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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
RACINE | 1 |
SIR THOMAS BROWNE | 15 |
SHAKESPEARE’S FINAL PERIOD | 23 |
THE LIVES OF THE POETS[1] | 34 |
MADAME DU DEFFAND[2] | 38 |
VOLTAIRE AND ENGLAND[3] | 54 |
A DIALOGUE | 69 |
MOSES, DIOGENES, AND MR. LOKE | 69 |
MR. LOKE | 69 |
DIOGENES | 69 |
MR. LOKE | 69 |
DIOGENES | 69 |
MR. LOKE | 70 |
MOSES | 70 |
DIOGENES. | 70 |
MR. LOKE | 70 |
MOSES | 70 |
MR. LOKE | 70 |
DIOGENES | 71 |
MOSES | 71 |
DIOGENES | 71 |
MR. LOKE | 71 |
VOLTAIRE’S TRAGEDIES | 71 |
VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK THE GREAT | 80 |
THE ROUSSEAU AFFAIR | 99 |
THE POETRY OF BLAKE[8] | 106 |
THE LAST ELIZABETHAN | 114 |
HENRI BEYLE | 130 |
LADY HESTER STANHOPE | 144 |
MR. CREEVEY | 150 |
INDEX | 155 |
When Ingres painted his vast ‘Apotheosis of Homer,’ he represented, grouped round the central throne, all the great poets of the ancient and modern worlds, with a single exception—Shakespeare. After some persuasion, he relented so far as to introduce into his picture a part of that offensive personage; and English visitors at the Louvre can now see, to their disgust or their amusement, the truncated image of rather less than half of the author of King Lear just appearing at the extreme edge of the enormous canvas. French taste, let us hope, has changed since the days of Ingres; Shakespeare would doubtless now be advanced—though perhaps chiefly from a sense of duty—to the very steps of the central throne. But if an English painter were to choose a similar subject, how would he treat the master who stands acknowledged as the most characteristic representative of the literature of France? Would Racine find a place in the picture at all? Or, if he did, would more of him be visible than the last curl of his full-bottomed wig, whisking away into the outer darkness?
There is something inexplicable about the intensity of national tastes and the violence of national differences. If, as in the good old days, I could boldly believe a Frenchman to be an inferior creature, while he, as simply, wrote me down a savage, there would be an easy end of the matter. But alas! nous avons change tout cela. Now we are each of us obliged to recognise that the other has a full share of intelligence, ability, and taste; that the accident of our having been born on different sides of the Channel is no ground for supposing either that I am a brute or that he is a ninny. But, in that case, how does it happen that while on one side of that ‘span of waters’ Racine is despised and Shakespeare is worshipped, on the other, Shakespeare is tolerated and Racine is adored? The perplexing question was recently emphasised and illustrated in a singular way. Mr. John Bailey, in a volume of essays entitled ‘The Claims of French Poetry,’ discussed the qualities of Racine at some length, placed him, not without contumely, among the second rank of writers, and drew the conclusion that, though indeed the merits of French poetry are many and great, it is not among the pages of Racine that they are to be found. Within a few months of the appearance of Mr. Bailey’s book, the distinguished French writer and brilliant critic, M. Lemaitre, published a series of lectures on Racine, in which the highest note of unqualified panegyric sounded uninterruptedly from beginning to end. The contrast is remarkable, and the conflicting criticisms seem to represent, on the whole, the views of the cultivated classes in the two countries. And it is worthy of note that neither of these critics pays any heed, either explicitly or by implication, to the opinions of the other. They are totally at variance, but they argue along lines so different
M. Lemaitre, starting out, like a native of the mountains, from a point which can only be reached by English explorers after a long journey and a severe climb, devotes by far the greater part of his book to a series of brilliant psychological studies of Racine’s characters. He leaves on one side almost altogether the questions connected both with Racine’s dramatic construction, and with his style; and these are the very questions by which English readers are most perplexed, and which they are most anxious to discuss. His style in particular—using the word in its widest sense—forms the subject of the principal part of Mr. Bailey’s essay; it is upon this count that the real force of Mr. Bailey’s impeachment depends; and, indeed, it is obvious that no poet can be admired or understood by those who quarrel with the whole fabric of his writing and condemn the very principles of his art. Before, however, discussing this, the true crux of the question, it may be well to consider briefly another matter which deserves attention, because the English reader is apt to find in it a stumbling-block at the very outset of his inquiry. Coming to Racine with Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans warm in his memory, it is only to be expected that he should be struck with a chilling sense of emptiness and unreality. After the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of the very stuff of life and to have been built up with the varied and generous structure of Nature herself, the Frenchman’s dramas, with their rigid uniformity of setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious pseudo-classical summer-house appearing suddenly at the end of a vista, after one has been rambling through an open forest. ’La scene est a Buthrote, ville d’Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus’—could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement? Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of ‘blasted heaths,’ or the ‘seaboard of Bohemia’; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches. The ‘three unities’ and the rest of the ‘rules’ are a burden which the English reader finds himself quite unaccustomed to carry; he grows impatient of them; and, if he is
It is remarkable that Mr. Bailey, while seeming to approve of the classicism of Racine’s dramatic form, nevertheless finds fault with him for his lack of a quality with which, by its very nature, the classical form is incompatible. Racine’s vision, he complains, does not ’take in the whole of life’; we do not find in his plays ’the whole pell-mell of human existence’; and this is true, because the particular effects which Racine wished to produce necessarily involved this limitation of the range of his interests. His object was to depict the tragic interaction of a small group of persons at the culminating height of its intensity; and it is as irrational to complain of his failure to introduce into his compositions ‘the whole pell-mell of human existence’ as it would be to find fault with a Mozart quartet for not containing the orchestration of Wagner. But it is a little difficult to make certain of the precise nature of Mr. Bailey’s criticism. When he speaks of Racine’s vision not including ‘the whole of life,’ when he declares that Racine cannot be reckoned as one of the ‘world-poets,’ he seems to be taking somewhat different ground and discussing a more general question. All truly great poets, he asserts, have ‘a wide view of humanity,’ ’a large view of life’—a profound sense, in short, of the relations between man and the universe; and, since Racine is without this quality, his claim to true poetic greatness must be denied. But, even upon the supposition that this view of Racine’s philosophical outlook is the true one—and, in its most important sense, I believe that it is not—does Mr. Bailey’s conclusion really follow? Is it possible to test a poet’s
‘L’epithete rare,’ said the De Goncourts,’voila la marque de l’ecrivain.’ Mr. Bailey quotes the sentence with approval, observing that if, with Sainte-Beuve, we extend the phrase to ‘le mot rare,’ we have at once one of those invaluable touch-stones with which we may test the merit of poetry. And doubtless most English readers would be inclined to agree with Mr. Bailey, for it so happens that our own literature is one in which rarity of style, pushed often to the verge of extravagance, reigns supreme. Owing mainly, no doubt, to the double origin of our language, with its strange and violent contrasts between the highly-coloured crudity of the Saxon words and the ambiguous splendour of the Latin vocabulary; owing partly, perhaps, to a national taste for the intensely imaginative, and partly, too, to the vast and penetrating influence of those grand masters of bizarrerie—the Hebrew Prophets—our poetry, our prose, and our whole conception of the art of writing have fallen under the dominion of the emphatic, the extraordinary,
Ariane ma soeur, de quel amour
blessee,
Vous mourutes aux bords ou
vous futes laissee.
Here, certainly, are no ‘mots rares’; here is nothing to catch the mind or dazzle the understanding; here is only the most ordinary vocabulary, plainly set forth. But is there not an enchantment? Is there not a vision? Is there not a flow of lovely sound whose beauty grows upon the ear, and dwells exquisitely within the memory? Racine’s triumph is precisely this—that he brings about, by what are apparently the simplest means, effects which other poets must strain every nerve to produce. The narrowness of his vocabulary is in fact nothing but a proof of his amazing art. In the following passage, for instance, what a sense of dignity and melancholy and power is conveyed by the commonest words!
Enfin j’ouvre les yeux,
et je me fais justice:
C’est faire a vos beautes
un triste sacrifice
Que de vous presenter, madame,
avec ma foi,
Tout l’age et le malheur
que je traine avec moi.
Jusqu’ici la fortune
et la victoire memes
Cachaient mes cheveux blancs
sous trente diademes.
Mais ce temps-la n’est
plus: je regnais; et je fuis:
Mes ans se sont accrus; mes
honneurs sont detruits.
Is that wonderful ‘trente’ an ‘epithete rare’? Never, surely, before or since, was a simple numeral put to such a use—to conjure up so triumphantly such mysterious grandeurs! But these are subtleties which pass unnoticed by those who have been accustomed to the violent appeals of the great romantic poets. As Sainte-Beuve says, in a fine comparison between Racine and Shakespeare, to come to the one after the other is like passing to a portrait by Ingres from a decoration by Rubens. At first, ’comme on a l’oeil rempli de l’eclatante verite pittoresque du grand maitre flamand, on ne voit dans l’artiste francais qu’un ton assez uniforme, une teinte diffuse de pale et douce lumiere. Mais qu’on approche de plus pres et qu’on observe avec soin: mille nuances fines vont eclore sous le regard; mille intentions savantes vont sortir de ce tissu profond et serre; on ne peut plus en detacher ses yeux.’
Similarly when Mr. Bailey, turning from the vocabulary to more general questions of style, declares that there is no ’element of fine surprise’ in Racine, no trace of the ’daring metaphors and similes of Pindar and the Greek choruses—the reply is that he would find what he wants if he only knew where to look for it. ‘Who will forget,’ he says, ’the comparison of the Atreidae to the eagles wheeling over their empty nest, of war to the money-changer whose gold dust is that of human bodies, of Helen to the lion’s whelps?... Everyone knows these. Who will match them among the formal elegances of Racine?’ And it is true that when Racine wished to create a great effect he did not adopt the romantic method; he did not chase his ideas through the four quarters of the universe to catch them at last upon the verge of the inane; and anyone who hopes to come upon ‘fine surprises’ of this kind in his pages will be disappointed. His daring is of a different kind; it is not the daring of adventure but of intensity; his fine surprises are seized out of the very heart of his subject, and seized in a single stroke. Thus many of his most astonishing phrases burn with an inward concentration of energy, which, difficult at first to realise to the full, comes in the end to impress itself ineffaceably upon the mind.
C’etait pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit.
The sentence is like a cavern whose mouth a careless traveller might pass by, but which opens out, to the true explorer, into vista after vista of strange recesses rich with inexhaustible gold. But, sometimes, the phrase, compact as dynamite, explodes upon one with an immediate and terrific force—
C’est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee!
A few ‘formal elegances’ of this kind are surely worth having.
But what is it that makes the English reader fail to recognise the beauty and the power of such passages as these? Besides Racine’s lack of extravagance and bravura, besides his dislike of exaggerated emphasis and far-fetched or fantastic imagery, there is another characteristic of his style to which we are perhaps even more antipathetic—its suppression of detail. The great majority of poets—and especially of English poets—produce their most potent effects by the accumulation of details—details which in themselves fascinate us either by their beauty or their curiosity or their supreme appropriateness. But with details Racine will have nothing to do; he builds up his poetry out of words which are not only absolutely simple but extremely general, so that our minds, failing to find in it the peculiar delights to which we have been accustomed, fall into the error of rejecting it altogether as devoid of significance. And the error is a grave one, for in truth nothing is more marvellous than the magic with which Racine can conjure up out of a few expressions of the vaguest import a sense of complete and intimate reality. When Shakespeare wishes to describe a silent night he does so with a single stroke of detail—’not a mouse stirring’! And Virgil adds touch upon touch of exquisite minutiae:
Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes,
pictaeque volucres,
Quaeque lacus late liquidos,
quaeque aspera dumis
Rura tenent, etc.
Racine’s way is different, but is it less masterly?
Mais tout dort, et l’armee, et les vents, et Neptune.
What a flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman’s first thought—with the conventional ‘Neptune,’ and the vague ‘armee,’ and the commonplace ‘vents.’ And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce—the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness and ominous hush.
It is particularly in regard to Racine’s treatment of nature that this generalised style creates misunderstandings. ‘Is he so much as aware,’ exclaims Mr. Bailey, ’that the sun rises and sets in a glory of colour, that the wind plays deliciously on human cheeks, that the human ear will never have enough of the music of the sea? He might have written every page of his work without so much as looking out of the window of his study.’ The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we know, was not his plan. But he is constantly, with his subtle art, suggesting them. In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise:
Deja le jour plus grand nous frappe et nous eclaire.
And how varied and beautiful are his impressions of the sea! He can give us the desolation of a calm:
La
rame inutile
Fatigua vainement une mer
immobile;
or the agitated movements of a great fleet of galleys:
Voyez tout l’Hellespont blanchissant sous nos rames;
or he can fill his verses with the disorder and the fury of a storm:
Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs
et leurs mille vaisseaux,
Mer, tu n’ouvriras pas
des abymes nouveaux!
Quoi! lorsque les chassant
du port qui les recele,
L’Aulide aura vomi leur
flotte criminelle,
Les vents, les memes vents,
si longtemps accuses,
Ne te couvriront pas de ses
vaisseaux brises!
And then, in a single line, he can evoke the radiant spectacle of a triumphant flotilla riding the dancing waves:
Prets a vous recevoir mes
vaisseaux vous attendent;
Et du pied de l’autel
vous y pouvez monter,
Souveraine des mers qui vous
doivent porter.
The art of subtle suggestion could hardly go further than in this line, where the alliterating v’s, the mute e’s, and the placing of the long syllables combine so wonderfully to produce the required effect.
But it is not only suggestions of nature that readers like Mr. Bailey are unable to find in Racine—they miss in him no less suggestions of the mysterious and the infinite. No doubt this is partly due to our English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are complex and unfamiliar. When we come across the mysterious accent of fatality and remote terror in a single perfectly simple phrase—
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae
we are apt not to hear that it is there. But there is another reason—the craving, which has seized upon our poetry and our criticism ever since the triumph of Wordsworth and Coleridge at the beginning of the last century, for metaphysical stimulants. It would be easy to prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of ‘sublunary debate,’ but it is sufficient to point out that Mr. Bailey’s criticism of Racine affords an excellent example of the fatal effects of this obsession. His pages are full of references to ‘infinity’ and ’the unseen’ and ‘eternity’ and ‘a mystery brooding over a mystery’ and ’the key to the secret of life’; and it is only natural that he should find in these watchwords one of those tests of poetic greatness of which he is so fond. The fallaciousness of such views as these becomes obvious when we remember the plain fact that there is not a trace of this kind of mystery or of these ‘feelings after the key to the secret of life,’ in Paradise Lost, and that Paradise Lost is one of the greatest poems in the world. But Milton is sacrosanct in England; no theory, however mistaken, can shake that stupendous name, and the damage which may be wrought by a vicious system of criticism only becomes evident in its treatment of writers like Racine, whom it can attack with impunity and apparent success. There is no ‘mystery’ in Racine—that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo! But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble? And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longings for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first—the mystery of the mind of man. This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies—Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phedre—seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight! Look where we will, we shall find among his pages the traces of an inward mystery and the obscure infinities of the heart.
Nous avons su toujours nous aimer et nous taire.
The line is a summary of the romance and the anguish of two lives. That is all affection; and this all desire—
J’aimais jusqu’a ses pleurs que je faisais couler.
Or let us listen to the voice of Phedre, when she learns that Hippolyte and Aricie love one another:
Les a-t-on vus souvent se
parler, se chercher?
Dans le fond des forets alloient-ils
se cacher?
Helas! ils se voyaient avec
pleine licence;
Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait
l’innocence;
Ils suivaient sans remords
leur penchant amoureux;
Tous les jours se levaient
clairs et sereins pour eux.
This last line—written, let us remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ruin of a great soul?
It is, perhaps, as a psychologist that Racine has achieved his most remarkable triumphs; and the fact that so subtle and penetrating a critic as M. Lemaitre has chosen to devote the greater part of a volume to the discussion of his characters shows clearly enough that Racine’s portrayal of human nature has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality with the passage of time. On the contrary, his admirers are now tending more and more to lay stress upon the brilliance of his portraits, the combined vigour and intimacy of his painting, his amazing knowledge, and his unerring fidelity to truth. M. Lemaitre, in fact, goes so far as to describe Racine as a supreme realist, while other writers have found in him the essence of the modern spirit. These are vague phrases, no doubt, but they imply a very definite point of view; and it is curious to compare with it our English conception of Racine as a stiff and pompous kind of dancing-master, utterly out of date and infinitely cold. And there is a similar disagreement over his style. Mr. Bailey is never tired of asserting that Racine’s style is rhetorical, artificial, and monotonous; while M. Lemaitre speaks of it as ‘nu et familier,’ and Sainte-Beuve says ‘il rase la prose, mais avec des ailes,’ The explanation of these contradictions is to be found in the fact that the two critics are considering different parts of the poet’s work. When Racine is most himself, when he is seizing upon a state of mind and depicting it with all its twistings and vibrations, he writes with a directness which is indeed naked, and his sentences, refined to the utmost point of significance, flash out like swords, stroke upon stroke, swift, certain, irresistible. This is how Agrippine, in the fury of her tottering ambition, bursts out to Burrhus, the tutor of her son:
Pretendez-vous longtemps me
cacher l’empereur?
Ne le verrai-je plus qu’a
titre d’importune?
Ai-je donc eleve si haut votre
fortune
Pour mettre une barriere entre
mon fils et moi?
Ne l’osez-vous laisser
un moment sur sa foi?
Entre Seneque et vous disputez-vous
la gloire
A qui m’effacera plus
tot de sa memoire?
When we come upon a passage like this we know, so to speak, that the hunt is up and the whole field tearing after the quarry. But Racine, on other occasions, has another way of writing. He can be roundabout, artificial, and vague; he can involve a simple statement in a mist of high-sounding words and elaborate inversions.
Jamais l’aimable soeur
des cruels Pallantides
Trempa-t-elle aux complots
de ses freres perfides.
That is Racine’s way of saying that Aricie did not join in her brothers’ conspiracy. He will describe an incriminating letter as ’De sa trahison ce gage trop sincere.’ It is obvious that this kind of expression has within it the germs of the ‘noble’ style of the eighteenth-century tragedians, one of whom, finding himself obliged to mention a dog, got out of the difficulty by referring to—’De la fidelite le respectable appui.’ This is the side of Racine’s writing that puzzles and disgusts Mr. Bailey. But there is a meaning in it, after all. Every art is based upon a selection, and the art of Racine selected the things of the spirit for the material of its work. The things of sense—physical objects and details, and all the necessary but insignificant facts that go to make up the machinery of existence—these must be kept out of the picture at all hazards. To have called a spade a spade would have ruined the whole effect; spades must never be mentioned, or, at the worst, they must be dimly referred to as agricultural implements, so that the entire attention may be fixed upon the central and dominating features of the composition—the spiritual states of the characters—which, laid bare with uncompromising force and supreme precision, may thus indelibly imprint themselves upon the mind. To condemn Racine on the score of his ambiguities and his pomposities is to complain of the hastily dashed-in column and curtain in the background of a portrait, and not to mention the face. Sometimes indeed his art seems to rise superior to its own conditions, endowing even the dross and refuse of what it works in with a wonderful significance. Thus when the Sultana, Roxane, discovers her lover’s treachery, her mind flies immediately to thoughts of revenge and death, and she exclaims—
Ah! je respire enfin, et ma
joie est extreme
Que le traitre une fois se
soit trahi lui-meme.
Libre des soins cruels ou
j’allais m’engager,
Ma tranquille fureur n’a
plus qu’a se venger.
Qu’il meure. Vengeons-nous.
Courez. Qu’on le saisisse!
Que la main des muets s’arme
pour son supplice;
Qu’ils viennent preparer
ces noeuds infortunes
Par qui de ses pareils les
jours sont termines.
To have called a bowstring a bowstring was out of the question; and Racine, with triumphant art, has managed to introduce the periphrasis in such a way that it exactly expresses the state of mind of the Sultana. She begins with revenge and rage, until she reaches the extremity of virulent resolution; and then her mind begins to waver, and she finally orders the execution of the man she loves, in a contorted agony of speech.
But, as a rule, Racine’s characters speak out most clearly when they are most moved, so that their words, at the height of passion, have an intensity of directness unknown in actual life. In such moments, the phrases that leap to their lips quiver and glow with the compressed significance of character and situation; the ‘Qui te l’a dit?’ of Hermione, the ‘Sortez’ of Roxane, the ‘Je vais a Rome’ of Mithridate, the ‘Dieu des Juifs, tu l’emportes!’ of Athalie—who can forget these things, these wondrous microcosms of tragedy? Very different is the Shakespearean method. There, as passion rises, expression becomes more and more poetical and vague. Image flows into image, thought into thought, until at last the state of mind is revealed, inform and molten, driving darkly through a vast storm of words. Such revelations, no doubt, come closer to reality than the poignant epigrams of Racine. In life, men’s minds are not sharpened, they are diffused, by emotion; and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and agglomerated rather than compact and defined. But Racine’s aim was less to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its inmost being and to give expression to that. One might be tempted to say that his art represents the sublimed essence of reality, save that, after all, reality has no degrees. Who can affirm that the wild ambiguities of our hearts and the gross impediments of our physical existence are less real than the most pointed of our feelings and ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’?
It would be nearer the truth to rank Racine among the idealists. The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through ’an ampler ether, a diviner air.’ It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love the beginning and the end of all. It is, too, the world of a poet, so that we reach it, not through melody nor through vision, but through the poet’s sweet articulation—through verse. Upon English ears the rhymed couplets of Racine sound strangely; and how many besides Mr. Bailey have dubbed his alexandrines ‘monotonous’! But to his lovers, to those who have found their way into the secret places of his art, his lines are impregnated with a peculiar beauty, and the last perfection of style. Over
Oui, prince, je languis, je
brule pour Thesee ...
Il avait votre port, vos yeux,
votre langage,
Cette noble pudeur colorait
son visage,
Lorsque de notre Crete il
traversa les flots,
Digne sujet des voeux des
filles de Minos.
Que faisiez-vous alors?
Pourquoi, sans Hippolyte,
Des heros de la Grece assembla-t-il
l’elite?
Pourquoi, trop jeune encor,
ne putes-vous alors
Entrer dans le vaisseau qui
le mit sur nos bords?
Par vous aurait peri le monstre
It is difficult to ‘place’ Racine among the poets. He has affinities with many; but likenesses to few. To balance him rigorously against any other—to ask whether he is better or worse than Shelley or than Virgil—is to attempt impossibilities; but there is one fact which is too often forgotten in comparing his work with that of other poets—with Virgil’s for instance—Racine wrote for the stage. Virgil’s poetry is intended to be read, Racine’s to be declaimed; and it is only in the theatre that one can experience to the full the potency of his art. In a sense we can know him in our library, just as we can hear the music of Mozart with silent eyes. But, when the strings begin, when the whole volume of that divine harmony engulfs us, how differently then we understand and feel! And so, at the theatre, before one of those high tragedies, whose interpretation has taxed to the utmost ten generations of the greatest actresses of France, we realise, with the shock of a new emotion, what we had but half-felt before. To hear the words of Phedre spoken by the mouth of Bernhardt, to watch, in the culminating horror of crime and of remorse, of jealousy, of rage, of desire, and of despair, all the dark forces of destiny crowd down upon that great spirit, when the heavens and the earth reject her, and Hell opens, and the terriffic urn of Minos thunders and crashes to the ground—that indeed is to come close to immortality, to plunge shuddering through infinite abysses, and to look, if only for a moment, upon eternal light.
1908.
The life of Sir Thomas Browne does not afford much scope for the biographer. Everyone knows that Browne was a physician who lived at Norwich in the seventeenth century; and, so far as regards what one must call, for want of a better term, his ‘life,’ that is a sufficient summary of all there is to know. It is obvious that, with such scanty and unexciting materials, no biographer can say very much about what Sir Thomas Browne did; it is quite easy, however, to expatiate about what he wrote. He dug deeply into so many subjects, he touched lightly upon so many more, that his works offer innumerable openings for those half-conversational digressions and excursions of which perhaps the pleasantest kind of criticism is composed.
Mr. Gosse, in his volume on Sir Thomas Browne in the ’English Men of Letters’ Series, has evidently taken this view of his subject. He has not attempted to treat it with any great profundity or elaboration; he has simply gone ‘about it and about.’ The result is a book so full of entertainment, of discrimination, of quiet humour, and of literary tact, that no reader could have the heart to bring up against it the obvious—though surely irrelevant—truth, that the general impression which it leaves upon the mind is in the nature of a composite presentment, in which the features of Sir Thomas have become somehow indissolubly blended with those of his biographer. It would be rash indeed to attempt to improve upon Mr. Gosse’s example; after his luminous and suggestive chapters on Browne’s life at Norwich, on the Vulgar Errors, and on the self-revelations in the Religio Medici, there seems to be no room for further comment. One can only admire in silence, and hand on the volume to one’s neighbour.
There is, however, one side of Browne’s work upon which it may be worth while to dwell at somewhat greater length. Mr. Gosse, who has so much to say on such a variety of topics, has unfortunately limited to a very small number of pages his considerations upon what is, after all, the most important thing about the author of Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus—his style. Mr. Gosse himself confesses that it is chiefly as a master of literary form that Browne deserves to be remembered. Why then does he tell us so little about his literary form, and so much about his family, and his religion, and his scientific opinions, and his porridge, and who fished up the murex?
Nor is it only owing to its inadequacy that Mr. Gosse’s treatment of Browne as an artist in language is the least satisfactory part of his book: for it is difficult not to think that upon this crucial point Mr. Gosse has for once been deserted by his sympathy and his acumen. In spite of what appears to be a genuine delight in Browne’s most splendid and characteristic passages, Mr. Gosse cannot help protesting somewhat acrimoniously against that very method of writing whose effects he is so ready to admire. In practice, he approves; in theory, he condemns. He ranks the Hydriotaphia among the gems of English literature; and the prose style of which it is the consummate expression he denounces as fundamentally wrong. The contradiction is obvious; but there can be little doubt that, though Browne has, as it were, extorted a personal homage, Mr. Gosse’s real sympathies lie on the other side. His remarks upon Browne’s effect upon eighteenth-century prose show clearly enough the true bent of his opinions; and they show, too, how completely misleading a preconceived theory may be.
The study of Sir Thomas Browne, Mr. Gosse says, ’encouraged Johnson, and with him a whole school of rhetorical writers in the eighteenth century, to avoid circumlocution by the invention of superfluous words, learned but pedantic, in which darkness was concentrated without being dispelled.’ Such is Mr. Gosse’s account of the influence of Browne and Johnson upon the later eighteenth-century writers of prose. But to dismiss Johnson’s influence as something altogether deplorable, is surely to misunderstand the whole drift of the great revolution which he brought about in English letters. The characteristics of the pre-Johnsonian prose style—the style which Dryden first established and Swift brought to perfection—are obvious enough. Its advantages are those of clarity and force; but its faults, which, of course, are unimportant in the work of a great master, become glaring in that of the second-rate practitioner. The prose of Locke, for instance, or of Bishop Butler, suffers, in spite of its clarity and vigour, from grave defects. It is very flat and very loose; it has no formal beauty, no elegance, no balance, no trace of the deliberation of art. Johnson, there can be no doubt, determined to remedy these evils by giving a new mould to the texture of English prose; and he went back for a model to Sir Thomas Browne. Now, as Mr. Gosse himself observes, Browne stands out in a remarkable way from among the great mass of his contemporaries and predecessors, by virtue of his highly developed artistic consciousness. He was, says Mr. Gosse, ’never carried away. His effects are closely studied, they are the result of forethought and anxious contrivance’; and no one can doubt the truth or the significance of this dictum who compares, let us say, the last paragraphs of The Garden of Cyrus with any page in The Anatomy of Melancholy. The peculiarities of Browne’s style—the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its tendency towards sonorous antithesis—culminated in his last, though not his best, work, the Christian Morals, which almost reads like an elaborate and magnificent parody of the Book of Proverbs. With the Christian Morals to guide him, Dr. Johnson set about the transformation of the prose of his time. He decorated, he pruned, he balanced; he hung garlands, he draped robes; and he ended by converting the Doric order of Swift into the Corinthian order of Gibbon. Is it quite just to describe this process as one by which ’a whole school of rhetorical writers’ was encouraged ‘to avoid circumlocution’ by the invention ‘of superfluous words,’ when it was this very process that gave us the peculiar savour of polished ease which characterises nearly all the important prose of the last half of the eighteenth century—that of Johnson himself, of Hume, of Reynolds, of Horace Walpole—which can be traced even in Burke, and which fills the pages of Gibbon? It is, indeed, a curious reflection, but one which is amply justified by the facts, that the Decline and Fall could not have been precisely what it is, had Sir Thomas Browne never written the Christian Morals.
