Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
Books and Authors
Books and Authors
By
Robert Lynd
Delight, the parent of so many virtues.
_Coleridge._
Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity,
the delight of admiration, and perform the
duties of reverence.
_Landor._
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1923
Copyright, 1923
by
Robert Lynd
[Illustration]
Made in the United States of America
To
H. M. TOMLINSON
PREFACE
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
To write books about books has been spoken of as though it were a
parasitic industry. Undoubtedly, books about books are among the
least necessary of books. The world delighted in songs and epics and
histories for centuries before it paused to attend to a literary
critic. Even to-day, when men engage in the eternal discussion of the
books with which they would like to be left on a desert island, I do
not think a vote is ever given to a volume of criticism. The poet, the
essayist, the novelist, the biographer, the philosopher, are all safe
among the world’s best authors: the critic must be content if he is
given a place among the second-best. He is not a contributor to the
hundred best books; the most that he can claim is that no collection of
the thousand best books would be complete without him. Certainly, it is
difficult to imagine a well-chosen library of a thousand books without
a volume or two of literary criticism.
This may be because a thousand supremely good books have not yet been
written--a melancholy reflection when we think of all the ink and paper
that have been used since authorship began. I think, however, it is
also partly due to the fact that as human society becomes civilised,
books become more and more a necessary part of the environment of men
and women, so that we may say that on the whole it is more natural for
a civilised man to write a book about books than a book about birds or
butterflies. In a highly-developed civilisation, literature inevitably
takes literature as part of its subject-matter as it takes every other
great human interest. Even the historian ends by admitting authors
among his characters along with statesmen and soldiers, and in general
literature we have poems on poets, essays on essayists, biographies of
biographers, criticisms of critics, and novels about novelists. Writing
about writers, indeed, has become in our day an all but universal
practice, and it seems to me to stand in no more need of defence than
writing about tramps or travellers, about business-men or burglars.
There is, I admit, always a danger that a writer about writers
may become excessively professional. He may discuss writing as a
cotton-manufacturer would discuss the manufacture of cotton, telling
us a great deal about the mechanism of production and nothing about the
energies, sacrifices, and personal qualities that are the secret of
genius in business as in the arts. Criticism of this kind is important,
but its place is in a technical or professional treatise. Criticism,
in order to justify itself as a branch of literature, must subordinate
all such technical matter to philosophy or biography, or both,--must
associate ideas about literature with ideas about life, as Schopenhauer
did, or like Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, must portray in an
author, not only an author, but a man.
Those critics who write about literature as though it were a cult for
the few instead of a normal human interest, confine themselves largely
to analysis--some of them to pretended analysis. They do not see that
the critic’s analysis is of value only if it leads to a synthesis.
There is no use in his taking to pieces what he sees as the genius of
Shakespeare if he cannot put it together again in such a way that it is
mirrored in the minds and imaginations of his readers as well as in his
own. It seems to me to be the positive task of criticism to create in
one’s own mind an image of a writer’s genius and then to try to clear
the minds of one’s readers so that the same image will be reflected in
theirs. We may fail; but that, at least, is what we are attempting to
do, or what we ought to be attempting to do.
ROBERT LYND.
LONDON, November, 1922.
CONTENTS
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
PAGE
I.--HERRICK 3
II.--VICTOR HUGO 12
III.--MOLIÈRE 22
IV.--EDMUND BURKE 30
V.--KEATS 41
VI.--CHARLES LAMB 61
VII.--BYRON ONCE MORE 68
VIII.--SHELLEY 76
IX.--PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES 84
X.--HANS ANDERSEN 93
XI.--JOHN CLARE 104
XII.--HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS 114
XIII.--A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY 122
XIV.--THE POETRY OF POE 131
XV.--HAWTHORNE 140
XVI.--JONAH IN LANCASHIRE 149
INTERLUDE
THE CULT OF DULLNESS 159
MORE OR LESS MODERN
I.--MR. MAX BEERBOHM 171
II.--MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES 188
III.--MR. CONRAD AT HOME 196
IV.--MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD 206
V.--MR. CLUTTON-BROCK 214
VI.--HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS 222
VII.--LORD ROSEBERY 230
VIII.--MR. VACHEL LINDSAY 237
IX.--MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING 244
X.--MR. H. M. TOMLINSON 252
XI.--THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV 260
XII.--NIETZSCHE: A NOTE 268
XIII.--MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC 277
XIV.--MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES 285
XV.--M. ANDRE GIDE MAKES A JOKE 293
FINALE
THE CRITIC 305
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
I
HERRICK
Herrick was a gross and good-natured clergyman who had a double chin.
