mainly--a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it
is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing
but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest
English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest
prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates
the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a
Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen
or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the
echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with
another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists
can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see
is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world
as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or,
on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or
goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no
better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well
as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of
them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury,
and you will see how the artist, even though his characters as a rule
are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out
of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them
permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England
into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth
peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality
of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about
it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.
Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within
and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of
his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of
a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day’s work
and the day’s play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as in
_Young Goodman Brown_, everyday reality passes into fable and back
again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in
a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory
than any other writer’s since Bunyan. This is generally counted a
defect, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with
the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world
never became less real on account of the fable it bore within it like
an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same
time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that
he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in
which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently
remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with
the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of
fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. “Never
comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region,” he wrote of the
Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made “such havoc
of his wits.” He had to transform his surroundings into a strange
land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the
invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project
his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense
of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this
moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life.
It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong
though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of
sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns
the sin of self-righteousness more than the sins of the flesh.
Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who
believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference
is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going
people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I
misunderstand _Young Goodman Brown_, Hawthorne is here telling us how
he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having
given way to temptation. In _The Scarlet Letter_, the egoism of the
vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the
minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That
Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown
by the fact that _The Scarlet Letter_ still holds us under its spell in
days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are
no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast;
they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet
alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel
survives--a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good
and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil
is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like
that of Hans Andersen, because, not only does it carry the burden of
morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing
as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he
has left no successors in his kind.
XVI
JONAH IN LANCASHIRE
The author of _Patience_--the other _Patience_, I mean, not the Gilbert
opera--is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is
not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable
poems, _Pearl_ and _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_. Gaston Paris
describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,”
and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a
favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of
these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history
for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was
suggested that he wrote the romance _Sir Gawayne_ in his gaudy youth.
Then, having lost a child, he composed in _Pearl_ a passionate lament
for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote _Patience_
as an expression of his submission to the will of God. Mr. Bateson
will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with
the chronology. He regards _Patience_ as the earliest of the poems,
and is of the opinion that _Pearl_, far from being a lament for a lost
child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would
think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a
dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not
necessarily so. No one denies that the _Song of Solomon_ is a great
poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as
the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly
school of literature. Coming to _Patience_ itself, I fancy that the man
who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal
confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved
father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It
is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book
of Jonah for comfortable morals. _Patience_ is a sermon addressed to
other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow
oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and
vigour of its narrative.
_Patience_ is the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah
is here painted in English colours. He is the Jonah not of a
tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a
Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a
Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this
in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one
of the sources of _Patience_. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a
formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old
Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he
steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God.
Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne,
we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm
that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has
been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such
tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey
of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity
of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year
when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for
begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate
circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement
that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel
for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe
the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to
enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah,
when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing
overboard
Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.
The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be
a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah
story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or
calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French
giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:
Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;
Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,
Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,
To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.
Both in Tertullian and in _Patience_ Jonah is made not only to sleep
but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:
Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.
The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom
of the boat,
Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes.
A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the
casting of lots:
The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up.
Then came the casting of the lots:
And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas.
The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English:
What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech?
What seches thou on see, synful schrewe,
With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?
Soon after follows the decision to throw him overboard:
Now is Jonas the Jwe jugged to drowne.
“A wylde walteande whale” comes up opportunely to the side of the boat:
And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened...,
With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.
In spite of his safe passage beyond the whale’s teeth, however, Jonah’s
plight was not an enviable one:
Lorde! colde was his cumfort, and his care huge.
The poet describes him as passing down the throat like a “mote in at a
minster door”:
He glydes in by the gills ...;
Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute,
Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle;
And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,
And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.
So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson
thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories
of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the
situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the
whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring
on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however,
Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In
a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:
For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,
Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.
These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English:
“For the mote made him--though it were little as compared with him--to
feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling
stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”
We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the
narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God
had commanded the whale----
That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,
we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding
with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh.
The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of
convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight,
as he lay under it--“so glad of his gay lodge”--is amusingly described.
He----
Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.
So contentedly did he “loll” there, indeed--“so blithe of his
wood-bine”--that he cared not a penny for any “diet” that day; and when
it “nighed to night” and “nappe hym bihoued,” he slept the sleep of
the just “vnder leues.” In his account of Jonah’s anger against God,
and God’s argument in favour of sparing Nineveh, the poet elaborates
as ever the Bible narrative, and the appeal for the right of the
inhabitants to live is tenderer than in the more concise original. God
pleads, for instance, for the “lyttel bairnes on barme (breast) that
neuer bale wrought,” and the reference to “much cattle” becomes:
And als ther ben doumbe bestes in the burgh many.
