in

them.

It is quite by chance that there should be almost an equal number of

foreigners, contemporaries and native classics in my list. I suppose it

means that I devote about one-third of my reading hours to each.

With regard to my method of approach, it is no good reviling me for not

criticising each book or author according to a stereotyped plan, as if I

were a chemist analysing a compound. I am not analysing so much as

enjoying. My position is that of the not altogether successful cricketer

who yet takes a keen delight in watching great players bat. I do not

propose to sit down and lay emphasis on the chances given or the faulty

strokes: my object is rather to take as many enthusiasts of the game

with me as I can find and just lie down and watch an innings which I

know to be a good one.

To call this "gush" or "gusto," as some of my reviewers do, is merely

silly. I am not so mentally deficient as they would have people to

believe.

Merely to "slobber" over a book or a person is not one of my

characteristics. It is extremely easy to pick holes, to adopt a negative

attitude, to call down fire from heaven and make a show with the fists

when your enemy is merely an author. That is not my idea of honourable

action. If a book is bad (and I agree that most books are), let it die

by itself. Professional critics only too frequently remind me of

vultures: they crowd round the weak and the dying ready to devour.

The object of any man who enjoys life is to share his enjoyment with

others. If a book appeals to me I want as many people as possible to

derive the pleasure that I derived from it.

I would have my critics remember that this is not a book on "Why we

should _not_ Read----" (which would have been very easy to write), and

therefore is meant to be laudatory. I do demand sincerity in my authors

and at any rate a feeling for beauty.... Knowing full well as a novelist

myself how extremely hard these desiderata are to be obtained, I am

perhaps more lenient than some critics who have never tackled a creative

task, just as I am less inclined to decry another man's strokes at

cricket when I think of my own feeble efforts, but it is very

definitely worth pointing out that the severest critics of any sport are

always those who know nothing about it, and I am beginning to believe

that these modern critics who find no good in any work which comes under

their notice know nothing whatever about literature, but, like the

audiences at a Cup-tie, talk a wonderful jargon which is apt to deceive

all but the elect.

I feel that I have wasted too much time on the critics. They don't

really count for anything on either side.

To you for whom I have written this book there is perhaps just this to

say. Don't begin by looking for fresh light on authors that you already

know. My sole object is to introduce you to authors that you don't yet

know. This introduction was not written for you. You can leave it out.

The introduction was written for the critics, the book for you, and the

proportion of pages devoted to them set against the pages devoted to you

will give you an accurate idea of the proportion of favour that I want,

yours and the critics'.

Five of the shortest chapters in this book have been already published,

one in _To-Day_, the others in _John o' London's Weekly_; to the editors

of these journals I am indebted for permission to reprint.

PART I

SOME ENGLISH CLASSICS

I

_TOM JONES_

I suppose there is still somebody living who has not read _Tom Jones_:

it seems inconceivable that it should be so, but queer things of this

sort do happen. Only the other day I met a man who had never seen any

Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. To say that Fielding possessed more

wit and humour and more knowledge of mankind than any other person of

modern times, except Shakespeare, ought to be sufficient to drive anyone

ignorant of his work at once to the nearest bookshop. "Since the days of

Homer," says one great critic, "the world has not seen a more artful

fable [than _Tom Jones_]. The characters and adventures are wonderfully

diversified; yet the circumstances are all so natural, and rise so

easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in

bringing on, even while they seem to retard, the catastrophe, that the

curiosity of the reader is kept always awake, and instead of flagging,

grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it

becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end, and look back on

the whole contrivance, we are amazed to find that of so many incidents

there should be so few superfluous; that in such variety of fiction

there should be so great probability, and that so complete a tale should

be so perspicuously conducted and with perfect unity of design."

We read and reread _Tom Jones_ in order to recapture some of that first

careless rapture which is so refreshing a point in Fielding's fiction,

to get away from the weary, meticulous self-analysis of the modern

novelist, to the full-blooded, honest attitude of the country-bred

Englishman of the eighteenth century. Here we have a tale told for the

sake of narrative, with incidents, the interest in which never for a

moment flags, characters all lively, true and fresh, dialogue full of

point, variety and suitability. It is a test of our interest that we

feel angry at the constant digressions and interruptions, but who would

do without those masterly initial chapters in each book?

As to the charge of coarseness which has been brought against him, we

feel that Fielding would have been dumbfounded with surprise. He states

explicitly, over and over again, that to recommend goodness and

innocence was always his sincere endeavour, and certainly no

higher-souled, purer heroine than Sophia Western ever walked. Even Tom

Jones himself, who was singularly unable to resist the importunity of

frail ladies, acts up to a code which is certainly not coarse.

"I do not pretend to the gift of chastity more than my neighbours," he

says to Nightingale. "I have been guilty with women, I own it, but am

not conscious that I ever injured any. Nor would I, to procure pleasure

to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being."

Allworthy, as his name suggests, is a model of what we should all like

to be, generous, pure, slow to believe evil, quick to forgive, a true

friend and a merciful judge.

"It hath been my constant maxim in life," he says to Blifil when he

hears of his sister's marriage, "to make the best of all matters that

happen."

Not that Fielding makes his characters impossibly good: there is none

that avoids some taint. Allworthy is altogether too credulous, and

Sophia's allegiance to her family passes the bounds of common sense,

while the rest of the characters have very much of the earthy in their

texture. The lovable Partridge is a coward, his wife a shrew,

Allworthy's sister and her husband hate each other like poison, Square

and Thwackum are eaten up with hypocrisy and deceit, young Blifil is an

unredeemed villain, Squire Western is an ignorant, blasphemous boor, and

his sister would be a thorn in any man's flesh. Square, with his eternal

harping on the natural beauty of virtue, and Thwackum, with his chatter

about the divine power of grace, are a pretty couple of scoundrels for

Fielding to lavish his irony on.

"Had not Thwackum too much neglected virtue, and Square religion, in the

composition of their several systems, and had not both utterly discarded

all natural goodness of heart, they had never been represented as the

objects of derision in this history," says the author.

But perhaps Fielding's greatest charm lies in his firm, masculine,

straightforward, even racy English. We may take as an example what the

ordinary author finds most difficult, the description of his heroine.

"Her shape was not only exact, but extremely delicate; and the nice

proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs. Her

hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle,

before she cut it to comply with the modern fashion, and it was now

curled so gracefully in her neck that few could believe it to be her

own.... Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of art

to imitate. Her black eyes had a lustre in them which all her softness

could not extinguish. Her nose was exactly regular, and her mouth, in

which were two rows of ivory, exactly answered Sir John Suckling's

description in those lines:

'Her lips were red, and one was thin,

Compared to that was next her chin.

Some bee had stung it newly.'

Her cheeks were of the oval kind, and in her right she had a dimple,

which the least smile discovered."

Such is the girl who fell in love with Tom Jones in her teens and who

after an amazing series of misfortunes ultimately married him, in spite

of her knowledge of his many temporary intrigues with other women.

Indeed, if she followed after her father, she would have "liked him the

better for it."

"You have not the worse opinion of a young fellow," bellows the Squire

to Sophia, "for getting a bastard, have you, girl? No, no, the women

will like un the better for't."

Certainly Sophia did not seem to like Tom the worse for his amatory

adventure with Molly Seagrim, perhaps because she, like her creator, was

able to differentiate between real love and that "desire of satisfying a

voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human

flesh" which passes for love.

In other words, Fielding has made her human.

"We ... are admitted behind the scenes of this great theatre of nature,"

he proudly says in one of his prefaces "(and no author ought to write

anything besides dictionaries and spelling-books who hath not this

privilege)...." He is certainly admitted behind the scenes of the

country squire's household.

