averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of
his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar
sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish the extended
acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the
liberal palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_; and joy for many
a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and
means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active
life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our
English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile,
smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.
1885.
WILFUL SADNESS IN LITERATURE
"Leave things so prostitute,
And take the Alcaic lute!"
BEN JONSON.
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in the preface to the first edition of his
collected poems (1853) withdrew from circulation, and gave reasons
for withdrawing, his splendid _Empedocles on Etna_. Nothing in Mr.
Arnold's career did him more honor than that fine scrupulousness
leading him to decry his dramatic masterpiece as too mournful, too
introspective, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage which it is
the business of poets to give to the world. He says of it, that it
belongs to a class of faulty representations "in which suffering
finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental
distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance;
in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.
In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the
description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual
life, they are painful, not tragic: the representation of them in
poetry is painful also." The same verdict that condemns the stagnant
sadness of _Empedocles_, reacts upon Clough's _Dipsychus_, to some of
us the most attractive of modern monodies, on Marlowe's _Faustus_,
and on _Hamlet_ itself. But every one of these is an inestimable
experience to the happy and the virtuous who love the intimate study
of humanity, and are made, by the perusal, more thoughtful and
tender. On none but general considerations, could Mr. Arnold have
attempted to suppress _Empedocles_. The great rules of æsthetics, as
for ethics, must be for the many, not for the few; and the many are
neither happy nor virtuous: and it may well seem a sort of treachery
in a man of genius to speak aloud at all, in our vast society of the
desponding and the unspiritual, unless he can speak the helping word.
This cannot be sufficiently insisted upon before young writers,
who are too ready to burst in upon us with their Ahs and Welladays,
and to set up, at twenty, for jaded cynics, and lovers who have
loved, according to their own pinched measure, too well. Some public
censor, a Stoic having a heart, and perfect control of it, should
be appointed, in every township, to kill off whatever is uselessly
doleful, in the egg, and spread abroad the right idea of what is fit
to be uttered in this valley of tears. The elect should be supplied
with Empedocleian extras: but the multitude which can be impressed
by their intrinsic evil should never be incited to approach their
extrinsic beauty.
The play which leaves us miserable and bewildered, the harrowing
social lesson leading nowhere, the transcript from commonplace
life in which nothing is admirable but the faithful skill of the
author,--these are bad morals because they are bad art. With them
ranks the invertebrate poetry of two and three generations ago, which
has bequeathed its sickly taint to its successor in popular favor,
our modern minor fiction. Authors are, in a sense, the universal
burden-bearers: those who can carry much vicariously, without
posing or complaining. Mr. Arnold's penance for his melancholy is a
noble spectacle; and it will always do what he feared _Empedocles_
would fail to do, "inspirit and rejoice the reader." The ancients
stepped securely in this matter of sadness; for piety, retribution,
awe, spring from every agony of Oedipus and Orestes. Many of
the Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible; but they compel men
to think, and teach more humanities than a university course. Mr.
Meredith's influence, in our own day, is not such as will induce you
to sit shaking your maudlin head over yourself and all creation;
neither--need it be added?--is Mr. Stevenson's. Mr. Henry James has
just said of Mr. Lowell: "He is an erect fighting figure on the side
of optimism and beauty." What made Browning exceedingly popular at
last, was his courage in overthrowing blue devils.
"What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?"
His many and unique merits have small share in the result.
Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, as the Schoolmen heartily
thought after him, is nothing less than an actual crime. Sadness
which is impersonal, reluctantly uttered, and adjusted, in the
utterance, to the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to conceal the
merely painful, as did the Greek audiences and the masters of their
drama. That critic would be crazy, or excessively sybaritic, who
would bar out the tragic from the stage, the studio, the orchestra,
or the library shelf. Melancholy, indeed, is inseparable from the
highest art. We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery
over it in the least, as well as in the greatest: a melancholy like
that of Burns, truth itself, native dignity itself; or the Virgilian
melancholy of Tennyson in his sweet broodings over the abysses of our
unblest life, and the turn of his not hopeless thought and phrase.
