You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes
briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with a long steady rush,
like the breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at hand, the branches
move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its
heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a
bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or
you may time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's
axe. From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not
sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of
the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear
suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit
past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in
green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandolier; and then, out of the
thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds
are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through
the clearings, and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you,
where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot,
and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a
vague excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few
people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying their
axes steadily, and old women and children gathering wood for the fire.
You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight: the old woman
laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a long branch
behind them in her wake. That is the worst of what there is to
encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure
was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat
grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall
here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders.
He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an
open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire.
The eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing
out notes on a key-bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the
neighbourhood picking violets. And the whole party as grave and silent
as the woods around them! My friend watched for a long time, he says;
but all held their peace; not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept
choosing out single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at
his work and made strange movements the while with his flexible
eyebrows. They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which
was disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical wax-works. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might
have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as
this hypothesis of his became more certain, the awful insolubility of
why they should be left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them
up again when they ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might
happen next, became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and
fairly took to his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but
he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.
Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were
automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself)
that this is all another chapter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the
young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.
MORALITY
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men. Not
one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to
spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern France have
had their word to say about Fontainebleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet,
Beranger, George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the brothers
Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each of these has done something to the
eternal praise and memory of these woods. Even at the very worst of
times, even when the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons
of Taste, the forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It
was in 1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his "Historical Description
of the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau." And very droll it is
to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what was
then permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbe, "sont
admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace:
Ut mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus mirari libet." The good man is not
exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back against
Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at any rate, was classical. For
the rest, however, the Abbe likes places where many alleys meet; or
which, like the Belle-Etoile, are kept up "by a special gardener," and
admires at the Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and
Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, "qui a fait faire ce magnifique
endroit."
But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of
the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick Francis Firsts and
vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for
consolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired out of the press of
life, as into a deep bay-window on some night of masquerade, and here
found quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is the great
moral spa; this forest without a fountain is itself the great fountain
of Juventius. It is the best place in the world to bring an old sorrow
that has been a long while your friend and enemy; and if, like
Beranger's, your gaiety has run away from home and left open the door
for sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may
expect to find the truant hid. With every hour you change. The air
penetrates through your clothes, and nestles to your living body. You
love exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals. You forget all
your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the moment
only. For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral feeling. Such
people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; but you see them
framed in the forest, like figures on a painted canvas; and for you,
they are not people in any living and kindly sense. You forget the grim
contrariety of interests. You forget the narrow lane where all men
jostle together in unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and
unclean, that gapes on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple
enough, it seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad
fancy out of a last night's dream.
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You become
enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air, where the
muscles shall be more exercised than the affections. When you have had
your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round world. You may
buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot. You may bestride a
good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted
East. You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany widespread before
you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and spired, that dream
all day on their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass
the spinal cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where
Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the
midland sea. You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may
be awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
the robin in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the
beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn
should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the lane; inn after
inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by river receive your body
in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees and
pleasant villages should compass you about; and light fellowships should
take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. You may
see from afar off what it will come to in the end--the weather-beaten
red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all
near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And
yet it will seem well--and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best--to break all the network bound about your feet by birth and
old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of phosphates
to and fro, in town and country, until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself,
and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land of
labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as
it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see
and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts
will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time
to time will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a
knowledge of its greatness is for much in the effect produced. You
reckon up the miles that lie between you and intrusion. You may walk
before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden,
or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And
there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there
was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and
these words engraved on the collar: "Caesar mini hoc donavit." It is no
wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood
aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and
following an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is
scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this
stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers
and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's hounds
and horses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, with
all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and elude Death, the
mighty hunter, for more than the span of human years? Here, also, crash
his arrows; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the gallop of the pale
horse. But he does not hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game
is thin and small: and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged
ever in the deepest thickets, you too might live on into later
generations and astonish men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an
immemorial success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing
here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the impudences of
the brawling world reach you no more. You may count your hours, like
Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression
of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through
the naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough
weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of
healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance,
all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure
daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if
perchance you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together, like an
ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory
chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as for the
staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and
harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a
battle there in the old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out
yonder where men strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and
clamorous dispute. So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the
imagination. A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as
of some dead religion.
FOOTNOTE:
[42] "Deux poures varlez qui n'out nulz gages et qui gissoient la
nuit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles
d'Orleans," i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, _ibid._ 96.
CRITICISMS
CRITICISMS
I
LORD LYTTON'S "FABLES IN SONG"
It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form
most natural to his talent. In some ways, indeed, it may be held
inferior to "Chronicles and Characters"; we look in vain for anything
like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in "Irene," or for any
such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared, here and
there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy of its
model, Hugo's "Legend of the Ages." But it becomes evident, on the most
hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a step on the way towards
the later. It seems as if the author had been feeling about for his
definite medium, and was already, in the language of the child's game,
growing hot. There are many pieces in "Chronicles and Characters" that
might be detached from their original setting, and embodied, as they
stand, among the "Fables in Song."
