the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common
sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem
of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the
problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any
national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart,
even when he praises the League of Nations with his lips. He desires a
world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather
than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but
only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable.
Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal
that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think
that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of
the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of
world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever
its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It
remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and
does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that
the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of
individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a
man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the
Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the
family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every
man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties--loyalty to
himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to
the world. The religion of the brotherhood of man must bow to this
fact, or it must fail. To ignore it is to be a doctrinaire--to fail,
that is, to bring home one’s doctrine to men’s business and bosoms. It
is to sit above the battle so far as the immediate issues with which
mankind is faced are concerned. Mr. Wells has rendered an immense
service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and
the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope
through which we can look back and see man struggling out of the mud
and can look forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle.
I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route
to the pinnacle--whether he does not expect us to reach it as the
crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep
rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to
fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows.
The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its
driving-force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to
the idea of the world as one place.
V
MR. CLUTTON-BROCK
Mr. Clutton-Brock is a critic with an unusual equality of interests.
He seems to be the centre of an almost perfect circle, and literature,
painting, religion, philosophy, ethics, and education are the all but
equal radii that connect him with the circumference. Many writers have
been as versatile, but few have been as symmetrical. He has all his
gifts in due proportion. He is not more æsthetic than moral, or more
moral than æsthetic. His idealism and his intellect balance each other
exactly. His matter and his manner are twins. He produces on us the
effect of a harmony, not of a nature in conflict with itself. Had he
lived in the ancient world, he would probably have been a teacher of
philosophy. He has gifts of temper as well as powers of exposition and
understanding that make him a teacher even to-day, whether he will or
not. He does not speak down to us from the chair, but he is at our
elbows murmuring with exquisite restraint yet with an eagerness only
half-hidden the “nothing too much” of the Greeks, the “Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty” of Keats, the good news that the flesh and spirit are not
enemies but friends, and that the Earth for the wise man is not at odds
with Paradise.
Those who shrink from virtue as from a split infinitive sometimes
speak in disparagement of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head
of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side,
and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell
which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a
virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme
differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he
measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which
goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. His ideal
man is the _kalos k’ agathos_ of ancient Athens. He goes among authors
in quest of this part-song in their work. He misses it in the later
Tolstoy: he discovers it in Marvell and Vaughan. He is not to be put
off, however, with a forced and unnatural antiphony. He is critical
of the antiphony of body and soul that announces “All’s well!” in
Whitman’s verse. He finds in Whitman not organic cheerfulness but
functional cheerfulness--“willed cheerfulness,” he calls it. And he
says of Whitman with penetrating wisdom: “He was a man not strong
enough in art or in life to do without that willed cheerfulness; it
is for him a defence like irony, though a newer, more democratic,
more American defence.” He writes with equal wisdom when he says that
Whitman “has got a great part of his popularity from those who were
grateful to him for saying so firmly and so often what they wished to
believe.” But might not this be said of all poets of hope? Might it not
be said of Shelley and of Browning? I am not sure, indeed, that Mr.
Clutton-Brock does not do serious injustice to Whitman in exaggerating
the element of reaction in him against old fears as well as old forms.
His discovery of the secret of what is false in Whitman has partly
blinded him to the secret of what is true. Otherwise, how could he ask
us whether there is anything in _Leaves of Grass_ that moves us as we
are moved by Edgar Allan Poe’s _The Sleeper_? Can he have forgotten
_Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_, to name but one of Whitman’s
profoundly moving poems? Mr. Clutton-Brock does, indeed, end his essay
with fine if tempered praise of Whitman’s genius. But his essay as
a whole is a question-mark, expressing a doubt of something false,
something even “faked.”