We can demand, in these matters, the insincerity of the too-little,
rather than the cant of the too-much. The danger of expressing
despondency is extreme. The maudlin shoots like a parasite from the
most moving themes, and laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It was
not without reason that Thackeray made fun of Werther. What Sidney
sweetly calls--
"Poore Petrarch's long-deceasèd woes,"
stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh Hunt, and of the indelicate
public after him. No poet can put fully into words the ache and
stress of human passion: no very wise poet will ever try to do so,
save by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. The pathos which
goes deep is generally a plain statement, not a reflection. The old
ballad, _Waly, Waly_, for instance, is a terrible thing to get away
from, dry-eyed. Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, as a
mere obituary announcement. Hear the long throbbing lines of the old
elegy supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke:
"Learning her light hath lost, Valor hath slain her knight:
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight."
Or Chapman:
"For now no more of Oeneus' race survived: they all were gone.
No more his royal self did live; no more his noble son,
The golden Meleager now: their glasses all were run."
The heartbreaking climax of _Lear_, the bursting-point of so much
grandeur and so much suffering, is a dying commonplace almost
grotesque: "Pray you, undo this button." But to harrow us is
another affair altogether. Plato could never forgive a subject
not inevitable, chosen simply because it is in itself piteous or
startling, and invites the rhetorical gabble which its creator, after
one fashion or another, can spend upon it.
The French and their followers have driven us into a demand for
decency, and unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent than the things
oftener named and contested by our worthiest critics. What use have
we for any Muse, be she the most accomplished in the world, who
lives but to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, "soothed with
delicious sorrow"? Art has little to do with her: for art is made
of seemly abstinences. The moment it speaks out fully, lets us know
all, ceases to represent a choice and a control of its own material,
ceases to be, in short, an authority and a mystery, and prefers to
set up for a mere Chinese copy of life,--just so soon its birthright
is transferred. "I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly,"
that even Beauty has her responsibilities, and Art her ideals of
conduct. Nay, she has her definite dogma. "Our only chance," says
Addington Symonds in a private letter to Robert Louis Stevenson,
"seems to me to maintain, against all appearances, that evil can
never, and in no way, be victorious."
We owe our gratitude to the men of letters who deliberately undertake
to be gay: for nobody expects unconscious and spontaneous gayety in
books nowadays. The modern spirit has seen to that. No thanks of
ours are too good even for the bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid
towards Americans: for he is the one living poet already famous,
who has struck, and means to strike, the very note of "How happy is
he born and taught," and "Shall I, wasting in despair." But if our
dilettantes lament a withered wildflower, or praise a young face,
they feel that they have done enough towards clearing the air, and
justifying "the ways of God to man." It is inconvenient to have
the large old fundamental feelings: to be energetic, or scornful,
or believing. The fashionable poetic utterance is dejected, and
of consummate refinement; _le besoin de sentir_ is about it like a
strange fragrance. We have had disheartening modern music, and of
the highest order, too long. Beginning with Byron, and, in a far
different manner, with Shelley, we may count those problems of our
life few indeed which have lacked the poor solution of a protest or a
tear. Wordsworth was the last great man
----"contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand."
Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this case, since he had no marked
constitutional sensitiveness. The lyres of "Parnaso mount" have
grown passive and unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse us, and we
have ceased to wonder at them because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to
whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in the magazines; of the three,
whimpering is the favorite. Now, to "make a scene" is not mannerly,
even on paper. Before the implacable Fates we may as well be
collected. It seems less than edifying to ask the cold one, though in
enchanting numbers, whether her bosom be of marble, or of her ghost
whether it will not visit us in the garden. Yet such attitudinizing
pathos, impossible so long as faith was general, and true emotion
therefore unexhausted, the pathos of the decadence, the exaggeration
of normal moods and affectation of more than is felt, _l'expression
forte des sentiments faibles_,--is the prevailing feature of current
verse. Rather, to be quite accurate, it was the prevailing feature a
moment ago. There are, in the east, other portents more significant.
It is indicative not only of his middle age, but of something
touching ourselves and our to-morrow, that Mr. Swinburne, let us
say, is less stormy and maledictionary, and longs not so incessantly
to be laid in the exquisite burial-places of his imagination. They
that wail well in duodecimo may presently be accused of giddiness
and shallow thought. For literature, at last, is picking up heart:
health and spring and fight are re-establishing themselves. Out of
the alcoves of time, certain sunny faces of old look fatherly and
smiling, as the vapors disperse. Hail also, young meek out-riders,
morning-colored contemporaries! At least, you are of excellent
cheer. You have done with sourness, and
----"hear it sweep
In distance down the dark and savage vale."
Change is at hand. The Maypole is up in Bookland.
1892.