Sophia's aunt, with her political and philosophical analogies ("You are

to consider me, child, as Socrates, not asking your opinion, but only

informing you of mine"; and again, "The French shall as soon persuade me

that they take foreign towns in defence only of their own country as you

can impose on me to believe you have never yet thought seriously of

matrimony ..."); Sophia's father's relations with his wife ("His

conversation consisted chiefly of halloaing, singing, relations of

sporting adventures, bawdy, and abuse of women and of the Government:

these, however, were the only seasons when Mr Western saw his wife, for

when he repaired to her bed he was generally so drunk that he could not

see; and, in the sporting season, he always rose from her before it was

light") and his attitude to her after she died ("When anything in the

least soured him, as a bad scenting day, or a distemper among his

hounds, or any other such misfortune, he constantly vented his spleen by

invectives against the deceased, saying, 'If my wife was alive now, she

would be glad of this.'")--all these pictures are lightning strokes of

verisimilitude which prove how perfectly at home Fielding was in the

great theatre of nature.

When we come to the lower classes, to Mrs Honour, with her "Marry, come

up!" "Hoity toity!" prefaces to gossip, which is only rivalled and not

excelled by her counterpart in Shakespeare, Juliet's nurse; to

Partridge, with his pricelessly irrelevant tags from the classics:

"infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," "hinc illæ lachrymæ,"

"tempus edax rerum," and so on, we can only give ourselves up

whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of them and wish that they may go on

talking for ever.

Then there is the surgeon whose talk might well be set for dictation in

schools: "I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a

violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was

lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge; and the

interior membranes were so divellicated that the os or bone very plainly

appeared through the aperture of the vulnus or wound. Some febrile

symptoms intervening at the same time (for the pulse was exuberant, and

indicated much phlebotomy), I apprehended an immediate mortification."

The fact is that Fielding, like the classical author he is so fond of

quoting, finds every_thing_ and particularly every_one_ in the world

amusing and interesting.

It was a stroke of genius to send Sophia and Tom wandering from inn to

inn, for in no other way than by making his characters take to the open

road could the author have introduced such a variety of characters or

such exciting episodes.

"For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of

probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his

incidents, should be trite, common or vulgar; such as happen in every

street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles

of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and

things, which may possibly have never fallen within the knowledge of

great part of his readers."

In one point Fielding certainly does strain the bounds of probability

beyond all bearing: there never was such a book for impossible

coincidences as _Tom Jones_. Everybody appears to know everybody else

and everybody else's business; people turn up in the most unexpected

places (especially bedrooms) at the most unfortunate moments. It is like

a musical comedy in this respect. There is much more of the surprising

than there is of the credible in _events_, not in the _people_, who are,

as I have said, only too natural.

It is not so much surprising that Partridge should read Erasmus, Ovid,

Pope's _Homer_, _The Spectator_, _Robinson Crusoe_ and Thomas à Kempis

as that he should have ever met Tom Jones as he did and when he did.

It is not at all surprising that a barber should quote Latin tags

irrelevantly, or that he should join Tom with the idea of fighting for

the Jacobites, but not be "over-nice" when he found out that he was

"booked" for the other side (though he was going to fight against his

own cause, yet he would not drink against it); but it is impossible to

believe that the same people should jump into and out of the story and

meet again after a score of years or more.

There are readers who object to the interpolation of the episode of the

Man of the Hill on the ground that it only retards the action. Such

people ought not to read _Tom Jones_. The true reader is in no hurry to

get on with the story, though he is thrilled with the intricacies of it;

he is ready to turn aside into any by-path which will shed more light on

the England of the eighteenth century. For after all it is from the Man

of the Hill that we hear that "he could not only hit a standing mark

with great certainty, but hath actually shot a crow as it was flying in

the air"; that there were gentlemen farmers of three hundred pounds a

year in 1657; that on five hundred pounds a year at Oxford a profligate

could keep his horses and his whore and obtain what credit he pleased;

that there were Justice Darlings even in those days ("I have travelled

the circuit these forty years and never found a horse in my life ...

thou art a lucky fellow ... for thou didst not only find a horse, but a

halter too, I promise thee"); how to leave a restaurant without paying

for one's food; how much more costly precious Burgundy used to be than

simple claret; how philosophy elevates and steels the mind ("Men of true

learning and almost universal knowledge always compassionate the

ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low,

contemptible art are always certain to despise those who are

unacquainted with that art"); how the sane Englishman of the time

regarded James II., and a thousand other things of equal interest.

And in spite of its apparent irrelevance, does not this episode develop

our appreciation of the hero? Set against the misanthropic Man of the

Hill, who sees marks of God's Power, Wisdom and Goodness everywhere but

in his fellow-man, Tom Jones acts as an admirable foil.

"I have lived," he says, "but a short time in the world, and yet have

known men worthy of the highest friendship, and women of the highest

love."

It is by virtue of contrasts such as this just shown that Fielding would

claim to be named among the geniuses.

"By genius I would understand that power, or rather those powers of the

mind which are capable of penetrating into all things within our reach

and knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential differences. These

are no other than invention and judgment...."

Added to this there must be "conversation."

"So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men that

none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives

have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however

exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true

practical system can be learnt only in the world."

He also requires of his ideal author "refinement, elegance and

liberality of spirit." He must have a good heart and be capable of

feeling. "The author who will make me weep," says Horace, "must first

weep himself. No man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel

while he is painting it.... I am convinced I never make my reader laugh

heartily but where I have laughed before him."

Who would deny the interest or importance of digressions like these when

they shed such a flood of light on to the author's attitude to his own

work?

The sergeant who resented the imputation against his character conveyed

by the words _non sequitur_ ("You are another," cries the sergeant, "an

you come to that. No more a sequitur than yourself. You are a pack of

rascals, and I'll prove it, for I will fight the best man of you all for

twenty pounds"); the lightning-like flash of inspiration which made Mrs

Waters repeat the cry, "Rape! Rape!" when she is discovered in bed with

Tom; the logic of the landlady of the inn ("So easy and good-humoured

were they that they found no fault with my Worcestershire perry, which I

sold them for champagne; and it, to be sure, is as well tasted, and as

wholesome, as the best champagne in the kingdom, otherwise I would scorn

to give it 'em; and they drank me two bottles. No, no, I will never

believe any harm of such sober, good sort of people")--all these touches

and thousands more are proofs of how much genius depends upon

"conversation," or a practical knowledge of the world, the power of

distinguishing essential differences.

Fielding seems to have distinguished these essential differences not

only in people but in the life of his time on every side. Realising full

well that posterity would read him, he also realised what were the

things that posterity would like to hear about it. So we get that

inimitable description of the puppet show where "The Provoked Husband"

displaced "Punch and Judy," by the throwing out of which "such idle

trumpery puppet-shows were," in the words of their master, "at last

brought to be a rational entertainment."

"I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession," answered

Jones, "but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance

Master Punch for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by

leaving him out and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet

show"--a sentiment that many of us to-day will heartily endorse.

It is a rare treat to be shown a performance of _Hamlet_ in the

eighteenth century with Partridge as critic, preferring Claudius to the

rest of the actors because he spoke louder, and objecting to the

gravediggers because of their lack of skill. Then there is the gypsies'

wedding in the barn, with its sumptuous food and its Solomon-like

judgment delivered by the king on the cuckold: "Me do order dat you have

no money given you, for you deserve punishment, not reward; me do order,

therefore, dat you be de infamous gipsy, and do wear a pair of horns

upon your forehead for one month; and dat your wife be called de whore,

and pointed at all dat time; for you be de infamous gipsy, but she be no

less de infamous whore."

Running through it all is the delicious Partridge, resenting not at all

attacks upon his honour, but up in arms at once when Tom casts

aspersions on his parts of speech. "A child may sometimes teach his

grandmother to suck eggs. I have lived to a fine purpose, truly, if I am

to be taught my grammar at this time of day."