His essay on Poe is more sympathetic. He finds in Poe, not a false
harmony, but a real discord--a pitiable discord. “There was a fatal
separation,” we are told, “between his intellect and his emotions,
except in a very few of his poems, because he could not value life or
human nature in comparison with the life and the nature of that other
planet for which he was homesick. So he exercised his intellect on
games, but with a thwarted passion which gives a surprising interest
and beauty even to his detective stories.” This is well said, but, as
we read the essay, we become aware of a curious ultra-fastidiousness
in Mr. Clutton-Brock--a lack of vulgarity, in the best sense of the
word. We see this in his attitude to Poe’s most popular work; he
dismisses _The Raven_ and _The Bells_ as “fit to be recited at penny
readings.” That certainly has been their fate, but it does not prevent
them from being masterpieces in their kind--the _jeux d’esprit_ of
a planet-struck man. They are not, however, we may admit, the poems
that reveal Poe as an inspired writer. It is a much more serious thing
for Mr. Clutton-Brock to omit _Annabel Lee_ from the list of the six
poems or so, on which Poe’s reputation as a poet rests. _Annabel
Lee_ is a work of genius, if Poe ever wrote a work of genius. _Helen,
Thy Beauty is to Me_--which has none of its faults--is the only one
of his poems that challenges its supremacy, perhaps successfully.
Mr. Clutton-Brock’s essay on the other hand, will be of service to
the general reader if it gives him the feeling that Poe is to be
approached, not as a hackneyed author, but as a writer of undiscovered
genius. He does not exaggerate the beauty of _The Sleeper_, though he
exaggerates its place in Poe’s work. The truth is, Poe is a neglected
poet. The average reader regards him as too well known to be worth
reading, and _The Sleeper_, _The City in the Sea_ and _Romance_ are
ignored because _The Bells_ has fallen into the hands of popular
reciters.
Mr. Clutton-Brock has the happy gift of taking his readers into the
presence of most of his authors in the spirit of discoverers. It is
not that he aims at originality or paradox. He is always primarily
in search of truth, even when he gets on a false scent. His essay on
Meredith is a series of interesting guesses at truth, some of which
are extremely suggestive, and some of which seem to me to miss the
mark. The most suggestive is the remark that _Love in the Valley_ is
not only written on “a theme that inspired the music of the first
folk-songs,” but that the verse itself has “for its underlying tune”
a folk-measure--the old Saturnian measure of the Romans. Macaulay, it
may be remembered, was startled to learn that his ballad of “brave
Horatius” was written largely in the Saturnian metre, and still more
startled when he was unable to find any perfect example of this metre
in English verse, except:
The Queen was in her parlour, eating bread and honey.
It comes as something of a shock to be told that the lines--
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star;
are musically akin to:
Lars Porsena of Clusium,
By the nine gods he swore.
And Mr. Clutton-Brock would be the last man to pretend that it is the
same music we find in both. Meredith’s variations on the old tune are,
he makes clear, as important a part of the music as is the old tune
itself. “It is folk-song with the modern orchestra like the symphonies
of Dvorák, and it combines a singing rhythm with sharpness and fullness
of detail as they had never before been combined in romantic poetry.”
Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess
of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which
make _Love in the Valley_ probably the most enduring of Meredith’s
works.
I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith
as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith’s
witty characters, or mouthpieces, are “always subsidiary and often
unpleasant,” like the wise youth in _Richard Feverel_. Meredith, he
declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot
do without.” He “would never make a hero more witty than he could help,
for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths
whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with
cleverness, and never aimed at it.” This is only partly true. It is
partly true in regard to Meredith’s men, and not true at all in regard
to his women. _Diana of the Crossways_ alone is enough to disprove
it. Meredith’s heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations;
and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural
air. His _Essay on Comedy_ is a witty dithyramb in praise of wit. Mr.
Clutton-Brock seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith
when he says that “if he had had less genius, less power of speech,
less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist.” As a matter
of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud
essayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a
proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a
fascinating arrogance.
It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every
good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do.
Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay,
“The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the
current over-estimate of the prose--the excellent prose--of Mr. Hudson.
The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as
to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his
thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is
an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships
beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are
rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments
on authors.
VI
HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS
Henley was a master of the vainglorious phrase. He was Pistol with
a style. He wrote in order to be overheard. His words were sturdy
vagabonds, bawling and swaggering. “Let us be drunk,” he cried in one
of his _rondeaux_, and he made his words exultant as with wine.
He saw everywhere in Nature the images of the lewd population of
midnight streets. For him even the moon over the sea was like some old
hag out of a Villon ballade:
Flaunting, tawdry and grim,
From cloud to cloud along her beat,
Leering her battered and inveterate leer,
She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,
Her horrible old man,
Mumbling old oaths and warming
His villainous old bones with villainous talk.
