of the Moselle has kept its real spirit, its individual soul, alive
underneath the covering of conquest and administration. If Treves were
to-morrow to become again, as it was in the past for so many centuries,
a State, there would be hardly any change to the eye. The same
sharply-cut hills going in succession like cliffs along the valley--the
typical hills of Lorraine which Claude loved--would still carry the
same terraced vineyards, and the specially Northern cultivation of the
grape would show all its accustomed marks.
As one goes up the valley, one may still see upon one of the sandstone
slabs of the steep above the river road, a sign marking the limit of
the jurisdiction of the Archbishop, a crozier and a cross deeply carved
into the smooth rock. It is a symbol of what Treves was in the past, of
its strong local character and individuality. Perhaps some later symbol
will mark the resurrection of that spirit.
There is also in the heart of the town something which the people may
well boast of as a mark of their Western inheritance. It is the first
of the Gothic churches of Germany.
It came surprisingly early. Suger had planted, during the Second
Crusade, three miles north of the Gate of Paris, the aboriginal pointed
arch from which so vast a revolution in architecture was to spring.
You get the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the whole movement of the Ile
de France. But this little church, right up against the tremendous
cathedral of the Dark Ages, this little church here, hundreds of miles
away from the Gallic origin of such things, was begun actually within a
hundred years of Suger's innovation! St. Louis was still a boy, and so
was Henry III of England, when the first stones of the delicate thing
were laid here in Treves. How European and civilised a place it was in
those days!
And talking of this church, I came upon something there even more
astonishing than its early witness to the Western spirit of Treves.
Immediately to the left of the choir I also found a witness of the
_endurance_ of civilisation in Treves--a thing of, I suppose, the other
day--a little statue in freestone, of the most heavenly sort: what the
will of an English king prettily called "_Mariolam quemdam_"--"some
little Madonna or other."
It seemed to be unknown. There was no reproduction of it in the town.
No one had a photograph of it. No one could tell me who had carved it.
It looked quite new. It was as good a thing as even I have seen. And it
was here in Treves! It was in a place which finds itself upon the map
(as the map still insecurely stands) mixed up with the monstrosities of
the monument of Leipsic, the hideous vulgarity of the Hohenzollerns and
their palace at Posen (but I forgot--Posen is no longer counted upon
the same map; it has been restored to civilisation), the comic streets
of Berlin.
Seeing such a noble statue there, I thought to myself of what advantage
it would be if the people who write about Europe would really travel.
If only they would stop going from one large cosmopolitan hotel to
another, and giving us cuttings from newspapers as the expressions of
the popular soul! If only they would peer about and walk and see things
with their eyes!
This little statue to the left of the choir of Treves would be an
education for such men. No longer would they talk of Treves as
something identical with strange and distant Koenigsberg or as a cousin
to base Frankfort. It would no longer be for them a railway station or
a dot upon the map. Even as I looked at that statue I bethought myself
of that other statue: the enormity at Metz. For, as we all know, the
Prussian Government built, or rather plastered, onto the Western porch
of Metz a red statue of the late Emperor and Prussian King. He appears
as the Prophet Daniel! The rest of the cathedral is of a marvellous
and aged grey, but he is red, carved out of red stone. He is dressed
up in a sort of monk's habit with a cowl. His moustaches are turned up
fiercely at the end--and yet the statue is solemnly inscribed with that
title: "The Prophet Daniel"....
These are the things that our generation has seen and that posterity
will not believe.
ON THE CATHEDRAL OF SEVILLE AND "THE MISANTHROPE"
I, within one week, experienced, felt, saw and handled with my mind,
the two chief creations of the human spirit: a marvellous piece of
luck! I heard Mass in Seville Cathedral on an autumn Sunday. The Sunday
after I sat at the Français marvelling at _The Misanthrope_.
These two creations, the one in stone, the other in The Verb, are, so
far as I know, the summit of our European creative power, and therefore
of the world.