Truly Fielding invoked the comic spirit to some purpose: "Come, thou,

that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy

Rabelais, thy Molière, thy Shakespeare, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my

pages with humour; till mankind learn the good nature to laugh only at

the follies of others, and the humility to grieve at their own." The

creator of Partridge is worthy to hold his own in the kingdom of humour

with any of the octette.

No less successful is he when he leaves the broad highway and the rustic

inns of the west for the fashionable life of the metropolis. The

coquetry of Lady Bellaston and the gallantry of Lord Fellamar are as

well portrayed as the poachers and squires of Somerset. Indeed with

Hogarth on the one side and Fielding on the other as companions he must

be extremely dull-witted who fails to get right behind the scenes of

eighteenth-century England, when the devil was no longer believed in,

and ladies of fashion curtsied low to their male friends, when nobody's

manners were "over-nice," when a virtuous girl was almost as rare as a

road safe from highwaymen, where "the highest life is much the dullest,

and affords very little humour or entertainment" beyond "dressing and

cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtsying," where a country

gentleman orders as a dinner for one at the Hercules' Pillars "a

shoulder of mutton roasted, a spare rib of pork and a fowl and egg

sauce," where the same country gentleman sends his daughter into the

arms of her lover with a "Yoicks!" and a "Tally-ho!": "To her, boy! to

her! Go to her! That's it, little honeys. O, that's it!" and a "Harkee,

Allworthy, I'll bet thee five pounds to a crown we have a boy to-morrow

nine months; but prithee tell me what wut ha'! Wut ha' Burgundy,

champagne, or what? For, please Jupiter, we'll make a night on't."

We read _Tom Jones_, then, first and foremost because it is a "rattling

good yarn" from start to finish, full of hair-breadth escapes, trials

of, and misunderstandings between, hero and heroine, ending, after

fickle Fortune has done everything in her power to prevent it, in the

complete happiness of their union; we read it because in the course of

our journey through it we make many new and life-long friends, find much

to laugh at; tenderness and pity are roused in us for the unhappy, mirth

at the discomfiture of the self-complacent hypocrites.

We read it in order to be transported to a healthier century than ours,

when neurasthenia was unknown and people were tortured by nothing worse

than colic and spleen; we read it to get away from people who think too

much and live not at all, to people who think not at all and live every

moment of their lives to the full, sinning, if they sin, splendidly,

like the pagans they were.

We read it because it was written by a man of genius possessed of a

fine, liberal-hearted spirit, a perfect command of his native tongue and

a great lover of humanity.

"And now, my friend, I take this opportunity of heartily wishing thee

well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee

it is what I have desired."

II

_WUTHERING HEIGHTS_

We read and reread _Wuthering Heights_ because it is like no other book

in the world. The nearest approach to it is not English at all, but

Russian. Dostoievsky in _The Brothers Karamazov_ has characters in some

degree approximating to Heathcliff. In English fiction there is no one

in the least like him.

Emily Brontë with her love of life, her passionate adoration of the

earth, sweeps us off our feet. She plunges us into a world of elemental

lusts and hates and cruelties. Heathcliff is treated brutally and

revenges himself even more brutally. The frustrated passion of Catherine

for Heathcliff and of Heathcliff for Catherine is scarcely

distinguishable from hate; they repay each other with torture for

torture, pang for hopeless pang. Judged by his deeds, Heathcliff is as

much a monster of evil as Iago, but--and this is what makes Emily

Brontë's genius so amazing--we never for a moment judge him by his

deeds. The material event never seems to matter. In fact, so far as

material actions go, Heathcliff is completely inert. He lets things take

their course. His most striking, almost his only violent, action is his

running away with Isabella. He does nothing to prevent Catherine from

marrying Edgar Linton: his vengeance is completely removed from any

material sphere and once accomplished rouses in him no satisfaction: he

merely dies. The world of Heathcliff and Catherine is a world of

spiritual affinities, of spiritual conflicts and loves. The whole book

moves on a spiritual plane except for one lapse, the unwholesome

physical passion of Isabella for her husband. "No brutality disgusted

her," says Heathcliff. "I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of

invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep

shamefully back."

Catherine is completely innocent when she gives her body to Edgar while

her soul belongs to Heathcliff. This is her unforgivable sin, the

attempt to sunder the body from the soul.

"Nelly," she cries, "I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind:

not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my

own being."

But out of the raging discord that Emily Brontë creates in the

stupendous passion of Catherine and Heathcliff she wrings a strange and

terrible harmony. One cannot help but gasp at the quiet, peaceful

ending:

"I lingered round them under that benign sky: watched the moths

fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind

breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine

unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

In the union of the younger Catherine and the redeemed Hareton one is

expected to feel that the souls of the two giant characters are

appeased, but we are not interested in that. The deaths of Catherine and

Heathcliff matter no more than the death of Cæsar in the play. Catherine

is never so much in the picture as when she has passed out of it

physically for ever. The whole tragedy is conducted on an invisible and

immaterial plane: it is really all written round one line of Browning

inverted:

"The passion that left the sky to seek itself in the earth."

We are introduced to it at the very beginning of the book when Lockwood

hears and feels the ghost of Catherine: it begins with Heathcliff's

passionate outburst at her death: "Oh, God, it is unbearable! I _cannot_

live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!"

It continues without a break for eighteen years and by the side of it

any passion that we have read of in modern English fiction seems so puny

and frigid as to be almost laughable.

The fight of Catherine to get through to her lover, hampered by his

flesh, forms really the great struggle of the book.

"I looked round impatiently"--it is Heathcliff's poignant cry--"I felt

her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I _could not_!... She

showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then,

sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that

intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed

that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should

meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she

_must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in

her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the

moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding

back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head

on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to

see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night--to be

always disappointed! It racked me!... It was a strange way of killing:

not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the

spectre of a hope through eighteen years."

It is on reading passages like this that one realises the futility of

trying to explain away genius. This could only have been written by one

who had been whirled in a maelstrom of passion, racked and tortured on

the wheel of life in a way that we know Emily Brontë was never called

upon to endure, or--it is the result of a divine inspiration vouchsafed,

one knows not how, irrespective of mortal experience.

This wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit is

one of the most deeply tragic, most deeply moving ideas ever presented

to man.

"In every cloud," he says at the end of the drama, "in every

tree--filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object

by day--I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and

women--my own features--mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is

a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have

lost her...."

Again: "I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss

kills my body, but do not satisfy itself...."

And again: "There is _one_ who won't shrink from my company! By God!

she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and

blood to bear--even mine."

No--the real ending of _Wuthering Heights_ does not lie in any

concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.

The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the

moor after Heathcliff is dead.

"I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening

thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little

boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I

supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered,

'un' I darenut pass 'em.'"

There is no question of redemption or moral problems here. She reveals a

point of view above good and evil. In her artistry and technique she is

thorough. The minor characters all preserve their individuality from

Joseph, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, to Nelly Dean, the teller of the

tale. Emily Brontë's accuracy in transcribing the Yorkshire dialect is

astonishing. She certainly listened to those Haworth rustics to some

advantage, even if she rarely exchanged a word with them. She is as well

able to paint the civilised, over-refined type who inhabit Thrushcross

Grange as she is to depict the primitive, half-savage inhabitants of

Wuthering Heights.

The sensual sentimentalist Isabella rouses the devil in Catherine and

loathing in Heathcliff; the illusion of refinement in Edgar results in

the terrible divorce of Catherine's body from her soul.

In these two and many other instances we see an unerring psychology in

Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte

Brontë realised, was not his love for Catherine, which was "a sentiment

fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed regard for Hareton

Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined."

Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the spirit

of the moors over _Wuthering Heights_. Emily Brontë's descriptions of

scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy: they are even less

laboured.

