from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of
universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis.
The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy:
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the dædal Earth,
And of Heaven--and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth--
And then I changed my pipings--
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction--a dissatisfaction
that many people feel when reading his poetry--with a life that is too
full of mirages and metamorphoses.
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung:
Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea.
Where light is, chameleons change!
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.
This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to
have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It
was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful
image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The
Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent--the gift by which
the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place--but Shelley
had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant
so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was
blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the
morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”:
So their plumes of purple grain,
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail.
No naturalist could have been more accurate in his description than
this. Shelley, indeed, claimed for himself in the preface to _Laon and
Cythna_ that, in his imagery, he was essentially and supremely a poet
of experience:
I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and
the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon
the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden
the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down
mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come
forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream
among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched
the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst
assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more
visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced
to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked
inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I
have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient
Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to
me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the
sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have
been drawn.
All this was true, but Shelley was too impatient of experience to rely
on it when there was a richer world of images at hand. Images--images
passing into each other--meant more to him than experience as he wrote
such lines as
My soul is an enchanted boat
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.
He said himself of the poet that
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aërial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.
There was never another poet of whom this was so true as of himself.
Even when he writes
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
or,
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,
he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world.
There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light
in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in
the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of
any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are
not made of substances but of dreams--a world in which we walk over
rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.
IX
PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES
Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have
been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How
superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent
pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no
anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found
the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out
that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of
anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind
has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is
supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of
anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote
its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander,
when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and
in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of
virtue or vice--nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often
makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands
fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the
general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere
vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a
later man of genius a clue to a character--the character of a man or
the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more
profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though
he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The
life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It
contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley--a
genius that was of the air rather than of the earth--a genius at once
noble and incongruous with the world in which men live.
Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes.
The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of
portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new
or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the
great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes
for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and
connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little
suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as
looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some
notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are
woven.
I doubt if a more virtuous imagination ever applied itself to
literature. Plutarch’s unending quest was virtue, and no illustrious
man ever sat to him for a portrait without discovering to him virtues
that he would never have revealed to a scandalmonger such as Suetonius.
It was as though moral dignity were the chief of the colours on
Plutarch’s palette. He was fond of contrasting his heroes with one
another, but, even when he took for heroes men who were mortal enemies,
he would penetrate deep into the heart of each in search of some
hidden or imprisoned nobleness. He cannot paint an Alcibiades or a
Sulla as a model for children, but even in them he seems to perceive
and reverence a greatness of spirit in ruins--some brightness of charm
or courage beyond the scope of little men. No other writer except
Shakespeare has had the same power of setting before the imagination
characters that remain noble though undone by great vices. To do this
is, to some extent, in the common tradition of tragedy, but there
is in Shakespeare and Plutarch a certain sweetness and warmth of
understanding--something even more than an enthusiasm for the best
in full view and admission of the worst--unlike anything else in
literature. It was not an accident that Shakespeare drew so freely and
so confidently on Plutarch. The geniuses of the two men were akin.