AN INQUIRENDO INTO THE
WIT AND OTHER GOOD
PARTS OF HIS LATE
MAJESTY, KING
CHARLES THE
SECOND
SCENE: Saint James's Park, on the afternoon of the
twenty-ninth of May. Edward Clay, with a twig of oak stuck
in his hat is on the bank of the little lake, feeding the
water-fowl. Percy Wetherell, a fellow-author, and Rhoda,
his wife, who are crossing the bridge, perceive him.
MRS. WETHERELL
See! there's our dear Mr. Clay. What is he doing that for?
WETHERELL
The motive must be pure benevolence. Give me a little start, and I
will run him down. [_Followed by Rhoda, he goes down the steps,
close to his friend's shoulder, observes the decoration, and utters
in a sepulchral tone: "Long live Oliver!" Clay looks up, and smiles,
still breaking his biscuit. Finally he speaks_:]
CLAY
You have guessed it: I am keeping Restoration Day. It struck me as
a pleasing rite to come up here and feast the descendants of King
Charles the Second's water-fowl. I have to lecture on him to-night.
MRS. WETHERELL
King Charles the Second! Why, Mr. Clay, I thought he was the
dreadfullest person!
WETHERELL
Easy now, my only love: don't hurt Edward's little feelings. He is a
notorious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, a pre-Jacobite, a
seventeenth-centurion, and all that.
MRS. WETHERELL
Oh! a Royalist, a White Rose man? I never dreamed it.
CLAY
Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. Only, you see, I honestly like
the rogue; people don't understand him. If I had your husband's
leisure, I should never rest until I had moused in the archives at
first hand, and said the authentic last good word for him. There
would be no end of fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine pair.
WETHERELL
That green bird on your boot will choke himself. It is wonderful how
tame they are!--I thought you knew more than anybody alive, on that
subject, these ten years.
CLAY
I might say with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: "I have thought more
than I have read, and read more than I have written."
MRS. WETHERELL
Do you really mean to make people like him? They taught us in the
school-books that he was a bad good-for-nothing king.
WETHERELL
Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, he did not choose to consider
himself as being in "the king business." He was a choice wag, at any
rate.
CLAY
Yes: though not much worse than you. And he was the last Mind we have
seen, or shall ever see, on the throne.
WETHERELL
Owch! Treason! She is all she should be, God bless her.
CLAY
[_Laughing._] Allowed. I was contending that Charles the Second
had wit, and a keen survey of men and things: he had the
literary-philosophic turn, in short. He wasn't good, he wasn't
beautiful, he wasn't much of a Protestant, or a Constitutional
Sovereign; but it is my long-standing theory that he was an indolent
original genius of the first water, and a fine character spoiled.
Here, billy, quack, quack, quack!
WETHERELL
Your indolent original point of view! I don't deny we have some
pretty valuable bequests from that bacchanalian reign: the Habeas
Corpus Act, for instance. But Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket
Compendium of all the vices? How are you going to excuse him? Because
he was weak?
CLAY
Why do you think he must be excused? My pious intention is only to
extra-illustrate him: "naught extenuate, and naught set down in
malice." I mean to provide the ordinary listener at the Institute
with a little dispassionate extra acquaintanceship, pleasant in its
nature, with the gentleman in question; and I distinctly mean not
to tamper with what knowledge of him he may have acquired on other
themes, and from other sources. You see how sly a plan of campaign it
is. But your adjective, Wetherell, will never do. Weak? Where did you
hear that fiddle-faddle? He had the most tremendous will. Repeatedly,
and with the greatest severity and despatch, he took matters over
into his own hands; and very often he was right, and ahead of
contemporary policy. Look at the way he prorogued Parliament, in the
May of 1679, after the famous quarrel over the trial of the five
lords; the way he rejected the application of the Roos divorce bill,
shaped so as to give himself latitude and precedent; his speech in
the Upper House, insisting on holding to the terms of pardon which he
had offered from Breda; his letters to the young Duke of Gloucester,
when there was rumor of a change of religion; or, to come to smaller
and uglier matters, look at his obstinate maintenance of his right to
appoint the ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his whole inexcusable
treatment of the great Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read Green?
Green, who comes down hard on him, would sooner have you think him an
accomplished tyrant, and so should I.
WETHERELL
Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful to the very people who brought
about the Restoration, wasn't he?--Rhoda, these swans are actually
fatter than Lord Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay talk? I am
egging him on; it does me good.)