"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of

the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet

substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which

drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At

Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw

or a season of steady rain."

Exactitude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of passions and

emotions.

Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never been

a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before one can

grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale within tale

of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember who is

speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But her genius

is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story you simply

don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the machinery.

Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its

simplicity, strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte

with her "peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever

fail her: her scenes of passion follow nature and always ring true.

The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's _Life of

Charlotte Brontë_, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of

the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that book

as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.

It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily

herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul,

independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the

insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.

"Not a single event," he writes, "ever paused as it passed by her

threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart,

with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail.

We say that nothing ever happened, but did not all things really happen

to her much more directly and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that

everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard

was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent

love, admiration, adoration of life?...

"If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow,

passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion

has faded away."

And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with us

who are concentrating our attention on _Wuthering Heights_? Let

Swinburne supply the answer:

"The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the

main and central fact to be remembered. Circumstances have modified the

details; they have not implanted the conception.... The love which

devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the

future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it

than flame or sunlight. And this passionate and ardent chastity is

utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story

is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and

digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence

of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the

ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or

the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on issuing sometimes from the

tumult of charging waters, he finds, with something of wonder, how

absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his

own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of soiling

sand, not a waif of clogging weed."

We read _Wuthering Heights_ then for its exquisite purity of

description:--"The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I only

see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is blue, and

the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all brim full"--the

perfection of her style. "If she be cold, I'll think it is this north

wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep," and "I

dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart

stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers," the stark-naked grandeur of

its genius.

"_Wuthering Heights_," says Charlotte Brontë, "was hewn in a wild

workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found

a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the

crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded

with at least one element of grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude

chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time

and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal,

dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible

and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is

of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its

blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the

giant's foot."

III

CHARLES LAMB

Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one

prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm

to a quart of "swipes," _crêpe de Chine_ and georgette to ninon, Gerald

du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, Titian to

Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-down"?

It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a

question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We

are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity

with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true sense of the

word.

There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an

introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who has

the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny

imagination.

Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most

important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us

away; of all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable.

Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to _The Last Essay of Elia_.

There you will hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes

to give you--"a sort of unlicked, incondite things--villainously pranked

in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."

Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the

society of what are called good people" ... that "he herded always,

while it was possible, with people younger than himself" ... that "his

manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The

_toga virilis_ never sate gracefully on his shoulders."

He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like

fame.

He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted

partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences.

As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of

mankind--to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon

things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or

distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices ... the

veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."

The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of

life he was:

"I am not content to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those

metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of

mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears

human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.

I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the

unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I would

set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the age to

which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop, like mellow fruit, as

they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine ...

puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being staggers me. 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 fireside

conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_--do

these things go out with Life?"

If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece

of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human

yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer:

(1) because he has always something to say and conveys his thought

"without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because in antique fancy, quip,

oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a

supreme master; (3) because his limitations and tragedies were, like

ours, many, but his courage in facing them, unlike ours, was cheerful

and invincible; the best dramatic and literary critic of his time, he

yet had no ear for music ("to read a book, _all stops_, and be obliged

to supply the verbal matter"). He was prevented from becoming an actor

by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he

was fond of it; himself the shining example of the sanity of true

genius, his sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in

reverence more than any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his

choice; designed by nature to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was

denied a university education and condemned to thirty-six years of

drudgery in a city office ... the list of Life's little ironies in his

case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this

sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist;

and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and

sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured

among us reconsider life and its possibilities.

IV

JAMES BOSWELL

Boswell is essentially a book for the pocket, to be opened at random

while waiting for a train or a doctor or a dentist; busy men of affairs

like Lord Rosebery have recognised it as the finest "night-cap" in the

world. It is the fallacy of thinking that "skipping" is the sign of a

shallow mind that has led to the avoidance of what is really the most

absorbing study in the world, the revelation of the lives and characters

of men of fame. And of all subjects for biography Dr Johnson stands

easily first, because he embodies all the essential features of the

English character; we see in him "our own magnified and glorified

selves."

Furthermore, he has a genius for his biographer; as Sir Walter Raleigh

says: "The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell

is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary

history."

It is mainly by his conversations that his character is depicted, and it

is worth remembering that his _mots_ are famous not only for their good

sense and sound judgment, but for their freshness and unexpectedness.

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into

a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being

drowned ... a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly

better company." "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and

therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not

think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as

themselves." "Even ill-assorted marriages are preferable to cheerless

celibacy." "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his

hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done

at all." "A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars

destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded

from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from

garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie." "I am always for

getting a boy forward with his learning ... I would let him at first

read _any_ English book ... because you have done a great deal when you

have brought him to have entertainment from a book." "Sir, young men

have more virtue than old men; they have more wit and humour and

knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good

scholars."

Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively.

One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared

his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms. You

will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in language

poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to associate with the

"sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of outlook and healthiness

of mind is expressed in such a robust sentence as "Every man has a right

to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock

him down for it"; or, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of

life." What joy we feel in the thought that to appreciate such talk as

his we need not be literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without

the knowledge of life are useless; or what should books teach but the

art of living?" We can trust a man who talks like that.

But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr Johnson;

it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in virtue,

human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an unpayable

debt of gratitude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his

fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us

than any other man in history." How well do we all recall that exquisite

summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would dare to give us so paradoxical

a picture. Here is a man full of reverence and piety who yet touches the

posts as he walks to avert evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and

lack of manners, who describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of

needless scrupulosity," and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing

of the bear but his skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most

of us, who yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to

operate on himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of

the most jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and

averse from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary

mortals.

Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a multitude

of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed almost

entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all) the great

giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left practically

nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the greatness of

Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought of himself as a

man, not as an author ... duties and friendships and charities were more

to him than fame and honour." But the wise man will not be content with

the greatness of the man; "the reader who desires to have Johnson to

himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to

the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they

are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that

they are all too few."

It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the noble preface to the

_Dictionary_, the illuminating preface to and notes on Shakespeare, the

thrilling _Life of Richard Savage_, and a selection of the sage essays

in _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_ should rest content until he had read

Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one should read Boswell; you

will get a full-length picture of the typical Englishman at his

greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an appetite to read the works

of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers who ever lived.

V

WILLIAM HAZLITT

"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the

wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave

without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion," writes

Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not quarrel with

the world at the rate he does."

We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read

Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of

glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy attitude

to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating criticism.

There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was

unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his

life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy, but

lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even managed

to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and brilliant lecturer,

there was little sympathy between him and his audience. The early part

of the nineteenth century was the worst possible time for a shy,

over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to work in; the obscenities

of the _Blackwood's Magazine_ clique have left an ineradicable

stain--but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an ulcer than a man,"

even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one ceases to wonder at

the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his enemies.

We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his knees;

he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked nor gave

quarter.

Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are should

have been content for so long with such inept accounts of mighty

conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers. Bernard Shaw

did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt alone among

writers has succeeded in expounding the philosophy of sport and making

us live through every moment of a bygone fight as if we had actually

witnessed it:

"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the

face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he

hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his

hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw

anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces

of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a

human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The eyes were filled with

blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not

like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or

like one of the figures in Dante's _Inferno_."

It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies:

"nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of

the brave."

Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essay _On Going a

Journey_, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a

tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky

over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-known

words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me,

and a three hours' march to dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if

I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I

sing for joy." He brings just this naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm

into all his critical work, and it is this quality that calls forth that

noble panegyric of Professor Saintsbury which shows once and for all the

reason for reading Hazlitt:

"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to

anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for

himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is

not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is

the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."