I do not suggest that _Patience_ is better than the Book of Jonah, or
as good, but that it has the vitality of an original work. The poet
has a personal knowledge of character--a sense of drama, and a sense
of life. Mr. Bateson’s edition of the poem was first published seven
years ago. He has now largely recast and rewritten it. I have taken
some liberties with his text in quoting it, slightly modernising
it in places. It is an edition for students of mediæval literature
rather than for the general reader. But with the help of its excellent
glossary others than scholars should be able to enjoy it if they are
prepared to take a little pains. And it is worth taking pains to become
acquainted with so vivid and robust a poet as the author of _Sir
Gawayne and the Green Knight_.
INTERLUDE
THE CULT OF DULLNESS
Many conflicting opinions were expressed on the occasion of the Keats
centenary, but everybody appeared to be unanimous on at least one
point--contempt for the critics who told Keats to go back to his
gallipots. We took it for granted that they were a very unusual sort
of critics, and that, if a Keats were born to-day, we should give him
a different sort of welcome. It is as though we had forgotten the
history of literary genius and of its first reception into a jealous
world. Human beings have naturally a profound respect for the great
man, but they respect him most when he is dead. A dead demigod is to
them infinitely better than a living lion. Their self-respect suffers
if they have to live in the same world with some young fellow that
overtops them. They feel, unconsciously, that by bringing him down
they are raising themselves up. The Greeks pretended that it was the
gods, and not themselves, who were jealous of human greatness, and they
called this jealousy Nemesis. I suspect, however, that it was human
beings who first felt this passion for equality. It is not in this
form a noble passion. It is a passion for being equal to the people
above us, not for being equal to the people below. This is the passion
that cannot forgive wit or beauty in a contemporary. Some men--the
finest--are entirely without it. Further, most of us yield to facts and
frankly recognise genius when there is no getting away from it. But
there always remains a company of the dull and the crabbed who believe
till the end that to disparage a good writer is to be, at least on this
point, superior to him. They are afraid that if the world welcomes
this wit and beauty it will have no welcome for their own dullness.
That is the secret fear that is a cause of a great deal of the worst
sort of bad criticism. There is a league of dullness constantly making
war on wit and beauty. Its malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely
intelligent enough to be deliberate. It is founded not on reason, but
on the instinct of self-defence.
It is difficult, I admit, to say how far the disparagement of good
writing is the result of mere stupidity and how far it is the result
of malignity. The longer one lives, the more one is amazed at the
incredible achievements of human stupidity.
Possibly, then, the critics who attempted to drag down Keats to the
level of bad writers were merely ordinary stupid human beings--good men
in the bosoms of their families, but fools anywhere else. They had,
after all, standards to which Keats did not conform. They had either
to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards--which would have
been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of
his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial
spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be
punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for
the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages.
Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness,
but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite
for blow. Molière brought great trouble on his head by being witty. He
held the mirror up to fools, and in answer the fools baited him. He had
not all the critics against him, but only all the stupid critics. That
is a distinction that should always be remembered in any discussion on
literary criticism. Many writers, wearied by the slings and arrows of
outrageous critics, have settled down into the easy conviction that
all criticism is a waste of words. Disraeli dismissed the whole brood
of critics in the saying that critics are those who have failed in
literature. This, of course, is a libel on a reputable art. The success
of such critics as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse is literary success
as desirable as that of most poets or novelists. At the same time,
there is a half-truth in the saying of Disraeli. There is no critic
who does more injury to the reputation of his art than the embittered
failure--the man who has shouted in the world’s ear and has yet not
made himself heard. To speak to a deaf man makes some people angry:
to speak to a deaf world has the same effect on many writers. Nature
is kind, and she enables writers of this sort to deceive themselves
into thinking that their ill-natured egoism is a sort of divine anger
on behalf of great art. Their self-righteousness masks itself as
literary piety. Coleridge a hundred years ago noticed the irritability
of minor poets--“men of undoubted talents but not of genius,” whose
tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_
men of genius.” That is the irritation that is the cause of so much
bad criticism. The critic who feels irritated should begin to suspect
himself, and ask himself whether it is the excellences or the faults of
the work he is criticising that have put him in a temper. We are often
told in these days that criticism is too gentle. In a world in which
such a mass of criticism is being written it is difficult to sum up
the tendencies of the whole period in a phrase. There may be an excess
of unintelligent praise, but there is also, it seems to me, an excess
of unintelligent carping and ill-tempered denigration. The present age,
like Coleridge’s, might be described as “this age of personality, this
age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are
worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless
head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.”