He kept a pet pig, which drank beer out of a tankard, and he and the
pig had probably a good many of the same characteristics. It would be a
libel on him to say that he was a pig, but it would not be a libel to
say that he was a pet pig.
His life, like the pet pig’s, was not real, and it certainly was not
earnest. He spent the best part of his youth mourning over the brevity
of life, and he lived till he was comfortably over eighty. He was an
Epicurean, indeed, in the vulgar sense of the word, whose dominant
theme was the mortality of pretty things. For Herrick gives us the
feeling that for him the world was a world of pretty things rather than
of beautiful things. He was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and
himself served an apprenticeship to the trade. The effect of this may,
I think, be seen in his verse. His spiritual home always remained in
Cheapside rather than in the Church which he afterwards entered. He
enjoyed the world as though it were a street of shops. To read him is
to call at the florist’s and the perfumer’s and the milliner’s and the
jeweller’s and the confectioner’s and the vintner’s and the fruiterer’s
and the toy-seller’s. If he writes, as he proclaims, of bridegrooms
and brides, he does not forget the bride’s dress or the bride’s cake.
His very vision of Nature belittles it to the measure of “golden
Cheapside.” He begins _Fair Days_ with the lines:
Fair was the dawn; and but e’en now the skies
Show’d like rich cream, enspir’d with strawberries.
If he invites Phyllis to love him and live with him in the country, he
reduces the hills for her to the size of bric-à-brac:
Thy feasting-tables shall be hills
With daisies spread, and daffodils.
He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from
most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure
from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till
he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But
his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror of Devonshire
in his verse. He was a censorious exile amid beauty of that sort, and
could have had all the flowers and country scenes he cared for within
an hour’s walk of the shop in Cheapside. He speaks in one of his poems
of “this loathed country-life,” and in the verses called _Dean-bourn,
a rude River in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt_, he bids the river
farewell, and expresses the hope that he will never set eyes on its
“warty incivility” again:
To my content, I never should behold,
Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover
Thy men, and rocky are thy ways all over.
O men, O manners, now and ever known
To be a rocky generation!
A people currish, churlish as the seas,
And rude almost as rudest savages.
There is no missing the sincere unappreciativeness of these lines. The
best that he can say of Devon is not that it is beautiful but that he
wrote some good verses in it:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born than here,
Where I have been and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire.
Yet justly too I must confess;
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Press
Than where I loathed so much.
It has been remarked that, even when he writes of fairies, he has in
mind, not the fairies of the West Country, but the fairies he brought
with him from Ben Jonson’s London. He is rich in the fancies of the
town-poet. For him Oberon walks through a grove “tinselled with
twilight,” and is led by the shine of snails. As for the cave in which
the Fairy King seeks Queen Mab:
To pave
The excellency of this cave,
Squirrels’ and children’s teeth late shed
Are neatly here enchequered.
_Oberon’s Feast_ again is a revel of fantastical dishes not from
nature, but from that part of the imagination that is a toy-shop:
A little moth
Late fattened in a piece of cloth:
With withered cherries; mandrake’s ears;
Moles’ eyes; to these, the slain stag’s tears;
The unctuous dewlaps of a snail;
The broke heart of a nightingale
O’ercome in music.
The very titles of many of his poems seem to have come straight from
the toy-shop. How charming some of them are:
_A ternary of Littles upon a pipkin of Jelly sent to a lady;
Upon a Cherrystone sent to the tip of the Lady Jemonia Walgrave’s ear;
Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arm of the Countess of Carlisle;
Upon Julia’s Hair, bundled up in a golden net;
To the Fever, not to trouble Julia;
Upon Lucia, dabbled in the Dew;
The Funeral Rites of the Rose!_
Most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the title of his most famous poem,
“Gather ye rosebuds,” which runs, _To the Virgins, to make much of
time_. Herrick’s small and delightful genius is as manifest in the
titles of his poems as in the poems themselves. All the perfume of
his verse is in such titles as _To live merrily, and to trust to Good
Verses_; _To Mistress Katherine Bradshaw the lovely, that crowned
him with Laurel_; _To the most virtuous Mistress Pot, who many times
entertained him_; and, especially, _To Daisies, not to shut so soon_.