Similarly, the cat breaking in upon the exquisite dawn that wakes the
“little twitter-and-cheep” of the birds in a London Park becomes a
picturesque and obscene figure:
Behold
A rakehell cat--how furtive and acold!
A spent witch homing from some infamous dance--
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!
Or, again, take the description of the East Wind in _London
Voluntaries_:
Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent influence released
From the most squalid cellarage of hell,
The Wind-fiend, the abominable--
The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light--
Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,
Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;
And in a cloud unclean
Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate run and range,
Into a dire intensity of life,
A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London Town.
This is, of its kind, remarkable writing. It may not reflect a
poetic view of life, but it reflects a romantic and humorous view.
Henley’s humour is seldom good humour: it is, rather, a sort of
boisterous invective. His phrases delight us like the oaths of some
old sea-captain if we put ourselves in the mood of delight. And how
extravagantly he flings them down, like a pocketful of money on the
counter of a bar! He may only be a pauper, behaving like a rich man,
but we, who are his guests for an hour, submit to the illusion and
become happy echoes of his wild talk.
For he has the gift of language. It is not the loud-sounding sea
but loud-sounding words that are his passion. Compared to Henley,
even Tennyson was modest in his use of large Latin negatives. His
eloquence is sonorous with the music of “immemorial,” “intolerable,”
“immitigable,” “inexorable,” “unimaginable,” and the kindred train
of words. He is equally in love with “wonderful,” “magnificent,”
“miraculous,” “immortal,” and all the flock of adjectival enthusiasm.
Here in this radiant and immortal street,
he cries, as he stands on a spring day in Piccadilly. He did not use
sounding adjectives without meaning, however. His adjectives express
effectively that lust of life that distinguishes him from other
writers. For it is lust of life, in contradistinction to love, that is
the note of Henley’s work. He himself lets us into this secret in the
poem that begins:
Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb.
Again, when he writes of Piccadilly in spring, he cries:
Look how the liberal and transfiguring air
Washes this inn of memorable meetings,
This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,
Till, through its jocund loveliness of length
A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore,
A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,
It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,
Some vision multitudinous and agleam,
Of happiness as it shall be evermore!
The spectacle of life produced in Henley an almost exclusively physical
excitement. He did not wish to see things transfigured by the light
that never was on sea or land. He preferred the light on the wheels
of a hansom cab or, at best, the light that falls on the Thames
as it flows through London. His attitude to life, in other words,
was sensual. He could escape out of circumstances into the sensual
enchantments of the _Arabian Nights_, but there was no escape for him,
as there is for the great poets, into the general universe of the
imagination. This physical obsession may be put down in a measure
to his long years of ill-health and struggle. But even a healthy and
prosperous Henley, I fancy, would have been restless, dissatisfied,
embittered. For him most seas were Dead Seas, and most shores were
desolate. The sensualist’s “Dust and Ashes!” breaks in, not always
mournfully, but at times angrily, upon the high noon of his raptures.
He longs for death as few poets have longed:
Of art and drink I have had my fill,
he declares, and the conclusion of the whole matter is:
For the end I know is the best of all.
To his mother, to his sister, to Stevenson he writes this recurrent
message--the glad tidings of death to come. Man’s life is for him but a
child’s wanderings among the shows of a fair:
Till at last,
Tired of experience he turns
To the friendly and comforting breast
Of the old nurse, Death.
And in most of his poems on this theme it seems to be the peace of the
grave he desires, not an immortality of new experiences. There is one
moving poem, however, dedicating the “windlestraws” of his verse to his
wife in which a reference to their dead child suggests that he, too,
may have felt the hunger for immortality:
Poor windlestraws
On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time
And Chance and Change, I know!
But they are yours, as I am, till we attain
That end for which we make, we two that are one:
A little exquisite Ghost
Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes
Seen in this world, and calling, calling still
In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties
Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave,
Break the poor heart to hear:
“_Come, Dadsie, come?