Not that even men of genius have always been just to each other. Byron
was unjust to Shakespeare and Keats: Keats was unjust to Pope. But we
do not demand sound criticism as a right from a great poet, who may
easily feel the partiality of a specialist. The meanness of the mean
critic is of quite another sort. He is a fox without a tail, who could
only feel important in a world of foxes without tails. He is always
in search of a standard according to which even he will have a chance
of seeming great. That is why in every generation good writers are
attacked and dull writers are exalted by this sort of critic. The cult
of the dull, of the mediocre, is necessary in order that he, too, may
win some reverence. The whole thing is, it seems to me, a pathetic
delusion. The critic may for a time organise fame for dull painters
and dull writers, and he may win a year’s or ten years’ praise by doing
so. But all the time he is losing that generous and disinterested
spirit which is one of the most precious possessions of the artist. The
ordinary writer sets out with the hope of qualifying for a place in the
temple of fame: he ends too often by merely qualifying for a place in
the _Dunciad_. He may be a man of one talent, which would serve well
enough if put to proper uses, but he prefers to hide it and to pretend
that it is ten, railing all the while at others on the ground that they
have only five. I used to think that it was un-Christian of the Founder
of Christianity to give the man with one talent so poor a name compared
to the man with five or the man with ten. But I have long since come
to see that in doing so he spoke out of a profound knowledge of human
nature. The man with one talent is the most likely of all to make no
use of it. He does not see that even his poverty may be turned into
riches, as is obvious when one remembers such Lilliputian and immortal
poets as Lovelace. He is blinded by a sense of his insignificance.
He has the false humility of the frog, which is not content to be a
first-rate frog but must try to swell itself into a bull.
The spectacle of the bad critic would be matter for pity were it not
that he has some influence on the immediate fate of good writers. He
cannot prevent the recognition of a Keats, but he can delay it. “Mr.
Hunt,” said _Blackwood’s_, “is a small poet, but he is a clever man.
Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty
abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil.... We
venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a
second time venture £50 upon anything he can write.” The attacks on
Keats, it has been contended, were animated by political rather than
literary rivalry. But, whatever their origin, they were a crime against
the spirit of disinterestedness, which is the holy spirit of criticism.
Niggardliness with praise is as shabby a vice as niggardliness with
money, and I have often noticed that the man who is a miser with the
one is a miser with the other. It is the most unattractive form of
selfishness. The critics, however, did not write down Keats: they
succeeded only in writing down themselves. And yet, every now and
then, we find someone clamouring for a return of the good old days of
_Blackwood’s_ and the _Quarterly_. Are our own days, then, lacking in
“foolish, trivial, almost ostentatiously dishonest” criticism? It would
be pleasant to think so. But I suspect that folly and dishonesty have
not disappeared but have merely changed their style. What is needed in
criticism to-day, as always, is the sympathetic imagination. A fool
with a sledge-hammer is of no service to literature. We need the comic
sense to laugh at folly, the moral sense to make war on cant. There is
no need for wrath in criticism except in presence of pretentiousness.
The pretentious is the grand enemy of literature as of religion. But in
regard to the small sins of literature, we may as well cultivate the
same tolerance that a good-natured man feels towards the small sins of
life. To be tolerant is not to resign either one’s moral or artistic
standards. The greatest moralists of the world have been the most
tolerant. Intolerance, indeed, is only a part of the general cult of
dullness. It would confine the arts to a coterie, and steal Shakespeare
himself from the world at large, on the ground that the world cannot
appreciate him. It would turn literature into a pedantic mystery, and
make an end of it as a noble entertainment. But, alas, intolerance and
dullness are immortal, and we shall always have a war between them, on
the one hand, and the Keatses and the Molières on the other. And the
Keatses and the Molières will go on writing, and it may be that they
would not be so firmly rooted if it were not for the fierce wind of
stupid words that so constantly assails them. All may be for the best.
Without dullness to contend against, beauty and wit might succumb to
Capua.
MORE OR LESS MODERN
I
MR. MAX BEERBOHM
1. THE STUDENT OF PERFECTION