They praise the Giralda of Seville, the great tower outside the
Cathedral, and they are right. But they are wrong when they praise it
with a more or less conscious motive of crying up Islam and running
down their own blood. The beauty of the Giralda is not an Islamic
beauty, though Islam built the most of it. It is what it is because
Europe repairs and finishes. If you doubt it you may go and look at
its twin tower, the great Tower of Hassan on the Hill above Rabat.
That huge brown tower at Rabat looks over the Atlantic Seas, towards
its sister, the Giralda: an imperfect thing looking at a perfected
thing: a thing essentially weak because not permanent, looking at a
symbol of permanence: a thing destined to ruin looking at a thing
destined to life. And I say in the maugre of the teeth of those with
whom I disagree that the Giralda would not be the Giralda but for its
Christian cap. However, there it stands, useful at least as a contrast.
For if the Giralda be very beautiful (as it is), what is it compared
to the Cathedral itself? _That_ building can never be excelled. Our
race once, in one great moment of three centuries, reached its highest
level. We shall hardly return to such a summit.
The Gallic spirit had created the Gothic; the unfathomed suggestion of
the perfect ogive, of the uplifted arch of 60 degrees, had spread from
Paris outward; it had built all the ring of great shrines--Chartres,
Beauvais, Amiens, Rheims. It was proceeding in outer circles to
Britain, and even to the Rhine and beyond, and on through the
Reconquista, southwards, shooting up Burgos like a fire, and planting
the nobility of Oviedo and Leon, when the Christian cavalry entered
Seville and began the last and the noblest of all those things. What a
mood of making, what an enlarging passion to produce and to form and
to express, must have possessed the men who through those centuries
completed that thing! It is everything from the thirteenth century to
the _Reyes Catolicos_; it is everything from St. Ferdinand to Ferdinand
and Isabella.
Castille rode in and made this marvellous thing. I wonder what Aragon
would have done? Often, as I have gone down the banks of that torrent,
which is also a god, and which gave its name to a mighty kingdom,
often, as I have gone down the gorge of the Pyrenees with the Aragon
tumbling at my side, I have meditated upon its spirit; broader, I
think, less piercing, with more grasp, less thrust, than the chivalry
to the west, than the raiders of Castille; suffused, I think, with the
Catalan spirit (though they would hate to be told it), and in some way
at once less solemn and yet more solid. That was Aragon.
But Aragon had no chance to spread south. It was blocked. It was
Castille that rode in and made this thing the Cathedral of Seville. And
in making it, Castille made the greatest monument which the race of men
can boast.
There is some unexplained power in proportion which not only
symbolises, not only suggests, but actually presents that which has no
proportions; the illimitable vastness--Eternity.
There is a mystery about just proportion. It has this magic about
it--that it can express at once both the sublime and the merely
accurate. It will suggest repose, it will suggest a disdainful
superiority to inferior things, it carries a patent of nobility always,
but in rare times and places it can also effect what I have said--the
vision of the eternal.
A man in the Cathedral of Seville understands the end of his being. He
is, while standing there on earth, surrounded by stones and rocks of
the earth, with his own body in decay and all about him in decay--he
is, in the midst of all this material affair, yet in some side-manner
out of it all; he is half in possession of the final truths. Nowhere
else in the world, that I know of, has the illimitable fixed itself in
material. Divinity is here impetricate.
It is not only proportion that does this at Seville--it is also
multiplicity. It is not only that mark of true creative power--the
making of something more than that you meant to make--it is also that
other mark of creative power--diversity, endless breeding, burgeoning,
foison, which everywhere clothes this amazing result. Seville has not
(in proportion to its area, its great space) the actual number of
carven things which glorify Brou, the Jewel of the House of Savoy. It
has not perhaps any one statue which will match the immortal Magdalen
of Brou or her cousin Katherine or the modern and (to my astonishment)
German little sandstone Madonna of Treves which I have written of in
this book, nor that other Madonna praying to her own self, which for a
long time I believed to be the loveliest figure in the world. I mean
the one over the Southern porch of Rheims (the barbaric ineptitude
missed it and it still remains). But if Seville has not some one
statue, it has the effect of multiplicity more greatly developed
than any other building I know, and here again you will ask yourself
in vain, as the creators of Seville themselves would have asked
themselves in vain, how that effect arose. It is so; and there stands
Seville. If you would know how silence can be full and how a supreme
unity can be infinitely diverse, if you would touch all the mysteries
and comprehend them as well as they can be comprehended within the
limits of our little passage through the daylight, you must see
Seville. But do not go there in Holy Week.