Herrick appears in his poetry, if we leave out of consideration
the inferior religious verse in _Noble Numbers_, mainly in three
characters. He is the cheerful countryman, the praiser of his
mistresses, and the philosopher of the mortality of pretty things. As
for the first, he was too good a disciple of Horace not to be able to
play the part cheerfully and to smile among his animals and his beans:
A hen
I keep, which, creaking day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A lamb
I keep (tame) with my morsels fed,
Whose dam
An orphan left him (lately dead) ...
A cat
I keep, that plays about my house,
Grown fat
With eating many a miching mouse.
As he writes down the list, he himself realises to what an extent his
life in the country is a life of make-believe among toys:
Which are
But toys to give my heart some ease:
Where care
Ne’er is, slight things do lightly please.
His mistresses are, however, a thing apart from this happy farmyard.
When he goes to the farmyard for a simile in praise of Julia, the
effect is amusing, but it is a little lower than love-poetry:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.
Some critics have doubted whether Herrick ever was actually in love.
They regard his Julias and Antheas and Lucias as but an array of Delf
shepherdesses that every poet of the day was expected to keep on his
table. This may be true of most of the ladies, but Julia seems real
enough. Herrick was obviously incapable of the passion of Keats or
Shelley or Browning, but we may take it that he had been enchained and
enchanted by the lady with the black eyes and the replica of his own
double chin:
Black and rolling is her eye,
Double-chinn’d, and forehead high;
Lips she has, all ruby red,
Cheeks like cream enclareted;
And a nose that is the grace
And proscenium of her face.
It is not a very attractive picture, and it is characteristic of
Herrick that he can paint Julia’s clothes better than he can paint her
face. It was an enchained and enchanted man who wrote those lines that
are far too well known to quote and far too charming to refrain from
quoting:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me.
This is no figmentary picture. The songs to Julia--most of all, the
glorious _Night Piece_--are songs of experience. Herrick may not have
loved Julia well enough to marry her, even if she had been willing,
but he loved her well enough to write good verses. He could probably
have said farewell to any woman as philosophically as he said farewell
to sack. He was a cautious man, and a predestined bachelor. He was,
indeed, a man of no very profound feeling. There is no deep tide of
emotion making his verse musical. He knew love and he knew regret, but
not tragically. If he wept to see the daffodils haste away so soon,
we may be sure that he brushed away his tears at the sound of the
dinner-bell and forgot the premature death of the flowers in cheerful
conversation with his housekeeper, Prue. This does not mean that his
mood was insincere; it does not mean that in _To Daffodils_ he did not
give immortal and touching expression to one of the universal sorrows
of men. He comes nearer the grave music of poetry here than in any of
his other poems. But the _Memento mori_ that runs through his verses
is the _Memento mori_ of a banqueter, not of a sufferer. It is the
mournfulness of a heart that has no intention of breaking.
Herrick proved a true prophet in regard to the immortality of his
verse, though _Hesperides_ made no great stir when it was published
in 1648 and seems to have made no friends among critics till the end
of the eighteenth century. But he never gave a wiser estimate of the
quality of his work than those lines, in _When he would have his verses
read_, where he bids us:
In sober mornings do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drank and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read....
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though
he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with
Campion. But he is a master of light poetry--of poetry under the rose.
II
VICTOR HUGO
It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him,
it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books
and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict,
you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so
ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in
literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as
“the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did
not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time
it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as
“plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as
well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He
was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s
favourite writers, and _Notre Dame_ was one of the books that
influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age Tolstoy admitted
_Les Misérables_ through the strait gate of the best literature in
_What is Art?_ and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it
was at the back of his mind when he wrote _Resurrection_.
His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was
a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes
Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo--an inspired donkey!” and his
assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,”
had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the
brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first
night of _Les Burgraves_:
The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt.
But the poetry--ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian
painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s
plays an absence of _heart_, which was never so conspicuous. Victor
Hugo is not _true_.