That Johnson and his disciples had no inkling of the inner spirit of the writer to whose outward form they owed so much, has been pointed out by Mr. Gosse, who adds that Browne’s ’genuine merits were rediscovered and asserted by Coleridge and Lamb.’ But we have already observed that Mr. Gosse’s own assertion of these merits lies a little open to question. His view seems to be, in fact, the precise antithesis of Dr. Johnson’s; he swallows the spirit of Browne’s writing, and strains at the form. Browne, he says, was ’seduced by a certain obscure romance in the terminology of late Latin writers,’ he used ’adjectives of classical extraction, which are neither necessary nor natural,’ he forgot that it is better for a writer ’to consult women and people who have not studied, than those who are too learnedly oppressed by a knowledge of Latin and Greek.’ He should not have said ‘oneiro-criticism,’ when he meant the interpretation of dreams, nor ‘omneity’ instead of ‘oneness’; and he had ’no excuse for writing about the “pensile” gardens of Babylon, when all that is required is expressed by “hanging."’ Attacks of this kind—attacks upon the elaboration and classicism of Browne’s style—are difficult to reply to, because they must seem, to anyone who holds a contrary opinion, to betray such a total lack of sympathy with the subject as to make argument all but impossible. To the true Browne enthusiast, indeed, there is something almost shocking about the state of mind which would exchange ‘pensile’ for ‘hanging,’ and ‘asperous’ for ‘rough,’ and would do away with ‘digladiation’ and ‘quodlibetically’ altogether. The truth is, that there is a great gulf fixed between those who naturally dislike the ornate, and those who naturally love it. There is no remedy; and to attempt to ignore this fact only emphasises it the more. Anyone who is jarred by the expression ‘prodigal blazes’ had better immediately shut up Sir Thomas Browne. The critic who admits the jar, but continues to appreciate, must present, to the true enthusiast, a spectacle of curious self-contradiction.
If once the ornate style be allowed as a legitimate form of art, no attack such as Mr. Gosse makes on Browne’s latinisms can possibly be valid. For it is surely an error to judge and to condemn the latinisms without reference to the whole style of which they form a necessary part. Mr. Gosse, it is true, inclines to treat them as if they were a mere excrescence which could be cut off without difficulty, and might never have existed if Browne’s views upon the English language had been a little different. Browne, he says, ’had come to the conclusion that classic words were the only legitimate ones, the only ones which interpreted with elegance the thoughts of a sensitive and cultivated man, and that the rest were barbarous.’ We are to suppose, then, that if he had happened to hold the opinion that Saxon words were the only legitimate ones, the Hydriotaphia would have been as free
There is, of course, no doubt that Browne’s vocabulary is extraordinarily classical. Why is this? The reason is not far to seek. In his most characteristic moments he was almost entirely occupied with thoughts and emotions which can, owing to their very nature, only be expressed in Latinistic language. The state of mind which he wished to produce in his readers was nearly always a complicated one: they were to be impressed and elevated by a multiplicity of suggestions and a sense of mystery and awe. ‘Let thy thoughts,’ he says himself, ’be of things which have not entered into the hearts of beasts: think of things long past, and long to come: acquaint thyself with the choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expanse beyond them. Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which visive organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles; and thoughts of things, which thoughts but tenderly touch.’ Browne had, in fact, as Dr. Johnson puts it, ’uncommon sentiments’; and how was he to express them unless by a language of pomp, of allusion, and of elaborate rhythm? Not only is the Saxon form of speech devoid of splendour and suggestiveness; its simplicity is still further emphasised by a spondaic rhythm which seems to produce (by some mysterious rhythmic law) an atmosphere of ordinary life, where, though the pathetic may be present, there is no place for the complex or the remote. To understand how unsuitable such conditions would be for the highly subtle and rarefied art of Sir Thomas Browne, it is only necessary to compare one of his periods with a typical passage of Saxon prose.
Then they brought a faggot, kindled with fire, and laid the same down at Doctor Ridley’s feet. To whom Master Latimer spake in this manner: ’Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’
Nothing could be better adapted to the meaning and sentiment of this passage than the limpid, even flow of its rhythm. But who could conceive of such a rhythm being ever applicable to the meaning and sentiment of these sentences from the Hydriotaphia?
To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.
Here the long, rolling, almost turgid clauses, with their enormous Latin substantives, seem to carry the reader forward through an immense succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm, the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his eyes. The entire effect depends upon the employment of a rhythmical complexity and subtlety which is utterly alien to Saxon prose. It would be foolish to claim a superiority for either of the two styles; it would be still more foolish to suppose that the effects of one might be produced by means of the other.
Wealth of rhythmical elaboration was not the only benefit which a highly Latinised vocabulary conferred on Browne. Without it, he would never have been able to achieve those splendid strokes of stylistic bravura, which were evidently so dear to his nature, and occur so constantly in his finest passages. The precise quality cannot be easily described, but is impossible to mistake; and the pleasure which it produces seems to be curiously analogous to that given by a piece of magnificent brushwork in a Rubens or a Velasquez. Browne’s ‘brushwork’ is certainly unequalled in English literature, except by the very greatest masters of sophisticated art, such as Pope and Shakespeare; it is the inspiration of sheer technique. Such expressions as: ’to subsist in bones and be but pyramidally extant’—’sad and sepulchral pitchers which have no joyful voices’—’predicament of chimaeras’—’the irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity’—are examples of this consummate mastery of language, examples which, with a multitude of others, singly deserve whole hours of delicious gustation, whole days of absorbed and exquisite worship. It is pleasant to start out for a long walk with such a splendid phrase upon one’s lips as: ’According to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven,’ to go for miles and miles with the marvellous syllables still rich upon the inward ear, and to return home with them in triumph. It is then that one begins to understand how mistaken it was of Sir Thomas Browne not to have written in simple, short, straightforward Saxon English.
One other function performed by Browne’s latinisms must be mentioned, because it is closely connected with the most essential and peculiar of the qualities which distinguish his method of writing. Certain classical words, partly owing to their allusiveness, partly owing to their sound, possess a remarkable flavour which is totally absent from those of Saxon derivation. Such a word, for instance, as ‘pyramidally,’ gives one at once an immediate sense of something mysterious, something extraordinary, and, at the same time, something almost grotesque. And this subtle blending of mystery and queerness characterises not only Browne’s choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics of a few generations back, who admired him simply and solely for what they called his ‘quaintness’; while Mr. Gosse has flown to the opposite extreme, and will not allow Browne any sense of humour at all. The confusion no doubt arises merely from a difference in the point of view. Mr. Gosse, regarding Browne’s most important and general effects, rightly fails to detect anything funny in them. The Early Victorians, however, missed the broad outlines, and were altogether taken up with the obvious grotesqueness of the details. When they found Browne asserting that ‘Cato seemed to dote upon Cabbage,’ or embroidering an entire paragraph upon the subject of ‘Pyrrhus his Toe,’ they could not help smiling; and surely they were quite right. Browne, like an impressionist painter, produced his pictures by means of a multitude of details which, if one looks at them in themselves, are discordant, and extraordinary, and even absurd.
There can be little doubt that this strongly marked taste for curious details was one of the symptoms of the scientific bent of his mind. For Browne was scientific just up to the point where the examination of detail ends, and its coordination begins. He knew little or nothing of general laws; but his interest in isolated phenomena was intense. And the more singular the phenomena, the more he was attracted. He was always ready to begin some strange inquiry. He cannot help wondering: ’Whether great-ear’d persons have short necks, long feet, and loose bellies?’ ‘Marcus Antoninus Philosophus,’ he notes in his commonplace book, ’wanted not the advice of the best physicians; yet how warrantable his practice was, to take his repast in the night, and scarce anything but treacle in the day, may admit of great doubt.’ To inquire thus is, perhaps, to inquire too curiously; yet such inquiries are the stuff of which great scientific theories are made. Browne, however, used his love of details for another purpose: he co-ordinated them, not into a scientific theory, but into a work of art. His method was one which, to be successful, demanded a self-confidence, an imagination, and a technical power, possessed by only the very greatest artists. Everyone knows Pascal’s overwhelming
Browne produced his greatest work late in life; for there is nothing in the Religio Medici which reaches the same level of excellence as the last paragraphs of The Garden of Cyrus and the last chapter of Urn Burial. A long and calm experience of life seems, indeed, to be the background from which his most amazing sentences start out into being. His strangest phantasies are rich with the spoils of the real world. His art matured with himself; and who but the most expert of artists could have produced this perfect sentence in The Garden of Cyrus, so well known, and yet so impossible not to quote?
Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.
This is Browne in his most exquisite mood. For his most characteristic, one must go to the concluding pages of Urn Burial, where, from the astonishing sentence beginning—’Meanwhile Epicurus lies deep in Dante’s hell’—to the end of the book, the very quintessence of his work is to be found. The subject—mortality in its most generalised aspect—has brought out Browne’s highest powers; and all the resources of his art—elaboration of rhythm, brilliance of phrase, wealth and variety of suggestion, pomp and splendour of imagination—are accumulated in every paragraph. To crown all, he has scattered through these few pages a multitude of proper names, most of them gorgeous in sound, and each of them carrying its own strange freight of reminiscences and allusions from the unknown depths of the past. As one reads, an extraordinary procession of persons seems to pass before one’s eyes—Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan
It is interesting—or at least amusing—to consider what are the most appropriate places in which different authors should be read. Pope is doubtless at his best in the midst of a formal garden, Herrick in an orchard, and Shelley in a boat at sea. Sir Thomas Browne demands, perhaps, a more exotic atmosphere. One could read him floating down the Euphrates, or past the shores of Arabia; and it would be pleasant to open the Vulgar Errors in Constantinople, or to get by heart a chapter of the Christian Morals between the paws of a Sphinx. In England, the most fitting background for his strange ornament must surely be some habitation consecrated to learning, some University which still smells of antiquity and has learnt the habit of repose. The present writer, at any rate, can bear witness to the splendid echo of Browne’s syllables amid learned and ancient walls; for he has known, he believes, few happier moments than those in which he has rolled the periods of the Hydriotaphia out to the darkness and the nightingales through the studious cloisters of Trinity.
But, after all, who can doubt that it is at Oxford that Browne himself would choose to linger? May we not guess that he breathed in there, in his boyhood, some part of that mysterious and charming spirit which pervades his words? For one traces something of him, often enough, in the old gardens, and down the hidden streets; one has heard his footstep beside the quiet waters of Magdalen; and his smile still hovers amid that strange company of faces which guard, with such a large passivity, the circumference of the Sheldonian.
1906.
The whole of the modern criticism of Shakespeare has been fundamentally affected by one important fact. The chronological order of the plays, for so long the object of the vaguest speculation, of random guesses, or at best of isolated ‘points,’ has been now discovered and reduced to a coherent law. It is no longer possible to suppose that The Tempest was written before Romeo and ’Juliet;
Upon this firm foundation modern writers have been only too eager to build. It was apparent that the Plays, arranged in chronological order, showed something more than a mere development in the technique of verse—a development, that is to say, in the general treatment of characters and subjects, and in the sort of feelings which those characters and subjects were intended to arouse; and from this it was easy to draw conclusions as to the development of the mind of Shakespeare itself. Such conclusions have, in fact, been constantly drawn. But it must be noted that they all rest upon the tacit assumption, that the character of any given drama is, in fact, a true index to the state of mind of the dramatist composing it. The validity of this assumption has never been proved; it has never been shown, for instance, why we should suppose a writer of farces to be habitually merry; or whether we are really justified in concluding, from the fact that Shakespeare wrote nothing but tragedies for six years, that, during that period, more than at any other, he was deeply absorbed in the awful problems of human existence. It is not, however, the purpose of this essay to consider the question of what are the relations between the artist and his art; for it will assume the truth of the generally accepted view, that the character of the one can be inferred from that of the other. What it will attempt to discuss is whether, upon this hypothesis, the most important part of the ordinary doctrine of Shakespeare’s mental development is justifiable.
What, then, is the ordinary doctrine? Dr. Furnivall states it as follows:
Shakespeare’s course is thus shown to have run from the amorousness and fun of youth, through the strong patriotism of early manhood, to the wrestlings with the dark problems that beset the man of middle age, to the gloom which weighed on Shakespeare (as on so many men) in later life, when, though outwardly successful, the world seemed all against him, and his mind dwelt with sympathy on scenes of faithlessness of friends, treachery of relations and subjects, ingratitude of children, scorn of his kind; till at last, in his Stratford home again, peace came to him, Miranda and Perdita in their lovely freshness and charm greeted him, and he was laid by his quiet Avon side.
And the same writer goes on to quote with approval Professor Dowden’s
likening of Shakespeare
to a ship, beaten and storm-tossed, but yet
entering harbour with
sails full-set, to anchor in peace.
Such, in fact, is the general opinion of modern writers upon Shakespeare; after a happy youth and a gloomy middle age he reached at last—it is the universal opinion—a state of quiet serenity in which he died. Professor Dowden’s book on ‘Shakespeare’s Mind and Art’ gives the most popular expression to this view, a view which is also held by Mr. Ten Brink, by Sir I. Gollancz, and, to a great extent, by Dr. Brandes. Professor Dowden, indeed, has gone so far as to label this final period with the appellation of ‘On the Heights,’ in opposition to the preceding one, which, he says, was passed ‘In the Depths.’ Sir Sidney Lee, too, seems to find, in the Plays at least, if not in Shakespeare’s mind, the orthodox succession of gaiety, of tragedy, and of the serenity of meditative romance.
Now it is clear that the most important part of this version of Shakespeare’s mental history is the end of it. That he did eventually attain to a state of calm content, that he did, in fact, die happy—it is this that gives colour and interest to the whole theory. For some reason or another, the end of a man’s life seems naturally to afford the light by which the rest of it should be read; last thoughts do appear in some strange way to be really best and truest; and this is particularly the case when they fit in nicely with the rest of the story, and are, perhaps, just what one likes to think oneself. If it be true that Shakespeare, to quote Professor Dowden, ’did at last attain to the serene self-possession which he had sought with such persistent effort’; that, in the words of Dr. Furnivall, ’forgiven and forgiving, full of the highest wisdom and peace, at one with family and friends and foes, in harmony with Avon’s flow and Stratford’s level meads, Shakespeare closed his life on earth’—we have obtained a piece of knowledge which is both interesting and pleasant. But if it be not true, if, on the contrary, it can be shown that something very different was actually the case, then will it not follow that we must not only reverse our judgment as to this particular point, but also readjust our view of the whole drift and bearing of Shakespeare’s ‘inner life’?
The group of works which has given rise to this theory of ultimate serenity was probably entirely composed after Shakespeare’s final retirement from London, and his establishment at New Place. It consists of three plays—Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—and three fragments—the Shakespearean parts of Pericles, Henry VIII., and The Two Noble Kinsmen. All these plays and portions of plays form a distinct group; they resemble each other in a multitude of ways, and they differ in a multitude of ways from nearly all Shakespeare’s previous work.
One other complete play, however, and one other fragment, do resemble in some degree these works of the final period; for, immediately preceding them in date, they show clear traces of the beginnings of the new method, and they are themselves curiously different from the plays they immediately succeed—that great series of tragedies which began with Hamlet in 1601 and ended in 1608 with Antony and Cleopatra. In the latter year, indeed, Shakespeare’s entire method underwent an astonishing change. For six years he had been persistently occupied with a kind of writing which he had himself not only invented but brought to the highest point of excellence—the tragedy of character. Every one of his masterpieces has for its theme the action of tragic situation upon character; and, without those stupendous creations in character, his greatest tragedies would obviously have lost the precise thing that has made them what they are. Yet, after Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare deliberately turned his back upon the dramatic methods of all his past career. There seems no reason why he should not have continued, year after year, to produce Othellos, Hamlets, and Macbeths; instead, he turned over a new leaf, and wrote Coriolanus.
Coriolanus is certainly a remarkable, and perhaps an intolerable play: remarkable, because it shows the sudden first appearance of the Shakespeare of the final period; intolerable, because it is impossible to forget how much better it might have been. The subject is thick with situations; the conflicts of patriotism and pride, the effects of sudden disgrace following upon the very height of fortune, the struggles between family affection on the one hand and every interest of revenge and egotism on the other—these would have made a tragic and tremendous setting for some character worthy to rank with Shakespeare’s best. But it pleased him to ignore completely all these opportunities; and, in the play he has given us, the situations, mutilated and degraded, serve merely as miserable props for the gorgeous clothing of his rhetoric. For rhetoric, enormously magnificent and extraordinarily elaborate, is the beginning and the middle and the end of Coriolanus. The hero is not a human being at all; he is the statue of a demi-god cast in bronze, which roars its perfect periods, to use a phrase of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, through a melodious megaphone. The vigour of the presentment is, it is true, amazing; but it is a presentment of decoration, not of life. So far and so quickly had Shakespeare already wandered from the subtleties of Cleopatra. The transformation is indeed astonishing; one wonders, as one beholds it, what will happen next.
At about the same time, some of the scenes in Timon of Athens were in all probability composed: scenes which resemble Coriolanus in their lack of characterisation and abundance of rhetoric, but differ from it in the peculiar grossness of their tone. For sheer virulence of foul-mouthed abuse, some of the speeches in Timon are probably unsurpassed in any literature; an outraged drayman would speak so, if draymen were in the habit of talking poetry. From this whirlwind of furious ejaculation, this splendid storm of nastiness, Shakespeare, we are confidently told, passed in a moment to tranquillity and joy, to blue skies, to young ladies, and to general forgiveness.
From 1604 to 1610 [says Professor Dowden] a show of tragic figures, like the kings who passed before Macbeth, filled the vision of Shakespeare; until at last the desperate image of Timon rose before him; when, as though unable to endure or to conceive a more lamentable ruin of man, he turned for relief to the pastoral loves of Prince Florizel and Perdita; and as soon as the tone of his mind was restored, gave expression to its ultimate mood of grave serenity in The Tempest, and so ended.
This is a pretty picture, but is it true? It may, indeed, be admitted at once that Prince Florizel and Perdita are charming creatures, that Prospero is ‘grave,’ and that Hermione is more or less ‘serene’; but why is it that, in our consideration of the later plays, the whole of our attention must always be fixed upon these particular characters? Modern critics, in their eagerness to appraise everything that is beautiful and good at its proper value, seem to have entirely forgotten that there is another side to the medal; and they have omitted to point out that these plays contain a series of portraits of peculiar infamy, whose wickedness finds expression in language of extraordinary force. Coming fresh from their pages to the pages of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, one is astonished and perplexed. How is it possible to fit into their scheme of roses and maidens that ‘Italian fiend’ the ’yellow Iachimo,’ or Cloten, that ‘thing too bad for bad report,’ or the ’crafty devil,’ his mother, or Leontes, or Caliban, or Trinculo? To omit these figures of discord and evil from our consideration, to banish them comfortably to the background of the stage, while Autolycus and Miranda dance before the footlights, is surely a fallacy in proportion; for the presentment of the one group of persons is every whit as distinct and vigorous as that of the other. Nowhere, indeed, is Shakespeare’s violence of expression more constantly displayed than in the ’gentle utterances’ of his last period; it is here that one finds Paulina, in a torrent of indignation as far from ‘grave serenity’ as it is from ‘pastoral love,’ exclaiming to Leontes:
What studied torments, tyrant,
hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires?
what flaying? boiling
In leads or oils? what old
or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every
word deserves
To taste of thy most worst?
Thy tyranny,
Together working with thy
jealousies,
Fancies too weak for boys,
too green and idle
For girls of nine, O! think
what they have done,
And then run mad indeed, stark
mad; for all
Thy by-gone fooleries were
but spices of it.
That thou betray’dst
Polixenes, ’twas nothing;
That did but show thee, of
a fool, inconstant
And damnable ingrateful; nor
was’t much
Thou would’st have poison’d
good Camillo’s honour,
To have him kill a king; poor
trespasses,
Nowhere are the poet’s metaphors more nakedly material; nowhere does he verge more often upon a sort of brutality of phrase, a cruel coarseness. Iachimo tells us how:
The
cloyed will,
That satiate yet unsatisfied
desire, that tub
Both filled and running, ravening
first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage.
and talks of:
an eye
Base and unlustrous as the smoky light
That’s fed with stinking tallow.
‘The south fog rot him!’ Cloten bursts out to Imogen, cursing her husband in an access of hideous rage.
What traces do such passages as these show of ‘serene self-possession,’ of ‘the highest wisdom and peace,’ or of ‘meditative romance’? English critics, overcome by the idea of Shakespeare’s ultimate tranquillity, have generally denied to him the authorship of the brothel scenes in Pericles but these scenes are entirely of a piece with the grossnesses of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.
Is there no way for men to be,
but women
Must be half-workers?
says Posthumus when he hears of Imogen’s guilt.
We
are all bastards;
And that most venerable man,
which I
Did call my father, was I
know not where
When I was stamped. Some
coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit; yet
my mother seemed
The Dian of that time; so
doth my wife
The nonpareil of this—O
vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she
restrained
And prayed me, oft, forbearance;
did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet
view on’t
Might well have warmed old
Saturn, that I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow—O,
all the devils!—
This yellow Iachimo, in an
hour,—was’t not?
Or less,—at first:
perchance he spoke not; but,
Like a full-acorned boar,
a German one,
Cried, oh! and mounted:
found no opposition
But what he looked for should
oppose, and she
Should from encounter guard.
And Leontes, in a similar situation, expresses himself in images no less to the point.
There
have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds
ere now,
And many a man there is, even
at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds
his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has
been sluiced in’s absence
And his pond fished by his
next neighbour, by
It is really a little difficult, in the face of such passages, to agree with Professor Dowden’s dictum: ’In these latest plays the beautiful pathetic light is always present.’
But how has it happened that the judgment of so many critics has been so completely led astray? Charm and gravity, and even serenity, are to be found in many other plays of Shakespeare. Ophelia is charming, Brutus is grave, Cordelia is serene; are we then to suppose that Hamlet, and Julius Caesar, and King Lear give expression to the same mood of high tranquillity which is betrayed by Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale? ‘Certainly not,’ reply the orthodox writers, ’for you must distinguish. The plays of the last period are not tragedies; they all end happily’—’in scenes,’ says Sir I. Gollancz, ’of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.’ Virtue, in fact, is not only virtuous, it is triumphant; what would you more?
But to this it may be retorted, that, in the case of one of Shakespeare’s plays, even the final vision of virtue and beauty triumphant over ugliness and vice fails to dispel a total effect of horror and of gloom. For, in Measure for Measure Isabella is no whit less pure and lovely than any Perdita or Miranda, and her success is as complete; yet who would venture to deny that the atmosphere of Measure for Measure was more nearly one of despair than of serenity? What is it, then, that makes the difference? Why should a happy ending seem in one case futile, and in another satisfactory? Why does it sometimes matter to us a great deal, and sometimes not at all, whether virtue is rewarded or not?
The reason, in this case, is not far to seek. Measure for Measure is, like nearly every play of Shakespeare’s before Coriolanus, essentially realistic. The characters are real men and women; and what happens to them upon the stage has all the effect of what happens to real men and women in actual life. Their goodness appears to be real goodness, their wickedness real wickedness; and, if their sufferings are terrible enough, we regret the fact, even though in the end they triumph, just as we regret the real sufferings of our friends. But, in the plays of the final period, all this has changed; we are no longer in the real world, but in a world of enchantment,
Remember,
sir, my liege,
The Kings your ancestors,
together with
The natural bravery of your
isle, which stands
As Neptune’s park, ribbed
and paled in
With rocks unscaleable and
roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear
your enemies’ boats,
But suck them up to the topmast.
A kind of conquest
Caesar made here; but made
not here his brag
Of ‘Came, and saw, and
overcame’; with shame—
The first that ever touched
him—he was carried
From off our coast, twice
beaten; and his shipping—
Poor ignorant baubles!—on
our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells moved upon
the surges, crack’d
As easily ’gainst our
rocks; for joy whereof
The famed Cassibelan, who
was once at point—
O giglot fortune!—to
master Caesar’s sword,
Made Lud’s town with
rejoicing fires bright
And Britons strut with courage.
It comes with something of a shock to remember that this medley of poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other person than the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra; and the contrast is the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation and diplomacy in the latter play, which passes between Octavius, Maecenas, and Agrippa on the one side, and Antony and Enobarbus on the other, and results in the reconciliation of the rivals and the marriage of Antony and Octavia.
Thus strangely remote is the world of Shakespeare’s latest period; and it is peopled, this universe of his invention, with beings equally unreal, with creatures either more or less than human, with fortunate princes and wicked step-mothers, with goblins and spirits, with lost princesses and insufferable kings. And of course, in this sort of fairy land, it is an essential condition that everything shall end well; the prince and princess are bound to marry and live happily ever afterwards, or the whole story is unnecessary and absurd; and the villains and the goblins must naturally repent and be forgiven. But it is clear that such happy endings, such conventional closes to fantastic tales, cannot be taken as evidences of serene tranquillity on the part of their maker; they merely show that he knew, as well as anyone else, how such stories ought to end.
Yet there can be no doubt that it is this combination of charming heroines and happy endings which has blinded the eyes of modern critics to everything else. Iachimo, and Leontes, and even Caliban, are to be left out of account, as if, because in the end they repent or are forgiven, words need not be wasted on such reconciled and harmonious fiends. It is true they are grotesque; it is true that such personages never could have lived; but who, one would like to know, has ever met Miranda, or become acquainted with Prince Florizel of Bohemia? In this land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins? In this world of dreams, are we justified in ignoring the nightmares? Is it fair to say that Shakespeare was in ’a gentle, lofty spirit, a peaceful, tranquil mood,’ when he was creating the Queen in Cymbeline, or writing the first two acts of The Winter’s Tale?
Attention has never been sufficiently drawn to one other characteristic of these plays, though it is touched upon both by Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes—the singular carelessness with which great parts of them were obviously written. Could anything drag more wretchedly than the denouement of Cymbeline? And with what perversity is the great pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale interspersed with long-winded intrigues, and disguises, and homilies! For these blemishes are unlike the blemishes which enrich rather than lessen the beauty of the earlier plays; they are not, like them, interesting or delightful in themselves; they are usually merely necessary to explain the action, and they are sometimes purely irrelevant. One is, it cannot be denied, often bored, and occasionally irritated, by Polixenes and Camillo and Sebastian and Gonzalo and Belarius; these personages have not even the life of ghosts; they are hardly more than speaking names, that give patient utterance to involution upon involution. What a contrast to the minor characters of Shakespeare’s earlier works!
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric, or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech. In this mood he must have written his share in The Two Noble Kinsmen, leaving the plot and characters to Fletcher to deal with as he pleased, and reserving to himself only the opportunities for pompous verse. In this mood he must have broken off half-way through the tedious history of Henry VIII.; and in this mood he must have completed, with all the resources of his rhetoric, the miserable archaic fragment of Pericles.
Is it not thus, then, that we should imagine him in the last years of his life? Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech? If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is surely this.
And such is the conclusion which is particularly forced upon us by a consideration of the play which is in many ways most typical of Shakespeare’s later work, and the one which critics most consistently point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity—The Tempest. There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare’s prime, are present here in a still greater degree. In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal characters are frankly not human beings at all; and the whole action passes, through a series of impossible occurrences, in a place which can only by courtesy be said to exist. The Enchanted Island, indeed, peopled, for a timeless moment, by this strange fantastic medley of persons and of things, has been cut adrift for ever from common sense, and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry. Never did Shakespeare’s magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions that the triumph of his language asserts itself. It finds as splendid a vent in the curses of Caliban:
All the infection that the
sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on
Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease!
and in the similes of Trinculo:
Yond’ same black cloud,
yond’ huge one, looks like a foul
bombard that would shed his
liquor.
The denouement itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg for fine writing.
O,
it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke
and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me;
and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe,
pronounced
The name of Prosper; it did
bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i’
th’ ooze is bedded, and
I’ll seek him deeper
than e’er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.
And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play.