Plutarch, no doubt, was more consciously ethical than Shakespeare,
but he was ethical not after the manner of the narrow propagandist,
but after the manner of the imaginative artist. He does not write of
model characters. He knows that there are no perfect human beings. He
recognises the goodness in bad men, and the badness in good men. No
biographer has been more keenly aware of the corruptibility of human
nature. Hence the characters in his Lives are real men, with not a
fault (and hardly the rumour of a fault) hidden. He will not bear
false witness for the sake of making great men appear better than they
are. He achieves the difficult feat of praising virtue without either
canting or lying. He is not afraid to hold the mirror up to nature and
to show us virtue fighting a doubtful battle in a corrupt and tragic
scene. He does not believe that the virtuous man is necessarily secure
either from corruption or defeat, but he believes that virtue itself
is secure from defeat. His recurrent theme is the Christian theme:
“Fear not them that kill the body.” He is the painter, not only of
illustrious lives, but of illustrious deaths. He feels a spectator’s
elation as he watches a noble fifth act. He obtains from the spectacle
of virtue impavid amid the ruins an æsthetic as well as an ethical
pleasure. If any man wishes to make a study of the æsthetics of
virtue, he will find abundant material in Plutarch. Plutarch writes of
the tragic hero as of a man playing a fine part finely. He delights
in the moving speeches, in the very gestures. He makes us conscious
of a rhythm of nobleness running through human life, as when he
describes the conduct of the Spartan women who fled with Cleomenes (the
quasi-Socialist king) to Egypt, and who were murdered by their cruel
hosts. He first wins our sympathies for the wife of Panteus, “most
noble and beautiful to look upon,” and tells us how she was but lately
married to Panteus, so that “their misfortunes came to them in the
heyday of their love.” He then describes how this great lady behaved
when she was overtaken by death in company with the mother and children
of the king:
She it was who now took the hand of Cratesicleia as she was led
forth by the soldiers, held up her robe for her, and bade her be
of good courage. And Cratesicleia herself was not one whit dismayed
at death, but asked one favour only, that she might die before
the children died. However, when they were come to the place of
execution, first the children were slain before her eyes, and then
Cratesicleia herself was slain, making but one cry at sorrows so
great: “O children, whither are ye gone?” Then the wife of Panteus,
girding up her robe, vigorous and stately woman that she was,
ministered to each of the dying women calmly and without a word,
and laid them out for burial as well as she could. And, finally,
after all were cared for, she arrayed herself, let down her robe
from about her neck, and suffering no one besides the executioner
to come near or look on her, bravely met her end, and had no need
of any one to array or cover up her body after death. Thus her
decorum of spirit attended her in death, and she maintained to the
end that watchful care of her body which she had set over it in
life.
That “decorum of spirit” is, for Plutarch, the finishing grace of the
noble life. And he summarises his creed in the triumphant comment on
the Spartan women: “So then, Sparta, bringing her women’s tragedy into
emulous competition with that of her men, showed the world that in the
last extremity Virtue cannot be outraged by Fortune.”
Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue,
and gently though he scans his brother man--does he not forgive the
baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with
any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek
and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature,
which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence,
cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?--in spite of
this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid
and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of
temperance--of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in
the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is
a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those
points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius
and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would
seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more
kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands
upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except
Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their
fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed
them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when
Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned
wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the
better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere
and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent
extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty
drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though
brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and
attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of
possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably
charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out
upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor
of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a
beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother,
when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My
son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and
humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even
here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not
admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,”
he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little
spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had
deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to
his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife
with a devil--the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their
inspired hour: he pities them in the hour of their ruin. Thus he does
not love men at the expense of truth, as some preachers do, or tell
the truth about men at the expense of love, as some cynics do. His
imagination holds the reins both of the heart and of the mind. That is
the secret of his genius as a biographer.
X
HANS ANDERSEN
Almost the last story Hans Andersen wrote was a sentimental fable,
called “The Cripple,” which he intended as an apologia for his career
as a teller of fairy-tales. It is the story of a bed-ridden boy, the
son of a poor gardener and his wife, who receives a story-book as a
Christmas present from his father’s master and mistress. “He won’t
get fat on that,” says the father when he hears of so useless a gift.
In the result, as was to be expected, the book turns out to have a
talismanic effect on the fortunes of the family. It converts the father
and mother from grumblers into figures of contentment and benevolence,
so that they look as though they had won a prize in the lottery. It
is also indirectly the cause of little Hans recovering the use of his
legs. For, while he is lying in bed one day, he throws the book at the
cat in order to scare it away from his bird, and, having missed his
shot, he makes a miraculous effort and leaps out of bed to prevent
disaster. Though the bird is dead, Hans is saved, and we leave him to
live happily ever afterwards as a prospective schoolmaster. This, it
must be confessed, sounds rather like the sort of literature that is
given away as Sunday-school prizes. One could conceive a story of the
same kind being written by the author of _No Gains Without Pains_ or
_Jessica’s First Prayer_. Hans Andersen, indeed, was in many respects
more nearly akin to the writers of tracts and moral tales than to
the folklorists. He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated
the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was
no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a
wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never
a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He
could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those
little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New
Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such
as he himself had been. He loved the poor, the ill-treated, and the
miserable, and to illuminate their lives with all sorts of fancies.