“Victor Hugo is not _true_.” That is the suspicion that constantly
trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in
public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing
humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his
wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame Duclaux tells
again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress
across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime!
Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when
he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his
wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine
at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same
time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in
literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to
note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an
idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature
was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife
told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he
fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as
a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful
even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved
him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in
1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette
Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between
seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the hint of
the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with
a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew
the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss
on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed
his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could
hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted
women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of
his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even
on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love
with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve
he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between
them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on
remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as
evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at
all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a
humbug, whatever he had done.
His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him.
Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist,
he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant _Ego Hugo_. But at
least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time
of the _coup d’état_ of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his
head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary
Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback:
The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab,
tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly,
began to harangue the General:
“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to
you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of
the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now
do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”
This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during
the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously
playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he
did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his
convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” in _Les Châtiments_ may
be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric:
Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même
Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla:
S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;
Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.
There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it
alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this
redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely
any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative
poet--the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the
vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great
natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us
along as we read.
Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what
Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious
temperament.”
His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any
razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth;
even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his
lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.”
His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo.
“You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all
sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans,
stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast,
and during a long time.”
“Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there
circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”
This Gargantuan appetite expresses itself everywhere in his writings.
He was a Gargantua in regard to life as well as food. He devoured the
past like the present. He devoured politics, religion, the stage,
poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who
devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the
accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays,
and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor
in _L’Homme qui rit_ Tom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us
a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world
as real as Æsop’s _Fables_. He is an inventor of myths and fables,
indeed. He no more attempts to imitate the surface of life than a
musician attempts to imitate the sounds of life. Like Dickens, he is a
great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his
hands with devil or imp or angel--with figures of pity or horror, of
laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickens’s comic imagination;
the fantastic and the ironic take the place of humour in his books.
But his work, like that of Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile
built on the ancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in
our time may observe or ask questions: it seldom affirms. But I doubt
whether it even observes the essential heart of things with as sure an
eye as that of Hugo or Dickens. It does not penetrate with its pity to
that underworld of pain in which Cosette and Smike grow up, starved
and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were at least rescuers. They were not
mere sentimentalists: they had the imaginative sympathy that would not
let them rest in the presence of the miseries of life. They hated the
tyranny of men and the tyranny of institutions; they hated greed and
cruelty, and the iron door shut on children and on the helpless and the
suffering.
Hugo has dramatised this imaginative sympathy and hatred in novels
so mythical in substance that one might easily fall into the mistake
of regarding them as false. We must think of Jean Valjean and Javert
as figures in a morality play rather than in a psychological study
if we are to appreciate the greatness of _Les Misérables_. They were
created, not by God, but by Victor Hugo. But, if they have not at all
points psychological reality, they have at least legendary reality.
We can say the same of the characters in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_
and _L’Homme qui rit_. They all inhabit the world, not as it actually
is, but as it is transmuted in a legendary imagination. Unfortunately,
Hugo professes to write about real people and not about dragons, and
we constantly find ourselves applying psychological tests as we read
him. When Gilliatt drowns himself in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_ we
complain not only of the dubious psychology but of the mechanical
theatrical effect. Victor Hugo, we feel at such moments, was a great
“producer” rather than a great artist. He would, undoubtedly, had he
lived, have taken full advantage of the over-emphasis of the cinema. On
the other hand, the over-emphasis of which his critics complain is not
the over-emphasis of weakness straining after strength. It is rather an
overflow of the Gothic imagination. “His flat foot,” he tells us, of
a certain character, “was a vulture’s claw. His skull was low at the
top and large about the temples. His ugly ears bristled with hair, and
seemed to say: ‘Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave.’” His
style is essentially the exaggerated style. His genius is the genius
of exaggeration. Luckily, he exaggerates, not wholly in clouds, but
in carved gnomes and all manner of fantastic detail. He omits not a
comma from his dreams and nightmares. That is why his short sentences
and paragraphs still startle us into attention when we open one of
his novels. His imagination at least teems on every page--teems with
absurdities, perhaps, as well as with truth and beauty, but teems
always with interest. Madame Duclaux’s excellent biography should send
many readers back to the work of this magnificent and preposterous
legend-maker and lover of his fellow-men.