A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the last of Shakespeare’s completed works, and that early drama which first gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings. The points of resemblance between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, their common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the verve of their vulgar comedy—these, of course, are obvious enough; but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison striking. One
The depth of the gulf between the two plays is, however, best measured by a comparison of Caliban and his masters with Bottom and his companions. The guileless group of English mechanics, whose sports are interrupted by the mischief of Puck, offers a strange contrast to the hideous trio of the ‘jester,’ the ‘drunken butler,’ and the ’savage and deformed slave,’ whose designs are thwarted by the magic of Ariel. Bottom was the first of Shakespeare’s masterpieces in characterisation, Caliban was the last: and what a world of bitterness and horror lies between them! The charming coxcomb it is easy to know and love; but the ‘freckled whelp hag-born’ moves us mysteriously to pity and to terror, eluding us for ever in fearful allegories, and strange coils of disgusted laughter and phantasmagorical tears. The physical vigour of the presentment is often so remorseless as to shock us. ‘I left them,’ says Ariel, speaking of Caliban and his crew:
I’ the filthy-mantled
pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to the chins,
that the foul lake
O’erstunk their feet.
But at other times the great half-human shape seems to swell like the ‘Pan’ of Victor Hugo, into something unimaginably vast.
You taught me language, and
my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.
Is this Caliban addressing Prospero, or Job addressing God? It may be either; but it is not serene, nor benign, nor pastoral, nor ’On the Heights.’
1906.
No one needs an excuse for re-opening the Lives of the Poets; the book is too delightful. It is not, of course, as delightful as Boswell; but who re-opens Boswell? Boswell is in another category; because, as every one knows, when he has once been opened he can never be shut. But, on its different level, the Lives will always hold a firm and comfortable place in our affections. After Boswell, it is the book which brings us nearer than any other to the mind of Dr. Johnson. That is its primary import. We do not go to it for information or for instruction, or that our tastes may be improved, or that our sympathies may be widened; we go to it to see what Dr. Johnson thought. Doubtless, during the process, we are informed and instructed and improved in various ways; but these benefits are incidental, like the invigoration which comes from a mountain walk. It is not for the sake of the exercise that we set out; but for the sake of the view. The view from the mountain which is Samuel Johnson is so familiar, and has been so constantly analysed and admired, that further description would be superfluous. It is sufficient for us to recognise that he is a mountain, and to pay all the reverence that is due. In one of Emerson’s poems a mountain and a squirrel begin to discuss each other’s merits; and the squirrel comes to the triumphant conclusion that he is very much the better of the two, since he can crack a nut, while the mountain can do no such thing. The parallel is close enough between this impudence and the attitude—implied, if not expressed—of too much modern criticism towards the sort of qualities—the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality, the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence of thought—which went to the making of the Lives of the Poets. There is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: that, in this particular instance, the mountain was able to crack nuts a great deal better than any squirrel that ever lived.
That the Lives continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself a high proof of the eminence of Johnson’s intellect; because, as serious criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far removed from the futile. Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one: they are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is ’of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.’ Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could anything be of less ‘relation to the purpose’? It is his wit—and we are speaking, of course, of wit in its widest sense—that has sanctified Johnson’s peversities and errors, that has embalmed them for ever, and that has put his book, with all its mass of antiquated doctrine, beyond the reach of time.
For it is not only in particular details that Johnson’s criticism fails to convince us; his entire point of view is patently out of date. Our judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different, but because our whole method of judging has changed. Thus, to the historian of letters, the Lives have a special interest, for they afford a standing example of a great dead tradition—a tradition whose characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves. Perhaps the most striking difference between the critical methods of the eighteenth century and those of the present day, is the difference in sympathy. The most cursory glance at Johnson’s book is enough to show that he judged authors as if they were criminals in the dock, answerable for every infraction of the rules and regulations laid down by the laws of art, which it was his business to administer without fear or favour. Johnson never inquired what poets were trying to do; he merely aimed at discovering whether what they had done complied with the canons of poetry. Such a system of criticism was clearly unexceptionable, upon one condition—that the critic was quite certain what the canons of poetry were; but the moment that it became obvious that the only way of arriving at a conclusion upon the subject was by consulting the poets themselves, the whole situation completely changed. The judge had to bow to the prisoner’s ruling. In other words, the critic discovered that his first duty was, not to criticise, but to understand the object of his criticism.
But other defects, besides lack of sympathy, mar the Lives of the Poets. One cannot help feeling that no matter how anxious Johnson might have been to enter into the spirit of some of the greatest of the masters with whom he was concerned, he never could have succeeded. Whatever critical method he might have adopted, he still would have been unable to appreciate certain literary qualities, which, to our minds at any rate, appear to be the most important of all. His opinion of Lycidas is well known: he found that poem ’easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.’ Of the songs in Comus he remarks: ’they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.’ He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but ’glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.’ The passionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, and he had no imagination. These are, indeed, grievous disabilities in a critic. What could have induced such a man, the impatient reader is sometimes tempted to ask, to set himself up as a judge of poetry?
The answer to the question is to be found in the remarkable change which has come over our entire conception of poetry, since the time when Johnson wrote. It has often been stated that the essential characteristic of that great Romantic Movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, was the re-introduction of Nature into the domain of poetry. Incidentally, it is curious to observe that nearly every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return to Nature. No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne himself—the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century—wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance. Precisely the same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets,
The new edition of the Lives, which Dr. Birkbeck Hill prepared for publication before his death, and which has been issued by the Clarendon Press, with a brief Memoir of the editor, would probably have astonished Dr. Johnson. But, though the elaborate erudition of the notes and appendices might have surprised him, it would not have put him to shame. One can imagine his growling scorn of the scientific conscientiousness of the present day. And indeed, the three tomes of Dr. Hill’s edition, with all their solid wealth of information, their voluminous scholarship, their accumulation of vast research, are a little ponderous and a little ugly; the hand is soon wearied with the weight, and the eye is soon distracted by the varying types, and the compressed columns of the notes, and the paragraphic numerals in the margins. This is the price that must be paid for increased efficiency. The wise reader will divide his attention between the new business-like edition and one of the charming old ones, in four comfortable volumes, where the text is supreme upon the page, and the paragraphs follow one another at leisurely intervals. The type may be a little faded, and the paper a little yellow; but what of that? It is all quiet and easy; and, as one reads, the brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the Past, with the friendliness of a conversation.
1906.
NOTES:
[Footnote 1: Lives of the English Poets. By Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1905.]
When Napoleon was starting for his campaign in Russia, he ordered the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might be necessary to make. ’Je m’ennuie en route; je lirai ces volumes, et j’ecrirai de Mayence ce qu’il y aura a faire.’ The volumes thus chosen to beguile the imperial leisure between Paris and Mayence contained the famous correspondence of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole. By the Emperor’s command a few excisions were made, and the book—reprinted from Miss Berry’s original edition which had appeared two years earlier in England—was published almost at once. The sensation in Paris was immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning of Moscow and the passage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination—on the one hand as a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and become historical. The letters were hardly more than thirty years old; but the world which they depicted in all its intensity and all its singularity—the world of the old regime—had vanished for ever into limbo. Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was fixed—a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has passed; the gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us to-day seems hardly less remote—from some points of view, indeed, even more—than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the correspondence of Cicero. Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange and dead antiquity: there is a personal and human element in the letters which gives them a more poignant interest, and brings them close to ourselves. The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the eighteenth century, can never be out of date.
A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate them in their completeness. The late Mrs. Paget Toynbee, while preparing her edition of Horace Walpole’s letters, came upon the trace of the original manuscripts, which had long lain hidden in obscurity in a country house in Staffordshire. The publication of these manuscripts in full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs. Toynbee’s well-known accuracy, industry, and tact are everywhere conspicuous, is an event of no small importance to lovers of French literature. A great mass of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance. The original edition produced by Miss Berry in 1810, from which all the subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy, turns out to have contained nothing more than a comparatively small fraction of the whole correspondence; of the 838 letters published by Mrs. Toynbee, 485 are entirely new, and of the rest only 52 were printed by Miss Berry in their entirety. Miss Berry’s edition was, in fact, simply a selection, and as a selection it deserves nothing but praise. It skims the cream of the correspondence; and it faithfully preserves the main outline of the story which the letters reveal. No doubt that was enough for the readers of that generation; indeed, even for the more exacting reader of to-day, there is something a little overwhelming in the closely packed 2000 pages of Mrs. Toynbee’s volumes. Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry’s edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but Mrs. Toynbee’s will always be indispensable for the historical student, and invaluable for anyone with the leisure, the patience, and the taste for a detailed and elaborate examination of a singular adventure of the heart.
The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris. She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century: it was the age of the Regent Orleans, Fontenelle, and the young Voltaire; not that of Rousseau, the ‘Encyclopaedia,’ and the Patriarch of Ferney. It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every
Madame du Deffand’s generation had, indeed, very little in common with that ardent, hopeful, speculative, sentimental group of friends who met together every evening in the drawing-room of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV. For a fortnight (so she confessed to Walpole) she was actually the Regent’s mistress; and a fortnight, in those days, was a considerable time. Then she became the intimate friend of Madame de Prie—the singular woman who, for a moment, on the Regent’s death, during the government of M. le Duc, controlled the destinies of France, and who committed suicide when that amusement was denied her. During her early middle age Madame du Deffand was one of the principal figures in the palace of Sceaux, where the Duchesse du Maine, the grand-daughter of the great Conde and the daughter-in-law of Louis XIV., kept up for many years an almost royal state among the most distinguished men and women of the time. It was at Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations—supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park—that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved. The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and the memoirs that have come down to us. The days of formal pomp and vast representation had ended for ever when the ‘Grand Monarque’ was no longer to be seen strutting, in periwig and red-heeled shoes, down the glittering gallery of Versailles; the intimacy and seclusion of modern life had not yet begun. It was an intermediate period, and the comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and intelligent classes led an existence in which the elements of publicity and privacy were curiously combined. Never, certainly, before or since, have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years of the eighteenth century. The circle of one’s friends was, in those days, the framework of one’s whole being; within which was to be found all that life had to offer, and outside of which no interest, however fruitful, no passion, however profound, no art, however soaring, was of the slightest account. Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of personal selfishness have played so small a part. The selfishness of the eighteenth century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate
Yet, though the wheels of life rolled round with such an alluring smoothness, they did not roll of themselves; the skill and care of trained mechanicians were needed to keep them going; and the task was no light one. Even Fontenelle himself, fitted as he was for it by being blessed (as one of his friends observed) with two brains and no heart, realised to the full the hard conditions of social happiness. ’Il y a peu de choses,’ he wrote, ’aussi difficiles et aussi dangereuses que le commerce des hommes.’ The sentence, true for all ages, was particularly true for his own. The graceful, easy motions of that gay company were those of dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing, over the thinnest ice. Those drawing-rooms, those little circles, so charming with the familiarity of their privacy, were themselves the rigorous abodes of the deadliest kind of public opinion—the kind that lives and glitters in a score of penetrating eyes. They required in their votaries the absolute submission that reigns in religious orders—the willing sacrifice of the entire life. The intimacy of personal passion, the intensity of high endeavour—these things must be left behind and utterly cast away by all who would enter that narrow sanctuary. Friendship might be allowed there, and flirtation disguised as love; but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself should never be admitted to destroy the calm of daily intercourse and absorb into a single channel attentions due to all. Politics were to
An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse—such were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux. About the middle of the century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which still showed traces—in the emblazoned arms over the great mantelpiece—of the occupation of Madame de Montespan. A few years later a physical affliction overtook her: at the age of fifty-seven she became totally blind; and this misfortune placed her, almost without a transition, among the ranks of the old. For the rest of her life she hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most celebrated in Europe. The thirty years of her reign there fall into two distinct and almost equal parts. The first, during which d’Alembert was pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life, her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.
It is this final period of Madame du Deffand’s life that is reflected so minutely in the famous correspondence which the labours of Mrs. Toynbee have now presented to us for the first time in its entirety. Her letters to Walpole form in effect a continuous journal covering the space of fifteen years (1766-1780). They allow us, on the one hand, to trace through all its developments the progress of an extraordinary passion, and on the other to examine, as it were under the microscope of perhaps the bitterest perspicacity on record, the last phase of a doomed society. For the circle which came together in her drawing-room during those years had the hand of death upon it. The future lay elsewhere; it was simply the past that survived there—in the rich trappings of fashion and wit and elaborate gaiety—but still irrevocably the past. The radiant creatures of Sceaux had fallen into the yellow leaf. We see them in these letters, a collection of elderly persons trying hard to amuse themselves, and not succeeding very well. Pont-de-Veyle, the youthful septuagenarian, did perhaps succeed; for he never noticed what a bore he was becoming with his perpetual cough, and continued to go the rounds with indefatigable animation, until one day his cough was heard no more. Henault—once notorious for his dinner-parties, and for having written an historical treatise—which, it is true, was worthless, but he had written it—Henault was beginning to dodder, and Voltaire, grinning in Ferney, had already dubbed him ‘notre delabre President.’ Various dowagers were engaged upon various vanities. The Marquise de Boufflers was gambling herself to ruin; the Comtesse de Boufflers was wringing out the last drops of her reputation as the mistress of a Royal Prince; the Marechale de Mirepoix was involved in shady politics; the Marechale de Luxembourg was obliterating a highly dubious past by a scrupulous attention to ‘bon ton,’ of which, at last, she became the arbitress: ‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible; ’ah, Madame, quel dommage que le Saint Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!’ Then there was the floating company of foreign diplomats, some of whom were invariably to be found at Madame du Deffand’s: Caraccioli, for instance, the Neapolitan Ambassador—’je perds les trois quarts de ce qu’il dit,’ she wrote, ’mais comme il en dit beaucoup, on peut supporter cette perte’; and Bernstorff, the Danish envoy, who became the fashion, was lauded to the skies for his wit and fine manners, until, says the malicious lady, ’a travers tous ces eloges, je m’avisai de l’appeler Puffendorf,’ and Puffendorf the poor man remained for evermore. Besides the diplomats, nearly every foreign traveller of distinction found his way to the renowned salon; Englishmen were particularly frequent visitors; and among the familiar figures of whom we catch more than one glimpse in the letters to Walpole are Burke, Fox, and Gibbon. Sometimes influential parents in England
It was, after all, only natural that she should put off going to bed, for she rarely slept for more than two or three hours. The greater part of that empty time, during which conversation was impossible, she devoted to her books. But she hardly ever found anything to read that she really enjoyed. Of the two thousand volumes she possessed—all bound alike, and stamped on the back with her device of a cat—she had only read four or five hundred; the rest were impossible. She perpetually complained to Walpole of the extreme dearth of reading matter. In nothing, indeed, is the contrast more marked between that age and ours than in the quantity of books available for the ordinary reader. How the eighteenth century would envy us our innumerable novels, our biographies, our books of travel, all our easy approaches to knowledge and entertainment, our translations, our cheap reprints! In those days, even for a reader of catholic tastes, there was really very little to read. And, of course, Madame du Deffand’s tastes were far from catholic—they were fastidious to the last degree. She considered that Racine alone of writers had reached perfection, and that only once—in Athalie. Corneille carried her away for moments, but on the whole he was barbarous. She highly admired ’quelques centaines de vers de M. de Voltaire.’ She thought Richardson and Fielding excellent, and she was enraptured by the style—but only by the style—of Gil Blas. And that was all. Everything else appeared to her either affected or pedantic or insipid. Walpole recommended to her a History of Malta; she tried it, but she soon gave it up—it mentioned the Crusades. She began Gibbon, but she found him superficial. She tried Buffon, but he was ’d’une monotonie insupportable; il sait bien ce qu’il sait, mais il ne s’occupe que des betes; il faut l’etre un peu soi-meme pour se devouer a une telle occupation.’ She got hold of the memoirs of Saint-Simon in manuscript, and these amused her enormously; but she was so disgusted by the style that she was very nearly sick. At last, in despair, she embarked on a prose translation of Shakespeare. The result was unexpected; she was positively pleased. Coriolanus, it is true, ’me semble, sauf votre respect, epouvantable, et n’a pas le sens commun’; and ‘pour La Tempete, je ne suis pas touchee de ce genre.’ But she was impressed by Othello; she was interested by Macbeth; and she admired Julius Caesar, in spite of its bad taste. At King Lear, indeed, she had to draw the line. ’Ah, mon Dieu! Quelle piece! Reellement la trouvez-vous belle? Elle me noircit l’ame a un point que je ne puis exprimer; c’est un amas de toutes les horreurs infernales.’ Her reader was an old soldier from the Invalides, who came round every morning early, and took up his position by her bedside. She lay back among the cushions, listening, for long hours. Was there ever a more incongruous company, a queerer trysting-place, for Goneril and Desdemona, Ariel and Lady Macbeth?
Often, even before the arrival of the old pensioner, she was at work dictating a letter, usually to Horace Walpole, occasionally to Madame de Choiseul or Voltaire. Her letters to Voltaire are enchanting; his replies are no less so; and it is much to be regretted that the whole correspondence has never been collected together in chronological order, and published as a separate book. The slim volume would be, of its kind, quite perfect. There was no love lost between the two old friends; they could not understand each other; Voltaire, alone of his generation, had thrown himself into the very vanguard of thought; to Madame du Deffand progress had no meaning, and thought itself was hardly more than an unpleasant necessity. She distrusted him profoundly, and he returned the compliment. Yet neither could do without the other: through her, he kept in touch with one of the most influential circles in Paris; and even she could not be insensible to the glory of corresponding with such a man. Besides, in spite of all their differences, they admired each other genuinely, and they were held together by the habit of a long familiarity. The result was a marvellous display of epistolary art. If they had liked each other any better, they never would have troubled to write so well. They were on their best behaviour—exquisitely courteous and yet punctiliously at ease, like dancers in a minuet. His cajoleries are infinite; his deft sentences, mingling flattery with reflection, have almost the quality of a caress. She replies in the tone of a worshipper, glancing lightly at a hundred subjects, purring out her ‘Monsieur de Voltaire,’ and seeking his advice on literature and life. He rejoins in that wonderful strain of epicurean stoicism of which he alone possessed the secret: and so the letters go on. Sometimes one just catches the glimpse of a claw beneath the soft pad, a grimace under the smile of elegance; and one remembers with a shock that, after all, one is reading the correspondence of a monkey and a cat.
Madame du Deffand’s style reflects, perhaps even more completely than that of Voltaire himself, the common-sense of the eighteenth century. Its precision is absolute. It is like a line drawn in one stroke by a master, with the prompt exactitude of an unerring subtlety. There is no breadth in it—no sense of colour and the concrete mass of things. One cannot wonder, as one reads her, that she hardly regretted her blindness. What did she lose by it? Certainly not
The sweet approach
of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom,
or Summer’s rose;
for what did she care for such particulars when her eyes were at their clearest? Her perception was intellectual; and to the penetrating glances of her mental vision the objects of the sensual world were mere irrelevance. The kind of writing produced by such a quality of mind may seem thin and barren to those accustomed to the wealth and variety of the Romantic school. Yet it will repay attention. The vocabulary is very small; but every word is the right one; this old lady of high society, who had never given a thought to her style, who wrote—and spelt—by the light of nature, was a past mistress of that most difficult of literary accomplishments—’l’art de dire en un mot tout ce qu’un mot peut dire.’ The object of all art is to make suggestions. The romantic artist attains that end by using a multitude of different stimuli, by calling up image after image, recollection after recollection, until the reader’s mind is filled and held by a vivid and palpable evocation; the classic works by the contrary method of a fine economy, and, ignoring everything but what is essential, trusts, by means of the exact propriety of his presentation, to produce the required effect. Madame du Deffand carries the classical ideal to its furthest point. She never strikes more than once, and she always hits the nail on the head. Such is her skill that she sometimes seems to beat the Romantics even on their own ground: her reticences make a deeper impression than all the dottings of their i’s. The following passage from a letter to Walpole is characteristic:
Nous eumes une musique charmante, une dame qui joue de la harpe a merveille; elle me fit tant de plaisir que j’eus du regret que vous ne l’entendissiez pas; c’est un instrument admirable. Nous eumes aussi un clavecin, mais quoiqu’il fut touche avec une grande perfection, ce n’est rien en comparaison de la harpe. Je fus fort triste toute la soiree; j’avais appris en partant que Mme. de Luxembourg, qui etait allee samedi a Montmorency pour y passer quinze jours, s’etait trouvee si mal qu’on avait fait venir Tronchin, et qu’on l’avait ramenee le dimanche a huit heures du soir, qu’on lui croyait de l’eau dans la poitrine. L’anciennete de la connaissance; une habitude qui a l’air de l’amitie; voir disparaitre ceux avec qui l’on vit; un retour sur soi-meme; sentir que l’on ne tient a rien, que tout fuit, que tout echappe, qu’on reste seule dans l’univers, et que malgre cela on craint de le quitter; voila ce qui m’occupa pendant la musique.
Here are no coloured words, no fine phrases—only the most flat and ordinary expressions—’un instrument admirable’—’une grande perfection’—’fort triste.’ Nothing is described; and yet how much is suggested! The whole scene is conjured up—one does not know how; one’s imagination is switched on to the right rails, as it were, by a look, by a gesture, and then left to run of itself. In the simple, faultless rhythm of that closing sentence, the trembling melancholy of the old harp seems to be lingering still.
While the letters to Voltaire show us nothing but the brilliant exterior of Madame du Deffand’s mind, those to Walpole reveal the whole state of her soul. The revelation is not a pretty one. Bitterness, discontent, pessimism, cynicism, boredom, regret, despair—these are the feelings that dominate every page. To a superficial observer Madame du Deffand’s lot must have seemed peculiarly enviable; she was well off, she enjoyed the highest consideration, she possessed intellectual talents of the rarest kind which she had every opportunity of displaying, and she was surrounded by a multitude of friends. What more could anyone desire? The harsh old woman would have smiled grimly at such a question. ’A little appetite,’ she might have answered. She was like a dyspeptic at a feast; the finer the dishes that were set before her, the greater her distaste; that spiritual gusto which lends a savour to the meanest act of living, and without which all life seems profitless, had gone from her for ever. Yet—and this intensified her wretchedness—though the banquet was loathsome to her, she had not the strength to tear herself away from the table. Once, in a moment of desperation, she had thoughts of retiring to a convent, but she soon realised that such an action was out of the question. Fate had put her into the midst of the world, and there she must remain. ‘Je ne suis point assez heureuse,’ she said, ’de me passer des choses dont je ne me soucie pas.’ She was extremely lonely. As fastidious in friendship as in literature, she passed her life among a crowd of persons whom she disliked and despised, ’Je ne vois que des sots et des fripons,’ she said; and she did not know which were the most disgusting. She took a kind of deadly pleasure in analysing ‘les nuances des sottises’ among the people with whom she lived. The varieties were many, from the foolishness of her companion, Mademoiselle Sanadon, who would do nothing but imitate her—’elle fait des definitions,’ she wails—to that of the lady who hoped to prove her friendship by unending presents of grapes and pears—’comme je n’y tate pas, cela diminue mes scrupules du peu de gout que j’ai pour elle.’ Then there were those who were not quite fools but something very near it. ‘Tous les Matignon sont des sots,’ said somebody one day to the Regent, ‘excepte le Marquis de Matignon.’ ‘Cela est vrai,’ the Regent replied, ‘il n’est pas sot, mais on voit bien qu’il est le fils d’un sot.’ Madame du Deffand was an expert at tracing such affinities. For instance, there was Necker. It was clear that Necker was not a fool, and yet—what was it? Something was the matter—yes, she had it: he made you feel a fool yourself—’l’on est plus bete avec lui que l’on ne l’est tout seul.’ As she said of herself: ’elle est toujours tentee d’arracher les masques qu’elle rencontre.’ Those blind, piercing eyes of hers spied out unerringly the weakness or the ill-nature or the absurdity that lurked behind the gravest or the most fascinating
J’admirais hier au soir la nombreuse compagnie qui etait chez moi; hommes et femmes me paraissaient des machines a ressorts, qui allaient, venaient, parlaient, riaient, sans penser, sans reflechir, sans sentir; chacun jouait son role par habitude: Madame la Duchesse d’Aiguillon crevait de rire, Mme. de Forcalquier dedaignait tout, Mme. de la Valliere jabotait sur tout. Les hommes ne jouaient pas de meilleurs roles, et moi j’etais abimee dans les reflexions les plus noires; je pensai que j’avais passe ma vie dans les illusions; que je m’etais creusee tous les abimes dans lesquels j’etais tombee.
At other times she could see around her nothing but a mass of mutual hatreds, into which she was plunged herself no less than her neighbours:
Je ramenai la Marechale de Mirepoix chez elle; j’y descendis, je causai une heure avec elle; je n’en fus pas mecontente. Elle hait la petite Idole, elle hait la Marechale de Luxembourg; enfin, sa haine pour tous les gens qui me deplaisent me fit lui pardonner l’indifference et peut-etre la haine qu’elle a pour moi. Convenez que voila une jolie societe, un charmant commerce.
Once or twice for several months together she thought that she had found in the Duchesse de Choiseul a true friend and a perfect companion. But there was one fatal flaw even in Madame de Choiseul: she was perfect!—’Elle est parfaite; et c’est un plus grand defaut qu’on ne pense et qu’on ne saurait imaginer.’ At last one day the inevitable happened—she went to see Madame de Choiseul, and she was bored. ’Je rentrai chez moi a une heure, penetree, persuadee qu’on ne peut etre content de personne.’
One person, however, there was who pleased her; and it was the final irony of her fate that this very fact should have been the last drop that caused the cup of her unhappiness to overflow. Horace Walpole had come upon her at a psychological moment. Her quarrel with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and the Encyclopaedists had just occurred; she was within a few years of seventy; and it must have seemed to her that, after such a break, at such an age, there was little left for her to do but to die quietly. Then the gay, talented, fascinating Englishman appeared, and she suddenly found that, so far from her life
About half-way through the correspondence there is an acute crisis, after which the tone of the letters undergoes a marked change. After seven years of struggle, Madame du Deffand’s indomitable spirit was broken; henceforward she would hope for nothing; she would gratefully accept the few crumbs that might be thrown her; and for the rest she resigned herself to her fate. Gradually sinking into extreme old age, her self-repression and her bitterness grew ever more and more complete. She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations on the perpetual theme of ‘ennui.’ ‘C’est une maladie de l’ame,’ she says, ’dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l’existence; c’est le ver solitaire qui absorbe tout.’ And again, ’l’ennui est l’avant-gout du neant, mais le neant lui est preferable.’ Her existence had become a hateful waste—a garden, she said, from which all the flowers had been uprooted and which had been sown with salt. ’Ah! Je le repete sans cesse, il n’y a qu’un malheur, celui d’etre ne.’ The grasshopper had become a burden; and yet death seemed as little desirable as life. ‘Comment est-il possible,’ she asks, ’qu’on craigne la fin d’une vie aussi triste?’ When Death did come at last, he came very gently. She felt his approaches, and dictated a letter to Walpole, bidding him, in her strange fashion, an infinitely restrained farewell: ’Divertissez-vous, mon ami, le plus que vous pourrez; ne vous affligez point de mon etat, nous etions presque perdus l’un pour l’autre;
NOTES:
[Footnote 2: Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand a Horace Walpole (1766-80). Premiere Edition complete, augmentee d’environ 500 Lettres inedites, publiees, d’apres les originaux, avec une introduction, des notes, et une table des noms, par Mrs. Paget Toynbee. 3 vols. Methuen, 1912.]
The visit of Voltaire to England marks a turning-point in the history of civilisation. It was the first step in a long process of interaction—big with momentous consequences—between the French and English cultures. For centuries the combined forces of mutual ignorance and political hostility had kept the two nations apart: Voltaire planted a small seed of friendship which, in spite of a thousand hostile influences, grew and flourished mightily. The seed, no doubt, fell on good ground, and no doubt, if Voltaire had never left his native country, some chance wind would have carried it over the narrow seas, so that history in the main would have been unaltered. But actually his was the hand which did the work.
It is unfortunate that our knowledge of so important a period in Voltaire’s life should be extremely incomplete. Carlyle, who gave a hasty glance at it in his life of Frederick, declared that he could find nothing but ‘mere inanity and darkness visible’; and since Carlyle’s day the progress has been small. A short chapter in Desnoiresterres’ long Biography and an essay by Churton Collins did something to co-ordinate the few known facts. Another step was taken a few years ago with the publication of M. Lanson’s elaborate and exhaustive edition of the Lettres Philosophiques, the work in which Voltaire gave to the world the distilled essence of his English experiences. And now M. Lucien Foulet has brought together all the extant letters concerning the period, which he has collated with scrupulous exactitude and to which he has added a series of valuable appendices upon various obscure and disputed points. M. Lanson’s great attainments are well known, and to say that M. Foulet’s work may fitly rank as a supplementary volume to the edition of the Lettres Philosophiques is simply to say that he is a worthy follower of that noble tradition of profound research and perfect lucidity which has made French scholarship one of the glories of European culture.
