appealed to men and women as strongly as to children. We hear
occasionally of children who cannot be reconciled to him because of
his incurable habit of pathos. A child can read a fairy-tale like “The
Sleeping Beauty” as if it were playing among toys, but it cannot
read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” without enacting in its own soul the
pathetic adventures of the frog-girl; it cannot read “The Snow Queen”
without enduring all the sorrows of Gerda as she travels in search of
her lost friend; it cannot read “The Little Mermaid” without feeling
as if the knives were piercing its feet just as the mermaid felt when
she got her wish to become a human being so that she might possess
a soul. Even in “The Wild Swans,” though Lisa’s eleven brothers are
all restored to humanity from the shapes into which their wicked
step-mother had put them, it is only after a series of harrowing
incidents; and Lisa herself has to be rescued from being burned as
a witch. Hans Andersen is surely the least gay of all writers for
children. He does not invent exquisite confectionery for the nursery
such as Charles Perrault, having heard a nurse telling the stories
to his little son, gave the world in “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard.”
To read stories like these is to enter into a game of make-believe,
no more to be taken seriously than a charade. The Chinese lanterns
of a happy ending seem to illuminate them all the way through. But
Hans Andersen does not invite you to a charade. He invites you to put
yourself in the place of the little match-girl who is frozen to death
in the snow on New Year’s Eve after burning her matches and pretending
that she is enjoying all the delights of Christmas. He is more like a
child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote
fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens,
indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding
inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so
recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests
eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his
comedy. But how delightful is the fun at the end of “Soup on a Sausage
Peg” when the Mouse King learns that the only way in which the soup can
be made is by stirring a pot of boiling water with his own tail! And
what child does not love in all its bones the cunning in “Little Claus
and Big Claus,” when Big Claus is tricked into killing his horses,
murdering his grandmother, and finally allowing himself to be tied in a
sack and thrown into the river?
But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write
stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher
or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used
the fairy-tale continually as a means of teaching and warning them. In
one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been
cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has
dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry
because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly
rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a
result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness
in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the
mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her
eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans
Andersen, however, like Ibsen in _Peer Gynt_, believes in redemption
through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is
ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The
Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative
representation of that gospel--a gospel that so easily becomes mush
and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator,
as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel
from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but
he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a
schoolboy. He endows everything he sees--china shepherdesses, tin
soldiers, mice and flowers--with the similitude of life, action and
conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable
of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair
of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women.
He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no
higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning
on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose
cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were
her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never
becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s in _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But there was nothing else like it in the
fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full
of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks
of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks
till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr.
Edmund Gosse, in _Two Visits to Denmark_, a book in which everything
is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to
Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into
the balcony and bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in
the Sound below--‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The
image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as
coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so
much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century,
the magician of the flock of wild swans.
XI
JOHN CLARE
Mr. Arthur Symons edited a good selection of the poems of John Clare
a few years ago, and Edward Thomas was always faithful in his praise.
Yet Messrs. Blunden & Porter’s new edition of Clare’s work has meant
for most of its readers the rediscovery of a lost man of genius. For
Clare, though he enjoyed a “boom” in London almost exactly a hundred
years ago, has never been fully appreciated: he has never even been
fully printed. In 1820 he was more famous than Keats, who had the same
publisher. Keats’s 1820 volume was one of the great books of English
literature, but the public preferred John Clare, and three editions of
_Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery_ were sold between January
16 and the end of March. It was not that the public had discovered a
poet: it was merely that they had discovered an agricultural labourer
who was a poet. At the same time, to have been over-boomed was bound
to do Clare’s reputation harm. It raised hopes that his verse did
not satisfy, and readers who come to an author expecting too much are
apt in their disappointment to blame him for even more faults than he
possesses. It is obvious that if we are asked to appreciate Clare as
a poet of the same company as Keats and Shelley, our minds will be
preoccupied with the feeling that he is an intruder, and we shall be
able to listen to him with all our attention only when he has ceased to
challenge such ruinous comparisons. I do not know whether the critics
of 1820 gave more praise to Clare than to Keats. But the public did.
The public blew a bubble, and the bubble burst. Had Clare, instead
of making a sensation, merely made the quiet reputation he deserved,
he would not have collapsed so soon into one of the most unjustly
neglected poets of the nineteenth century.