III
MOLIÈRE
The way of entertainers is hard. It is a good enough world for those
who entertain us no higher than the ribs, but to attempt to entertain
the mind is another matter. Comedy shows men and women (among other
things) what humbugs they are, and, as the greatest humbugs are
often persons of influence, the comic writer is naturally hated and
disparaged during his lifetime in some of the most powerful circles.
That Molière’s body was at first refused Christian burial may have
been due to the fact that he was an actor--in theory, an actor was
not allowed even to receive the Sacrament in those days unless he had
renounced his profession--but his profession of comic writer had during
the latter part of his life brought him into far worse disrepute than
his profession of comic actor. He was the greatest portrayer of those
companion figures, the impostor and the dupe, who ever lived, and, as a
result, every kind of impostor and dupe, whether religious, literary,
or fashionable, was enraged against him. That Molière was a successful
author is not disputed, but he never enjoyed a calm and unchallenged
success. He had the support of Louis XIV and the public, but the
orthodox, the professional and the highbrow lost no opportunity of
doing him an injury.
Molière was nearly forty-two when he produced _L’École des Femmes_. He
had already, as Mr. Tilley tells us, in his solidly instructive study,
“become an assured favourite with the public,” though _Les Précieuses
ridicules_ had given offence in the salons, and performances were
suspended for a time. With the appearance of _L’École des Femmes_ he
at length stood forth a great writer, and the critics began to take
counsel together. A ten months’ war followed, in the course of which he
delivered two smashing blows against his enemies, first in _La Critique
de l’École des Femmes_ and _L’Impromptu de Versailles_. Then “on May
12, 1664, he presented at Versailles the first three acts of Tartuffe.”
This began a new war which lasted, not merely ten months, but five
years. It was not until 1669 that Molière received permission to
produce in public the five-act play that we now know. The violence of
the storm the play raised may be gauged from the quotation Mr. Tilley
makes from Pierre Roullé’s pamphlet, in which Roullé called Molière “un
démon vêtu de chair et habillé en homme, un libertin, un impie digne
d’un supplice exemplaire.” Mr. Shaw himself never made people angrier
than Molière. Having held a religious hypocrite up to ridicule, Molière
went on to paint a comic portrait of a freethinker. He gave the world
_Dom Juan_, which was a great success--for a week or two. Suddenly, it
was withdrawn, and Molière never produced it again. Nor did he publish
it. It had apparently offended not only the clergy but the great
nobles, who disliked the exposure of a gentleman on his way to Hell.
It was, we may presume, these cumulative misfortunes that drove him
into the pessimistic mood out of which _Le Misanthrope_ was born. He
had now written three masterpieces for the purpose of entertaining
his fellows, and he was being treated, not as a public benefactor,
but as a public enemy. One of the three had been calumniated; one was
prohibited; the third had to be withdrawn. And, in addition to being
at odds with the world, he was at odds with his wife. He had married
her, a girl under twenty, when he himself was forty, and she apparently
remained a coquette after marriage. One could not ask for clearer
evidence of the sanity of Molière’s genius than the fact that he was
able to make of his bitter private and public quarrels one of the
most delightful comedies in literature. Alceste, it is true, with his
desire to quit the insincere and fashionable world and to retire into
the simple and secluded life, is said to be a study, not of Molière
himself, but of a misanthropic nobleman. But, though Molière may have
borrowed a few features of the nobleman’s story, he undoubtedly lent
the nobleman the soul of Molière. He had the comic vision of himself as
well as of the rest of humanity. He might mock the vices of the world,
but he could also mock himself for hating the world, in the spirit of
a superior person, on account of its vices. He could even, as a poet,
see his wife’s point of view, though he might quarrel with her as a
husband. Célimène, that witty and beautiful lady who refuses to retire
with Alceste into his misanthropic solitude, has had all the world in
love with her ever since. Molière, we may be sure, sympathised with her
when she protested:
La solitude effraye une âme de vingt ans.
Molière himself played the part of Alceste, and his wife played
Célimène. The play, we are told, was not one of his greatest popular
successes. As one reads it, indeed, one is puzzled at times as to why
it should be giving one such exquisite enjoyment. There is less action
in it than in any other great play. The plot never thickens, and the
fall of the curtain leaves us with nothing settled as to Alceste’s
and Célimène’s future. To write a comedy which is not very comic and
a drama which is not very dramatic, and to make of this a masterpiece
of comic drama, is surely one of the most remarkable of achievements.