His miracles happen preferably to those who live in poor men’s houses.
His cinder-girl seldom marries a prince: if she marries at all, it is
usually some honest fellow who will have to work for his living. In
Hans Andersen, however, it is the exception rather than the rule to
marry and live happily ever afterwards. The best that even Hans the
cripple has to look forward to is being a schoolmaster. There was never
an author who took fewer pains to give happy endings to his stories.
His own life was a mixture of sadness and the vanity of success. “The
Ugly Duckling” is manifestly the fable of his autobiography. Born
into the house of a poor cobbler, he was at once shy and ugly, and he
appears to have been treated by other children like the duckling which
“was bitten and pushed and jeered at” in the farmyard, and upon which
“the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought
himself an emperor, blew himself up like a ship in full sail and bore
straight down.” His father died early, and at the age of eleven Hans
ceased to go to school and was allowed to run wild. He amused himself
by devouring plays and acting them with puppets in a toy theatre which
he had built, till at the age of eighteen he realised that he must
do something to make a living. As he did not wish to dwindle into a
tailor, he left his home, confident that he had the genius to succeed
in Copenhagen. There his passion for the theatre led him to try all
sorts of occupations. He tried to write; he tried to act; he tried to
sing; he tried to dance. “He danced figure dances,” wrote Nisbet Bain,
“before the most famous _danseuse_ of the century, who not unnaturally
regarded the queer creature as an escaped lunatic.”
By his persistence and his ugliness, perhaps, as much as by the first
suggestions of his genius, he contrived at last to interest the manager
of the Royal Theatre, and, through him, the King; and the latter had
him sent off to school with a pension to begin his education all over
again in a class of small boys. Here, one can imagine, the “ugly
duckling” had a bad time of it, and the head master, a man with a
satirical tongue, seems to have been as merciless as the turkey-cock
in the story. Hans’s education and his unhappiness went on till he was
in his twenties, when he escaped and tried his hand at poetry, farce,
fantasy, travel-books and fiction. We hear very little of his novels
nowadays--in England at any rate; but we know how they were appreciated
at the time from some references in the Browning love-letters, within a
few years of their being published. The first of them appeared in 1835,
when the author was thirty, and a few months later an instalment of
the first volume of the fairy-tales was published. Andersen described
the latter as “fairy-tales which used to please me when I was little
and which are not known, I think.” The book (which began with “The
Tinder-Box” and “Little Claus and Big Claus”) was, apart from one
critic, reviewed unfavourably where it was reviewed at all. Andersen
himself appears to have been on the side of those who thought little of
it. His ambition was to write plays and novels and epics for serious
people, and all his life he was rather rebellious against the fame
which he gradually won all over Europe as a story-teller for children.
He longed for appreciation for works like _Ashuerus_, described by
Nisbet Bain as “an aphoristic series of historical tableaux from the
birth of Christ to the discovery of America,” and _To Be or Not to Be_,
the last of his novels, in which he sought to “reconcile Nature and the
Bible.”
We are told of his vexation when a statue was put up in Copenhagen,
representing him as surrounded by a group of children. “Not one of
the sculptors,” he declared, “seems to know that I never _could_
tell tales whenever anyone is sitting behind me, or close up to me,
still less when I have children in my lap, or on my back, or young
Copenhageners leaning right against me. To call me the children’s poet
is a mere figure of speech. My aim has always been to be the poet of
older people of all sorts: children alone cannot represent me.” It is
possible, however, that Andersen rather enjoyed taking up a grumpy pose
in regard to his stories for children. In any case he continued to
publish fresh series of them until 1872, three years before his death.
He also enjoyed the enthusiastic reception their popularity brought
him during his frequent travels in most of the countries of Europe
between England and Turkey. Nor did he object to turning himself into
a story-teller at a children’s party. There is a description in one of
Henry James’s books of such a party at Rome, at which Hans Andersen
read “The Ugly Duckling” and Browning “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,”
followed by “a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment,
with [W. W.] Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.”
Nor does Andersen seem to have thought too disrespectfully of his
fairy-tales when he wrote “The Cripple.”