MRS. WETHERELL
I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to atone for you. Yes: it is great
to find so much animation expended on dead issues.
CLAY
Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can see. Think of the times, think
of the hue and cry after indemnities and offices; think of the
million million services, little and great, reported, invented,
exaggerated, and real, all being urged together, on the day when
fortune first smiled on the King. Could any one man satisfy such
greed? Might not any one man get confused in such a muddle of
beseeching hungry hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, save
with the few he knew and remembered? And those he never forgot: not
the least Penderell among them.
WETHERELL
How about the epigram,--Barrow's, wasn't it? A very good hit: let me
see. _Te magis_, that's it:
_Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo:
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus._
CLAY
That is just the sort of dig Charles enjoyed. It isn't malicious.
He was immensely amused by the protestations of the realm which,
according to its own tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, and
labored to bring him to his own again. He said ironically: "The
fault is plainly mine that I came not before." How did he keep his
patience through the incessant begging? He must have suffered more
than a newly-elected president in America. As it was, he granted
innumerable pardons, and restitutions, and awards, "hearing anybody
against anybody," and sure to be of propitious bent when petitions
forced their way into his own hand. But he kept no memoranda. Or,
as his apologist, Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, "he
never would break his Head with Business." Long before there was
much chance of his securing his succession to the crown, the hints
of his adherents fell about him as thick as snow-flakes. Hasn't he
told us how the country innkeeper, alone with him a moment, during
his fugitive days, read him through his disguise? "He kissed my hand
that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me: 'God bless you
wherever you go, for I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord,
and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and went away.... He proved very
honest." That same innkeeper must have turned up, two hundred strong
at least, at Whitehall. Again, you know how poor the King was, and
how estates and emoluments had been parcelled out, and tied up,
during the Protectorate. He had actually nothing, at first, to give.
WETHERELL
Except scandal.
CLAY
Irrelevant!
WETHERELL
And, of course, the immortal house-warming: a gift to the
imaginations of all Englishmen forever. I am sorry I wasn't there
myself.
CLAY
O that day! What a wonderful procession it must have been, from
London Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, in his Diary, so
beautifully calls "a lane of happy faces," and troops pressing to
their lips the hilts of their weapons, and waving them overhead, in a
unique salutation; the King, whom the Speaker of the House of Commons
was about to address as King of Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth
birthday, between his brothers of York and Gloucester, past the long
waving of scarfs and glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right,
like a dark pine in the wind; the saddle-cloths of purple and gold,
the salvos, the tears, "the ways strewn all with flowers, bells
ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with wine,
trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking; and two hundred
thousand horse and foot brandishing their swords, and shouting with
inexpressible joy."
WETHERELL
Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. England clamored against the
Judges, and for the King; and, like Saul, he came: tall, robust,
keen, suave, comely, with the curse of retrogression behind him.
MRS. WETHERELL
Hear the magnificent phrases!
CLAY
But they are true.
WETHERELL
Our collaborated Prose Works, specimen sheets.
MRS. WETHERELL
And to think you are all out of practice!
WETHERELL
Of what, shepherdess? Of truth?
MRS. WETHERELL
Mr. Clay, haven't you some more nice Charles-Secondy things to tell
me? I am so interested.
WETHERELL
More of your ingenious charities, Clay, by all means. Those
faithless ducks of yours are seceding to the children, and Rhoda and
I are out for a walk. Come, let us sink to the occasion. We might
pace up and down awhile, under the trees beyond, at the edge of the
old tilt-yard. Then let us all go together to the Abbey. We have
promised to meet two American relatives of Rhoda's, at half after
three. They wrote us that they arrived only yesterday; but your
homing pigeon of a Yankee always must make straight for the Abbey.
Meanwhile, can't you give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture?
MRS. WETHERELL
He will, he will!
CLAY
I haven't all my notes with me. You are sure it won't tire you?
WETHERELL
Never. I love the æsthetic point of view. If any man remind me now
that my father was a Whig, I will bray at him.
CLAY
Well, well, nice of you, I'm sure. You know my idea is just to
present a special plea. How will you have me begin? I can't go on
automatically, as if you were the Public Eye.
WETHERELL
Oh, anecdotes: or his witticisms. There must be scores of them
running wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. Cut me no sirloin,
sirrah; starve me no Nellies.
CLAY
I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It belongs with ever so many
Charles Lamb puns, sayable enough, only not said by the sayer.
WETHERELL
There isn't much chance for a king who has a genius for concise
conversation.
CLAY