It can only be explained by the fact that Molière was a great creator
and not a great mechanician. He gives the secret of life to his people.
His success in doing this is shown by the way in which men have argued
about them ever since, as we argue about real men and women. There are
even critics who are unable to laugh at Molière, so overwhelming is
the reality of his characters. Mr. Tilley quotes M. Donnay as saying,
“Aujourd’hui nous ne rions pas de Tartuffe ni même d’Orgon”; and even
Mr. Tilley himself, discussing _Le Malade imaginaire_, says that
we realise that Argan--Argan of the enemas--is “at bottom a tragic
figure.” Again, he sees a “tragic element” in the characterisation of
Harpagon in _L’Avare_, and, speaking of Alceste in _Le Misanthrope_,
he observes that, “though we may be sure that [Molière] fully realised
the tragic side of his character, it was not this aspect that he
wished to present to the public.” It seems to me that there is a good
deal of unreality in all this. It is as though the errors of men
were too serious things to laugh at--as though comedy had not its
own terrible wisdom and must not venture into the depths of reality.
Molière would probably have had a short way with those who cannot laugh
at _Tartuffe_, as Cervantes would have had a short way with those who
cannot laugh at _Don Quixote_. There is as much imagination--as much
sympathy, even, perhaps--in the laughter of the great comic writers
as in the tears of the sentimentalist. And Molière’s aim was laughter
achieved through an exaggerated imitation of reality. He was the poet
of good sense, and he felt that he had but to hold up the mirror of
good sense in order that we might see how absurd is every form of
egotism and pretentiousness. He took the side of the simple dignity of
human nature against all the narrowing vices, the anti-social vices,
whether of avarice, licentiousness, self-righteousness or preciosity.
He has written the smiling poetry of our sins. Not that he is indulgent
to them, like Anatole France, whose view of life is sentimental.
Molière’s work was a declaration of war against all those human beings
who are more pleased with themselves than they ought to be, down to
that amazing coterie of literary ladies in _Les Femmes savantes_,
concerning whose projected academy of taste one of them announces in
almost modern accents:
Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages;
Par nos lois, prose et vers, tout nous sera soumis;
Nul n’aura de l’esprit hors nous et nos amis;
Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire,
Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire.
Molière has been accused of writing an attack on the higher
education of women in _Les Femmes savantes_. What we see in it
to-day is an immortal picture of those intellectual impostors of the
drawing-room--the not-very-intelligentsia, as they have been wittily
called--who exist in every civilised capital and in every generation.
The vanities of the rival poets, it is true, are caricatured rather
extravagantly, but the caricature is essentially true to life. This is
what men and women are like. At least, this is what they are like when
they are most exclusive and most satisfied with themselves. Molière
knew human nature. That is what makes him so much greater a comic
dramatist than any English dramatist who has written since Shakespeare.
Molière has been taken to task by many critics since his death. He has
been accused even of writing badly. He has been accused of padding,
incorrectness, and the use of jargon. He has been told that he should
have written none of his plays in verse, but all of them, as he wrote
_L’Avare_, in prose. All these criticisms are nine-tenths fatuous.
Molière by the use of verse gave comic speech the exhilaration of a
game, as Pope did, and literature that has exhilarating qualities of
this kind has justified its existence, whether or not it squares with
some hard-and-fast theory of poetry. If we cannot define poetry so as
to leave room for Molière and Pope, then so much the worse for our
definition of poetry. As for padding, I doubt whether any dramatist
has ever kept the breath of life in his speech more continuously than
Molière. His dialogue is not a flowing tap but a running stream. That
Molière’s language may be faulty I will not dispute, as French is
an alien and but half-known tongue to me. He produces his effects,
whatever his grammar. He has created for us a world, delicious even
in its insincerities and absurdities--a world seen through charming,
humorous, generous, remorseless eyes--a world held together by wit--a
world in which the sins of society dance to the ravishing music of the
alexandrine.