In order to appreciate Clare, we have to begin by admitting that he
never wrote either a great or a perfect poem. He never wrote a “Tintern
Abbey” or a “Skylark” or a “Grecian Urn” or a “Tiger” or a “Red, Red
Rose” or an “Ode to Evening.” He was not a great artist uttering the
final rhythms and the final sentences--rhythms and sentences so perfect
that they seem like existences that have escaped out of eternity.
His place in literature is nearer that of Gilbert White or Mr. W. H.
Hudson than that of Shelley. His poetry is a mirror of things rather
than a window of the imagination. It belongs to a borderland where
naturalism and literature meet. He brings things seen before our
eyes: the record of his senses is more important than the record of
his imagination or his thoughts. He was an observer whose consuming
delight was to watch--to watch a grasshopper or a snail, a thistle or
a yellow-hammer. The things that a Wordsworth or a Shelley sees or
hears open the door, as it were, to still more wonderful things that
the poet has not seen or heard. Shelley hears a skylark, and it becomes
not only a skylark, but a flight of images, illumining the mysteries
of life as they pass. Wordsworth hears a Highland girl singing, and
her song becomes not only a girl’s song, but the secret music of far
times and far places, brimming over and filling the world. To Clare the
skylark was most wonderful as a thing seen and noticed: it was the end,
not the beginning, of wonders. He may be led by real things to a train
of reflections: he is never at his best led to a train of images. His
realism, however, is often steeped in the pathos of memory, and it is
largely this that changes his naturalism into poetry. One of the most
beautiful of his poems is called “Remembrances,” and who that has
read it can ever forget the moving verse in which Clare calls up the
playtime of his boyhood and compares it with a world in which men have
begun to hang dead moles on trees?
When from school o’er Little Field with its brook and wooden brig,
Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big,
While I held my little plough though ’twas but a willow twig,
And drove my team along made of nothing but a name,
“Gee hep” and “hoit” and “woi”--O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind,
While I see little mouldiwarps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains,
And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains
And in a silent murmuring complains.
The pity that we find in this poem is, perhaps, the dominant emotion
in Clare’s work. Helpless living things made the strongest appeal to
him, and he honoured the spear-thistle, as it had never been honoured
in poetry before, chiefly because of the protection it gave to the
nesting partridge and the lark. In “Spear Thistle,” after describing
the partridge, which will lie down in a thistle-clump,
and dust
And prune its horse-shoe circled breast,
he continues:
The sheep when hunger presses sore
May nip the clover round its nest;
But soon the thistle wounding sore
Relieves it from each brushing guest
That leaves a bit of wool behind,
The yellow-hammer loves to find.
The horse will set his foot and bite
Close to the ground lark’s guarded nest
And snort to meet the prickly sight;
He fans the feathers of her breast--
Yet thistles prick so deep that he
Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.
We have only to compare the detail of Clare’s work with the sonorous
generalisations in, say, Thomson’s _Seasons_--which he admired--to
realise the immense gulf that divides Clare from his eighteenth-century
predecessors. Clare, indeed, is more like a twentieth-century than an
eighteenth-century poet. He is almost more like a twentieth-century
than a nineteenth-century poet. He is “neo-Georgian” in his preference
for the fact in itself above the image or the phrase. The thing itself
is all the image he asks, and Mr. W. H. Davies in his simplest mood
might have made the same confession of faith as Clare:
I love the verse that mild and bland
Breathes of green fields and open sky,
I love the muse that in her hand
Bears flowers of native poesy;
Who walks nor skips the pasture brook
In scorn, but by the drinking horse
Leans o’er its little brig to look
How far the sallows lean across.
There is no poet, I fancy, in whose work the phrase, “I love,” recurs
oftener. His poetry is largely a list of the things he loves:
I love at early morn, from new-mown swath
To see the startled frog his route pursue;
To mark while, leaping o’er the dripping path,
His bright sides scatter dew,
The early lark that from its bustle flies
To hail his matin new;
And watch him to the skies:
To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,
The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn,
With earnest heed and tremulous intent,
Frail brother of the morn,
That from the tiny bents and misted leaves
Withdraws his timid horn,
And fearful visions weaves.
As we read Clare we discover that it is almost always the little things
that catch his eye:
Grasshoppers go in many a thrumming spring,
And now to stalks of tasselled sow-grass cling,
That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;
While arching ox-eye doubles with his weight.