That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening

lecture on the English poets:

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates

to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes

home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes

home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject

for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with

nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much

respect for himself or for anything else ... it is not a branch of

authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.'"

These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a pugilist,

straight from the shoulder.

His _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ is studded with gems of

criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that

they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure

abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all

critics and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his

conclusions are not those of the academic professors, and it delights

our hearts to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the

mob, and extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is

the better man of the two."

And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read Hazlitt and

the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A fondness for Hazlitt

is a fondness for health in literature" ... and there is room for health

in the literature of to-day.

"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like

Hazlitt."

If you want to prove this, turn again to _The Ignorance of the Learned_.

If only we could write like that!

VI

SAMUEL PEPYS

All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just

as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what they

imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of expression

would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either took any pains

to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist two things are

pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life and a complete

self-candour which is poles removed from the anæmic sickness of

self-love and an effective antidote against it. No one should dare to

keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to end, and few people will

dare to do so after reading him.

The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot help

reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have the audacity

to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time Secretary to the

Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the Trinity House, master

of a city company, Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Society,

the friend and counsellor of kings and princes, and yet spent his spare

time "picking up" girls in church or behind the counter, making love to

his own maids and actresses, hiding his gold in the garden and digging

it up again, expressing "mighty content" at the spectacle of men being

hanged, drawn and quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and

soothing her suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not

to get drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a

peacock, lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a

miser, frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague,

chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and

every delectable wench that he saw or kissed--in short, expressing all

the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.

"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by himself."

Certainly no man ever wrote himself "down" more honestly than Pepys.

Arnold Bennett was only speaking the bare truth when he said that none

of us would ever have the pluck to lock ourselves in a room and commit

to paper exactly what we have said or done or felt during the whole of

one day, even if we knew that no eyes but our own should ever scan the

page and that the manuscript should be burnt as soon as it was written.

Compromise is an essential concomitant of civilisation: perfect

sincerity even with ourselves is impossible. This explains at once the

irresistible fascination of Pepys: here is a man who has actually

achieved the impossible. Nine-tenths of our staple food in conversation

is gossip, not only in suburban drawing-rooms and London clubs, but in

every department of life. Scandal-mongering is as much a part and parcel

of our life as it was in Lady Sneerwell's day.

These peeps behind the scenes in a man's private life make us much more

lenient in our judgment of our own peccadilloes: thousands of men have,

we feel, acted as he did and we have done, but only Pepys has had the

temerity to confess: there is no entertainment so diverting as that of

watching a man give himself away. Pepys does it on every page with an

unconscious humour which adds a thousandfold to our enjoyment:

"To the Strand, to my booksellers, and there bought an idle, rogueish

French book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying

of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to

burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to

disgrace them if it should be found." ... "This day, not for want, but

for good husbandry, I sent my father, by his desire, six pair of my old

shoes, which fit him, and are good."

"To St Dunstan's church where ... I stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom

I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and

further from me; and at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of

her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again--which, seeing, I did

forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon

another pretty maid, in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go

about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then

withdrew."

Pretty good, this, for the Secretary to the Admiralty! We feel ourselves

mighty superior fellows when we read confessions like this, don't we?

"My wife being dressed this day in fair hair, did make me so mad, that I

spoke not one word to her, though I was ready to burst with anger ... in

my way home discovered my trouble to my wife, swearing several times,

which I pray God forgive me for, and bending my fist, that I would not

endure it. She, poor wretch, was surprised with it, and made me no

answer all the way home; but there we parted, and I to the office late,

and then home, and without supper to bed, vexed ... up (next day) and

by-and-by down comes my wife ... she promising to wear white locks no

more in my sight, which I, like a severe fool, thinking not enough,

begun to except against, and made her fly out to very high terms and

cry, and in her heat, told me of (my) keeping company with Mrs Knipp

(the actress), saying, that if I would never see her more--of whom she

hath more reason to suspect than I had heretofore of Pembleton--she

would never wear white locks more. This vexed me ... but to think never

to see this woman--at least, to have her here more; and so all very good

friends as ever."

"'And so to bed,' writes Mr Secretary Pepys a hundred times in his

diary, and we may be sure that each time he joined Mrs Pepys beneath the

coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the end of his wonderful

day was one deserving careful record." So writes "W. N. P. Barbellion,"

the only modern diarist possessed in any degree of Pepys' complete

self-candour, and, it is worthy of notice, the passage occurs in a book

called _Enjoying Life_.

VII

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Because he always wrote prose like an artist Walter Savage Landor is

worthy to be read at all times and in all moods.

"And through the trumpet of a child of Rome

Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece."

We all know what Swinburne thought about him: the trouble has been that

so few people have taken any pains to go further and rediscover this

great, imaginative artist for themselves. He is one of those

unfortunates whose work we agree to take as read. If we only had a half

his feeling for the value and weight of words the English tongue would

be ten times richer than it is to-day, richer in harmony, richer in

preciseness, richer in simplicity. He had a very definite sense of a

writer's duty: "I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty and

moroseness those that fit the thing." Surely when we find a man with so

wide a range of thought, so filled with imagination, so much in love

with heroism, beauty and freedom, with a prose style that is, of its

kind, unrivalled, it is incumbent upon us to sink our prejudice against

the classical and do the little extra work which is essential to a true

appreciation of that salutary, clear-cut, highly disciplined art. His

appeal is to the few who can enjoy the best literature for itself, but

there is no reason why this circle should not be far wider than it is.

In his determination not to say anything superfluous he did at times

fall into obscurity, but we forgive that in Browning: it is certainly

not an all-obtrusive fault in Landor, especially in that later work of

his, the _Imaginary Conversations_, on which his reputation now rests.

Whether in those short and stirring scenes of emotion and action, or in

the long and quiet ones of discussion and reflection, he shows an

admirable insight into character, a fine dignity and urbanity, a

mastery over delicate aphorisms on human nature, and a range of interest

running from the earliest times to his own era. Take a few of the titles

at random if you wish to gauge his range: "Peleus and Thetis," "Leofric

and Godiva," "Mahomet and Sergius," "Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius

IV.," "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn," "Peter the Great and Alexis," "The

Dream of Boccaccio," "The Dream of Petrarca."

Who is there among the narrators of old-time legends capable of charming

us so much as the man who makes the slave-girl Rhodopè begin her life

story thus:

"Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the coolest

part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a chlamys of

scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant out of the

door, and then looked wistfully into the corn-chest. I, who thought

there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and, finding it empty,

expressed my disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A

faint and transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of

mine. He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before

me, and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering

fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; I know not what flowers

he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and

some in my hair...."

Godiva's one poignant cry to herself, "I hope they will not crowd about

me so to-morrow," strikes a more effective note than the whole of

Tennyson's poem on the same subject. Filippo Lippi's peerless

description of his adventures in Barbary in the service of the corsair

Abdul, where he met Almeida of the hazel eyes, Almeida, "cool, smooth

and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise," is too well known to

be quoted here, but is one of the first to be read by those who would

see Landor in his natural element of beauty. "The clematis overtopped

the lemon and orange trees ... white pigeons, and others in colour like

the dawn of day ..."--this passage in particular is a masterpiece of

descriptive writing. Not easily does one forget the pathetic figure of

the discarded Anne Boleyn confronted in prison by her drunken husband.

"Love your Elizabeth, my honoured Lord, and God bless you! She will

soon forget to call me; do not chide her; think how young she is. Could

I, could I kiss her, but once again! It would comfort my heart--or break

it."

His sense of the dramatic is nowhere better shown than in that dialogue,

though Spenser's announcement of his terrible loss to Essex goes near to

equal it in pathos as does the appearance of Fiammetta to Boccaccio in

his dream.

But to prove how absolutely the classical spirit can bring perfection to

our native language what need is there of quoting more than this:

"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.