* * * * *
And _The Misanthrope_.
The supreme art of words is to produce a multiple and profound effect
with simplicity in construction. There is hardly in this masterpiece
one phrase which is not the phrase of convention or of daily use.
Where the words are not the words that men used, or the sentences
the sentences they used at the Court of Louis XIV, then they are the
words conventionally used in the heroic couplets of that day. And each
character has a set of lines to declaim (not very much), and there
is, you may say, no rhetoric, and there is, you may say, no lyric,
no deliberate poignancy; one might venture a paradox and say that in
_The Misanthrope_ there was no "effect," meaning no sudden, sharp,
contrasted effect. This mighty comedy of Molière's represents no more
than the simplest conjunction, the everyday business of a man who
expects too much of mankind, who is in love and expects too much of the
lady, who has a friend, a man who gives him good advice, and another
friend, a woman, who herself would marry him willingly enough, and who
yet advises him quietly and is more a support than a lover. There is
hardly any plot--merely the discovery that the young widow for whom the
Misanthrope feels such passion is a chatterbox and runs her friends
down behind their backs for the sake of tattle. There is the fatuous
bad versifier. There are the silly men of the world.
Such are the materials of _The Misanthrope_, common stones: and into
them a man did once breathe such life that he made a thing standing
quite apart from all his other creations, and something higher than
anything any other had accomplished. What depths and further depths!
What suggestions to the left and to the right! What infinite complexity
of real character (and just that infinite complexity of real character
exists in all of us), shines through those few pages, illumines and
glorifies two hours of acting on a stage!
There is perhaps no man intelligent and sensitive and having passed
the age of forty who will not, as he watches the acting of _The
Misanthrope_, see all that he knows of life passing before him and
sounding exactly in tune with the vibrations of his own soul. There is
passionate love, intense and disappointed, and there is the foil to
passion; that large, that honest, that domestic thing which rare women
possess, and, when they possess it, afford food, sustenance, sacrament
to the life of men. There is friendship; there is the ideal sought and
unattained; there is the disappointment to which all noble souls are
doomed. There is all human story put into one little frame. How? No one
can tell how. Molière himself could not have told how.
When those simple words, spoken quickly and in a low tone--"_Morbleu!
Faut il que je vous aime_"--are heard, the man's whole self, his whole
past (if he has loved fully), his security, his doubt, all of him
respond. Why? I cannot tell. I only know that the great poets do it,
and they themselves do not know how. It is the Muse. It is something
divine. It is inspiration.
It is inspiration. That word was justly framed. It would seem that
among the few consolations afforded to the miserable race of men,
among the little hints of a possible coming Beatitude, the Creator has
especially chosen from his storehouse this gem, this priceless gem, of
poetical power. I am reminded of it when I read the foolish judgment so
often repeated--that the Ancients had no landscape.
[Greek: "... oi rha min ôka
Thêsouo en Lukiês eureiês pioni dêmps."]
When I read that I see what I think Flaxman saw, the sunlight on the
Ægean, the Asian hills, and the fertile plain between; I feel the
warmer air. Yet is there not one word which describes these things,
unless you except the common word and symbol which says that Lycia is
rich. Tennyson did it too: "And the moon was full." So did Byron: "The
moon is up and yet it is not night." So did Shakespeare in "gentle and
low an excellent thing in women." So did Virgil: "_Et inania regna_."
So do they all.
But Molière in _The Misanthrope_ did it _all the time_. It is not
single lines (though I have quoted one); it is the whole river of the
thing, high in flood-tide, up to the top of its banks, broad, deep,
majestic, and upon a scale to which (one would have thought) mere man
could never reach.