Upon the events in particular which led up to Voltaire’s departure for England, M. Foulet has been able to throw considerable light. The story, as revealed by the letters of contemporary observers and the official documents of the police, is an instructive and curious one. In the early days of January 1726 Voltaire, who was thirty-one years of age, occupied a position which, so far as could be seen upon the surface, could hardly have been more fortunate. He was recognised everywhere as the rising poet of the day; he was a successful dramatist; he was a friend of Madame de Prie, who was all-powerful at Court, and his talents had been rewarded by a pension from the royal purse. His brilliance, his gaiety, his extraordinary capacity for being agreeable had made him the pet of the narrow and aristocratic circle which dominated France. Dropping his middle-class antecedents as completely as he had dropped his middle-class name, young Arouet, the notary’s offspring, floated at his ease through the palaces of dukes and princes, with whose sons he drank and jested, and for whose wives—it was de rigueur in those days—he expressed all the ardours of a passionate and polite devotion. Such was his roseate situation when, all at once, the catastrophe came. One night at the Opera the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, of the famous and powerful family of the Rohans, a man of forty-three, quarrelsome, blustering, whose reputation for courage left something to be desired, began to taunt the poet upon his birth—’Monsieur Arouet, Monsieur Voltaire—what is your name?’ To which the retort came quickly—’Whatever my name may be, I know how to preserve the honour of it.’ The Chevalier muttered something and went off, but the incident was not ended. Voltaire had let his high spirits and his sharp tongue carry him too far, and he was to pay the penalty. It was not an age in which it was safe to be too witty with lords. ‘Now mind, Dancourt,’ said one of those grands seigneurs to the leading actor of the day, ’if you’re more amusing than I am at dinner to-night, je te donnerai cent coups de batons.’ It was dangerous enough to show one’s wits at all in the company of such privileged persons, but to do so at their expense——! A few days later Voltaire and the Chevalier met again, at the Comedie, in Adrienne Lecouvreur’s dressing-room. Rohan repeated his sneering question, and ‘the Chevalier has had his answer’ was Voltaire’s reply. Furious, Rohan lifted his stick, but at that moment Adrienne very properly fainted, and the company dispersed. A few days more and Rohan had perfected the arrangements for his revenge. Voltaire, dining at the Duc de Sully’s, where, we are told, he was on the footing of a son of the house, received a message that he was wanted outside in the street. He went out, was seized by a gang of lackeys, and beaten before the eyes of Rohan, who directed operations from a cab. ‘Epargnez la tete,’ he shouted, ‘elle est encore
A letter, written by Voltaire to his friend Madame de Bernieres while he was still in hiding, reveals the effect which these events had produced upon his mind. It is the first letter in the series of his collected correspondence which is not all Epicurean elegance and caressing wit. The wit, the elegance, the finely turned phrase, the shifting smile—these things are still visible there no doubt, but they are informed and overmastered by a new, an almost ominous spirit: Voltaire, for the first time in his life, is serious.
J’ai ete a l’extremite; je n’attends que ma convalescence pour abandonner a jamais ce pays-ci. Souvenez-vous de l’amitie tendre que vous avez eue pour moi; au nom de cette amitie informez-moi par un mot de votre main de ce qui se passe, ou parlez a l’homme que je vous envoi, en qui vous pouvez prendre une entiere confiance. Presentez mes respects a Madame du Deffand; dites a Thieriot que je veux absolument qu’il m’aime, ou quand je serai mort, ou quand je serai heureux; jusque-la, je lui pardonne son indifference. Dites a M. le chevalier des Alleurs que je n’oublierai jamais la generosite de ses procedes pour moi. Comptez que tout detrompe que je suis de la vanite des amities humaines, la votre me sera a jamais precieuse. Je ne souhaite de revenir a Paris que pour vous voir, vous embrasser encore une fois, et vous faire voir ma constance dans mon amitie et dans mes malheurs.
‘Presentez mes respects a Madame du Deffand!’ Strange indeed are the whirligigs of Time! Madame de Bernieres was then living in none other than that famous house at the corner of the Rue de Beaune and the Quai des Theatins (now Quai Voltaire) where, more than half a century later, the writer of those lines was to come, bowed down under the weight of an enormous celebrity, to look for the last time upon Paris and the world; where, too, Madame du Deffand herself, decrepit, blind, and bitter with the disillusionments of a strange lifetime, was to listen once more to the mellifluous enchantments of that extraordinary intelligence, which—so it seemed to her as she sat entranced—could never, never grow old.[4]
Voltaire was not kept long in the Bastille. For some time he had entertained a vague intention of visiting England, and he now begged for permission to leave the country. The authorities, whose one object was to prevent an unpleasant fracas, were ready enough to substitute exile for imprisonment; and thus, after a fortnight’s detention, the ’fameux poete’ was released on condition that he should depart forthwith, and remain, until further permission, at a distance of at least fifty leagues from Versailles.
It is from this point onwards that our information grows scanty and confused. We know that Voltaire was in Calais early in May, and it is generally agreed that he crossed over to England shortly afterwards. His subsequent movements are uncertain. We find him established at Wandsworth in the middle of October, but it is probable that in the interval he had made a secret journey to Paris with the object—in which he did not succeed—of challenging the Chevalier de Rohan to a duel. Where he lived during these months is unknown, but apparently it was not in London. The date of his final departure from England is equally in doubt; M. Foulet adduces some reasons for supposing that he returned secretly to France in November 1728, and in that case the total length of the English visit was just two and a half years. Churton Collins, however, prolongs it until March 1729. A similar obscurity hangs over all the details of Voltaire’s stay. Not only are his own extant letters during this period unusually few, but allusions to him in contemporary English correspondences are almost entirely absent. We have to depend upon scattered hints, uncertain inferences, and conflicting rumours. We know that he stayed for some time at Wandsworth with a certain Everard Falkener in circumstances which he described to Thieriot in a letter in English—an English quaintly flavoured with the gay impetuosity of another race. ‘At my coming to London,’ he wrote, ’I found my damned Jew was broken.’ (He had depended upon some bills of exchange drawn upon a Jewish broker.)
I was without a penny, sick to dye of a violent ague, stranger, alone, helpless, in the midst of a city wherein I was known to nobody; my Lord and Lady Bolingbroke were into the country; I could not make bold to see our ambassadour in so wretched a condition. I had never undergone such distress; but I am born to run through all the misfortunes of life. In these circumstances my star, that among all its direful influences pours allways on me some kind refreshment, sent to me an English gentleman unknown to me, who forced me to receive some money that I wanted. Another London citisen that I had seen but once at Paris, carried me to his own country house, wherein I lead an obscure and charming life since that time, without going to London, and quite given over to the pleasures of indolence and friendshipp. The true and generous affection of this man who soothes the bitterness of my life brings me to love you more and more. All the instances of friendshipp indear my friend Tiriot to me. I have seen often mylord and mylady Bolinbroke; I have found their affection still the same, even increased in proportion to my unhappiness; they offered me all, their money, their house; but I have refused all, because they are lords, and I have accepted all from Mr. Faulknear because he is a single gentleman.
We know that the friendship thus begun continued for many years, but as to who or what Everard Falkener was—besides the fact that he was a ’single gentleman’—we have only just information enough to make us wish for more.
‘I am here,’ he wrote after Voltaire had gone, ’just as you left me, neither merrier nor sadder, nor richer nor poorer, enjoying perfect health, having everything that makes life agreeable, without love, without avarice, without ambition, and without envy; and as long as all this lasts I shall take the liberty to call myself a very happy man.’ This stoical Englishman was a merchant who eventually so far overcame his distaste both for ambition and for love, as to become first Ambassador at Constantinople and then Postmaster-General—has anyone, before or since, ever held such a singular succession of offices?—and to wind up by marrying, as we are intriguingly told, at the age of sixty-three, ‘the illegitimate daughter of General Churchill.’
We have another glimpse of Voltaire at Wandsworth in a curious document brought to light by M. Lanson. Edward Higginson, an assistant master at a Quaker’s school there, remembered how the excitable Frenchman used to argue with him for hours in Latin on the subject of ‘water-baptism,’ until at last Higginson produced a text from St. Paul which seemed conclusive.
Some time after, Voltaire being at the Earl Temple’s seat in Fulham, with Pope and others such, in their conversation fell on the subject of water-baptism. Voltaire assumed the part of a quaker, and at length came to mention that assertion of Paul. They questioned there being such an assertion in all his writings; on which was a large wager laid, as near as I remember of L500: and Voltaire, not retaining where it was, had one of the Earl’s horses, and came over the ferry from Fulham to Putney.... When I came he desired me to give him in writing the place where Paul said, he was not sent to baptize; which I presently did. Then courteously taking his leave, he mounted and rode back—
and, we must suppose, won his wager.
He seemed so taken with me (adds Higginson) as to offer to buy out the remainder of my time. I told him I expected my master would be very exorbitant in his demand. He said, let his demand be what it might, he would give it on condition I would yield to be his companion, keeping the same company, and I should always, in every respect, fare as he fared, wearing my clothes like his and of equal value: telling me then plainly, he was a Deist; adding, so were most of the noblemen in France and in England; deriding the account given by the four Evangelists concerning the birth of Christ, and his miracles, etc., so far that I desired him to desist: for I could not bear to hear my Saviour so reviled and spoken against. Whereupon he seemed under a disappointment, and left me with some reluctance.
In London itself we catch fleeting visions of the eager gesticulating figure, hurrying out from his lodgings in Billiter Square—’Belitery Square’ he calls it—or at the sign of the ‘White Whigg’ in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, to go off to the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton
You are so witty, profligate,
and thin,
At once we think you Milton,
Death, and Sin;
and at Blenheim, where the old Duchess of Marlborough hoped to lure him into helping her with her decocted memoirs, until she found that he had scruples, when in a fury she snatched the papers out of his hands. ’I thought,’ she cried, ’the man had sense; but I find him at bottom either a fool or a philosopher.’
It is peculiarly tantalising that our knowledge should be almost at its scantiest in the very direction in which we should like to know most, and in which there was most reason to hope that our curiosity might have been gratified. Of Voltaire’s relations with the circle of Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke only the most meagre details have reached us. His correspondence with Bolingbroke, whom he had known in France and whose presence in London was one of his principal inducements in coming to England—a correspondence which must have been considerable—has completely disappeared. Nor, in the numerous published letters which passed about between the members of that distinguished group, is there any reference to Voltaire’s name. Now and then some chance remark raises our expectations, only to make our disappointment more acute. Many years later, for instance, in 1765, a certain Major Broome paid a visit to Ferney, and made the following entry in his diary:
Dined with Mons. Voltaire, who behaved very politely. He is very old, was dressed in a robe-de-chambre of blue sattan and gold spots on it, with a sort of blue sattan cap and tassle of gold. He spoke all the time in English.... His house is not very fine, but genteel, and stands upon a mount close to the mountains. He is tall and very thin, has a very piercing eye, and a look singularly vivacious. He told me of his acquaintance with Pope, Swift (with whom he lived for three months at Lord Peterborough’s) and Gay, who first showed him the Beggar’s Opera before it was acted. He says he admires Swift, and loved Gay vastly. He said that Swift had a great deal of the ridiculum acre.
And then Major Broome goes on to describe the ‘handsome new church’ at Ferney, and the ‘very neat water-works’ at Geneva. But what a vision has he opened out for us, and, in that very moment, shut away for ever from our gaze in that brief parenthesis—’with whom he lived for three months at Lord Peterborough’s’! What would we not give now for no more than one or two of the bright intoxicating drops from that noble river of talk which flowed then with such a careless abundance!—that prodigal stream, swirling away, so swiftly and so happily, into the empty spaces of forgetfulness and the long night of Time!
So complete, indeed, is the lack of precise and well-authenticated information upon this, by far the most obviously interesting side of Voltaire’s life in England, that some writers have been led to adopt a very different theory from that which is usually accepted, and to suppose that his relations with Pope’s circle were in reality of a purely superficial, or even of an actually disreputable, kind. Voltaire himself, no doubt, was anxious to appear as the intimate friend of the great writers of England; but what reason is there to believe that he was not embroidering upon the facts, and that his true position was not that of a mere literary hanger-on, eager simply for money and reclame, with, perhaps, no particular scruples as to his means of getting hold of those desirable ends? The objection to this theory is that there is even less evidence to support it than there is to support Voltaire’s own story. There are a few rumours and anecdotes; but that is all. Voltaire was probably the best-hated man in the eighteenth century, and it is only natural that, out of the enormous mass of mud that was thrown at him, some handfuls should have been particularly aimed at his life in England. Accordingly, we learn that somebody was told by somebody else—’avec des details que je ne rapporterai point’—that ’M. de Voltaire se conduisit tres-irregulierement en Angleterre: qu’il s’y est fait beaucoup d’ennemis, par des procedes qui n’accordaient pas avec les principes d’une morale exacte.’ And we are told that he left England ‘under a cloud’; that before he went he was ‘cudgelled’ by an infuriated publisher; that he swindled Lord Peterborough out of large sums of money, and that the outraged nobleman drew his sword upon the miscreant, who only escaped with his life by a midnight flight. A more circumstantial story has been given currency by Dr. Johnson. Voltaire, it appears, was a spy in the pay of Walpole, and was in the habit of betraying Bolingbroke’s political secrets to the Government. The tale first appears in a third-rate life of Pope by Owen Ruffhead, who had it from Warburton, who had it from Pope himself. Oddly enough Churton Collins apparently believed it, partly from the evidence afforded by the ‘fulsome flattery’ and ‘exaggerated compliments’ to be found in Voltaire’s correspondence, which, he says, reveal a man in whom ’falsehood and hypocrisy are of the very essence of his composition. There is nothing, however base, to which he will not stoop: there is no law in the code of social honour which he is not capable of violating.’ Such an extreme and sweeping conclusion, following from such shadowy premises, seems to show that some of the mud thrown in the eighteenth century was still sticking in the twentieth. M. Foulet, however, has examined Ruffhead’s charge in a very different spirit, with conscientious minuteness, and has concluded that it is utterly without foundation.
It is, indeed, certain that Voltaire’s acquaintanceship was not limited to the extremely bitter Opposition circle which centred about the disappointed and restless figure of Bolingbroke. He had come to London with letters of introduction from Horace Walpole, the English Ambassador at Paris, to various eminent persons in the Government. ’Mr. Voltaire, a poet and a very ingenious one,’ was recommended by Walpole to the favour and protection of the Duke of Newcastle, while Dodington was asked to support the subscription to ’an excellent poem, called “Henry IV.,” which, on account of some bold strokes in it against persecution and the priests, cannot be printed here.’ These letters had their effect, and Voltaire rapidly made friends at Court. When he brought out his London edition of the Henriade, there was hardly a great name in England which was not on the subscription list. He was allowed to dedicate the poem to Queen Caroline, and he received a royal gift of L240. Now it is also certain that just before this time Bolingbroke and Swift were suspicious of a ’certain pragmatical spy of quality, well known to act in that capacity by those into whose company he insinuates himself,’ who, they believed, were betraying their plans to the Government. But to conclude that this detected spy was Voltaire, whose favour at Court was known to be the reward of treachery to his friends, is, apart from the inherent improbability of the supposition, rendered almost impossible, owing to the fact that Bolingbroke and Swift were themselves subscribers to the Henriade—Bolingbroke took no fewer than twenty copies—and that Swift was not only instrumental in obtaining a large number of Irish subscriptions, but actually wrote a preface to the Dublin edition of another of Voltaire’s works. What inducement could Bolingbroke have had for such liberality towards a man who had betrayed him? Who can conceive of the redoubtable Dean of St. Patrick, then at the very summit of his fame, dispensing such splendid favours to a wretch whom he knew to be engaged in the shabbiest of all traffics at the expense of himself and his friends?
Voltaire’s literary activities were as insatiable while he was in England as during every other period of his career. Besides the edition of the Henriade, which was considerably altered and enlarged—one of the changes was the silent removal of the name of Sully from its pages—he brought out a volume of two essays, written in English, upon the French Civil Wars and upon Epic Poetry, he began an adaptation of Julius Caesar for the French stage, he wrote the opening acts of his tragedy of Brutus, and he collected a quantity of material for his History of Charles XII. In addition to all this, he was busily engaged with the preparations for his Lettres Philosophiques. The Henriade met with a great success. Every copy of the magnificent quarto edition was sold before publication; three
It was not until five years later that the Lettres Philosophiques appeared. This epoch-making book was the lens by means of which Voltaire gathered together the scattered rays of his English impressions into a focus of brilliant and burning intensity. It so happened that the nation into whose midst he had plunged, and whose characteristics he had scrutinised with so avid a curiosity, had just reached one of the culminating moments in its history. The great achievement of the Revolution and the splendid triumphs of Marlborough had brought to England freedom, power, wealth, and that sense of high exhilaration which springs from victory and self-confidence. Her destiny was in the hands of an aristocracy which was not only capable and enlightened, like most successful aristocracies, but which possessed the peculiar attribute of being deep-rooted in popular traditions and popular sympathies and of drawing its life-blood from the popular will. The agitations of the reign of Anne were over; the stagnation of the reign of Walpole had not yet begun. There was a great outburst of intellectual activity and aesthetic energy. The amazing discoveries of Newton seemed to open out boundless possibilities of speculation; and in the meantime the great nobles were building palaces and reviving the magnificence of the Augustan Age, while men of letters filled the offices of State. Never, perhaps, before or since, has England been so thoroughly English; never have the national qualities of solidity and sense, independence of judgment and idiosyncrasy of temperament, received a more forcible and complete expression. It was the England of Walpole and Carteret, of Butler and Berkeley, of Swift and Pope. The two works which, out of the whole range of English literature, contain in a supreme degree those elements of power, breadth, and common sense, which lie at the root of the national genius—’Gulliver’s Travels’ and the ’Dunciad’—both appeared during Voltaire’s visit. Nor was it only in the high places of the nation’s consciousness that these signs were manifest; they were visible everywhere, to every stroller through the London streets—in the Royal Exchange, where all the world came crowding to pour its gold into English purses, in the Meeting Houses of the Quakers, where the Holy Spirit rushed forth untrammelled to clothe itself in the sober garb of English idiom, and in the taverns of Cheapside, where the brawny fellow-countrymen of Newton and Shakespeare sat, in an impenetrable silence, over their English beef and English beer.
It was only natural that such a society should act as a powerful stimulus upon the vivid temperament of Voltaire, who had come to it with the bitter knowledge fresh in his mind of the medieval futility, the narrow-minded cynicism of his own country. Yet the book which was the result is in many ways a surprising one. It is almost as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. In the first place, Voltaire makes no attempt to give his readers an account of the outward surface, the social and spectacular aspects of English life. It is impossible not to regret this, especially since we know, from a delightful fragment which was not published until after his death, describing his first impressions on arriving in London, in how brilliant and inimitable a fashion he would have accomplished the task. A full-length portrait of Hanoverian England from the personal point of view, by Voltaire, would have been a priceless possession for posterity; but it was never to be painted. The first sketch revealing in its perfection the hand of the master, was lightly drawn, and then thrown aside for ever. And in reality it is better so. Voltaire decided to aim at something higher and more important, something more original and more profound. He determined to write a book which should be, not the sparkling record of an ingenious traveller, but a work of propaganda and a declaration of faith. That new mood, which had come upon him first in Sully’s dining-room and is revealed to us in the quivering phrases of the note to Madame de Bernieres, was to grow, in the congenial air of England, into the dominating passion of his life. Henceforth, whatever quips and follies, whatever flouts and mockeries might play upon the surface, he was to be in deadly earnest at heart. He was to live and die a fighter in the ranks of progress, a champion in the mighty struggle which was now beginning against the powers of darkness in France. The first great blow in that struggle had been struck ten years earlier by Montesquieu in his Lettres Persanes; the second was struck by Voltaire in the Lettres Philosophiques. The intellectual freedom, the vigorous precision, the elegant urbanity which characterise the earlier work appear in a yet more perfect form in the later one. Voltaire’s book, as its title indicates, is in effect a series of generalised reflections upon a multitude of important topics, connected together by a common point of view. A description of the institutions and manners of England is only an incidental part of the scheme: it is the fulcrum by means of which the lever of Voltaire’s philosophy is brought into operation. The book is an extremely short one—it fills less than two hundred small octavo pages; and its tone and style have just that light and airy gaiety which befits the ostensible form of it—a set of private letters to a friend. With an extraordinary width of comprehension, an extraordinary pliability of intelligence, Voltaire touches upon a hundred subjects
It might have been expected that, among the reforms which such a work would advocate, a prominent place would certainly have been given to those of a political nature. In England a political revolution had been crowned with triumph, and all that was best in English life was founded upon the political institutions which had been then established. The moral was obvious: one had only to compare the state of England under a free government with the state of France, disgraced, bankrupt, and incompetent, under autocratic rule. But the moral is never drawn by Voltaire. His references to political questions are slight and vague; he gives a sketch of English history, which reaches Magna Charta, suddenly mentions Henry VII., and then stops; he has not a word to say upon the responsibility of Ministers, the independence of the judicature, or even the freedom of the press. He approves of the English financial system, whose control by the Commons he mentions, but he fails to indicate the importance of the fact. As to the underlying principles of the constitution, the account which he gives of them conveys hardly more to the reader than the famous lines in the Henriade:
Aux murs de Westminster on
voit paraitre ensemble
Trois pouvoirs etonnes du
noeud qui les rassemble.
Apparently Voltaire was aware of these deficiencies, for in the English edition of the book he caused the following curious excuses to be inserted in the preface:
Some of his English Readers may perhaps be dissatisfied at his not expatiating farther on their Constitution and their Laws, which most of them revere almost to Idolatry; but, this Reservedness is an effect of M. de Voltaire’s Judgment. He contented himself with giving his opinion of them in general Reflexions, the Cast of which is entirely new, and which prove that he had made this Part of the British Polity his particular Study. Besides, how was it possible for a Foreigner to pierce thro’ their Politicks, that gloomy Labyrinth, in which such of the English themselves as are best acquainted with it, confess daily that they are bewilder’d and lost?
Nothing could be more characteristic of the attitude, not only of Voltaire himself, but of the whole host of his followers in the later eighteenth century, towards the actual problems of politics. They turned away in disgust from the ‘gloomy labyrinth’ of practical fact to take refuge in those charming ‘general Reflexions’ so dear to their hearts, ’the Cast of which was entirely new’—and the conclusion of which was also entirely new, for it was the French Revolution.
It was, indeed, typical of Voltaire and of his age that the Lettres Philosophiques should have been condemned by the authorities, not for any political heterodoxy, but for a few remarks which seemed to call in question the immortality of the soul. His attack upon the ancien regime was, in the main, a theoretical attack; doubtless its immediate effectiveness was thereby diminished, but its ultimate force was increased. And the ancien regime itself was not slow to realise the danger: to touch the ark of metaphysical orthodoxy was in its eyes the unforgiveable sin. Voltaire knew well enough that he must be careful.
Il n’y a qu’une lettre touchant M. Loke [he wrote to a friend]. La seule matiere philosophique que j’y traite est la petite bagatelle de l’immortalite de l’ame; mais la chose a trop de consequence pour la traiter serieusement. Il a fallu l’egorger pour ne pas heurter de front nos seigneurs les theologiens, gens qui voient si clairement la spiritualite de l’ame qu’ils feraient bruler, s’ils pouvaient, les corps de ceux qui en doutent.
Nor was it only ‘M. Loke’ whom he felt himself obliged to touch so gingerly; the remarkable movement towards Deism, which was then beginning in England, Voltaire only dared to allude to in a hardly perceivable hint. He just mentions, almost in a parenthesis, the names of Shaftesbury, Collins, and Toland, and then quickly passes on. In this connexion, it may be noticed that the influence upon Voltaire of the writers of this group has often been exaggerated. To say, as Lord Morley says, that ’it was the English onslaught which sowed in him the seed of the idea ... of a systematic and reasoned attack’ upon Christian theology, is to misjudge the situation. In the first place it is certain both that Voltaire’s opinions upon those matters were fixed, and that his proselytising habits had begun, long before he came to England. There is curious evidence of this in an anonymous letter, preserved among the archives of the Bastille, and addressed to the head of the police at the time of Voltaire’s imprisonment.
Vous venez de mettre
a la Bastille [says the writer, who, it is
supposed, was an ecclesiastic]
un homme que je souhaitais y voir il
y a plus de 15 annees.
The writer goes on to speak of the
metier que faisait l’homme en question, prechant le deisme tout a decouvert aux toilettes de nos jeunes seigneurs ... L’Ancien Testament, selon lui, n’est qu’un tissu de contes et de fables, les apotres etaient de bonnes gens idiots, simples, et credules, et les peres de l’Eglise, Saint Bernard surtout, auquel il en veut le plus, n’etaient que des charlatans et des suborneurs.
‘Je voudrais etre homme d’authorite,’ he adds, ’pour un jour seulement, afin d’enfermer ce poete entre quatre murailles pour toute sa vie.’ That Voltaire at this early date should have already given rise to such pious ecclesiastical wishes shows clearly enough that he had little to learn from the deists of England. And, in the second place, the deists of England had very little to teach a disciple of Bayle, Fontenelle, and Montesquieu. They were, almost without exception, a group of second-rate and insignificant writers whose ‘onslaught’ upon current beliefs was only to a faint extent ‘systematic and reasoned.’ The feeble and fluctuating rationalism of Toland and Wollaston, the crude and confused rationalism of Collins, the half-crazy rationalism of Woolston, may each and all, no doubt, have furnished Voltaire with arguments and suggestions, but they cannot have seriously influenced his thought. Bolingbroke was a more important figure, and he was in close personal relation with Voltaire; but his controversial writings were clumsy and superficial to an extraordinary degree. As Voltaire himself said, ’in his works there are many leaves and little fruit; distorted expressions and periods intolerably long.’ Tindal and Middleton were more vigorous; but their work did not appear until a later period. The masterly and far-reaching speculations of Hume belong, of course, to a totally different class.
Apart from politics and metaphysics, there were two directions in which the Lettres Philosophiques did pioneer work of a highly important kind: they introduced both Newton and Shakespeare to the French public. The four letters on Newton show Voltaire at his best—succinct, lucid, persuasive, and bold. The few paragraphs on Shakespeare, on the other hand, show him at his worst. Their principal merit is that they mention his existence—a fact hitherto unknown in France; otherwise they merely afford a striking example of the singular contradiction in Voltaire’s nature which made him a revolutionary in intellect and kept him a high Tory in taste. Never was such speculative audacity combined with such aesthetic timidity; it is as if he had reserved all his superstition for matters of art. From his account of Shakespeare, it is clear that he had never dared to open his eyes and frankly look at what he should see before him. All was ’barbare, depourvu de bienseances, d’ordre, de vraisemblance’; in the hurly-burly he was dimly aware of a figured and elevated style, and of some few ‘lueurs etonnantes’; but to the true significance of Shakespeare’s genius he remained utterly blind.
Characteristically enough, Voltaire, at the last moment, did his best to reinforce his tentative metaphysical observations on ‘M. Loke’ by slipping into his book, as it were accidentally, an additional letter, quite disconnected from the rest of the work, containing reflexions upon some of the Pensees of Pascal. He no doubt hoped that these reflexions, into which he had distilled some of his most insidious venom, might, under cover of the rest, pass unobserved. But all his subterfuges were useless. It was in vain that he pulled wires and intrigued with high personages; in vain that he made his way to the aged Minister, Cardinal Fleury, and attempted, by reading him some choice extracts on the Quakers, to obtain permission for the publication of his book. The old Cardinal could not help smiling, though Voltaire had felt that it would be safer to skip the best parts—’the poor man!’ he said afterwards, ’he didn’t realise what he had missed’—but the permission never came. Voltaire was obliged to have recourse to an illicit publication; and then the authorities acted with full force. The Lettres Philosophiques were officially condemned; the book was declared to be scandalous and ’contraire a la religion, aux bonnes moeurs, et au respect du aux puissances,’ and it was ordered to be publicly burned by the executioner. The result was precisely what might have been expected: the prohibitions and fulminations, so far from putting a stop to the sale of such exciting matter, sent it up by leaps and bounds. England suddenly became the fashion; the theories of M. Loke and Sir Newton began to be discussed; even the plays of ’ce fou de Shakespeare’ began to be read. And, at the same time, the whispered message of tolerance, of free inquiry, of enlightened curiosity, was carried over the land. The success of Voltaire’s work was complete.