It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better

than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to

protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are

insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in

music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past, and what is to

come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there

are no voices, O Rhodopè, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there

is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which

the echo is not faint at last."

The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the

sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would have

her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds rightly.

This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can bear a great

deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent in the cadences

of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of to-day.

Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more

famous one of Keats:

"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left

discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under

them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our

path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."

"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments,

"are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the

work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely different

manner."

This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and the

classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare statement

of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of straight

lines than in the architecture of adornments and embellishments. His

aphorisms have passed into our common speech and men call up many

beautifully coined phrases from the depths of their consciousness about

life and death, forgetful of their source, which are attributable to

Landor.

"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice, and

protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly make men

happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who are quite satisfied

sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole

benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that such or such a thing 'is

not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few things are! What precious

recollections do some of them awaken! What pleasurable tears do they

excite? They purify the stream of life; they can delay it on its shelves

and rapids; they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which

its sources issue."

"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence, or

accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after.

The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern

the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if

they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones never."

Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm

manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words which,

like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.

"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted to _hear from

you_.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which, like some

of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of close

inspection."

The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the

object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a distance

that all the beauty lies in the vagueness and mystery of the scene.

Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs easily

from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical episodes,

so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on every topic of

human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners, society, politics,

literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of expression and

breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a sure sense of what

is required of him.

"A perfect piece of criticism must exhibit _where_ a work is good or

bad; _why_ it is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must

also demonstrate in what manner and to what extent the same ideas or

reflections have come to others, and if they be clothed in poetry, why,

by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is mediocrity, in

another is excellence."

"To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic,

and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He

walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather the

blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to display

his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and help to

raise what is lying on the ground."

"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is

certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding."

"To constitute a great writer the qualities are, adequate expression of

just sentiments, plainness without vulgarity, elevation without pomp,

sedateness without austerity, alertness without impetuosity."

As we should expect, he lays most stress upon the virtues of moderation

and composure. "Whoever has the power of creating has likewise the

inferior power of keeping his creations in order. The best poets are the

most impressive, because their steps are regular; for without regularity

there is neither strength nor state. Look at Sophocles, look at

Æschylus, look at Homer."

"There are four things requisite to constitute might, majesty and

dominion in a poet: these are creativeness, constructiveness, the

sublime, the pathetic. A poet of the first order must have formed, or

taken to himself and modified, some great subject. He must be creative

and constructive."

"It is only the wretchedest of poets that wish all they ever wrote to be

remembered: some of the best would be willing to lose the most."

When he descends to the particular we find the same strong, sane,

comprehensive attitude of criticism. What could be better than his note

on Addison?

"I have always been an admirer of Addison, and the oftener I read him, I

mean his prose, the more he pleases me. Perhaps it is not so much his

style, which, however, is easy and graceful and harmonious, as the sweet

temperature of thought in which we always find him, and the attractive

countenance, if you will allow me the expression, with which he meets me

upon every occasion. It is very remarkable, and therefore I stopped to

notice it, that not only what little strength he had, but even all his

grace and ease, forsake him when he ventures into poetry."

He defends the use of idiom ("Every good writer has much idiom; it is

the life and spirit of language") and attacks the use of quotation:

"Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom do

it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the beauty and

unity of style; especially when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A

quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements, or doubtful of his

cause. And, moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the

shoulder of another, however gracefully that other may walk."

Of his verse epigrams all the world knows _Rose Aylmer_ and most people

his of himself:

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life,

It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

It would be hard to improve upon the accuracy of that description or the

artistry with which it is expressed.

"I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests

few and select."

It is with the object of enticing you to join that group of eclectics

that I have attempted to show you what manner of man he is who invites

you to his table. The conversation will be rich, the viands delicious to

an Epicurean palate, but if you have no taste and your talk is vulgar

you will only be bored.

VIII

JOHN DONNE

Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the

acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr Logan Pearsall Smith will

with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent selections which

that versatile writer has made of Dr Donne's sermons.

But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we need go no

further than George Saintsbury's words:

"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the

ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations

not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of

passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and

spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any

writer like Donne."

Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who

wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from

the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the

intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day

in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law,

astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition

of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love

and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure,

he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever

had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his

congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never

equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence

of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he

knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity.

Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the

beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some

gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in

respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before

the Law given by _Moses_, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all

this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde,

... in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to

strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession

(rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber,

and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are

there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the

ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same

posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I

prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought

last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had

forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A

memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw

under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a

nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So

certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in

this world."

"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, his

_Sermons_ would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since

the days of the Apostles."

If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the

modern church-goers would be more plentiful:--

"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at

home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have

said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I

consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say

to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are

here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a

better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."

But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned

imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the

whole range of English prose:

"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell

me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it

sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of

great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it

distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest

not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine

eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne

the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the

dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift

those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the

noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran...."

But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote

"Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought,"

the Donne of

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,

Who died before the God of Love was born,"

of

"I wonder by my troth what thou and I

Did till we loved?"

of the

"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons:

towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the

universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the

complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work.

He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

"Whoever loves, if he do not propose

The right true end of love, he's one that goes

To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

"I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

"Though she were true when you met her,

And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two or three."

His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought

That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:

"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand

The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In his _Elegies_ he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full

detail, satirically, sensually. In _Jealousy_ we are given an exact

picture of the deformed husband who,

"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,

Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

--so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another

house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of

jealousy."

In _The Perfume_ we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie

still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her

daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her

longings: we see

"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man

That oft names God in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her

"hydroptic father catechized."

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled _To his

Mistress Going to Bed_, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely

quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

"There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of

love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an

abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

In _The Ecstasy_ we see him crying out against passionate friendship:

"But O alas, so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?"

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

"So must pure lovers' souls descend

T'affections and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great Prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so

Weak men on love reveal'd may look;

Love's mysteries in souls do grow

But yet the body is the book."

And in _The Anniversary_ he retracts all that he had once said about

inconstancy:

"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we

Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.

Who is so safe as we, where none can do

Treason to us, except one of us two?

True and false fears let us refrain;

Let us live nobly, and live, and add again

Years and years unto years, till we attain

To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics than _Break of Day_:

"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;

The light that shines comes from thine eyes;

The day breaks not, it is my heart,

Because that you and I must part.

Stay, or else my joys will die

And perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than

_The Dream_:

"Dear love, for nothing less than thee

Would I have broke this happy dream;

It was a theme

For reason, much too strong for fantasy.

Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet

My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.

Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice

To make dreams truths, and fables histories;

Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,

Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

As lightning, or a taper's light,

Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;

Yet I thought thee

--For thou lovest truth--an angel, at first sight;

But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,

And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,

When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when

Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,

I must confess, it could not choose but be

Profane, to think thee anything but thee."

There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and

extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults

lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are

worth searching for.

And yet--a word of warning--let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who

thinks _Don Quixote_ a merely funny book, no one who sees in

Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification

... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."

We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep

and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his

anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage

of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the

gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his

modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking:

he frees us from illusion.

IX

SUCH A BOOK AS _THE BEGGAR'S OPERA_

One imagines Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett suddenly starting hares

over their cigars after dinner. "What shall we do next?" asks N. P.

plaintively. "Aren't there any old plays that are really good that the

public knows nothing of?"

A. B. gets up wearily and turns over a Dodsley or a Nimmo. "We don't

want to cut into the preserves of the Phoenix," he grumbles. "_The

Duchess of Malfi_, _Volpone_, _All for Love_ ... do you mean that sort

of thing?"

"Good God, no," replies Nigel truculently. "I meant something

light--something with a 'zip' about it."

"_The Critic_ or _A Trip to Scarborough_?" queries A. B. He is getting

sleepy and is rather bored.