Next on the cat-tail grass with farther bound
He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.
He is never weary of describing the bees. He praises the ants. Of the
birds, he seems to love the small ones best. How beautifully he writes
of the hedge-sparrow’s little song!:
While in a quiet mood hedge-sparrows try
An inward stir of shadowed melody.
There is the genius of a lover in this description. Here is something
finally said. Clare continually labours to make the report of his eye
and ear accurate. He even begins one of his _Asylum Poems_ with the
line:
Sweet chestnuts brown like soling leather turn;
and, in another, pursues realism in describing an April evening to the
point of writing:
Sheep ointment seems to daub the dead-hued sky.
His attempt at giving an exact echo of the blue-tit’s song--his very
feeble attempt--makes the success of one of his good poems tremble for
a moment in the balance:
Dreamers, mark the honey bee;
Mark the tree
Where the blue cap “_tootle tee_”
Sings a glee,
Sung to Adam and to Eve--
Here they be.
When floods covered every bough,
Noah’s ark
Heard that ballad singing now;
Hark, hark.
“_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_”--
Can it be
Pride and fame must shadows be?
Come and see--
Every season owns her own;
Bird and bee
Sing creation’s music on;
Nature’s glee
Is in every mood and tone
Eternity.
Clare comes nearer an imaginative vision of life in this than in most
of his poems. But, where Shelley would have given us an image, Clare is
content to set down “_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_.”
His poems of human life are of less account than his poems of bird
and insect life; but one of the most beautiful of all his poems, “The
Dying Child,” introduces a human figure among the bees and flowers. How
moving are the first three verses!:
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,
As he was carried o’er the green.
His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee,
He knew those children of the spring:
When he was well and on the lea,
He held one in his hands to sing,
Which filled his heart with glee.
Infants, the children of the spring!
How can an infant die
When butterflies are on the wing,
Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at spring?
The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs.
Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will,
peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of
the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though
needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare
was called in Lamb’s circle because of his clothes. It is a story of
struggle, poverty, drink, a moment’s fame without money to correspond,
a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum,
ate “the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like
bread.” Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare’s poetry with all
the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or
a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book
that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.
XII
HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS
Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of
good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts
of writing--the entertaining and the dull--and the dull is outside
literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends
to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every
century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting
that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation
of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers
and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became
life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled.
A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more
ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he
were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us
a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbing figure, would
devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would
leave us with a mass of information about his _disjecta membra_,
which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This
was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is
an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object,
it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will
keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An
inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history
that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was
generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no
longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his
admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that
“the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to
the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably
at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific
or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not
know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would
be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as
Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his
delightful curiosity.
Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth,
and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in
a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist
as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes
his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust.
Sallust’s _Jugurtha_, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the
Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better
class than like sober history” and the _Cataline_, we are told, “is
inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion
of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of
a great moral idea--the idea of the corruption of human nature by
success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of
attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of
exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history
with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in
great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of
Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and
branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow
cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found
it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found
leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a
curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these
were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the
fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable,
a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good
literature unless it is an entertaining fable.
Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable.
That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled
him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was
naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him
to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated
scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations
later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed
and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to
understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from
Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had
deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined
lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of
the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was
led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself
the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in
pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that
is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The
pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the
sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians.
Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge
Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute
for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is
colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to
an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the
contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a
miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this.
He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her
all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it
was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble
character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till
the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been
done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in
human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the
supreme Greek biographer.
There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the
flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to
art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise
with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes.
His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a
specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have
made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed
into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:
Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many
crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband
and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read
in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and
dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many
other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there
was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you
could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or
her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more
often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the
conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts,
been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven
her headlong. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments;
she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was
modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree
of wit and charm.
A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!
But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their
hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of
moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history
may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to
the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories
that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for
the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like
that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the
Phrygians were the oldest nation:
Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed
themselves to be the oldest nation on earth.... Psammetichus,
being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come
into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children
of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his
flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their
hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in
due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children
their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave
this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first
break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct
babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as
he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and
entered, both the children ran to him, stretching out their hands
and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of
it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing
this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master,
and on command brought the children into the King’s presence.
Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language
this word “Bekos” might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word
signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed
that the Phrygians were older than they.
Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the
recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts,
not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place.
He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly
the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.
XIII