He himself, however, had been obliged to seek refuge from the wrath of the government in the remote seclusion of Madame du Chatelet’s country house at Cirey. In this retirement he pursued his studies of Newton, and a few years later produced an exact and brilliant summary of the work of the great English philosopher. Once more the authorities intervened, and condemned Voltaire’s book. The Newtonian system destroyed that of Descartes, and Descartes still spoke in France with the voice of orthodoxy; therefore, of course, the voice of Newton must not be heard. But, somehow or other, the voice of Newton was heard. The men of science were converted to the new doctrine; and thus it is not too much to say that the wonderful advances in the study of mathematics which took place in France during the later years of the eighteenth century were the result of the illuminating zeal of Voltaire.
With his work on Newton, Voltaire’s direct connexion with English influences came to an end. For the rest of his life, indeed, he never lost his interest in England; he was never tired of reading English books, of being polite to English travellers, and of doing his best, in the intervals of more serious labours, to destroy the reputation of that deplorable English buffoon, whom, unfortunately, he himself had been so foolish as first to introduce to the attention of his countrymen. But it is curious to notice how, as time went on, the force of Voltaire’s nature inevitably carried him further and further away from the central standpoints of the English mind. The stimulus which he had received in England only served to urge him into a path which no Englishman has ever trod. The movement of English thought in the eighteenth century found its perfect expression in the profound, sceptical, and yet essentially conservative, genius of Hume. How different was the attitude of Voltaire! With what a reckless audacity, what a fierce uncompromising passion he charged and fought and charged again! He had no time for the nice discriminations of an elaborate philosophy, and no desire for the careful balance of the judicial mind; his creed was simple and explicit, and it also possessed the supreme merit of brevity: ‘Ecrasez l’infame!’ was enough for him.
1914.
NOTES:
[Footnote 3: Correspondance de Voltaire (1726-1729). By Lucien Foulet. Paris: Hachette, 1913.]
[Footnote 4: ’Il est aussi anime qu’il ait jamais ete. Il a quatre-vingt-quatre ans, et en verite je le crois immortel; il jouit de tous ses sens, aucun meme n’est affaibli; c’est un etre bien singulier, et en verite fort superieur.’ Madame du Deffand to Horace Walpole, 12 Avril 1778.]
BETWEEN
DIOGENES
Confess, oh Moses! Your Miracles were but conjuring-tricks, your Prophecies lucky Hazards, and your Laws a Gallimaufry of Commonplaces and Absurdities.
Confess that you were more skill’d in flattering the Vulgar than in ascertaining the Truth, and that your Reputation in the World would never have been so high, had your Lot fallen among a Nation of Philosophers.
Confess that when you taught the Jews to spoil the Egyptians you were a sad rogue.
Confess that it was a Fable to give Horses to Pharaoh and an uncloven hoof to the Hare.
Confess that you did never see the Back Parts of the Lord.
Confess that your style had too much Singularity and too little Taste to be that of the Holy Ghost.
All this may be true, my good Friends; but what are the Conclusions you would draw from your Raillery? Do you suppose that I am ignorant of all that a Wise Man might urge against my Conduct, my Tales, and my Language? But alas! my path was chalk’d out for me not by Choice but by Necessity. I had not the Happiness of living in England or a Tub. I was the Leader of an ignorant and superstitious People, who would never have heeded the sober Counsels of Good Sense and Toleration, and who would have laughed at the Refinements of a nice Philosophy. It was necessary to flatter their Vanity by telling them that they were the favour’d Children of God, to satisfy their Passions by allowing them to be treacherous and cruel to their Enemies, and to tickle their Ears by Stories and Farces by turns ridiculous and horrible, fit either for a Nursery or Bedlam. By such Contrivances I was able to attain my Ends and to establish the Welfare of my Countrymen. Do you blame me? It is not the business of a Ruler to be truthful, but to be politick; he must fly even from Virtue herself, if she sit in a different Quarter from Expediency. It is his Duty to sacrifice the Best, which is impossible, to a little Good, which is close at hand. I was willing to lay down a Multitude of foolish Laws, so that, under their Cloak, I might slip in a few Wise ones; and, had I not shown myself to be both Cruel and Superstitious, the Jews would never have escaped from the Bondage of the Egyptians.
Perhaps that would not have been an overwhelming Disaster. But, in truth, you are right. There is no viler Profession than the Government of Nations. He who dreams that he can lead a great Crowd of Fools without a great Store of Knavery is a Fool himself.
Are not you too hasty? Does not History show that there have been great Rulers who were good Men? Solon, Henry of Navarre, and Milord Somers were certainly not Fools, and yet I am unwilling to believe that they were Knaves either.
No, not Knaves; but Dissemblers. In their different degrees, they all juggled; but ’twas not because Jugglery pleas’d ’em; ’twas because Men cannot be governed without it.
I would be happy to try the Experiment. If Men were told the Truth, might they not believe it? If the Opportunity of Virtue and Wisdom is never to be offer’d ’em, how can we be sure that they would not be willing to take it? Let Rulers be bold and honest, and it is possible that the Folly of their Peoples will disappear.
A pretty phantastick Vision! But History is against you.
And Prophecy.
And Common Observation. Look at the World at this moment, and what do we see? It is as it has always been, and always will be. So long as it endures, the World will continue to be rul’d by Cajolery, by Injustice, and by Imposture.
If that be so, I must take leave to lament the Destiny of the Human Race.
The historian of Literature is little more than a historian of exploded reputations. What has he to do with Shakespeare, with Dante, with Sophocles? Has he entered into the springs of the sea? Or has he walked in the search of the depth? The great fixed luminaries of the firmament of Letters dazzle his optic glass; and he can hardly hope to do more than record their presence, and admire their splendours with the eyes of an ordinary mortal. His business is with the succeeding ages of men, not with all time; but Hyperion might have been written on the morrow of Salamis, and the Odes of Pindar dedicated to George the Fourth. The literary historian must rove in other hunting grounds. He is the geologist of literature, whose study lies among the buried strata of forgotten generations, among the fossil remnants of the past. The great men with whom he must deal are the great men who are no longer great—mammoths and ichthyosauri kindly preserved to us, among the siftings of so many epochs, by the impartial benignity of Time. It is for him to unravel the jokes of Erasmus, and to be at home among the platitudes of Cicero. It is for him to sit up all night with the spectral heroes of Byron; it is for him to exchange innumerable alexandrines with the faded heroines of Voltaire.
The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works. With the exception of his letters, of Candide, of Akakia, and of a few other of his shorter pieces, the vast mass of his productions has been already consigned to oblivion. How many persons now living have travelled through La Henriade or La Pucelle? How many have so much as glanced at the imposing volumes of L’Esprit des Moeurs? Zadig and Zaire, Merope and Charles XII. still linger, perhaps, in the schoolroom; but what has become of Oreste, and of Mahomet, and of Alzire? Ou sont les neiges d’antan?
Though Voltaire’s reputation now rests mainly on his achievements as a precursor of the Revolution, to the eighteenth century he was as much a poet as a reformer. The whole of Europe beheld at Ferney the oracle, not only of philosophy, but of good taste; for thirty years every scribbler, every rising genius, and every crowned head, submitted his verses to the censure of Voltaire; Voltaire’s plays were performed before crowded houses; his epic was pronounced superior to Homer’s, Virgil’s, and Milton’s; his epigrams were transcribed by every letter-writer, and got by heart by every wit. Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly the gulf which divides us from our ancestors of the eighteenth century, than a comparison between our thoughts and their thoughts, between our feelings and their feelings, with regard to one and the same thing—a tragedy by Voltaire. For us, as we take down the dustiest volume in our bookshelf, as we open it vaguely at some intolerable tirade, as we make an effort to labour through the procession of pompous commonplaces which meets our eyes, as we abandon the task in despair, and hastily return the book to its forgotten corner—to us it is well-nigh impossible to imagine the scene of charming brilliance which, five generations since, the same words must have conjured up. The splendid gaiety, the refined excitement, the pathos, the wit, the passion—all these things have vanished as completely from our perceptions as the candles, the powder, the looking-glasses, and the brocades, among which they moved and had their being. It may be instructive, or at least entertaining, to examine one of these forgotten masterpieces a little more closely; and we may do so with the less hesitation, since we shall only be following in the footsteps of Voltaire himself. His examination of Hamlet affords a precedent which is particularly applicable, owing to the fact that the same interval of time divided him from Shakespeare as that which divides ourselves from him. One point of difference, indeed, does exist between the relative positions of the two authors. Voltaire, in his study of Shakespeare, was dealing with a living, and a growing force; our interest in the dramas of Voltaire is solely an antiquarian interest. At the present moment,[5] a literal translation of King Lear is drawing full houses at the Theatre Antoine. As a rule it is rash to prophesy; but, if that rule has any exceptions, this is certainly one of them—hundred years hence a literal translation of Zaire will not be holding the English boards.
It is not our purpose to appreciate the best, or to expose the worst, of Voltaire’s tragedies. Our object is to review some specimen of what would have been recognised by his contemporaries as representative of the average flight of his genius. Such a specimen is to be found in Alzire, ou Les Americains, first produced with great success in 1736, when Voltaire was forty-two years of age and his fame as a dramatist already well established.
Act I.—The scene is laid in Lima, the capital of Peru, some years after the Spanish conquest of America. When the play opens, Don Gusman, a Spanish grandee, has just succeeded his father, Don Alvarez, in the Governorship of Peru. The rule of Don Alvarez had been beneficent and just; he had spent his life in endeavouring to soften the cruelty of his countrymen; and his only remaining wish was to see his son carry on the work which he had begun. Unfortunately, however, Don Gusman’s temperament was the very opposite of his father’s; he was tyrannical, harsh, headstrong, and bigoted.
L’Americain farouche
est un monstre sauvage
Qui mord en fremissant le
frein de l’esclavage ...
Tout pouvoir, en un mot, perit
par l’indulgence,
Et la severite produit l’obeissance.
Such were the cruel maxims of his government—maxims which he was only too ready to put into practice. It was in vain that Don Alvarez reminded his son that the true Christian returns good for evil, and that, as he epigrammatically put it, ’Le vrai Dieu, mon fils, est un Dieu qui pardonne.’ To enforce his argument, the good old man told the story of how his own life had been spared by a virtuous American, who, as he said, ‘au lieu de me frapper, embrassa mes genoux.’ But Don Gusman remained unmoved by such narratives, though he admitted that there was one consideration which impelled him to adopt a more lenient policy. He was in love with Alzire, Alzire the young and beautiful daughter of Monteze, who had ruled in Lima before the coming of the Spaniards. ’Je l’aime, je l’avoue,’ said Gusman to his father, ’et plus que je ne veux.’ With these words, the dominating situation of the play becomes plain to the spectator. The wicked Spanish Governor is in love with the virtuous American princess. From such a state of affairs, what interesting and romantic developments may not follow? Alzire, we are not surprised to learn, still fondly cherished the memory of a Peruvian prince, who had been slain in an attempt to rescue his country from the tyranny of Don Gusman. Yet, for the sake of Monteze, her ambitious and scheming father, she consented to give her hand to the Governor. She consented; but, even as she did so, she was still faithful to Zamore. ‘Sa foi me fut promise,’ she declared to Don Gusman, ’il eut pour moi des charmes.’
Il m’aima: son
trepas me coute encore des larmes:
Vous, loin d’oser ici
condamner ma douleur,
Jugez de ma constance, et
connaissez mon coeur.
The ruthless Don did not allow these pathetic considerations to stand in the way of his wishes, and gave orders that the wedding ceremony should be immediately performed. But, at the very moment of his apparent triumph, the way was being prepared for the overthrow of all his hopes.
Act II.—It was only natural to expect that a heroine affianced to a villain should turn out to be in love with a hero. The hero adored by Alzire had, it is true, perished; but then what could be more natural than his resurrection? The noble Zamore was not dead; he had escaped with his life from the torture-chamber of Don Gusman, had returned to avenge himself, had been immediately apprehended, and was lying imprisoned in the lowest dungeon of the castle, while his beloved princess was celebrating her nuptials with his deadly foe.
In this distressing situation, he was visited by the venerable Alvarez, who had persuaded his son to grant him an order for the prisoner’s release. In the gloom of the dungeon, it was at first difficult to distinguish the features of Zamore; but the old man at last discovered that he was addressing the very American who, so many years ago, instead of hitting him, had embraced his knees. He was overwhelmed by this extraordinary coincidence. ’Approach. O heaven! O Providence! It is he, behold the object of my gratitude. ... My benefactor! My son!’ But let us not pry further into so affecting a passage; it is sufficient to state that Don Alvarez, after promising his protection to Zamore, hurried off to relate this remarkable occurrence to his son, the Governor.
Act III.—Meanwhile, Alzire had been married. But she still could not forget her Peruvian lover. While she was lamenting her fate, and imploring the forgiveness of the shade of Zamore, she was informed that a released prisoner begged a private interview. ‘Admit him.’ He was admitted. ‘Heaven! Such were his features, his gait, his voice: Zamore!’ She falls into the arms of her confidante. ’Je succombe; a peine je respire.’
ZAMORE: Reconnais ton amant.
ALZIRE: Zamore aux pieds d’Alzire!
Est-ce une illusion?
It was no illusion; and the unfortunate princess was obliged to confess to her lover that she was already married to Don Gusman. Zamore was at first unable to grasp the horrible truth, and, while he was still struggling with his conflicting emotions, the door was flung open, and Don Gusman, accompanied by his father, entered the room.
A double recognition followed. Zamore was no less horrified to behold in Don Gusman the son of the venerable Alvarez, than Don Gusman was infuriated at discovering that the prisoner to whose release he had consented was no other than Zamore. When the first shock of surprise was over, the Peruvian hero violently insulted his enemy, and upbraided him with the tortures he had inflicted. The Governor replied by ordering the instant execution of the prince. It was in vain that Don Alvarez reminded his son of Zamore’s magnanimity; it was in vain that Alzire herself offered to sacrifice her life for that of her lover. Zamore was dragged from the apartment; and Alzire and Don Alvarez were left alone to bewail the fate of the Peruvian hero. Yet some faint hopes still lingered in the old man’s breast. ‘Gusman fut inhumain,’ he admitted, ’je le sais, j’en fremis;
Mais il est ton epoux, il
t’aime, il est mon fils:
Son ame a la pitie se peut
ouvrir encore.’
‘Helas!’ (replied Alzire), ‘que n’etes-vous le pere de Zamore!’
Act IV.—Even Don Gusman’s heart was, in fact, unable to steel itself entirely against the prayers and tears of his father and his wife; and he consented to allow a brief respite to Zamore’s execution. Alzire was not slow to seize this opportunity of doing her lover a good turn; for she immediately obtained his release by the ingenious stratagem of bribing the warder of the dungeon. Zamore was free. But alas! Alzire was not; was she not wedded to the wicked Gusman? Her lover’s expostulations fell on unheeding ears. What mattered it that her marriage vow had been sworn before an alien God? ’J’ai promis; il suffit; il n’importe a quel dieu!’
ZAMORE: Ta promesse est
un crime; elle est ma perte; adieu.
Perissent tes serments et
ton Dieu que j’abhorre!
ALZIRE: Arrete; quels adieux! arrete, cher Zamore!
But the prince tore himself away, with no further farewell upon his lips than an oath to be revenged upon the Governor. Alzire, perplexed, deserted, terrified, tortured by remorse, agitated by passion, turned for comfort to that God, who, she could not but believe, was, in some mysterious way, the Father of All.
Great God, lead Zamore in safety through the desert places. ... Ah! can it be true that thou art but the Deity of another universe? Have the Europeans alone the right to please thee? Art thou after all the tyrant of one world and the father of another? ... No! The conquerors and the conquered, miserable mortals as they are, all are equally the work of thy hands....
Her reverie was interrupted by an appalling sound. She heard shrieks; she heard a cry of ‘Zamore!’ And her confidante, rushing in, confusedly informed her that her lover was in peril of his life.
Ah, chere Emire [she exclaimed], allons le secourir!
EMIRE: Que pouvez-vous, Madame? O Ciel!
ALZIRE: Je puis mourir.
Hardly was the epigram out of her mouth when the door opened, and an emissary of Don Gusman announced to her that she must consider herself under arrest. She demanded an explanation in vain, and was immediately removed to the lowest dungeon.
Act V.—It was not long before the unfortunate princess learnt the reason of her arrest. Zamore, she was informed, had rushed straight from her apartment into the presence of Don Gusman, and had plunged a dagger into his enemy’s breast. The hero had then turned to Don Alvarez and, with perfect tranquillity, had offered him the bloodstained poniard.
J’ai fait ce que j’ai
du, j’ai venge mon injure;
Fais ton devoir, dit-il, et
venge la nature.
Before Don Alvarez could reply to this appeal, Zamore had been haled off by the enraged soldiery before the Council of Grandees. Don Gusman had been mortally wounded; and the Council proceeded at once to condemn to death, not only Zamore, but also Alzire, who, they found, had been guilty of complicity in the murder. It was the unpleasant duty of Don Alvarez to announce to the prisoners the Council’s sentence. He did so in the following manner:
Good God, what a mixture of tenderness and horror! My own liberator is the assassin of my son. Zamore!... Yes, it is to thee that I owe this life which I detest; how dearly didst thou sell me that fatal gift.... I am a father, but I am also a man; and, in spite of thy fury, in spite of the voice of that blood which demands vengeance from my agitated soul, I can still hear the voice of thy benefactions. And thou, who wast my daughter, thou whom in our misery I yet call by a name which makes our tears to flow, ah! how far is it from thy father’s wishes to add to the agony which he already feels the horrible pleasure of vengeance. I must lose, by an unheard-of catastrophe, at once my liberator, my daughter, and my son. The Council has sentenced you to death.
Upon one condition, however, and upon one alone, the lives of the culprits were to be spared—that of Zamore’s conversion to Christianity. What need is there to say that the noble Peruvians did not hesitate for a moment? ‘Death, rather than dishonour!’ exclaimed Zamore, while Alzire added some elegant couplets upon the moral degradation entailed by hypocritical conversion. Don Alvarez was in complete despair, and was just beginning to make another speech, when Don Gusman, with the pallor of death upon his features, was carried into the room. The implacable Governor was about to utter his last words. Alzire was resigned; Alvarez was plunged in misery; Zamore was indomitable to the last. But lo! when the Governor spoke, it was seen at once that an extraordinary change had come over his mind. He was no longer proud, he was no longer cruel, he was no longer unforgiving; he was kind, humble, and polite; in short, he had repented. Everybody was pardoned, and everybody recognised the truth of Christianity. And their faith was particularly strengthened when Don Gusman, invoking a final blessing upon Alzire and Zamore, expired in the arms of Don Alvarez. For thus were the guilty punished, and the virtuous rewarded. The noble Zamore, who had murdered his enemy in cold blood, and the gentle Alzire who, after bribing a sentry, had allowed her lover to do away with her husband, lived happily ever afterwards. That they were able to do so was owing entirely to the efforts of the wicked Don Gusman; and the wicked Don Gusman very properly descended to the grave.
Such is the tragedy of Alzire, which, it may be well to repeat, was in its day one of the most applauded of its author’s productions. It was upon the strength of works of this kind that his contemporaries recognised Voltaire’s right to be ranked in a sort of dramatic triumvirate, side by side with his great predecessors, Corneille and Racine. With Racine, especially, Voltaire was constantly coupled; and it is clear that he himself firmly believed that the author of Alzire was a worthy successor of the author of Athalie. At first sight, indeed, the resemblance between the two dramatists is obvious enough; but a closer inspection reveals an ocean of differences too vast to be spanned by any superficial likeness.
A careless reader is apt to dismiss the tragedies of Racine as mere tours de force; and, in one sense, the careless reader is right. For, as mere displays of technical skill, those works are certainly unsurpassed in the whole range of literature. But the notion of ’a mere tour de force’ carries with it something more than the idea of technical perfection; for it denotes, not simply a work which is technically perfect, but a work which is technically perfect and nothing more. The problem before a writer of a Chant Royal is to overcome certain technical difficulties of rhyme and rhythm; he performs his tour de force, the difficulties are overcome, and his task is accomplished. But Racine’s problem was very different. The technical restrictions he laboured under were incredibly great; his vocabulary was cribbed, his versification was cabined, his whole power of dramatic movement was scrupulously confined; conventional rules of every conceivable denomination hurried out to restrain his genius, with the alacrity of Lilliputians pegging down a Gulliver; wherever he turned he was met by a hiatus or a pitfall, a blind-alley or a mot bas. But his triumph was not simply the conquest of these refractory creatures; it was something much more astonishing. It was the creation, in spite of them, nay, by their very aid, of a glowing, living, soaring, and enchanting work of art. To have brought about this amazing combination, to have erected, upon a structure of Alexandrines, of Unities, of Noble Personages, of stilted diction, of the whole intolerable paraphernalia of the Classical stage, an edifice of subtle psychology, of exquisite poetry, of overwhelming passion—that is a tour de force whose achievement entitles Jean Racine to a place among the very few consummate artists of the world.
Voltaire, unfortunately, was neither a poet nor a psychologist; and, when he took up the mantle of Racine, he put it, not upon a human being, but upon a tailor’s block. To change the metaphor, Racine’s work resembled one of those elaborate paper transparencies which delighted our grandmothers, illuminated from within so as to present a charming tinted picture with varying degrees of shadow and of light. Voltaire was able to make the transparency, but he never could light the candle; and the only result of his efforts was some sticky pieces of paper, cut into curious shapes, and roughly daubed with colour. To take only one instance, his diction is the very echo of Racine’s. There are the same pompous phrases, the same inversions, the same stereotyped list of similes, the same poor bedraggled company of words. It is amusing to note the exclamations which rise to the lips of Voltaire’s characters in moments of extreme excitement—Qu’entends-je? Que vois-je? Ou suis-je? Grands Dieux! Ah, c’en est trop, Seigneur! Juste Ciel! Sauve-toi de ces lieux! Madame, quelle horreur ... &c. And it is amazing to discover that these are the very phrases with which Racine has managed to express all the violence of human terror, and rage, and love. Voltaire at his best never rises above the standard of a sixth-form boy writing hexameters in the style of Virgil; and, at his worst, he certainly falls within measurable distance of a flogging. He is capable, for instance, of writing lines as bad as the second of this couplet—
C’est ce meme guerrier
dont la main tutelaire,
De Gusman, votre epoux, sauva,
dit-on, le pere,
or as
Qui les font pour un temps rentrer tous en eux-memes,
or
Vous comprenez, seigneur, que je ne comprends pas.
Voltaire’s most striking expressions are too often borrowed from his predecessors. Alzire’s ‘Je puis mourir,’ for instance, is an obvious reminiscence of the ‘Qu’il mourut!’ of le vieil Horace; and the cloven hoof is shown clearly enough by the ‘O ciel!’ with which Alzire’s confidante manages to fill out the rest of the line. Many of these blemishes are, doubtless, the outcome of simple carelessness; for Voltaire was too busy a man to give over-much time to his plays. ’This tragedy was the work of six days,’ he wrote to d’Alembert, enclosing Olympie. ‘You should not have rested on the seventh,’ was d’Alembert’s reply. But, on the whole, Voltaire’s verses succeed in keeping up to a high level of mediocrity; they are the verses, in fact, of a very clever man. It is when his cleverness is out of its depth, that he most palpably fails. A human being by Voltaire bears the same relation to a real human being that stage scenery bears to a real landscape; it can only be looked at from in front. The curtain rises, and his villains and his heroes, his good old men and his exquisite princesses, display for a moment their one thin surface to the spectator; the curtain falls, and they are all put back into their box. The glance which the reader has taken into the little case labelled Alzire has perhaps given him a sufficient notion of these queer discarded marionettes.
Voltaire’s dramatic efforts were hampered by one further unfortunate incapacity; he was almost completely devoid of the dramatic sense. It is only possible to write good plays without the power of character-drawing, upon one condition—that of possessing the power of creating dramatic situations. The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, for instance, is not a tragedy of character; and its vast crescendo of horror is produced by a dramatic treatment of situation, not of persons. One of the principal elements in this stupendous example of the manipulation of a great dramatic theme has been pointed out by Voltaire himself. The guilt of Oedipus, he says, becomes known to the audience very early in the play; and, when the denouement at last arrives, it comes as a shock, not to the audience, but to the King. There can be no doubt that Voltaire has put his finger upon the very centre of those underlying causes which make the Oedipus perhaps the most awful of tragedies. To know the hideous truth, to watch its gradual dawn upon one after another of the characters, to see Oedipus at last alone in ignorance, to recognise clearly that he too must know, to witness his struggles, his distraction, his growing terror, and, at the inevitable moment, the appalling revelation—few things can be more terrible than this. But Voltaire’s comment upon the master-stroke by which such an effect has been obtained illustrates, in a remarkable way, his own sense of the dramatic. ‘Nouvelle preuve,’ he remarks, ’que Sophocle n’avait pas perfectionne son art.’
More detailed evidence of Voltaire’s utter lack of dramatic insight is to be found, of course, in his criticisms of Shakespeare. Throughout these, what is particularly striking is the manner in which Voltaire seems able to get into such intimate contact with his great predecessor, and yet to remain as absolutely unaffected by him as Shakespeare himself was by Voltaire. It is unnecessary to dwell further upon so hackneyed a subject; but one instance may be given of the lengths to which this dramatic insensibility of Voltaire’s was able to go—his adaptation of Julius Caesar for the French stage. A comparison of the two pieces should be made by anyone who wishes to realise fully, not only the degradation of the copy, but the excellence of the original. Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony’s funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire’s version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:—
ANTOINE: Brutus ... ou suis-je?
O ciel! O crime! O barbarie!’
Chers amis, je succombe; et mes sens
interdits ...
Brutus, son assassin!... ce monstre etait
son fils!
ROMAINS: Ah dieux!
If Voltaire’s demerits are obvious enough to our eyes, his merits were equally clear to his contemporaries, whose vision of them was not perplexed and retarded by the conventions of another age. The weight of a reigning convention is like the weight of the atmosphere—it is so universal that no one feels it; and an eighteenth-century audience came to a performance of Alzire unconscious of the burden of the Classical rules. They found instead an animated procession of events, of scenes just long enough to be amusing and not too long to be dull, of startling incidents, of happy mots. They were dazzled by an easy display of cheap brilliance, and cheap philosophy, and cheap sentiment, which it was very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, at such a distance, and under artificial light. When, in Merope, one saw La Dumesnil; ‘lorsque,’ to quote Voltaire himself, ’les yeux egares, la voix entrecoupee, levant une main tremblante, elle allait immoler son propre fils; quand Narbas l’arreta; quand, laissant tomber son poignard, on la vit s’evanouir entre les bras de ses femmes, et qu’elle sortit de cet etat de mort avec les transports d’une mere; lorsque, ensuite, s’elancant aux yeux de Polyphonte, traversant en un clin d’oeil tout le theatre, les larmes dans les yeux, la paleur sur le front, les sanglots a la bouche, les bras etendus, elle s’ecria: “Barbare, il est mon fils!"’—how, face to face with splendours such as these, could one question for a moment the purity of the gem from which they sparkled? Alas! to us, who know not La Dumesnil, to us whose Merope is nothing more than a little sediment of print, the precious stone of our forefathers has turned out to be a simple piece of paste. Its glittering was the outcome of no inward fire, but of a certain adroitness in the manufacture; to use our modern phraseology, Voltaire was able to make up for his lack of genius by a thorough knowledge of ‘technique,’ and a great deal of ‘go.’
And to such titles of praise let us not dispute his right. His vivacity, indeed, actually went so far as to make him something of an innovator. He introduced new and imposing spectacular effects; he ventured to write tragedies in which no persons of royal blood made their appearance; he was so bold as to rhyme ‘pere’ with ‘terre.’ The wild diversity of his incidents shows a trend towards the romantic, which, doubtless, under happier influences, would have led him much further along the primrose path which ended in the bonfire of 1830.
But it was his misfortune to be for ever clogged by a tradition of decorous restraint; so that the effect of his plays is as anomalous as would be—let us say—that of a shilling shocker written by Miss Yonge. His heroines go mad in epigrams, while his villains commit murder in inversions. Amid the hurly-burly of artificiality, it was all his cleverness could do to keep its head to the wind; and he was only able to remain afloat at all by throwing overboard his humour. The Classical tradition has to answer for many sins; perhaps its most infamous achievement was that it prevented Moliere from being a great tragedian. But there can be no doubt that its most astonishing one was to have taken—if only for some scattered moments—the sense of the ridiculous from Voltaire.