All that!
For two hours, hearing this thing, I was quite outside the world; and
the memory of it is a possession which should endure, I think, for
ever; by which word I mean, even beyond the limitations of this life.
But therein I may be wrong.
ON THE "BUCOLICS" OF VIRGIL, A CAFÉ IN PARIS, THE LENGTH OF ESSAYS,
PHŒBUS, BACCHUS, A WANTON MAID, AND OTHER MATTERS
A fruitful subject for discussion in these days of war, foreign and
civil, ruin, approaching pestilence, eclipse and veiling of the gods,
is the proper place in which to read the _Bucolics_ of the poet Virgil.
Some would suggest a pastoral scene--a rising mound near some clear
river, or even the shade of a beech. Others a library brown with age,
dusty, and (please God) all the windows shut; oaken also, the roof not
high, the whole cut up into little compartments each with a wicket-gate
as libraries should be. Others would suggest bed--though that connotes
a complete acquaintance with the text. Others a railway journey, for on
such an occasion the mind is well cut off from interference by modern
things: that is, supposing the railway journey to be a fast one between
two very distant points--for there is no more distracting passage of
time than a journey in a slow train which stops at every station.
Others have suggested ship-board, which seems to me simply silly. For,
apart from the difficulty of reading anything at sea, there is the
gross unsuitability of time and place for the lovely lines of the
Eclogues.
And so on. It is a weighty matter for discussion, and one that can
never end, because it all turns upon an individual whim.
But for my part the place where I like to read the _Bucolics_ of Virgil
is at a table outside the door of a certain café facing the Bourse in
Paris; a table in the open air. The time of day in which this exercise
most pleases me is about two o'clock of an early summer afternoon.
As to why this should be so, I cannot tell. Locke would explain it
perhaps by his "Association of Ideas"; but Locke is dead and gone.
Perhaps once in boyhood, just in that place or in such a place, I first
was struck by the beauty of such and such a line. At any rate, that is
the place where now it pleases me to read the immortal stuff: a certain
café opposite the Bourse in Paris, sitting at a table in the open air,
in summer, with the book before me on a marble slab. There do I best
receive within my mind (aided by a crib) the noble outlines of the
Appennine, the Lombard Plain, the long shadows at evening, the bleating
of the flock.
Some little way before me, as I read, the howling mob, which clamours
all afternoon, buying and selling round the colonnade of the Bourse,
continues its surge. Individual voices at that distance are lost;
all you hear is the sea of human avarice and folly in its violence
confused.
Why on earth this singular piece of baseness, the roar of men buying
and selling and picking each other's pockets, should form a suitable
background in my mind for the delicate notes of the pipe in the wood
and the long regrets of the shepherds, heaven only knows. But so it is.
I wondered only this year as I re-read the heavenly poet in that place
(opposite the Bourse in Paris, the Vile Stock Exchange) whether the
advance of barbarism might not produce--and that in a very few years--a
generation to whom all these lines will be as tedious as is Corneille
to the educated Englishman of to-day.
I can imagine men still reasonably cultivated, still in part acquainted
with the Latin tongue, and yet fallen into such a degraded mood that
only here and there some specially vivid picture or some piece of
stronger rhetoric in the Eclogues shall touch them, while the rest will
appear mechanical, dry stuff. For there is a degree of descent in the
mind after which the magic of verse disappears; and that sacred quality
whereby--none can tell how--a particular disposition of words stirs the
mind in a fashion that is to common experience what music is to speech,
and what colour is to form, no longer effects its purpose.
I was reading the other day in the work of a Colonial, whose amusing
conceits we all properly admire and whose honest morals help to make
his work pleasant, a most amazing judgment passed by him upon the poet
Homer.
It seemed to him that the poet Homer did not write poetry at all. He
said it sounded to him, compared with real poetry, modern poetry, live
poetry (the Cad's Laureate, let us say), like the rude scratching of a
savage knife upon a wall compared with some glorious work of art, such
as a Coronation picture at the Royal Academy.... Well, well, well!...