"This is for the Lyric, Hammersmith, _our_ Lyric, not the Tooting Bec

Hippodrome or the Moss Empires."

"Well, what about _The Beggar's Opera_?" answers A. B. so languidly that

Nigel doesn't hear. He repeats it.

"The Beggar's what?" asks Nigel. "Never heard of it."

"I'll sing you some of the songs in it," says Arnold, waking up.

"No, no, for God's sake, no. We'll take it as sung."

That, I truly believe, is how plays get played. At any rate this is how

plays get read.

There are dozens of things lying buried in your old library, but you

won't take the trouble to unearth them. But now, well, you've only got

to dine earlier and enter a detestable Tube and cross a more detestable

Broadway and you can see _The Beggar's Opera_ most exquisitely done for

you on the stage. You can read the more piquant bits of it during the

interval in a truly Martin Seckerish edition if your companion goes to

the bar; this is quite different from the play as one hears it. The eye

is not so easily shocked as the ear. But I am wandering from my point,

which is this: "Why we should read Such a Book as _The Beggar's Opera_"

is my heavily weighted heading to this chapter.

Read _The Beggar's Opera_, yes, and then see if you can't find some of

the scores of other neglected plays equally well worth playing, and make

such a fuss about them that soon Nigel and Arnold or some other lover of

the theatre is compelled to put them on.

There is no dearth of mirth-provoking material, which is still not quite

intellectually futile---- But I'm wandering again. Let me begin.

We read _The Beggar's Opera_ for much the same reason that we read

Fielding, because it is, as Maurice Baring says, English, as English as

a landscape by Constable, or eggs and bacon. It has this added advantage

to those who see it acted, that it is full of ravishing English music.

Written in the first place in ridicule of the musical Italian opera, we

now read it or see it to regain some of that atmosphere of London life,

of brilliant wit, of racy coarseness, of satiric richness, which marked

the healthy century that gave it birth.

A bigger set of rogues than we here meet with it would be impossible to

imagine, but _nos hæc novimus esse nihil_ and we laugh undisturbed for

once by any moral twinges. "All Men are thieves in love, and like a

woman the better for being another's property": that is the sort of

proverb we like to hear in such a play: the more we hear the merrier we

grow.

How amazingly appropriate too are the songs: when Mrs Peachum learns

that Polly is really married to Macheath one feels that there was no

other way for her but to burst out into song:

"Our Polly is a sad Slut! nor heeds what we have taught her.

I wonder any Man alive will ever rear a Daughter!

For she must have both Hoods and Gowns, and Hoops to swell her Pride,

With Scarfs and Stays, and Gloves and Lace; and she will have Men

beside;

And when she's drest with Care and Cost, all tempting, fine and gay,

As Men should serve a Cowcumber, she flings herself away."

"Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long

together, if ever we had been married?" roars Peachum in a fine frenzy.

"Can you support the Expence of a Husband, Hussy, in Gaming, Drinking

and Whoring? Have you Money enough to carry on the daily Quarrels of Man

and Wife about who shall squander most?... Why, thou foolish Jade, thou

wilt be as ill-us'd, and as much neglected, as if thou hadst married a

Lord," shrieks her mother.

Polly confesses that she loves her husband and Mrs Peachum faints at the

awful news; revived by a double dose of cordial, she joins her daughter

in one of the most delicious songs in the play.

"O Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.

By keeping Men off, you keep them on.

POLLY

But he so teaz'd me,

And he so pleas'd me,

What I did, you must have done."

Her father then suggests that Polly has Macheath "peach'd" at the next

Sessions, so that she can become a rich widow, and leaves her to digest

the unpalatable idea. Macheath comes in and Polly urges him to fly,

which he does.

Act II. opens with one of the finest choruses imaginable, sung by a gang

of pickpockets in a tavern near Newgate:

"Fill every glass, for wine inspires us,

And fires us

With Courage, Love and Joy.

Women and wine should Life employ.

Is there ought else on Earth desirous?"

Macheath comes in and announces to the gang that he must go into hiding

for a week or two and is left alone to ruminate upon life:

"A Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I

with one Woman ..." and is immediately joined by a gang of lovely

ladies, by far the most attractive of whom is Jenny Diver.

"As prim and demure as ever! There is not any Prude, though ever so high

bred, hath a more sanctify'd Look, with a more mischievous Heart. Ah!

thou art a dear artful Hypocrite...." Jenny, who never drinks

"Strong-Waters" but when she has "the Cholic," who never goes "to the

Tavern with a Man, but in the View of Business." "I have other Hours,

and other sort of Men for my Pleasure." It is Jenny who sings one of the

sweetest songs in the play:

"Before the Barn-door crowing,

The Cock by Hens attended,

His Eyes around him throwing,

Stands for a while suspended.

Then One he singles from the Crew,

And cheers the happy Hen;

With how do you do, and how do you do,

And how do you do again."

It is Jenny who then blindfolds him and betrays him to Peachum and the

constables.

We accompany, loath as Macheath to part company with Jenny, the Captain

to Newgate, where Lucy Lockit appears to add to his discomfiture by

wishing to "be made an honest woman of."

The two jailers then come in and fight over a point of honour and

depart. Meanwhile Macheath endeavours to make Lucy free him and is on

the point of succeeding when Polly appears and the fat is properly in

the fire. The situation gives rise to the most famous song in the play:

"How happy I could be with either,

Were t'other dear charmer away!

But while you thus teaze me together,

To neither a word will I say:

But tol de rol...."

As a result of which the two girls turn on each other and Peachum

enters, giving Macheath a chance to reassure Lucy of his love for her,

so she gets the keys and lets him escape.

We then have an exquisite passage between Peachum and Mrs Trapes,

beginning in an inimitable vein:

_Peachum._ One may know by your Kiss, that your Ginn is excellent.

_Trapes._ I was always very curious in my Liquors.... Fill it up--I take

as large Draughts of Liquor, as I did of Love.... I hate a Flincher in

either.

Lucy, finding that she has released Macheath, only to let him fly to

Polly, resolves to poison her with rat's-bane mixed in her gin, which

Polly refuses: "Brandy and men (though women love them ever so well) are

always taken by us with some Reluctance--unless 'tis in private."

Macheath is again captured, this time in a gaming-house, and sings a

great number of songs (one to the tune of _Sally in our Alley_) in the

"Condemn'd Hold" while he drowns his sorrows in drink. To send the

audience away in a good humour he is reprieved at the last moment and

rejoins his doxie in a dance.

Such is the substance of a play which few people took the trouble to

read before they were unexpectedly given the chance of seeing it acted

at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

But whether we read it or see it, there are certain points about it

which make it perennially worth reading and worth seeing.

It is free from sentimentality, it is full of robust sense, and clears

the air once and for all from the taint of prurience that has fallen

upon us. The irony of it is mirth-provoking and delicious. It is a racy

and true picture of human nature stripped naked. There is no savagery,

only rascally good humour, true gaiety and buoyant vitality. As an

antidote to depression or bad temper it would be hard to think of any

quicker cut back to the joy of life.

And the best of it is that there are dozens of other plays equally

enjoyable hidden away in the treasure-house of old English plays,

waiting for you to unearth and rediscover them.

PART II

SOME CONTEMPORARIES

1

GEORGE SANTAYANA

Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration,

reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher "much

writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which

seemed ... more interesting and in many ways more important than

anything ... in the works of other contemporary writers ... it has been

his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of

the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this

common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern

mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its

opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and

altar."

In a word, then, we should read Mr Santayana because he has a definite

philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place

in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a

general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe

what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To

which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily

turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by

the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from

transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the

characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene

detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.

Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future

life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an

irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious

rites of his church. To such men--that is, to all of us who are not

philosophers--such a passage as the following acts like a tonic or tests

our courage.