NOTES:
[Footnote 5: April, 1905.]
At the present time,[6] when it is so difficult to think of anything but of what is and what will be, it may yet be worth while to cast occasionally a glance backward at what was. Such glances may at least prove to have the humble merit of being entertaining: they may even be instructive as well. Certainly it would be a mistake to forget that Frederick the Great once lived in Germany. Nor is it altogether useless to remember that a curious old gentleman, extremely thin, extremely active, and heavily bewigged, once decided that, on the whole, it would be as well for him not to live in France. For, just as modern Germany dates from the accession of Frederick to the throne of Prussia, so modern France dates from the establishment of Voltaire on the banks of the Lake of Geneva. The intersection of those two momentous lives forms one of the most curious and one of the most celebrated incidents in history. To English readers it is probably best known through the few brilliant paragraphs devoted to it by Macaulay; though Carlyle’s masterly and far more elaborate narrative is familiar to every lover of The History of Friedrich II. Since Carlyle wrote, however, fifty years have passed. New points of view have arisen, and a certain amount of new material—including the valuable edition of the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick published from the original documents in the Archives at Berlin—has become available. It seems, therefore, in spite of the familiarity of the main outlines of the story, that another rapid review of it will not be out of place.
Voltaire was forty-two years of age, and already one of the most famous men of the day, when, in August 1736, he received a letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia. This letter was the first in a correspondence which was to last, with a few remarkable intervals, for a space of over forty years. It was written by a young man of twenty-four, of whose personal qualities very little was known, and whose importance seemed to lie simply in the fact that he was heir-apparent to one of the secondary European monarchies. Voltaire, however, was not the man to turn up his nose at royalty, in whatever form it might present itself; and it was moreover clear that the young prince had picked up at least a smattering of French culture, that he was genuinely anxious to become acquainted with the tendencies of modern thought, and, above all, that his admiration for the author of the Henriade and Zaire was unbounded.
La douceur et le support [wrote Frederick] que vous marquez pour tous ceux qui se vouent aux arts et aux sciences, me font esperer que vous ne m’exclurez pas du nombre de ceux que vous trouvez dignes de vos instructions. Je nomme ainsi votre commerce de lettres, qui ne peut etre que profitable a tout etre pensant. J’ose meme avancer, sans deroger au merite d’autrui, que dans l’univers entier il n’y aurait pas d’exception a faire de ceux dont vous ne pourriez etre le maitre.
The great man was accordingly delighted; he replied with all that graceful affability of which he was a master, declared that his correspondent was ‘un prince philosophe qui rendra les hommes heureux,’ and showed that he meant business by plunging at once into a discussion of the metaphysical doctrines of ‘le sieur Wolf,’ whom Frederick had commended as ‘le plus celebre philosophe de nos jours.’ For the next four years the correspondence continued on the lines thus laid down. It was a correspondence between a master and a pupil: Frederick, his passions divided between German philosophy and French poetry, poured out with equal copiousness disquisitions upon Free Will and la raison suffisante, odes sur la Flatterie, and epistles sur l’Humanite, while Voltaire kept the ball rolling with no less enormous philosophical replies, together with minute criticisms of His Royal Highness’s mistakes in French metre and French orthography. Thus, though the interest of these early letters must have been intense to the young Prince, they have far too little personal flavour to be anything but extremely tedious to the reader of to-day. Only very occasionally is it possible to detect, amid the long and careful periods, some faint signs of feeling or of character. Voltaire’s empressement seems to take on, once or twice, the colours of something like a real enthusiasm; and one notices that, after two years, Frederick’s letters begin no longer with ‘Monsieur’ but with ‘Mon cher ami,’ which glides at last insensibly into ‘Mon cher Voltaire’; though the careful poet continues with his ‘Monseigneur’ throughout. Then, on one occasion, Frederick makes a little avowal, which reads oddly in the light of future events.
Souffrez [he says] que je vous fasse mon caractere, afin que vous ne vous y mepreniez plus ... J’ai peu de merite et peu de savoir; mais j’ai beaucoup de bonne volonte, et un fonds inepuisable d’estime et d’amitie pour les personnes d’une vertu distinguee, et avec cela je suis capable de toute la constance que la vraie amitie exige. J’ai assez de jugement pour vous rendre toute la justice que vous meritez; mais je n’en ai pas assez pour m’empecher de faire de mauvais vers.
But this is exceptional; as a rule, elaborate compliments take the place of personal confessions; and, while Voltaire is never tired of comparing Frederick to Apollo, Alcibiades, and the youthful Marcus Aurelius, of proclaiming the rebirth of ’les talents de Virgile et les vertus d’Auguste,’ or of declaring that ’Socrate ne m’est rien, c’est Frederic que j’aime,’ the Crown Prince is on his side ready with an equal flow of protestations, which sometimes rise to singular heights. ’Ne croyez pas,’ he says, ’que je pousse mon scepticisime a outrance ... Je crois, par exemple, qu’il n’y a qu’un Dieu et qu’un Voltaire dans le monde; je crois encore que ce Dieu avait besoin dans ce siecle d’un Voltaire pour le rendre aimable.’ Decidedly the Prince’s compliments were too emphatic, and the poet’s too ingenious; as Voltaire himself said afterwards, ‘les epithetes ne nous coutaient rien’; yet neither was without a little residue of sincerity. Frederick’s admiration bordered upon the sentimental; and Voltaire had begun to allow himself to hope that some day, in a provincial German court, there might be found a crowned head devoting his life to philosophy, good sense, and the love of letters. Both were to receive a curious awakening.
In 1740 Frederick became King of Prussia, and a new epoch in the relations between the two men began. The next ten years were, on both sides, years of growing disillusionment. Voltaire very soon discovered that his phrase about ’un prince philosophe qui rendra les hommes heureux’ was indeed a phrase and nothing more. His prince philosophe started out on a career of conquest, plunged all Europe into war, and turned Prussia into a great military power. Frederick, it appeared, was at once a far more important and a far more dangerous phenomenon than Voltaire had suspected. And, on the other hand, the matured mind of the King was not slow to perceive that the enthusiasm of the Prince needed a good deal of qualification. This change of view, was, indeed, remarkably rapid. Nothing is more striking than the alteration of the tone in Frederick’s correspondence during the few months which followed his accession: the voice of the raw and inexperienced youth is heard no more, and its place is taken—at once and for ever—by the self-contained caustic utterance of an embittered man of the world. In this transformation it was only natural that the wondrous figure of Voltaire should lose some of its glitter—especially since Frederick now
Yet, while his opinion of Voltaire’s character was rapidly growing more and more severe, his admiration of his talents remained undiminished. For, though he had dropped metaphysics when he came to the throne, Frederick could never drop his passion for French poetry; he recognised in Voltaire the unapproachable master of that absorbing art; and for years he had made up his mind that, some day or other, he would posseder—for so he put it—the author of the Henriade, would keep him at Berlin as the brightest ornament of his court, and, above all, would have him always ready at hand to put the final polish on his own verses. In the autumn of 1743 it seemed for a moment that his wish would be gratified. Voltaire spent a visit of several weeks in Berlin; he was dazzled by the graciousness of his reception and the splendour of his surroundings; and he began to listen to the honeyed overtures of the Prussian Majesty. The great obstacle to Frederick’s desire was Voltaire’s relationship with Madame du Chatelet. He had lived with her for more than ten years; he was attached to her by all the ties of friendship and gratitude; he had constantly declared that he would never leave her—no, not for all the seductions of princes. She would, it is true, have been willing to accompany Voltaire to Berlin; but such a solution would by no means have suited Frederick. He was not fond of ladies—even of ladies like Madame du Chatelet—learned enough to translate Newton and to discuss by the hour the niceties of the Leibnitzian philosophy; and he had determined to posseder Voltaire either completely or not at all. Voltaire, in spite of repeated temptations, had remained faithful; but now, for the first time, poor Madame du Chatelet began to be seriously alarmed. His letters from Berlin grew fewer and fewer, and more and more ambiguous; she knew nothing of his plans; ‘il est ivre absolument’ she burst out in her distress to d’Argental, one of his oldest friends. By every post she dreaded to learn at last that he had deserted her for ever. But suddenly Voltaire returned. The spell of Berlin had been broken, and he was at her feet once more.
What had happened was highly characteristic both of the Poet and of the King. Each had tried to play a trick on the other, and each had found the other out. The French Government had been anxious to obtain an insight into the diplomatic intentions of Frederick, in an unofficial way; Voltaire had offered his services, and it had been agreed that he should write to Frederick declaring that he was obliged to leave France for a time owing to the hostility of a member of the Government, the Bishop of Mirepoix, and asking for Frederick’s hospitality. Frederick had not been taken in: though he had not disentangled the whole plot, he had perceived clearly enough that Voltaire’s visit was in reality that of an agent of the French Government; he also thought he saw an opportunity of securing the desire of his heart. Voltaire, to give verisimilitude to his story, had, in his letter to Frederick, loaded the Bishop of Mirepoix with ridicule and abuse; and Frederick now secretly sent this letter to Mirepoix himself. His calculation was that Mirepoix would be so outraged that he would make it impossible for Voltaire ever to return to France; and in that case—well, Voltaire would have no other course open to him but to stay where he was, in Berlin, and Madame du Chatelet would have to make the best of it. Of course, Frederick’s plan failed, and Voltaire was duly informed by Mirepoix of what had happened. He was naturally very angry. He had been almost induced to stay in Berlin of his own accord, and now he found that his host had been attempting, by means of treachery and intrigue, to force him to stay there whether he liked it or not. It was a long time before he forgave Frederick. But the King was most anxious to patch up the quarrel; he still could not abandon the hope of ultimately securing Voltaire; and besides, he was now possessed by another and a more immediate desire—to be allowed a glimpse of that famous and scandalous work which Voltaire kept locked in the innermost drawer of his cabinet and revealed to none but the most favoured of his intimates—La Pucelle.
Accordingly the royal letters became more frequent and more flattering than ever; the royal hand cajoled and implored. ’Ne me faites point injustice sur mon caractere; d’ailleurs il vous est permis de badiner sur mon sujet comme il vous plaira.’ ’La Pucelle! La Pucelle! La Pucelle! et encore La Pucelle!’ he exclaims. ’Pour l’amour de Dieu, ou plus encore pour l’amour de vous-meme, envoyez-la-moi.’ And at last Voltaire was softened. He sent off a few fragments of his Pucelle—just enough to whet Frederick’s appetite—and he declared himself reconciled, ‘Je vous ai aime tendrement,’ he wrote in March 1749; ’j’ai ete fache contre vous, je vous ai pardonne, et actuellement je vous aime a la folie.’ Within a year of this date his situation had undergone a complete change. Madame du Chatelet was dead; and his position at Versailles, in spite of the friendship
The curious drama that followed, with its farcical [Greek: peripeteia] and its tragi-comic denouement, can hardly be understood without a brief consideration of the feelings and intentions of the two chief actors in it. The position of Frederick is comparatively plain. He had now completely thrown aside the last lingering remnants of any esteem which he may once have entertained for the character of Voltaire. He frankly thought him a scoundrel. In September 1749, less than a year before Voltaire’s arrival, and at the very period of Frederick’s most urgent invitations, we find him using the following language in a letter to Algarotti: ‘Voltaire vient de faire un tour qui est indigne.’ (He had been showing to all his friends a garbled copy of one of Frederick’s letters).
Il meriterait d’etre fleurdelise au Parnasse. C’est bien dommage qu’une ame aussi lache soit unie a un aussi beau genie. Il a les gentillesses et les malices d’un singe. Je vous conterai ce que c’est, lorsque je vous reverrai; cependant je ne ferai semblant de rien, car j’en ai besoin pour l’etude de l’elocution francaise. On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scelerat. Je veux savoir son francais; que m’importe sa morale? Cet homme a trouve le moyen de reunir tous les contraires. On admire son esprit, en meme temps qu’on meprise son caractere.
There is no ambiguity about this. Voltaire was a scoundrel; but he was a scoundrel of genius. He would make the best possible teacher of l’elocution francaise; therefore it was necessary that he should come and live in Berlin. But as for anything more—as for any real interchange of sympathies, any genuine feeling of friendliness, of respect, or even of regard—all that was utterly out of the question. The avowal is cynical, no doubt; but it is at any rate straightforward, and above all it is peculiarly devoid of any trace of self-deception. In the face of these trenchant sentences, the view of Frederick’s attitude which is suggested so assiduously by Carlyle—that he was the victim of an elevated misapprehension, that he was always hoping for the best, and that, when the explosion came he was very much surprised and profoundly disappointed—becomes obviously untenable. If any man ever acted with his eyes wide open, it was Frederick when he invited Voltaire to Berlin.
Yet, though that much is clear, the letter to Algarotti betrays, in more than one direction, a very singular state of mind. A warm devotion to l’elocution francaise is easy enough to understand; but Frederick’s devotion was much more than warm; it was so absorbing and so intense that it left him no rest until, by hook or by crook, by supplication, or by trickery, or by paying down hard cash, he had obtained the close and constant proximity of—what?—of a man whom he himself described as a ‘singe’ and a ‘scelerat,’ a man of base soul and despicable character. And Frederick appears to see nothing surprising in this. He takes it quite as a matter of course that he should be, not merely willing, but delighted to run all the risks involved by Voltaire’s undoubted roguery, so long as he can be sure of benefiting from Voltaire’s no less undoubted mastery of French versification. This is certainly strange; but the explanation of it lies in the extraordinary vogue—a vogue, indeed, so extraordinary that it is very difficult for the modern reader to realise it—enjoyed throughout Europe by French culture and literature during the middle years of the eighteenth century. Frederick was merely an extreme instance of a universal fact. Like all Germans of any education, he habitually wrote and spoke in French; like every lady and gentleman from Naples to Edinburgh, his life was regulated by the social conventions of France; like every amateur of letters from Madrid to St. Petersburg, his whole conception of literary taste, his whole standard of literary values, was French. To him, as to the vast majority of his contemporaries, the very essence of civilisation was concentrated in French literature, and especially in French poetry; and French poetry meant to him, as to his contemporaries, that particular kind of French poetry which had come into fashion at the court of Louis XIV. For this curious creed was as narrow as it was all-pervading. The Grand Siecle was the Church Infallible; and it was heresy to doubt the Gospel of Boileau.
Frederick’s library, still preserved at Potsdam, shows us what literature meant in those days to a cultivated man: it is composed entirely of the French Classics, of the works of Voltaire, and of the masterpieces of antiquity translated into eighteenth-century French. But Frederick was not content with mere appreciation; he too would create; he would write alexandrines on the model of Racine, and madrigals after the manner of Chaulieu; he would press in person into the sacred sanctuary, and burn incense with his own hands upon the inmost shrine. It was true that he was a foreigner; it was true that his knowledge of the French language was incomplete and incorrect; but his sense of his own ability urged him forward, and his indefatigable pertinacity kept him at his strange task throughout the whole of his life. He filled volumes, and the contents of those volumes afford probably the most complete illustration in
And, besides, though Voltaire might be a rogue, Frederick felt quite convinced that he could keep him in order. A crack or two of the master’s whip—a coldness in the royal demeanour, a hint at a stoppage of the pension—and the monkey would put an end to his tricks soon enough. It never seems to have occurred to Frederick that the possession of genius might imply a quality of spirit which was not that of an ordinary man. This was his great, his fundamental error. It was the ingenuous error of a cynic. He knew that he was under no delusion as to Voltaire’s faults, and so he supposed that he could be under no delusion as to his merits. He innocently imagined that the capacity for great writing was something that could be as easily separated from the owner of it as a hat or a glove. ’C’est bien dommage qu’une ame aussi lache soit unie a un aussi beau genie.’ C’est bien dommage!—as if there was nothing more extraordinary in such a combination than that of a pretty woman and an ugly dress. And so Frederick held his whip a little tighter, and reminded himself once more that, in spite of that beau genie, it was a monkey that he had to deal with. But he was wrong: it was not a monkey; it was a devil, which is a very different thing.
A devil—or perhaps an angel? One cannot be quite sure. For, amid the complexities of that extraordinary spirit, where good and evil were so mysteriously interwoven, where the elements of darkness and the elements of light lay crowded together in such ever-deepening ambiguity, fold within fold, the clearer the vision the greater the bewilderment, the more impartial the judgment the profounder the doubt. But one thing at least is certain: that spirit, whether it was admirable or whether it was odious, was moved by a terrific force. Frederick had failed to realise this; and indeed, though Voltaire was fifty-six when he went to Berlin, and though his whole life had been spent in a blaze of publicity, there was still not one of his contemporaries who understood the true nature of his genius; it was perhaps hidden even from himself. He had reached the threshold of old age, and his life’s work was still before him; it was not as a writer of tragedies and epics that he was to take his place in the world. Was he, in the depths of his consciousness, aware that this was so? Did some obscure instinct urge him forward, at this late hour, to break with the ties of a lifetime, and rush forth into the unknown?
What his precise motives were in embarking upon the Berlin adventure it is very difficult to say. It is true that he was disgusted with Paris—he was ill-received at Court, and he was pestered by endless literary quarrels and jealousies; it would be very pleasant to show his countrymen that he had other strings to his bow, that, if they did not appreciate him, Frederick the Great did. It is true, too, that he admired Frederick’s intellect, and that he was flattered by his favour. ‘Il avait de l’esprit,’ he said afterwards, ’des graces, et, de plus, il etait roi; ce qui fait toujours une grande seduction, attendu la faiblesse humaine.’ His vanity could not resist the prestige of a royal intimacy; and no doubt he relished to the full even the increased consequence which came to him with his Chamberlain’s key and his order—to say nothing of the addition of L800 to his income. Yet, on the other hand, he was very well aware that he was exchanging freedom for servitude, and that he was entering into a bargain with a man who would make quite sure that he was getting his money’s worth; and he knew in his heart that he had something better to do than to play, however successfully, the part of a courtier. Nor was he personally attached to Frederick; he was personally attached to no one on earth. Certainly he had never been a man of feeling, and now that he was old and hardened by the uses of the world he had grown to be completely what in essence he always was—a fighter, without tenderness, without scruples, and without remorse. No, he went to Berlin for his own purposes—however dubious those purposes may have been.
And it is curious to observe that in his correspondence with his niece, Madame Denis, whom he had left behind him at the head of his Paris establishment and in whom he confided—in so far as he can be said to have confided in anyone—he repeatedly states that there is nothing permanent about his visit to Berlin. At first he declares that he is only making a stay of a few weeks with Frederick, that he is going on to Italy to visit ‘sa Saintete’ and to inspect ‘la ville souterraine,’ that he will be back in Paris in the autumn. The autumn comes, and the roads are too muddy to travel by; he must wait till the winter, when they will be frozen hard. Winter comes, and it is too cold to move; but he will certainly return in the spring. Spring comes, and he is on the point of finishing his Siecle de Louis XIV.; he really must wait just a few weeks more. The book is published; but then how can he appear in Paris until he is quite sure of its success? And so he lingers on, delaying and prevaricating, until a whole year has passed, and still he lingers on, still he is on the point of going, and still he does not go. Meanwhile, to all appearances, he was definitely fixed, a salaried official, at Frederick’s court; and he was writing to all his other friends, to assure them that he had never been so happy, that he could see no reason why he should ever come away. What were his true intentions? Could he himself have said? Had he perhaps, in some secret corner of his brain, into which even he hardly dared to look, a premonition of the future? At times, in this Berlin adventure, he seems to resemble some great buzzing fly, shooting suddenly into a room through an open window and dashing frantically from side to side; when all at once, as suddenly, he swoops away and out through another window which opens in quite a different direction, towards wide and flowery fields; so that perhaps the reckless creature knew where he was going after all.
In any case, it is evident to the impartial observer that Voltaire’s visit could only have ended as it did—in an explosion. The elements of the situation were too combustible for any other conclusion. When two confirmed egotists decide, for purely selfish reasons, to set up house together, everyone knows what will happen. For some time their sense of mutual advantage may induce them to tolerate each other, but sooner or later human nature will assert itself, and the menage will break up. And, with Voltaire and Frederick, the difficulties inherent in all such cases were intensified by the fact that the relationship between them was, in effect, that of servant and master; that Voltaire, under a very thin disguise, was a paid menial, while Frederick, condescend as he might, was an autocrat whose will was law. Thus the two famous and perhaps mythical sentences, invariably repeated by historians of the incident, about orange-skins and dirty linen, do in fact sum up the gist of the matter. ’When
It was, indeed, Voltaire’s passion for money which brought on the first really serious storm. Three months after his arrival in Berlin, the temptation to increase his already considerable fortune by a stroke of illegal stock-jobbing proved too strong for him; he became involved in a series of shady financial transactions with a Jew; he quarrelled with the Jew; there was an acrimonious lawsuit, with charges and countercharges of the most discreditable kind; and, though the Jew lost his case on a technical point, the poet certainly did not leave the court without a stain upon his character. Among other misdemeanours, it is almost certain—the evidence is not quite conclusive—that he committed forgery in order to support a false oath. Frederick was furious, and for a moment was on the brink of dismissing Voltaire from Berlin. He would have been wise if he had done so. But he could not part with his beau genie so soon. He cracked his whip, and, setting the monkey to stand in the corner, contented himself with a shrug of the shoulders and the exclamation ’C’est l’affaire d’un fripon qui a voulu tromper un filou.’ A few weeks later the royal favour shone forth once more, and Voltaire, who had been hiding himself in a suburban villa, came out and basked again in those refulgent beams.
And the beams were decidedly refulgent—so much so, in fact, that they almost satisfied even the vanity of Voltaire. Almost, but not quite. For, though his glory was great, though he was the centre of all men’s admiration, courted by nobles, flattered by princesses—there is a letter from one of them, a sister of Frederick’s, still extant, wherein the trembling votaress ventures to praise the great man’s works, which, she says, ’vous rendent si celebre et immortel’—though he had ample leisure for his private activities, though he enjoyed every day the brilliant conversation of the King, though he could often forget for weeks together that he was the paid servant of a jealous despot—yet, in spite of all, there was a crumpled rose-leaf amid the silken sheets, and he lay awake o’ nights. He was not the only Frenchman at Frederick’s court. That monarch had surrounded himself with a small group of persons—foreigners for the most part—whose business it was to instruct him when he wished to improve his mind, to flatter him when he was out of temper, and to entertain him when he was bored. There was hardly one of them that was not thoroughly second-rate. Algarotti was an elegant dabbler in scientific matters—he had written a book to explain Newton to the ladies; d’Argens was an amiable and erudite writer of a dull free-thinking turn; Chasot was a retired military man with too many debts, and Darget was a good-natured secretary with too many love affairs; La Mettrie was a doctor who had been exiled from France for atheism and bad manners; and Poellnitz was a decaying baron who, under stress of circumstances, had unfortunately been obliged to change his religion six times.
These were the boon companions among whom Frederick chose to spend his leisure hours. Whenever he had nothing better to do, he would exchange rhymed epigrams with Algarotti, or discuss the Jewish religion with d’Argens, or write long improper poems about Darget, in the style of La Pucelle. Or else he would summon La Mettrie, who would forthwith prove the irrefutability of materialism in a series of wild paradoxes, shout with laughter, suddenly shudder and cross himself on upsetting the salt, and eventually pursue his majesty with his buffooneries into a place where even royal persons are wont to be left alone. At other times Frederick would amuse himself by first cutting down the pension of Poellnitz, who was at the moment a Lutheran, and then writing long and serious letters to him suggesting that if he would only become a Catholic again he might be made a Silesian Abbot. Strangely enough, Frederick was not popular, and one or other of the inmates of his little menagerie was constantly escaping and running away. Darget and Chasot both succeeded in getting through the wires; they obtained leave to visit Paris, and stayed there. Poor d’Argens often tried to follow their example; more than once he set off for France, secretly vowing never to return; but he had no money, Frederick was
Among this circle of down-at-heel eccentrics there was a single figure whose distinction and respectability stood out in striking contrast from the rest—that of Maupertuis, who had been, since 1745, the President of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. Maupertuis has had an unfortunate fate: he was first annihilated by the ridicule of Voltaire, and then recreated by the humour of Carlyle; but he was an ambitious man, very anxious to be famous, and his desire has been gratified in over-flowing measure. During his life he was chiefly known for his voyage to Lapland, and his observations there, by which he was able to substantiate the Newtonian doctrine of the flatness of the earth at the poles. He possessed considerable scientific attainments, he was honest, he was energetic; he appeared to be just the man to revive the waning glories of Prussian science; and when Frederick succeeded in inducing him to come to Berlin as President of his Academy the choice seemed amply justified. Maupertuis had, moreover, some pretensions to wit; and in his earlier days his biting and elegant sarcasms had more than once overwhelmed his scientific adversaries. Such accomplishments suited Frederick admirably. Maupertuis, he declared, was an homme d’esprit, and the happy President became a constant guest at the royal supper-parties. It was the happy—the too happy—President who was the rose-leaf in the bed of Voltaire. The two men had known each other slightly for many years, and had always expressed the highest admiration for each other; but their mutual amiability was now to be put to a severe test. The sagacious Buffon observed the danger from afar: ’ces deux hommes,’ he wrote to a friend, ’ne sont pas faits pour demeurer ensemble dans la meme chambre.’ And indeed to the vain and sensitive poet, uncertain of Frederick’s cordiality, suspicious of hidden enemies, intensely jealous of possible rivals, the spectacle of Maupertuis at supper, radiant, at his ease, obviously protected, obviously superior to the shady mediocrities who sat around—that sight was gall and wormwood; and he looked closer, with a new malignity; and then those piercing eyes began to make discoveries, and that relentless brain began to do its work.
Maupertuis had very little judgment; so far from attempting to conciliate Voltaire, he was rash enough to provoke hostilities. It was very natural that he should have lost his temper. He had been for five years the dominating figure in the royal circle, and now suddenly he was deprived of his pre-eminence and thrown completely into the shade. Who could attend to Maupertuis while Voltaire was talking?—Voltaire, who as obviously outshone Maupertuis as Maupertuis outshone La Mettrie and Darget and the rest. In his exasperation the President went to the length of openly giving his protection to a disreputable literary man, La Beaumelle, who was a declared enemy of Voltaire. This meant war, and war was not long in coming.
Some years previously Maupertuis had, as he believed, discovered an important mathematical law—the ‘principle of least action.’ The law was, in fact, important, and has had a fruitful history in the development of mechanical theory; but, as Mr. Jourdain has shown in a recent monograph, Maupertuis enunciated it incorrectly without realising its true import, and a far more accurate and scientific statement of it was given, within a few months, by Euler. Maupertuis, however, was very proud of his discovery, which, he considered, embodied one of the principal reasons for believing in the existence of God; and he was therefore exceedingly angry when, shortly after Voltaire’s arrival in Berlin, a Swiss mathematician, Koenig, published a polite memoir attacking both its accuracy and its originality, and quoted in support of his contention an unpublished letter by Leibnitz, in which the law was more exactly expressed. Instead of arguing upon the merits of the case, Maupertuis declared that the letter of Leibnitz was a forgery, and that therefore Koenig’s remarks deserved no further consideration. When Koenig expostulated, Maupertuis decided upon a more drastic step. He summoned a meeting of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, of which Koenig was a member, laid the case before it, and moved that it should solemnly pronounce Koenig a forger, and the letter of Leibnitz supposititious and false. The members of the Academy were frightened; their pensions depended upon the President’s good will; and even the illustrious Euler was not ashamed to take part in this absurd and disgraceful condemnation.