Mama, how long--how long?_”
Sufferer and sensualist, Henley found in the affections some relief
from his savage unrest. It was affection that painted that masterly
sonnet-portrait of Stevenson in _Apparition_, and there is affection,
too, in that song in praise of England, _Pro Rege Nostro_, though much
of his praise of England, like his praise of life, is but poetry of
lust. Lust in action, unfortunately, has a way of being absurd, and
Henley is often absurd in his lustful--by which one does not mean
lascivious--poems. His _Song of the Sword_ and his _Song of Speed_ are
both a little absurd in their sheer lustfulness. Here we have a mere
extravagance of physical exultation, with a great deal of talk about
“the Lord,” who is--to the ruin of the verse--a figure of rhetoric and
phrase of excitement, and not at all the Holy Spirit of the religious.
Henley, indeed, was for the most part not a religious man but an
egoist. He saw his own shadow everywhere on the universe, like the
shadow of a crippled but undefeated lion. He saw himself sometimes with
pity, oftener with pride. One day he found his image in an “old, black
rotter of a boat” that lay stranded at Shoreham:
With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,
That makes me think of legs and a broken spine.
But he preferred to think, as in the most famous of his poems, of his
“unconquerable soul,” and to enjoy the raree-show of life heroically
under the promise of death. To call this attitude vainglorious is not
to belittle it. Henley was a master in his own school of literature,
and his works live after him. His commixture of rude and civil phrase
may be a dangerous model for other writers, but with what skill he
achieves the right emphasis and witty magniloquence of effect! He
did not guess (or guess at) the secrets of life, but he watched the
pageant with a greedy eye, sketched one or two figures that amused or
attracted him, and cheered till his pen ought to have been hoarse. He
also cursed, and, part of the time, he played with rhymes, as if in an
interchange of railleries. But, in all circumstances, he was a valiant
figure--valiant not only in words but in the service of words. We need
not count him among the sages, but literature has also room for the
sightseers, and Henley will have a place among them for many years to
come.
VII
LORD ROSEBERY
Lord Rosebery’s oratory is the port at a banquet. It is a little
somnolent in its charm. Mr. Birrell has a better cellar of the livelier
French wines. But the Rosebery port is a wine without which no memorial
dinner can come to a perfect end. It is essentially the wine of memory.
It is used to moisten monumental effigies as champagne is used to
christen ships. As you read his two volumes of _Miscellanies_, you get
the impression that, wherever there is an effigy to be unveiled, you
will find Lord Rosebery present with his noble aspersion of words. I
do not know whether Lord Rosebery himself chooses what effigies he
will talk about or whether he has them chosen for him. It is difficult
to imagine a statue on which he would not talk admirably. He is the
greatest living showman of statues. Even when there is no statue to
be unveiled, but only a centenary to be commemorated, he usually sees
the great man in the posture of a statue--a little larger than life,
and with the sins and scandals discreetly slurred over. Hence it would
be in vain to look in his commemoration addresses for great character
studies or critical interpretations of genius. They are compliments,
not criticisms. They are spoken on behalf of all present. Lord
Rosebery’s art is the art of the funeral speech blended with the art of
the speech at a distribution of prizes. Of this difficult though minor
art he is an accomplished practitioner.
Hence it would be ridiculous to judge his addresses on Burns by the
same standards by which we judge the studies of Carlyle and Stevenson
and Henley on the same subject. Lord Rosebery’s speeches belong to
the literature of formalities, and it is their chief virtue that
they express the common view with brightness of emphasis, humour of
anecdote, and at times with a charming sentimental music of speech.
They say what everyone present would regard as the right thing to say,
and they say it very much better than anybody else on the platform
could say it. He is a spokesman, not a discoverer. His freshness is
that of a man who furnishes what is already known rather than of one
who adds to the stock of knowledge. That he has also the gifts of the
writer who can add to the stock of knowledge is shown by his humorous,
fascinating and amiable portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill. Here
he speaks for himself, not for the meeting. Lord Randolph is as real
to him as a character in fiction, with his spell, his impudence and
his disaster. As we read this story we feel that, if he cared, Lord
Rosebery might write a book of reminiscences, telling with detached
frankness the whole truth about himself and his great associates, which
would have an immortal place in English biographical literature. For
the present, however, we must be content that there should be someone
who can speak the general mind on Burns and Burke, on Oliver Cromwell
and Dr. Johnson, with a hint of majesty and a lulling charm.