IV
EDMUND BURKE
Burke, we are told, was known as “the dinner-bell” because the House
of Commons emptied when he rose to speak. This is usually put down to
the uncouthness of his delivery. But, after all, there was nothing
in his delivery to prevent his indictment of Warren Hastings from so
affecting his hearers in places that, as Lord Morley writes, “every
listener, including the great criminal, held his breath in an agony
of horror,” and “women were carried out fainting.” I fancy Burke’s
virtues rather than his vices were at the bottom of his failure in the
House of Commons. He took the imagination of an artist into politics,
and he soared high above the questions of the hour among eternal
principles of human nature in which country gentlemen had only a very
faint interest. Not that he was a theoretical speaker in the sense of
being a doctrinaire. He had no belief in paper Utopias. His object
in politics was not to construct an ideal society out of his head
but to construct an acceptable society out of human beings as their
traditions, their environment, and their needs have moulded them. He
never forgot that actual human beings are the material in which the
politician must work. His constant and passionate sense of human nature
is what puts his speeches far above any others that have been delivered
in English. Even when he spoke or wrote on the wrong side, he was often
right about human nature. Page after page of his _Reflections on the
French Revolution_ is as right about human nature as it is wrong about
its ostensible subject. One might say with truth that, whatever his
ostensible subject may be, Burke’s real subject is always human nature.
If he was indignant against wrong in America or India or Ireland,
it was not with the indignation of a sentimentalist so much as of
a moralist outraged by the degradation of human nature. He loved
disinterestedness and wisdom in public affairs, and he mourned over the
absence of them as a Shakespeare might have mourned over the absence
of noble characters about whom to write plays. In his great _Speech at
Bristol_ he pilloried that narrow and selfish conception of freedom
according to which freedom consists in the right to dominate over
others. Burke demanded of human nature not an impossible perfection
but at least the first beginnings of magnanimity. Thus he loathed
every form of mean domination, whether it revealed itself as religious
persecution or political repression. He attacked both the anti-Catholic
and the anti-American would-be despots in the _Speech at Bristol_, and
his comment may serve for almost any “anti” in any age:
It is but too true that the love, and even the very idea, of
genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there
are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride,
perverseness and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of
thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined
in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on
their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to
those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler,
debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling
Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone
that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep
his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of
the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the
American War. _Our_ subjects in America, _our_ colonies, _our_
dependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and
thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that
one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.
All through his life Burke set his face against what may be called the
lusts of human nature. As a Member of Parliament he refused to curry
favour with his constituents by gratifying their baser appetites.
In the farewell speech from which I have quoted, he has left us an
impassioned statement of his position:
No man carries farther than I do the policy of making government
pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic
complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not
only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully
gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must
be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in
my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play part in, any
innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I will never act the
tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their
sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient
creature whatsoever--no, not so much as a kitling--to torment.
Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the
discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights.
George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is
the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the
Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not
for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging
to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and
liberties of human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman
who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America
meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!”
All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was
this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the
American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the
House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body.
Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the
same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of the rights of
Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw
the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some
metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means
by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and
charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared
nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned
champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other
statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of
a right for its own sake--the politics born of the theory that one has
the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likes with
one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling
in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you
have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not
your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end
in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon
their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty
be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know
it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that
peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be
frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all
through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans
were human beings--a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time
of war--and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in
human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his
knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that
acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told
that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is,
if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.” Though opposed
to the separation of America, he was in the end convinced that, if
the alternatives were separation and coercion, England was more likely
to gain a separate America than a bludgeoned America as a friend.
Addressing his former constituents, he said:
I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body;
and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary:
anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.
This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency
without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from
every information, that it would have had a directly contrary
effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer
independency without war to independency with it; and I have so
much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and
so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more
benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under
a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the
Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and
abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as
mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin.
There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of
the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might
have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a
capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as
itself a primary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other
statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long
views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and
not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches
on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the
genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in
politics?
Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of
Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but
during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after
the _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol_ or the _Speech at Bristol_,
but after the _Letter to a Noble Lord_, in which Burke defends himself
in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during
the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction
of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the
American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do
not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound
of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be
conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician.
It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to
the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was
something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution.
He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye
is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper
political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human
nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human
nature--if the phrase is permissible--Burke has told the truth in
lasting prose.
His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to
silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of
dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily
occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of
eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us
off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him
personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of
ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal
intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton,
seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human
nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of
his time--an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent
until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase)
“the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent
lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination
survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows
weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate
of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.