Voltaire saw at once that his opportunity had come. Maupertuis had put himself utterly and irretrievably in the wrong. He was wrong in attributing to his discovery a value which it did not possess; he was wrong in denying the authenticity of the Leibnitz letter; above all he was wrong in treating a purely scientific question as the proper subject for the disciplinary jurisdiction of an Academy. If Voltaire struck now, he would have his enemy on the hip. There was only one consideration to give him pause, and that was a grave one: to attack Maupertuis upon this matter was, in effect, to attack the King. Not only was Frederick certainly privy to Maupertuis’
As a preparatory measure, he withdrew all his spare cash from Berlin, and invested it with the Duke of Wurtemberg. ’Je mets tout doucement ordre a mes affaires,’ he told Madame Denis. Then, on September 18, 1752, there appeared in the papers a short article entitled ’Reponse d’un Academicien de Berlin a un Academicien de Paris.’ It was a statement, deadly in its bald simplicity, its studied coldness, its concentrated force, of Koenig’s case against Maupertuis. The President must have turned pale as he read it; but the King turned crimson. The terrible indictment could, of course only have been written by one man, and that man was receiving a royal pension of L800 a year and carrying about a Chamberlain’s gold key in his pocket. Frederick flew to his writing-table, and composed an indignant pamphlet which he caused to be published with the Prussian arms on the title-page. It was a feeble work, full of exaggerated praises of Maupertuis, and of clumsy invectives against Voltaire: the President’s reputation was gravely compared to that of Homer; the author of the ’Reponse d’un Academicien de Berlin’ was declared to be a ‘faiseur de libelles sans genie,’ an ‘imposteur effronte,’ a ‘malheureux ecrivain’ while the ‘Reponse’ itself was a ‘grossierete plate,’ whose publication was an ’action malicieuse, lache, infame,’ a ‘brigandage affreux.’ The presence of the royal insignia only intensified the futility of the outburst. ’L’aigle, le sceptre, et la couronne,’ wrote Voltaire to Madame Denis, ’sont bien etonnes de se trouver la.’ But one thing was now certain: the King had joined the fray. Voltaire’s blood was up, and he was not sorry. A kind of exaltation seized him; from this moment his course was clear—he would do as much damage as he could, and then leave Prussia for ever. And it so happened that just then an unexpected opportunity occurred for one of those furious onslaughts so dear to his heart, with that weapon which he knew so well how to wield. ‘Je n’ai point de sceptre,’ he ominously shot out to Madame Denis, ‘mais j’ai une plume.’
Meanwhile the life of the Court—which passed for the most part at Potsdam, in the little palace of Sans Souci which Frederick had built for himself—proceeded on its accustomed course. It was a singular life, half military, half monastic, rigid, retired, from which all the ordinary pleasures of society were strictly excluded. ’What do you do here?’ one of the royal princes was once asked. ’We conjugate the verb s’ennuyer,’ was the reply. But, wherever he might be, that was a verb unknown to Voltaire. Shut up all day in the strange little room, still preserved for the eyes of the curious, with its windows opening on the formal garden, and its yellow walls thickly embossed with the brightly coloured shapes of fruits, flowers, birds, and apes, the indefatigable old man worked away at his histories, his tragedies, his Pucelle, and his enormous correspondence. He was, of course, ill—very ill; he was probably, in fact, upon the brink of death; but he had grown accustomed to that situation; and the worse he grew the more furiously he worked. He was a victim, he declared, of erysipelas, dysentery, and scurvy; he was constantly attacked by fever, and all his teeth had fallen out. But he continued to work. On one occasion a friend visited him, and found him in bed. ‘J’ai quatre maladies mortelles,’ he wailed. ‘Pourtant,’ remarked the friend, ‘vous avez l’oeil fort bon.’ Voltaire leapt up from the pillows: ‘Ne savez-vous pas,’ he shouted, ’que les scorbutiques meurent l’oeil enflamme?’ When the evening came it was time to dress, and, in all the pomp of flowing wig and diamond order, to proceed to the little music-room, where his Majesty, after the business of the day, was preparing to relax himself upon the flute. The orchestra was gathered together; the audience was seated; the concerto began. And then the sounds of beauty flowed and trembled, and seemed, for a little space, to triumph over the pains of living and the hard hearts of men; and the royal master poured out his skill in some long and elaborate cadenza, and the adagio came, the marvellous adagio, and the conqueror of Rossbach drew tears from the author of Candide. But a moment later it was supper-time; and the night ended in the oval dining-room, amid laughter and champagne, the ejaculations of La Mettrie, the epigrams of Maupertuis, the sarcasms of Frederick, and the devastating coruscations of Voltaire.
Yet, in spite of all the jests and roses, everyone could hear the rumbling of the volcano under the ground. Everyone could hear, but nobody would listen; the little flames leapt up through the surface, but still the gay life went on; and then the irruption came. Voltaire’s enemy had written a book. In the intervals of his more serious labours, the President had put together a series of ‘Letters,’ in which a number of miscellaneous scientific subjects were treated in a mildly speculative and popular style. The volume was rather dull, and very unimportant;
Ne vous embarrassez de rien, mon cher Maupertuis [he wrote to the President in his singular orthography]; l’affaire des libelles est finie. J’ai parle si vrai a l’home, je lui ai lave si bien la tete que je ne crois pas qu’il y retourne, et je connais son ame lache, incapable de sentiments d’honneur. Je l’ai intimide du cote de la boursse, ce qui a fait tout l’effet que j’attendais. Je lui ai declare enfin nettement que ma maison devait etre un sanctuaire et non une retraite de brigands ou de celerats qui distillent des poissons.
Apparently it did not occur to Frederick that this declaration had come a little late in the day. Meanwhile Maupertuis, overcome by illness and by rage,
The storm seemed to be over; but the tail of it was still hanging in the wind. Voltaire, on his way to the waters of Plombieres, stopped at Leipzig, where he could not resist, in spite of his repeated promises to the contrary, the temptation to bring out a new and enlarged edition of Akakia. Upon this Maupertuis utterly lost his head: he wrote to Voltaire, threatening him with personal chastisement. Voltaire issued yet another edition of Akakia, appended a somewhat unauthorised version of the President’s
After five weeks’ detention at Frankfort, Voltaire was free—free in every sense of the word—free from the service of Kings and the clutches of Residents, free in his own mind, free to shape his own destiny. He hesitated for several months, and then settled down by the Lake of Geneva. There the fires, which had lain smouldering so long in the profundities of his spirit, flared up, and flamed over Europe, towering and inextinguishable. In a few years letters began to flow once more to and from Berlin. At first the old grievances still rankled; but in time even the wrongs of Maupertuis and the misadventures of Frankfort were almost forgotten. Twenty years passed, and the King of Prussia was submitting his verses as anxiously as ever to Voltaire, whose compliments and cajoleries were pouring out in their accustomed stream. But their relationship was no longer that of master and pupil, courtier and King; it was that of two independent and equal powers. Even Frederick the Great was forced to see at last in the Patriarch of Ferney something more than a monkey with a genius for French versification. He actually came to respect the author of Akakia, and to cherish his memory. ‘Je lui fais tous les matins ma priere,’ he told d’Alembert, when Voltaire had been two years in the grave; ’je lui dis, Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis.’
1915.
NOTES:
[Footnote 6: October 1915.]
No one who has made the slightest expedition into that curious and fascinating country, Eighteenth-Century France, can have come away from it without at least one impression strong upon him—that in no other place and at no other time have people ever squabbled so much. France in the eighteenth century, whatever else it may have been—however splendid in genius, in vitality, in noble accomplishment and high endeavour—was certainly not a quiet place to live in. One could never have been certain, when one woke up in the morning, whether, before the day was out, one would not be in the Bastille for something one had said at dinner, or have quarrelled with half one’s friends for something one had never said at all.
Of all the disputes and agitations of that agitated age none is more remarkable than the famous quarrel between Rousseau and his friends, which disturbed French society for so many years, and profoundly affected the life and the character of the most strange and perhaps the most potent of the precursors of the Revolution. The affair is constantly cropping up in the literature of the time; it occupies a prominent place in the later books of the Confessions; and there is an account of its earlier phases—an account written from the anti-Rousseau point of view—in the Memoires of Madame d’Epinay. The whole story is an exceedingly complex one, and all the details of it have never been satisfactorily explained; but the general verdict of subsequent writers has been decidedly hostile to Rousseau, though it has not subscribed to all the virulent abuse poured upon him by his enemies at the time of the quarrel. This, indeed, is precisely the conclusion which an unprejudiced reader of the Confessions would naturally come to. Rousseau’s story, even as he himself tells it, does not carry conviction. He would have us believe that he was the victim of a vast and diabolical conspiracy, of which Grimm and Diderot were the moving spirits, which succeeded in alienating from him his dearest friends, and which eventually included all the ablest and most distinguished persons of the age. Not only does such a conspiracy appear, upon the face of it, highly improbable, but the evidence which Rousseau adduces to prove its existence seems totally insufficient; and the reader is left under the impression that the unfortunate Jean-Jacques was the victim, not of a plot contrived by rancorous enemies, but of his own perplexed, suspicious, and deluded mind. This conclusion is supported by the account of the affair given by contemporaries, and it is still further strengthened by Rousseau’s own writings subsequent to the Confessions, where his endless recriminations, his elaborate hypotheses, and his wild inferences bear all the appearance of mania. Here the matter has rested for many years;
If these conclusions really do follow from Mrs. Macdonald’s newly-discovered data, it would be difficult to over-estimate the value of her work, for the result of it would be nothing less than a revolution in our judgments upon some of the principal characters of the eighteenth century. To make it certain that Diderot was a cad and a cheat, that d’Alembert was a dupe, and Hume a liar—that, surely, were no small achievement. And, even if these conclusions do not follow from Mrs. Macdonald’s data, her work will still be valuable, owing to the data themselves. Her discoveries are important, whatever inferences may be drawn from them; and for this reason her book, ‘which represents,’ as she tells us, ‘twenty years of research,’ will be welcome to all students of that remarkable age.
Mrs. Macdonald’s principal revelations relate to the Memoires of Madame d’Epinay. This work was first printed in 1818, and the concluding quarter of it contains an account of the Rousseau quarrel, the most detailed of all those written from the anti-Rousseau point of view. It has, however, always been doubtful how far the Memoires were to be trusted as accurate records of historical fact. The manuscript disappeared; but it was known that the characters who, in the printed book, appear under the names of real persons, were given pseudonyms in the original document; and many of the minor statements contradicted known events. Had Madame d’Epinay merely intended to write a roman a clef? What seemed, so far as concerned the Rousseau narrative, to put this hypothesis out of court was the fact that the story of the quarrel as it appears in the Memoires is, in its main outlines, substantiated both by Grimm’s references to Rousseau in his Correspondance Litteraire, and by a brief memorandum of Rousseau’s misconduct, drawn up by Diderot for his private use, and not published until many years after Madame d’Epinay’s death. Accordingly most writers on the subject have taken the accuracy of the Memoires for granted; Sainte-Beuve, for instance, prefers the word of Madame d’Epinay to that of Rousseau, when there is a direct conflict of testimony; and Lord Morley, in his well-known biography, uses the Memoires as an authority for many of the incidents which he relates. Mrs. Macdonald’s researches, however, have put an entirely different complexion on the case.
Thus far we are on firm ground. But what are the conclusions which Mrs. Macdonald builds up from these foundations? The account, she says, of Rousseau’s conduct and character, as it appears in the printed version, is hostile to him, but it was not the account which Madame d’Epinay herself originally wrote. The hostile narrative was, in effect, composed by Grimm and Diderot, who induced Madame d’Epinay to substitute it for her own story; and thus her own story could not have agreed with theirs. Madame d’Epinay knew the truth; she knew that Rousseau’s conduct had been honourable and wise; and so she had described it in her book; until, falling completely under the influence of Grimm and Diderot, she had allowed herself to become the instrument for blackening the reputation of her old friend. Mrs. Macdonald paints a lurid picture of the conspirators at work—of Diderot penning his false and malignant instructions, of Madame d’Epinay’s half-unwilling hand putting the last touches to the fraud, of Grimm, rushing back to Paris at the time of the Revolution, and risking his life in order to make quite certain that the result of all these efforts should reach posterity. Well!
It is, I believe, possible to explain the condition of the d’Epinay manuscript without having recourse to the iconoclastic theory of Mrs. Macdonald. To explain everything, indeed, would be out of the question, owing to our insufficient data, and the extreme complexity of the events; all that we can hope to do is to suggest an explanation which will account for the most important of the known facts. Not the least interesting of Mrs. Macdonald’s discoveries went to show that the Memoires, so far from being historically accurate, were in reality
To follow Mrs. Macdonald into the inner recesses and elaborations of her argument would be a difficult and tedious task. The circumstances with which she is principally concerned—the suspicions, the accusations, the anonymous letters, the intrigues, the endless problems as to whether Madame d’Epinay was jealous of Madame d’Houdetot, whether Therese told fibs, whether, on the 14th of the month, Grimm was grossly impertinent, and whether, on the 15th, Rousseau was outrageously rude, whether Rousseau revealed a secret to Diderot, which Diderot revealed to Saint-Lambert, and whether, if Diderot revealed it, he believed that
It is, doubtless, conceivable that Grimm, who was Madame d’Epinay’s lover, was jealous of Rousseau, who was Madame d’Epinay’s friend. We know very little of Grimm’s character, but what we do know seems to show that he was a jealous man and an ambitious man; it is possible that a close alliance with Madame d’Epinay may have seemed to him a necessary step in his career; and it is conceivable that he may have determined not to rest until his most serious rival in Madame d’Epinay’s affections was utterly cast out. He was probably prejudiced against Rousseau from the beginning, and he may have allowed his prejudices to colour his view of Rousseau’s character and acts. The violence of the abuse which Grimm and the rest of the Encyclopaedists hurled against the miserable Jean-Jacques was certainly quite out of proportion to the real facts of the case. Whenever he is mentioned one is sure of hearing something about traitre and mensonge and sceleratesse. He is referred to as often as not as if he were some dangerous kind of wild beast. This was Grimm’s habitual language with regard to him; and this was the view of his character which Madame d’Epinay finally expressed in her book. The important question is—did Grimm know that Rousseau was in reality an honourable man, and, knowing this, did he deliberately defame him in order to drive him out of Madame d’Epinay’s affections? The answer, I think, must be in the negative, for the following reason. If Grimm had known that there was something to be ashamed of in the notes with which he had supplied Madame d’Epinay, and which led to the alteration of her Memoires, he certainly would have destroyed the draft of the manuscript, which was the only record of those notes having ever been made. As it happens, we know that he had the opportunity of destroying the draft, and he did not do so. He came to Paris at the risk of his life in 1791, and stayed there for four months, with the object, according to his own account, of collecting papers belonging to the Empress Catherine, or, according
If it is possible to suggest some fairly plausible motives which might conceivably have induced Grimm to blacken Rousseau’s character, the case of Diderot presents difficulties which are quite insurmountable. Mrs. Macdonald asserts that Diderot was jealous of Rousseau. Why? Because he was tired of hearing Rousseau described as ‘the virtuous’; that is all. Surely Mrs. Macdonald should have been the first to recognise that such an argument is a little too ‘psychological.’ The truth is that Diderot had nothing to gain by attacking Rousseau. He was not, like Grimm, in love with Madame d’Epinay; he was not a newcomer who had still to win for himself a position in the Parisian world. His acquaintance with Madame d’Epinay was slight; and, if there were any advances, they were from her side, for he was one of the most distinguished men of the day. In fact, the only reason that he could have had for abusing Rousseau was that he believed Rousseau deserved abuse. Whether he was right in believing so is a very different question. Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken. As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world—to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart. Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad? Who can wonder that, in his agitations, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend? ‘Cet homme est un
1907.
NOTES:
[Footnote 7: Jean Jacques Rousseau: a New Criticism, by Frederika Macdonald. In two volumes. Chapman and Hall. 1906.]
The new edition of Blake’s poetical works, published by the Clarendon Press, will be welcomed by every lover of English poetry. The volume is worthy of the great university under whose auspices it has been produced, and of the great artist whose words it will help to perpetuate. Blake has been, hitherto, singularly unfortunate in his editors. With a single exception, every edition of his poems up to the present time has contained a multitude of textual errors which, in the case of any other writer of equal eminence, would have been well-nigh inconceivable. The great majority of these errors were not the result of accident: they were the result of deliberate falsification. Blake’s text has been emended and corrected and ‘improved,’ so largely and so habitually, that there was a very real danger of its becoming permanently corrupted; and this danger was all the more serious, since the work of mutilation was carried on to an accompaniment of fervent admiration of the poet. ‘It is not a little bewildering,’ says Mr. Sampson, the present editor, ’to find one great poet and critic extolling Blake for the “glory of metre” and “the sonorous beauty of lyrical work” in the two opening lyrics of the Songs of Experience, while he introduces into the five short stanzas quoted no less than seven emendations of his own, involving additions of syllables and important changes of meaning.’ This is Procrustes admiring the exquisite proportions of his victim. As one observes the countless instances accumulated in Mr. Sampson’s notes, of the clippings and filings to which the free and spontaneous expression of Blake’s genius has been subjected, one is reminded of a verse in one of his own lyrics, where he speaks of the beautiful garden in which—
Priests in black gowns were
walking their rounds,
And binding with briers my
joys and desires;
and one cannot help hazarding the conjecture, that Blake’s prophetic vision recognised, in the lineaments of the ‘priests in black gowns,’ most of his future editors. Perhaps, though, if Blake’s prescience had extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded. The present edition, however, amply compensates for the past. Mr. Sampson gives us, in the first place, the correct and entire text of the poems, so printed as to afford easy reading to those who desire access to the text and nothing more. At the same time, in a series of notes and prefaces, he has provided an elaborate commentary, containing, besides all the variorum readings, a great mass of bibliographical and critical matter; and, in addition, he has enabled the reader to obtain a clue through the labyrinth of Blake’s mythology, by means of ample quotations from those passages in the Prophetic Books, which throw light upon the obscurities of the poems. The most important Blake document—the Rossetti MS.—has been freshly collated, with the generous aid of the owner, Mr. W.A. White, to whom the gratitude of the public is due in no common measure; and the long-lost Pickering MS.—the sole authority for some of the most mystical and absorbing of the poems—was, with deserved good fortune, discovered by Mr. Sampson in time for collation in the present edition. Thus there is hardly a line in the volume which has not been reproduced from an original, either written or engraved by the hand of Blake. Mr. Sampson’s minute and ungrudging care, his high critical acumen, and the skill with which he has brought his wide knowledge of the subject to bear upon the difficulties of the text, combine to make his edition a noble and splendid monument of English scholarship. It will be long indeed before the poems of Blake cease to afford matter for fresh discussions and commentaries and interpretations; but it is safe to predict that, so far as their form is concerned, they will henceforward remain unchanged. There will be no room for further editing. The work has been done by Mr. Sampson, once and for all.
In the case of Blake, a minute exactitude of text is particularly important, for more than one reason. Many of his effects depend upon subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling, which are too easily lost in reproduction. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’ is the ordinary version of one of his most celebrated lines. But in Blake’s original engraving the words appear thus—’Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’; and who can fail to perceive the difference? Even more remarkable is the change which the omission of a single stop has produced in the last line of one of the succeeding stanzas of the same poem.
And what shoulder, and what
art,
Could twist the sinews of
thy heart?
And when thy heart began to
beat,
What dread hand? and what
dread feet?
So Blake engraved the verse; and, as Mr. Sampson points out,’the terrible, compressed force’ of the final line vanishes to nothing in the ‘languid punctuation’ of subsequent editions:—’What dread hand and what dread feet?’ It is hardly an exaggeration to say, that the re-discovery of this line alone would have justified the appearance of the present edition.
But these considerations of what may be called the mechanics of Blake’s poetry are not—important as they are—the only justification for a scrupulous adherence to his autograph text. Blake’s use of language was not guided by the ordinarily accepted rules of writing; he allowed himself to be trammelled neither by prosody nor by grammar; he wrote, with an extraordinary audacity, according to the mysterious dictates of his own strange and intimate conception of the beautiful and the just. Thus his compositions, amenable to no other laws than those of his own making, fill a unique place in the poetry of the world. They are the rebels and atheists of literature, or rather, they are the sanctuaries of an Unknown God; and to invoke that deity by means of orthodox incantations is to run the risk of hell fire. Editors may punctuate afresh the text of Shakespeare with impunity, and perhaps even with advantage; but add a comma to the text of Blake, and you put all Heaven in a rage. You have laid your hands upon the Ark of the Covenant. Nor is this all. When once, in the case of Blake, the slightest deviation has been made from the authoritative version, it is hardly possible to stop there. The emendator is on an inclined plane which leads him inevitably from readjustments of punctuation to corrections of grammar, and from corrections of grammar to alterations of rhythm; if he is in for a penny, he is in for a pound. The first poem in the Rossetti MS. may be adduced as one instance—out of the enormous number which fill Mr. Sampson’s notes—of the dangers of editorial laxity.
I told my love, I told my
love,
I told her all
my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly
fears,
Ah! she doth depart.
This is the first half of the poem; and editors have been contented with an alteration of stops, and the change of ‘doth’ into ‘did.’ But their work was not over; they had, as it were, tasted blood; and their version of the last four lines of the poem is as follows:
Soon after she was gone from
me,
A traveller came
by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with
a sigh.
Reference to the MS., however, shows that the last line had been struck out by Blake, and another substituted in its place—a line which is now printed for the first time by Mr. Sampson. So that the true reading of the verse is:
Soon as she was gone from
me,
A traveller came
by,
Silently, invisibly—
O! was no deny.
After these exertions, it must have seemed natural enough to Rossetti and his successors to print four other expunged lines as part of the poem, and to complete the business by clapping a title to their concoction—’Love’s Secret’—a title which there is no reason to suppose had ever entered the poet’s mind.
Besides illustrating the shortcomings of his editors, this little poem is an admirable instance of Blake’s most persistent quality—his triumphant freedom from conventional restraints. His most characteristic passages are at once so unexpected and so complete in their effect, that the reader is moved by them, spontaneously, to some conjecture of ‘inspiration.’ Sir Walter Raleigh, indeed, in his interesting Introduction to a smaller edition of the poems, protests against such attributions of peculiar powers to Blake, or indeed to any other poet. ‘No man,’ he says, ‘destitute of genius, could live for a day.’ But even if we all agree to be inspired together, we must still admit that there are degrees of inspiration; if Mr. F’s Aunt was a woman of genius, what are we to say of Hamlet? And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired, stands very high indeed. If one could strike an average among poets, it would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned, Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the street. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate: ’What made him think of that?’ With Blake, one is asking the question all the time.
Blake’s originality of manner was not, as has sometimes been the case, a cloak for platitude. What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it. In English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he ’stands outside the regular line of succession.’ All that he had in common with the great leaders of the Romantic Movement was an abhorrence of the conventionality and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; for the eighteenth century itself was hardly more alien to his spirit than that exaltation of Nature—the ‘Vegetable Universe,’ as he called it—from which sprang the pantheism of Wordsworth and the paganism of Keats. ‘Nature is the work of the Devil,’ he exclaimed one day; ’the Devil is in us as far as we are Nature.’ There was no part of the sensible world which, in his philosophy, was not impregnated with vileness. Even the ‘ancient heavens’ were not, to his uncompromising vision, ’fresh and strong’; they were ‘writ with Curses from Pole to Pole,’ and destined to vanish into nothingness with the triumph of the Everlasting Gospel.
There are doubtless many to whom Blake is known simply as a charming and splendid lyrist, as the author of Infant Joy, and The Tyger, and the rest of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. These poems show but faint traces of any system of philosophy; but, to a reader of the Rossetti and Pickering MSS., the presence of a hidden and symbolic meaning in Blake’s words becomes obvious enough—a meaning which receives its fullest expression in the Prophetic Books. It was only natural that the extraordinary nature of Blake’s utterance in these latter works should have given rise to the belief that he was merely an inspired idiot—a madman who happened to be able to write good verses. That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne’s elaborate Essay, is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him among the Prophets. Anarchy is the most fashionable of creeds; and Blake’s writings, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, contain a complete exposition of its doctrines. The same critic asserts that Blake was ’one of the most consistent of English poets and thinkers.’ This is high praise indeed; but there seems to be some ambiguity in it. It is one thing to give Blake credit for that sort of consistency which lies in the repeated enunciation of the same body of beliefs throughout a large mass of compositions and over a long period of time, and which could never be possessed by a, madman or an incoherent charlatan. It is quite another thing to assert that his doctrines form in themselves a consistent whole, in the sense in which that quality would be ordinarily attributed to a system of philosophy. Does Sir Walter mean to assert that Blake is, in this sense too, ‘consistent’? It is a little difficult to discover. Referring, in his Introduction, to Blake’s abusive notes on Bacon’s Essays, he speaks of—
The sentimental enthusiast, who worships all great men indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position when his gods fall out among themselves. His case [Sir Walter wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief absence, found that the idols had quarrelled, and the biggest of them had smashed the rest to atoms. Blake is a dangerous idol for any man to keep in his shop.
We wonder very much whether he is kept in Sir Walter Raleigh’s.
It seems clear, at any rate, that no claim for a ‘consistency’ which would imply freedom from self-contradiction can be validly made for Blake. His treatment of the problem of evil is enough to show how very far he was from that clarity of thought without which even prophets are liable, when the time comes, to fall into disrepute. ‘Plato,’ said Blake, ’knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God’s eyes.’ And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. ’Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing’; there is no such thing as evil—it is a mere ‘negation.’ And the ‘moral virtues,’ which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely ‘allegories and dissimulations,’ they ‘do not exist.’ Such was one of the most fundamental of Blake’s doctrines; but it requires only a superficial acquaintance with his writings to recognise that their whole tenour is an implicit contradiction of this very belief. Every page he wrote contains a moral exhortation; bad thoughts and bad feelings raised in him a fury of rage and indignation which the bitterest of satirists never surpassed. His epigrams on Reynolds are masterpieces of virulent abuse; the punishment which he devised for Klopstock—his impersonation of ’flaccid fluency and devout sentiment’—is unprintable; as for those who attempt to enforce moral laws, they shall be ‘cast out,’ for they ‘crucify Christ with the head downwards.’ The contradiction is indeed glaring. ‘There is no such thing as wickedness,’ Blake says in effect, ‘and you are wicked if you think there is.’ If it is true that evil does not exist, all Blake’s denunciations are so much empty chatter; and, on the other hand, if there is a real distinction between good and bad, if everything, in fact, is not good in God’s eyes—then why not say so? Really Blake, as politicians say, ‘cannot have it both ways.’
But of course, his answer to all this is simple enough. To judge him according to the light of reason is to make an appeal to a tribunal whose jurisdiction he had always refused to recognise as binding. In fact, to Blake’s mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible. Reason is the ‘Spectre’ of Blake’s mythology, that Spectre, which, he says,
Around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my
way.
It is a malignant spirit, for ever struggling with the ‘Emanation,’ or imaginative side of man, whose triumph is the supreme end of the universe. Ever since the day when, in his childhood, Blake had seen God’s forehead at the window, he had found in imaginative vision the only reality and the only good. He beheld the things of this world ’not with, but through, the eye’:
With my inward Eye, ’tis
an old Man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle
across my way.
It was to the imagination, and the imagination alone, that Blake yielded the allegiance of his spirit. His attitude towards reason was the attitude of the mystic; and it involved an inevitable dilemma. He never could, in truth, quite shake himself free of his ‘Spectre’; struggle as he would, he could not escape altogether from the employment of the ordinary forms of thought and speech; he is constantly arguing, as if argument were really a means of approaching the truth; he was subdued to what he worked in. As in his own poem, he had, somehow or other, been locked into a crystal cabinet—the world of the senses and of reason—a gilded, artificial, gimcrack dwelling, after ‘the wild’ where he had danced so merrily before.
I strove to seize the inmost
Form
With ardour fierce and hands
of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a Weeping Babe became—
A weeping Babe upon the wild....
To be able to lay hands upon ‘the inmost form,’ one must achieve the impossible; one must be inside and outside the crystal cabinet at the same time. But Blake was not to be turned aside by such considerations. He would have it both ways; and whoever demurred was crucifying Christ with the head downwards.
Besides its unreasonableness, there is an even more serious objection to Blake’s mysticism—and indeed to all mysticism: its lack of humanity. The mystic’s creed—even when arrayed in the wondrous and ecstatic beauty of Blake’s verse—comes upon the ordinary man, in the rigidity of its uncompromising elevation, with a shock which is terrible, and almost cruel. The sacrifices which it demands are too vast, in spite of the divinity of what it has to offer. What shall it profit a man, one is tempted to exclaim, if he gain his own soul, and lose the whole world? The mystic ideal is the highest of all; but it has no breadth. The following lines express, with a simplicity and an intensity of inspiration which he never surpassed, Blake’s conception of that ideal:
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive
me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
‘This the Wine, & this
the Bread.’
It is easy to imagine the sort of comments to which Voltaire, for instance, with his ‘wracking wheel’ of sarcasm and common-sense, would have subjected such lines as these. His criticism would have been irrelevant, because it would never have reached the heart of the matter at issue; it would have been based upon no true understanding of Blake’s words. But that they do admit of a real, an unanswerable criticism, it is difficult to doubt. Charles Lamb, perhaps, might have made it; incidentally, indeed, he has. ’Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself’—do these things form no part of your Eternity?