For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously. In the most
typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception
purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there
is something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting
criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a
hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or
foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the
fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be
more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went
on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. That
depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was
fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this
description should become less common, as men learn to suspect some
serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical story of an ape touches us
quite differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory.
Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of
fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end of
some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined punishment,
the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as we have often to
assure tearful children on the like occasions, that they may dry their
eyes, for none of it was true.
But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers
and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot
deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in
his life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern
thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into
desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in
all points except that it is not altogether fabulous. And this new form,
such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents
the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also, there
is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea; and as in
any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the reader through
the intellect rather than through the feelings; so that, without being
very deeply moved or interested by the characters of the piece, we
should recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot revolves.
But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought
humorous situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral
expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery, in
fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous. We
find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson
embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New
Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the
collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to
resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral
sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with the
development of this change, yet another is developed: the moral tends to
become more indeterminate and large. It ceases to be possible to append
it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name
below a caricature; and the fable begins to take rank with all other
forms of creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of
its miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct formula without
the loss of all that is deepest and most suggestive in it.
Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;
there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already
mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables
by the utmost possible leniency of construction. "Composure," "Et
Caetera," and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So,
too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child,
having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes
back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the
same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a bundle of
love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone by, and then
long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded and sorrowfully
disappointing as the icicle. This is merely a simile poetically worked
out; and yet it is in such as these, and some others, to be mentioned
further on, that the author seems at his best. Wherever he has really
written after the old model, there is something to be deprecated: in
spite of all the spirit and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption
of that cheerful acceptation of things as they are, which, rightly or
wrongly, we come to attribute to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a
sense as of something a little out of place. A form of literature so
very innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's
conscious and highly-coloured style. It may be bad taste, but sometimes
we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose narration, and a little
Bewick by way of tail-piece. So that it is not among those fables that
conform most nearly to the old model, but one had nearly said among
those that most widely differ from it, that we find the most
satisfactory examples of the author's manner.
In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most
remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he who
raised the wind; or that of the grocer's balance ("Cogito ergo sum") who
considered himself endowed with free-will, reason, and an infallible
practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police made a descent upon
the shop, and find the weights false and the scales unequal; and the
whole thing is broken up for old iron. Capital fables, also, in the same
ironical spirit, are "Prometheus Unbound," the tale of the vainglorying
of a champagne-cork, and "Teleology," where a nettle justifies the ways
of God to nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of
luck, promptly changes its divinity.
In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will,
although, even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is
another group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look
in vain for any such playful liberties with Nature. Thus we have
"Conservation of Force"; where a musician, thinking of a certain
picture, improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes
home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter, under the
influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus lineally descended
from the first. This is fiction, but not what we have been used to call
fable. We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which
the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this
the case with others. "The Horse and the Fly" states one of the
unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward
way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married
pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all
killed. The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends
the tragedy by running over an only child; and there is some little
pathetic detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the reader's
indignation very white-hot against some one. It remains to be seen who
that some one is to be: the fly? Nay, but on closer inspection, it
appears that the fly, actuated by maternal instinct, was only seeking a
place for her eggs: is maternal instinct, then, "sole author of these
mischiefs all"? "Who's in the Right?" one of the best fables in the
book, is somewhat in the same vein. After a battle has been won, a group
of officers assemble inside a battery, and debate together who should
have the honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff, the
cavalry, the engineer who posted the battery in which they then stand
talking, are successively named: the sergeant, who pointed the guns,
sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close by, the
gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile of triumph,
since it was through his hand that the victorious blow had been dealt.
Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the gunner; the
cannon-ball, who actually goes forth on the dread mission, claims it
over the cannon, who remains idly behind; the powder reminds the
cannon-ball that, but for him, it would still be lying on the arsenal
floor; and the match caps the discussion; powder, cannon-ball, and
cannon would be all equally vain and ineffectual without fire. Just then
there comes on a shower of rain, which wets the powder and puts out the
match, and completes this lesson of dependence, by indicating the
negative conditions which are as necessary for any effect, in their
absence, as is the presence of this great fraternity of positive
conditions, not any one of which can claim priority over any other. But
the fable does not end here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it
should. It wanders off into a discussion as to which is the truer
greatness, that of the vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.
And the speech of the rain is charming:
"Lo, with my little drops I bless again
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,
But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.
Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,
And poppied corn, I bring.
'Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,
My violets spring.
Little by little my small drops have strength
To deck with green delights the grateful earth."
And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,
but welcome for its own sake.