Shall I attempt to criticise the Colonial? No, I will not.
The truth is, that when you come to criticise certain modern enormities
your instrument fails. The thing is too big for you altogether.
You can pick up a cricket ball with your hand; you can handle a
ten-foot spherical buoy with a crane. But how are you to deal with a
rounded mass several miles across? How are we to deal with _mountains_
of ineptitude? How is criticism to approach those last new literary
moods which are deaf to the ancients? I fear it cannot deal with such
moods at all. If a man feels like that, he feels like that, and one can
say no more. And if there is to come a time when men shall read:
_Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,_
and make no more of it than "Passengers must cross the line by the
bridge. Penalty £5," why, there it is! Things have their rising and
their setting. But before that day comes may the earth cover me.
* * * * *
If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes,
as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete,
I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very
good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world
in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words
long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or
a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special
length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing
this, at random, a vagary of the mind.
But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law
that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain
length.
There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best
would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For
instance:
_Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me_
_Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus._
This is not only a beautiful phrase, it is also true--and I am grateful
to the Delian. I will do my best never to put him out. I will keep by
me a few flowers for such a patron.
By the way, talking of that lovely couplet, do you know (it is true, it
is not a lie, I have the very words before me as I write)--do you know
that a gentleman still living translated that couplet thus: "Phœbus
loves me and I in my turn have gifts for Phœbus--laurels, and the
sweet blush of the hyacinth."
But this is not so wrong a rendering after all as that for which a
contemporary of mine was once responsible in the noblest and most
learned of the Oxford Colleges. For this man said (viva voce, it is
true) that certain Greek lines which really meant "at evening soft dew
descends upon the earth," signified in English, "Towards nightfall the
huge female sea monster crawls up upon the sand." Each a picture; the
one sweet, the other strong--but how different one from the other!
And as I have begun quoting, why not go on?
_Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,_
_Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri._
You may, if you like, apply this to yourself just as I applied the
first lines to myself. At any rate I will have nothing to do with them.
And really I can think of nothing more to say, and I must bring this to
an end.... But as I write, but as I write, a stream comes down from the
mountains, a girl escapes beyond the willow trees.
ON TITLES
In those long lists which the divine Rabelais delighted to string
together, wherewith also he has inspired many diverse men, Charles
Kingsley, Besant, and that remarkable historian York Powell to boot,
there is one omitted which I sometimes think Rabelais meant to write
and never did; and that is, the list of books which might well be
produced for the advancement and entertainment of mankind.
He did indeed produce a most glorious library of books, collected, if
you remember, for the education of the giant, every title in which
is a delight; and much better fun, I think, when you do not know the
allusions than when you do. Much better, that is, when you think it
was entirely made up out of Rabelais' head than when you get to know
that most of it was a parody on existing tomes. But he never gave us a
list of books which might exist and do not, and such a list is always
running in my head. From time to time I have jotted down a few names
for such books, and the regiment of them is now formidable. My only
hesitation in publishing it (or rather a fragment of it) is lest some
reader should steal my thunder and himself begin writing one of these
books. But I am charitable, and I also have sufficient knowledge of
time and space and human conditions to be certain that I cannot in what
is left of my life write them all myself, so I may as well throw out
the suggestions.
(1.) BRITISH HONOURS. _Being a guide to Literary Gents and Lion
Hunters, showing what Official Honours now exist in all States subject
to the British Crown, with their Distinctions, Emoluments (if any),
Order of Precedence and Method of Address in writing and in speech.
As also an Appendix showing the consequences mediate and immediate
following on the possession of each of such Honours by any man or
woman, and the consequent privileges of rank or custom attaching to
their relatives, children and dependents. The whole illustrated by
a copious Index with a coloured Frontispiece showing an Earl in his
Robes, and sundry diagrams._
Now, this would be a most useful book, and I do not think I will go on
with my list because it is in itself a subject not for one poor essay
but for a very pamphlet of examination and discussion.