"To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the

poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be

constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last?

It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to

earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which

the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other

world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor

is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite

endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply

a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven,

in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust

children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I

must find myself in the same world corrected."

In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in

our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak

lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the

other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic

clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish

terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.

"What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level

of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his

children, for his art, or for his country...." "Let a man once overcome

his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in

one sense, overcome...." "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live

on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not

willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is

not over-eager to live at all."

"While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to

existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction

intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on

reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to

should be enjoyed by others...."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who

have loved it."

So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:

"He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have

lived."

It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to

take refuge in comfortable superstitions that endears the philosopher to

us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of

Browning.

"It [Browning's "philosophy"] is in spirit the direct opposite of the

philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a

finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite,

also, of the religious _memento mori_, of the warning that time is short

before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account:

we have an infinite credit ... his notion is simply that the game of

life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible ... but it is

unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven ... it is a mere euphemism to

call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul."

Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr Santayana's

caustic comments on fame.

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to

deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination

almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have

no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which

reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame....

What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school,

or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which

everything he loved has departed?" ... But yet the ancients "often

identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more

rational sentiments than have since prevailed.... Fame consists in the

immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual

rejuvenation of his soul in the world."

The whole essence of Mr Santayana's teaching on this point is that we

become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It

is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this ... it leads us to the belief

that if we are butterflies, we have a real immortality in that we have

added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles

... and are squashed, I take it that one more piece of beastliness is

suppressed at our extinction and we ought to be glad at that.

Consequently, if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are

braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day

with the phrase, "I have lived," and we see our immortality in our

oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own

feeble personality.

And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.

"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness," we read. "It is a

true natural religion ... it sanctifies a natural mystery ... it

recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the

principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest

foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung

from something profound and elementary.... When the generative energy is

awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made

consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values.... As

a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so

the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes

simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness

toward every object."

And after love, religion.

He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that "a

little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in

philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

"When Bacon penned the sage epigram," he continues, "he forgot to add

that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far

from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It

would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions

than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where

tradition and passion have jumbled everything together."

I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount

of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we

have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana

clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we

were able to see clearly for the first time.

In _Prosaic Misunderstandings_ he makes us realise precisely what we

mean by religion.

"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be

dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an

idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated

as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The mass

of mankind is divided into two classes--the Sancho Panzas who have a

sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for

ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and

accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to

elude the normal human power of discrimination."

"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the

consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon

vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring

conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that

realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an

ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."

Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a

new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried

the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry

descended among men."

The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of

the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the

science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by

referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions

can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other

words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so

the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only

when it becomes poetry.

Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the

imagination: they made man understand the pathos and nobility of his

life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.

And though Mr Santayana would have us accept his dictum that matters of

religion should never be matters of controversy, he does not hesitate

to become controversial himself over what he calls Protestantism (which

he would doubtless say is not a matter of religion at all). He lashes

out in no uncertain tones: "It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and

unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety and

regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral

vocation."

It is not surprising in view of what he has to say about the world of

politics and religion to find that he expresses relief at being able to

turn from them to almost any art, "where what is good is altogether and

finally good and what is bad is at least not treacherous: ... how doubly

blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence,

where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is

consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it ... with an

artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colours of a child's

eyes." But he ponders upon the rarity of æsthetic feeling. "Men are

habitually insensible to beauty ... moralists are much more able to

condemn than to appreciate the effects of the arts ... and beauty (in

which he finds a hint of happiness) is something indescribable ... it is

the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its

possibility. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the

soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence of

the good."

So we find that in his eyes the value of all art lies in making people

happy " ... to discriminate happiness is the very soul of art, which

expresses experience without distorting it." The queer thing is that

though men ought to pursue happiness, they seldom do so ... by happiness

Mr Santayana means friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence

added to family life. "If, then, artists and poets are unhappy, it is,

after all, because happiness does not interest them; they cannot

seriously pursue it, because its components are not components of

beauty, and being in love with beauty, they neglect and despise those

unæsthetic social virtues in the operation of which happiness is found."

On the other hand, those who pursue happiness conceived in terms of

money, success, respectability and so on miss more often than not that

real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from the senses and

imagination. "This element is what the love of beauty can add to life:

for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of happiness. Yet the

happiness of loving beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else

too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly

mind."

When he descends to particularise upon the arts we are surprised to find

that he has nothing to say about painting, and begins with music, music

which he calls "essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility

to their conditions ... pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction

is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and while it has no external

significance, it bears no internal curse ... it is the chosen art of a

mind to whom the world is still foreign ... it serves to keep alive the

conviction that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us that

there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and

very near to the heart ..." and so while it is "the purest and most

impressive of the arts, it is the least human and instructive of them."

Literature, according to his theory, takes a middle course between music

and science and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be

futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making

music thereby significant. Literature "looks at natural things with an

incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which

they never are) and almost into persons. The literary man is an

interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience

and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity.

He needs inspiration ... yet inspiration alone will lead him astray, for

his art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it

comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it."

He rightly differentiates between the philosopher and the poet when he

says that the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while the poet

"has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher."

"Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it

is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's-length.... The first

element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is

the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the

first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops

to enjoy.... Poetry takes every present passion and every private dream

in turn for the core of the universe." He finds that the prosaic

rendering of experience has a greater value, if only the experience

covers enough human interests: youth and aspiration indulge in poetry

... for "youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume

and depth only in the soul; the half-seen, the supra-mundane, the

inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful and worthy of homage....

Mature interests centre on soluble problems and tasks capable of

execution ... to dwell, as irrational poets do, on some private

experience, on some emotion without representative or ulterior value,

seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting than affairs,

and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent whimper, a childish

foreshortening of the outspread world."

On the other hand, Mr Santayana finds in the abstractness of prose its

great defect. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a

language that lends the message an intrinsic value and makes it

delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or

practice. It is in that measure a fine art ... a poetry "pervasively

representative." In a most stimulating little essay on _The Supreme

Poet_ the philosopher propounds his ideal for literature. "It might be

throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate, but by

being appropriate: and the sense of a great precision and justness would

come over us as we read or write. It would delight us; it would make us

see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant,

economical, and sincere."

Furthermore, life has a margin of play which might become broader....

"To the art of working well a civilised race would add the art of

playing well. To play with nature and make it decorative, to play with

the over-tones of life and make them delightful, is a sort of art." The

new poet of this double insight would "live in the continual presence of

all experience, and respect it: he would at the same time understand

nature, the ground of that experience; and he would also have a

delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the

colours of his possible happiness." It is sad to think that this supreme

poet is in limbo still, but now that the path has been so clearly

indicated for him, are we not justified in thinking that Mr Santayana is

merely the herald of his great dawn?

Just as he sees no great poet even in embryo, so he laments the death of

all great men:

"A great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right, but he must

have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character ... greatness is

spontaneous ... simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are

essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction

of some possible sort of order ... how should there be any great heroes,

saints, artists, philosophers or legislators in an age when nobody

trusts himself ... in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of

reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it

is distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day....

A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned

world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his

helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound

and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied

psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the

processes of Nature make them forget her uses."

These are hard words, but who can say that they are undeserved?

Not less scornful is he over our contempt for the intellect. "The degree

of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable

that it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has

left behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as

astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feels _la

nostalgie de la boue_." Instead of freeing their intelligence, our

enslaved contemporaries elude it. They cannot rise to a detached

contemplation of earthly things; they revert to sensibility: having no

stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive.

"To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anæmia."

Yet Mr Santayana is not the sort of man to indulge in sweeping

denunciations. There is a reverse to this picture of the modern world.