The truth is plain: Blake was an intellectual drunkard. His words come down to us in a rapture of broken fluency from impossible intoxicated heights. His spirit soared above the empyrean; and, even as it soared, it stumbled in the gutter of Felpham. His lips brought forth, in the same breath, in the same inspired utterance, the Auguries of Innocence and the epigrams on Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was in no condition to chop logic, or to take heed of the existing forms of things. In the imaginary portrait of himself, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh’s volume, we can see him, as he appeared to his own ‘inward eye,’ staggering between the abyss and the star of Heaven, his limbs cast abroad, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of intoxication, so that, to the frenzy of his rolling vision, the whole universe is upside down. We look, and, as we gaze at the strange image and listen to the marvellous melody, we are almost tempted to go and do likewise.
But it is not as a prophet, it is as an artist, that Blake deserves the highest honours and the most enduring fame. In spite of his hatred of the ‘vegetable universe,’ his poems possess the inexplicable and spontaneous quality of natural objects; they are more like the works of Heaven than the works of man. They have, besides, the two most obvious characteristics of Nature—loveliness and power. In some of his lyrics there is an exquisite simplicity, which seems, like a flower or a child, to be unconscious of itself. In his poem of The Birds—to mention, out of many, perhaps a less known instance—it is not the poet that one hears, it is the birds themselves.
O thou summer’s harmony,
I have lived and mourned for
thee;
Each day I mourn along the
wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows
loud.
In his other mood—the mood of elemental force—Blake produces effects which are unique in literature. His mastery of the mysterious suggestions which lie concealed in words is complete.
He who torments the Chafer’s
Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless
Night.
What dark and terrible visions the last line calls up! And, with the aid of this control over the secret springs of language, he is able to produce in poetry those vast and vague effects of gloom, of foreboding, and of terror, which seem to be proper to music alone. Sometimes his words are heavy with the doubtful horror of an approaching thunderstorm:
The Guests are scattered thro’
the land,
For the Eye altering alters
all;
The Senses roll themselves
in fear,
And the flat Earth becomes
a Ball;
The Stars, Sun, Moon, all
shrink away,
A desart vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or
drink,
And a dark desart all around.
And sometimes Blake invests his verses with a sense of nameless and infinite ruin, such as one feels when the drum and the violin mysteriously come together, in one of Beethoven’s Symphonies, to predict the annihilation of worlds:
On the shadows of the Moon,
Climbing through Night’s
highest noon:
In Time’s Ocean falling,
drowned:
In Aged Ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp’d
the Wings
Of all Sublunary Things:
But when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot
Die,
Thro’ evening shades
I haste away
To close the Labours of my
Day.
The Door of Death I open found,
And the Worm Weaving in the
Ground;
Thou’rt my Mother, from
the Womb;
Wife, Sister, Daughter, to
the Tomb:
Weaving to Dreams the Sexual
strife,
And weeping over the Web of
Life.
Such music is not to be lightly mouthed by mortals; for us, in our weakness, a few strains of it, now and then, amid the murmur of ordinary converse, are enough. For Blake’s words will always be strangers on this earth; they could only fall with familiarity from the lips of his own Gods:
above
Time’s troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic Mountains,
In my Golden House on high.
They belong to the language of Los and Rahab and Enitharmon; and their mystery is revealed for ever in the land of the Sunflower’s desire.
1906.
NOTES:
[Footnote 8: The Poetical Works of William Blake. A new and verbatim text from the manuscript, engraved, and letter-press originals, with variorum readings and bibliographical notes and prefaces. By John Sampson, Librarian in the University of Liverpool. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1905.
The Lyrical Poems of William Blake. Text by John Sampson, with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1905.]
The shrine of Poetry is a secret one; and it is fortunate that this should be the case; for it gives a sense of security. The cult is too mysterious and intimate to figure upon census papers; there are no turnstiles at the temple gates; and so, as all inquiries must be fruitless, the obvious plan is to take for granted a good attendance of worshippers, and to pass on. Yet, if Apollo were to come down (after the manner of deities) and put questions—must we suppose to the Laureate?—as to the number of the elect, would we be quite sure of escaping wrath and destruction? Let us hope for the best; and perhaps, if we were bent upon finding out the truth, the simplest way would be to watch the sales of the new edition of the poems of Beddoes, which Messrs. Routledge have lately added to the ‘Muses’ Library.’ How many among Apollo’s pew-renters, one wonders, have ever read Beddoes, or, indeed, have ever heard of him? For some reason or another, this extraordinary poet has not only never received the recognition which is his due, but has failed almost entirely to receive any recognition whatever. If his name is known at all, it is known in virtue of the one or two of
He
hath skill in language;
And knowledge is in him, root,
flower, and fruit,
A palm with winged imagination
in it,
Whose roots stretch even underneath
the grave;
And on them hangs a lamp of
magic science
In his soul’s deepest
mine, where folded thoughts
Lie sleeping on the tombs
of magi dead.
If the neglect suffered by Beddoes’ poetry may be accounted for in more ways than one, it is not so easy to understand why more curiosity has never been aroused by the circumstances of his life. For one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer; and all that we know both of the life and the character of Beddoes possesses those very qualities of peculiarity, mystery, and adventure, which are so dear to the hearts of subscribers to circulating libraries. Yet only one account of his career has ever been given to the public; and that account, fragmentary and incorrect as it is, has long been out of print. It was supplemented some years ago by Mr. Gosse, who was able to throw additional light upon one important circumstance, and who has also published a small collection of Beddoes’ letters. The main biographical facts, gathered
Readers of Miss Edgeworth’s letters may remember that her younger sister Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes. Their eldest son, born in 1803, was named Thomas Lovell, after his father and grandfather, and grew up to be the author of The Brides’ Tragedy and Death’s Jest Book. Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man, endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare independence of character. His scientific attainments were recognised by the University of Oxford, where he held the post of Lecturer in Chemistry, until the time of the French Revolution, when he was obliged to resign it, owing to the scandal caused by the unconcealed intensity of his liberal opinions. He then settled at Clifton as a physician, established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics and scientific research. Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that ’he had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.’ The words are curiously suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental qualities. Not only did Beddoes inherit his father’s talents and his father’s inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less remarkable degree his father’s independence of mind. In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of Clifton by appearing at a tea-party with a packet of sugar in his hand; he explained that it was East Indian sugar, and that nothing would induce him to eat the usual kind, which came from Jamaica and was made by slaves. More extraordinary were his medical prescriptions; for he was in the habit of ordering cows to be conveyed into his patients’ bedrooms, in order, as he said, that they might ‘inhale the animals’ breath.’ It is easy to imagine the delight which the singular spectacle of a cow climbing upstairs into an invalid’s bedroom must have given to the future author of Harpagus and The Oviparous Tailor. But ‘little Tom,’ as Miss Edgeworth calls him, was not destined to enjoy for long the benefit of parental example; for Dr. Beddoes died in the prime of life, when the child was not yet six years old.
The genius at school is usually a disappointing figure, for, as a rule, one must be commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous world, to be remarkable is to be overlooked; and nothing less vivid than the white-hot blaze of a Shelley will bring with it even a distinguished martyrdom. But Beddoes was an exception, though he was not a martyr. On the contrary, he dominated his fellows as absolutely as if he had been a dullard and a dunce. He was at Charterhouse; and an entertaining account of his existence there has been preserved to us in a paper of school reminiscences, written by Mr. C.D. Bevan, who had been his fag. Though his place in the school was high, Beddoes’ interests were devoted not so much to classical scholarship as to the literature of his own tongue. Cowley, he afterwards told a friend, had been the first poet he had understood; but no doubt he had begun to understand poetry many years before he went to Charterhouse; and, while he was there, the reading which he chiefly delighted in was the Elizabethan drama. ’He liked acting,’ says Mr. Bevan, ’and was a good judge of it, and used to give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly Kean and Macready. Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner, that I was always glad to listen: even when I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required. One play in particular, Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, excited my admiration in this way; and a liking for the old English drama, which I still retain, was created and strengthened by such recitations.’ But Beddoes’ dramatic performances were not limited to the works of others; when the occasion arose he was able to supply the necessary material himself. A locksmith had incurred his displeasure by putting a bad lock on his bookcase; Beddoes vowed vengeance; and when next the man appeared he was received by a dramatic interlude, representing his last moments, his horror and remorse, his death, and the funeral procession, which was interrupted by fiends, who carried off body and soul to eternal torments. Such was the realistic vigour of the performance that the locksmith, according to Mr. Bevan, ’departed in a storm of wrath and execrations, and could not be persuaded, for some time, to resume his work.’
Besides the interlude of the wicked locksmith, Beddoes’ school compositions included a novel in the style of Fielding (which has unfortunately disappeared), the beginnings of an Elizabethan tragedy, and much miscellaneous verse. In 1820 he left Charterhouse, and went to Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in the following year, while still a freshman, he published his first volume, The Improvisatore, a series of short narratives in verse. The book had been written in part while he was at school; and its immaturity
Beddoes, however, had no reason to be ashamed of his next publication, The Brides’ Tragedy, which appeared in 1822. In a single bound, he had reached the threshold of poetry, and was knocking at the door. The line which divides the best and most accomplished verse from poetry itself—that subtle and momentous line which every one can draw, and no one can explain—Beddoes had not yet crossed. But he had gone as far as it was possible to go by the aid of mere skill in the art of writing, and he was still in his twentieth year. Many passages in The Brides’ Tragedy seem only to be waiting for the breath of inspiration which will bring them into life; and indeed, here and there, the breath has come, the warm, the true, the vital breath of Apollo. No one, surely, whose lips had not tasted of the waters of Helicon, could have uttered such words as these:
Here’s the blue violet,
like Pandora’s eye,
When first it darkened with
immortal life
or a line of such intense imaginative force as this:
I’ve huddled her into the wormy earth;
or this splendid description of a stormy sunrise:
The day is in its shroud while
yet an infant;
And Night with giant strides
stalks o’er the world,
Like a swart Cyclops, on its
hideous front
One round, red, thunder-swollen
eye ablaze.
The play was written on the Elizabethan model, and, as a play, it is disfigured by Beddoes’ most characteristic faults: the construction is weak, the interest fluctuates from character to character, and the motives and actions of the characters themselves are for the most part curiously remote from the realities of life. Yet, though the merit of the tragedy depends almost entirely upon the verse, there are signs in it that, while Beddoes lacked the gift of construction,
...
Speak, I pray thee, Floribel,
Speak to thy mother; do but
whisper ‘aye’;
Well, well, I will not press
her; I am sure
She has the welcome news of
some good fortune,
And hoards the telling till
her father comes;
... Ah! She half
laughed. I’ve guessed it then;
Come tell me, I’ll be
secret. Nay, if you mock me,
I must be very angry till
you speak.
Now this is silly; some of
these young boys
Have dressed the cushions
with her clothes in sport.
’Tis very like her.
I could make this image
Act all her greetings; she
shall bow her head:
‘Good-morrow, mother’;
and her smiling face
Falls on my neck.—Oh,
heaven, ’tis she indeed!
I know it all—don’t
tell me.
The last seven words are a summary of anguish, horror, and despair, such as Webster himself might have been proud to write.
The Brides’ Tragedy was well received by critics; and a laudatory notice of Beddoes in the Edinburgh, written by Bryan Waller Procter—better known then than now under his pseudonym of Barry Cornwall—led to a lasting friendship between the two poets. The connection had an important result, for it was through Procter that Beddoes became acquainted with the most intimate of all his friends—Thomas Forbes Kelsall, then a young lawyer at Southampton. In the summer of 1823 Beddoes stayed at Southampton for several months, and, while ostensibly studying for his Oxford degree, gave up most of his time to conversations with Kelsall and to dramatic composition. It was a culminating point in his life: one of those moments which come, even to the most fortunate, once and once only—when youth, and hope, and the high exuberance of genius combine with circumstance and opportunity to crown the marvellous hour. The spade-work of The Brides’ Tragedy had been accomplished; the seed had been sown; and now the harvest was beginning. Beddoes, ‘with the delicious sense,’ as Kelsall wrote long afterwards, ‘of the laurel freshly twined around his head,’ poured out, in these Southampton evenings, an eager stream of song. ’His poetic composition,’ says his friend, ’was then exceedingly facile: more than once or twice has he taken home with him at night some unfinished act of a drama, in which the editor [Kelsall] had found much to admire, and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor. Of several of these very striking fragments, large and grand in their aspect as they each started into form,
Like the red outline of beginning Adam,
... the only trace remaining is literally the impression thus deeply cut into their one observer’s mind. The fine verse just quoted is the sole remnant, indelibly stamped on the editor’s memory, of one of these extinct creations.’ Fragments survive of at least four dramas, projected, and brought to various stages of completion, at about this time. Beddoes was impatient of the common restraints; he was dashing forward in the spirit of his own advice to another poet:
Creep
not nor climb,
As they who place their topmost
of sublime
On some peak of this planet,
pitifully.
Dart eaglewise with open wings,
and fly
Until you meet the gods!
Eighteen months after his Southampton visit, Beddoes took his degree at Oxford, and, almost immediately, made up his mind to a course of action which had the profoundest effect upon his future life. He determined to take up the study of medicine; and with that end in view established himself, in 1825, at the University at Goettingen. It is very clear, however, that he had no intention of giving up his poetical work. He took with him to Germany the beginnings of a new play—’a very Gothic-styled tragedy,’ he calls it, ’for which I have a jewel of a name—DEATH’S JEST-BOOK; of course,’ he adds, ’no one will ever read it’; and, during his four years at Goettingen, he devoted most of his leisure to the completion of this work. He was young; he was rich; he was interested in medical science; and no doubt it seemed to him that he could well afford to amuse himself for half-a-dozen years, before he settled down to the poetical work which was to be the serious occupation of his life. But, as time passed, he became more and more engrossed in the study of medicine, for which he gradually discovered he had not only a taste but a gift; so that at last he came to doubt whether it might not be his true vocation to be a physician, and not a poet after all. Engulfed among the students of Goettingen, England and English ways of life, and even English poetry, became dim to him; ’dir, dem Anbeter der seligen Gottheiten der Musen, u.s.w.,’ he wrote to Kelsall, ’was Unterhaltendes kann der Liebhaber von Knochen, der fleissige Botaniker und Phisiolog mittheilen?’ In 1830 he was still hesitating between the two alternatives. ‘I sometimes wish,’ he told the same friend, ’to devote myself exclusively to the study of anatomy and physiology in science, of languages, and dramatic poetry’; his pen had run away with him; and his ‘exclusive’ devotion turned out to be a double one, directed towards widely different ends. While he was still in this state of mind, a new interest took possession of him—an interest which worked havoc with his dreams of dramatic authorship and scientific research: he became involved in the revolutionary movement which was at that time beginning to agitate Europe. The details of his adventures are unhappily lost to us, for we
Kelsall discharged his duties as literary executor with exemplary care. The manuscripts were fragmentary and confused. There were three distinct drafts of Death’s Jest Book, each with variations of its own; and from these Kelsall compiled his first edition of the drama, which appeared in 1850. In the following year he brought out the two volumes of poetical works, which remained for forty years the only record of the full scope and power of Beddoes’ genius. They contain reprints of The Brides’ Tragedy and Death’s Jest Book, together with two unfinished tragedies, and a great number of dramatic fragments and lyrics; and the poems are preceded by Kelsall’s memoir of his friend. Of these rare and valuable volumes the Muses’ Library edition is almost an exact reprint, except that it omits the memoir and revives The Improvisatore. Only one other edition of Beddoes exists—the limited one brought out by Mr. Gosse in 1890, and based upon a fresh examination of the manuscripts. Mr. Gosse was able to add ten lyrics and one dramatic fragment to those already published by Kelsall; he made public for the first time the true story of Beddoes’ suicide, which Kelsall had concealed; and, in 1893, he followed up his edition of the poems by a volume of Beddoes’ letters. It is clear, therefore, that there is no one living to whom lovers of Beddoes owe so much as to Mr. Gosse. He has supplied most important materials for the elucidation of the poet’s history: and, among the lyrics which he has printed for the first time, are to be found one of the most perfect specimens of Beddoes’ command of unearthly pathos—The Old Ghost—and
’Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold, trampling fellow—no creeper into worm-holes—no reviver even—however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold.’ The words occur in one of Beddoes’ letters, and they are usually quoted by critics, on the rare occasions on which his poetry is discussed, as an instance of the curious incapacity of artists to practise what they preach. But the truth is that Beddoes was not a ’creeper into worm-holes,’ he was not even a ‘reviver’; he was a reincarnation. Everything that we know of him goes to show that the laborious and elaborate effort of literary reconstruction was quite alien to his spirit. We have Kelsall’s evidence as to the ease and abundance of his composition; we have the character of the man, as it shines forth in his letters and in the history of his life—records of a ’bold, trampling fellow,’ if ever there was one; and we have the evidence of his poetry itself. For the impress of a fresh and vital intelligence is stamped unmistakably upon all that is best in his work. His mature blank verse is perfect. It is not an artificial concoction galvanized into the semblance of life; it simply lives. And, with Beddoes, maturity was precocious, for he obtained complete mastery over the most difficult and dangerous of metres at a wonderfully early age. Blank verse is like the Djin in the Arabian Nights; it is either the most terrible of masters, or the most powerful of slaves. If you have not the magic secret, it will take your best thoughts, your bravest imaginations, and change them into toads and fishes; but, if the spell be yours, it will turn into a flying carpet and lift your simplest utterance into the highest heaven. Beddoes had mastered the ‘Open, Sesame’ at an age when most poets are still mouthing ineffectual wheats and barleys. In his twenty-second year, his thoughts filled and moved and animated his blank verse as easily and familiarly as a hand in a glove. He wishes to compare, for instance, the human mind, with its knowledge of the past, to a single eye receiving the light of the stars; and the object of the comparison is to lay stress upon the concentration on one point of a vast multiplicity of objects. There could be no better exercise for a young verse-writer than to attempt his own expression of this idea, and then to examine these lines by Beddoes—lines where simplicity and splendour have been woven together with the ease of accomplished art.
How glorious to live!
Even in one thought
The wisdom of past times to
fit together,
And from the luminous minds
of many men
Catch a reflected truth; as,
in one eye,
Light, from unnumbered worlds
and farthest planets
Of the star-crowded universe,
is gathered
Into one ray.
The effect is, of course, partly produced by the diction; but the diction, fine as it is, would be useless without the phrasing—that art by which the two forces of the metre and the sense are made at once to combat, to combine with, and to heighten each other. It is, however, impossible to do more than touch upon this side—the technical side—of Beddoes’ genius. But it may be noticed that in his mastery of phrasing—as in so much besides—he was a true Elizabethan. The great artists of that age knew that without phrasing dramatic verse was a dead thing; and it is only necessary to turn from their pages to those of an eighteenth-century dramatist—Addison, for instance—to understand how right they were.
Beddoes’ power of creating scenes of intense dramatic force, which had already begun to show itself in The Brides’ Tragedy, reached its full development in his subsequent work. The opening act of The Second Brother—the most nearly complete of his unfinished tragedies—is a striking example of a powerful and original theme treated in such a way that, while the whole of it is steeped in imaginative poetry, yet not one ounce of its dramatic effectiveness is lost. The duke’s next brother, the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, returns to the city, after years of wandering, a miserable and sordid beggar—to find his younger brother, rich, beautiful, and reckless, leading a life of gay debauchery, with the assurance of succeeding to the dukedom when the duke dies. The situation presents possibilities for just those bold and extraordinary contrasts which were so dear to Beddoes’ heart. While Marcello, the second brother, is meditating over his wretched fate, Orazio, the third, comes upon the stage, crowned and glorious, attended by a train of singing revellers, and with a courtesan upon either hand. ‘Wine in a ruby!’ he exclaims, gazing into his mistress’s eyes:
I’ll solemnize their
beauty in a draught
Pressed from the summer of
an hundred vines.
Meanwhile Marcello pushes himself forward, and attempts to salute his brother.
Orazio. Insolent beggar!
Marcello. Prince! But we must shake hands. Look you, the round earth’s like a sleeping serpent, Who drops her dusky tail upon her crown Just here. Oh, we are like two mountain peaks Of two close planets, catching in the air: You, King Olympus, a great pile of summer, Wearing a crown of gods; I, the vast top Of the ghosts’ deadly world, naked and dark, With nothing reigning on my desolate head But an old spirit of a murdered god, Palaced within the corpse of Saturn’s father.
They begin to dispute, and at last Marcello exclaims—
Aye, Prince, you have a brother—
Orazio. The Duke—he’ll scourge you.
Marcello. Nay,
the second, sir,
Who, like an envious river,
flows between
Your footsteps and Ferrara’s
throne....
Orazio. Stood he before me there, By you, in you, as like as you’re unlike, Straight as you’re bowed, young as you are old, And many years nearer than him to Death, The falling brilliancy of whose white sword Your ancient locks so silverly reflect, I would deny, outswear, and overreach, And pass him with contempt, as I do you. Jove! How we waste the stars: set on, my friends.
And so the revelling band pass onward, singing still, as they vanish down the darkened street:
Strike, you myrtle-crowned
boys,
Ivied maidens, strike together!...
and Marcello is left alone:
I
went forth
Joyfully, as the soul of one
who closes
His pillowed eyes beside an
unseen murderer,
And like its horrible return
was mine,
To find the heart, wherein
I breathed and beat,
Cold, gashed, and dead.
Let me forget to love,
And take a heart of venom:
let me make
A staircase of the frightened
breasts of men,
And climb into a lonely happiness!
And thou, who only art alone
as I,
Great solitary god of that
one sun,
I charge thee, by the likeness
of our state,
Undo these human veins that
tie me close
To other men, and let your
servant griefs
Unmilk me of my mother, and
pour in
Salt scorn and steaming hate!
A moment later he learnt that the duke has suddenly died, and that the dukedom is his. The rest of the play affords an instance of Beddoes’ inability to trace out a story, clearly and forcibly, to an appointed end. The succeeding acts are crowded with beautiful passages, with vivid situations, with surprising developments, but the central plot vanishes away into nothing, like a great river dissipating itself among a thousand streams. It is, indeed, clear enough that Beddoes was embarrassed with his riches, that his fertile mind conceived too easily, and that he could never resist the temptation of giving life to his imaginations, even at the cost of killing his play. His conception of Orazio, for instance, began by being that of a young Bacchus, as he appears in the opening scene. But Beddoes could not leave him there; he must have a romantic wife, whom he has deserted; and the wife, once brought into being, must have an interview with her husband. The interview is an exquisitely beautiful one, but it shatters Orazio’s character, for, in the course of it, he falls desperately in love with his wife; and meanwhile the wife herself has become so important and interesting a figure that she must be given a father, who in his turn becomes the central character in more than one exciting scene.
Perhaps, however, the ordinary reader finds Beddoes’ lack of construction a less distasteful quality than his disregard of the common realities of existence. Not only is the subject-matter of the greater part of his poetry remote and dubious; his very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator’s delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal. They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death. The central idea of Death’s Jest Book—the resurrection of a ghost—fails to be truly effective, because it is difficult to see any clear distinction between the phantom and the rest of the characters. The duke, saved from death by the timely arrival of Wolfram, exclaims ‘Blest hour!’ and then, in a moment, begins to ponder, and agonise, and dream:
And yet how palely, with what
faded lips
Do we salute this unhoped
change of fortune!
Thou art so silent, lady;
and I utter
Shadows of words, like to
an ancient ghost,
Arisen out of hoary centuries
Where none can speak his language.
Orazio, in his brilliant palace, is overcome with the same feelings:
Methinks, these fellows, with
their ready jests,
Are like to tedious bells,
that ring alike
Marriage or death.
And his description of his own revels applies no less to the whole atmosphere of Beddoes’ tragedies:
Voices were heard, most loud,
which no man owned:
There were more shadows too
than there were men;
And all the air more dark
and thick than night
Was heavy, as ’twere
made of something more
Than living breaths.
It would be vain to look, among such spectral imaginings as these, for guidance in practical affairs, or for illuminating views on men and things, or for a philosophy, or, in short, for anything which may be called a ‘criticism of life.’ If a poet must be a critic of life, Beddoes was certainly no poet. He belongs to the class of writers of which, in English literature, Spenser, Keats, and Milton are the dominant figures—the writers who are great merely because of their art. Sir James Stephen was only telling the truth when he remarked that Milton might have put all that he had to say in Paradise Lost into a prose pamphlet of two or three pages. But who cares about what Milton had to say? It is his way of saying it that matters; it is his expression. Take away the expression from the Satires of Pope, or from The Excursion, and, though you will destroy the poems, you will leave behind a great mass of thought. Take away the expression from Hyperion, and you will leave nothing at all. To ask which is the better of the two styles is like asking whether a peach is better than a rose, because, both being beautiful, you can eat the one and not the other. At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses: it is in his expression that his greatness lies. His verse is an instrument of many modulations, of exquisite delicacy, of strange suggestiveness, of amazing power. Playing on it, he can give utterance to the subtlest visions, such as this:
Just now a beam of joy hung
on his eyelash;
But, as I looked, it sunk
into his eye,
Like a bruised worm writhing
its form of rings
Into a darkening hole.
Or to the most marvellous of vague and vast conceptions, such as this:
I
begin to hear
Strange but sweet sounds,
and the loud rocky dashing
Of waves, where time into
Eternity
Falls over ruined worlds.
Or he can evoke sensations of pure loveliness, such as these:
So fair a creature! of such
charms compact
As nature stints elsewhere:
which you may find
Under the tender eyelid of
a serpent,
Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured
rose,
By drops and sparks:
but when she moves, you see,
Like water from a crystal
overfilled,
Fresh beauty tremble out of
her and lave
Her fair sides to the ground.
Or he can put into a single line all the long memories of adoration:
My
love was much;
My life but an inhabitant
of his.
Or he can pass in a moment from tiny sweetness to colossal turmoil:
I
should not say
How thou art like the daisy
in Noah’s meadow,
On which the foremost drop
of rain fell warm
And soft at evening:
so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and
shut the treacherous water
Close to the golden welcome
of its breast,
Delighting in the touch of
that which led
The shower of oceans, in whose
billowy drops
Tritons and lions of the sea
were warring,
And sometimes ships on fire
sunk in the blood,
Of their own inmates; others
were of ice,
And some had islands rooted
in their waves,
Beasts on their rocks, and
forest-powdering winds,
And showers tumbling on their
tumbling self,
And every sea of every ruined
star
Was but a drop in the world-melting
flood.
He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic, dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:—
... What shall I do? I speak all wrong, And lose a soul-full of delicious thought By talking. Hush! Let’s drink each other up By silent eyes. Who lives, but thou and I, My heavenly wife?... I’ll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second By thy cheek’s change.
In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost hear the gnashing of the teeth. ‘Never!’ exclaims the duke to his son Torrismond:
There lies no grain of sand
between
My loved and my detested!
Wing thee hence,
Or thou dost stand to-morrow
on a cobweb
Spun o’er the well of
clotted Acheron,
Whose hydrophobic entrails
stream with fire!
And may this intervening earth
be snow,
And my step burn like the
mid coal of Aetna,
Plunging me, through it all,
into the core,
Where in their graves the
dead are shut like seeds,
If I do not—O,
but he is my son!
Is not that tremendous? But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality. One must wander with him through the pages of Death’s Jest Book, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn that ‘the dead are most and merriest,’ one must ask—’Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?’—one must realise that ‘murder is full of holes.’ Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,
Whose
tumultuous waves
Are heaped, contending ghosts,
one may understand how it is that
Death is mightier, stronger,
and more faithful
To man than Life.
Lingering there, one may watch the Deaths come down from their cloister, and dance and sing amid the moonlight; one may laugh over the grotesque contortions of skeletons; one may crack jokes upon corruption; one may sit down with phantoms, and drink to the health of Death.
In private intercourse Beddoes was the least morbid of human beings. His mind was like one of those Gothic cathedrals of which he was so fond—mysterious within, and filled with a light at once richer and less real than the light of day; on the outside, firm, and towering, and immediately impressive; and embellished, both inside and out, with grinning gargoyles. His conversation, Kelsall tells us, was full of humour and vitality, and untouched by any trace of egoism or affectation. He loved discussion, plunging into it with fire, and carrying it onward with high dexterity and good-humoured force. His letters are excellent: simple, spirited, spicy, and as original as his verse; flavoured with that vein of rattling open-air humour which had produced his school-boy novel in the style of Fielding. He was a man whom it would have been a rare delight to know. His character, so eminently English, compact of courage, of originality, of imagination, and with something coarse in it as well, puts one in mind of Hamlet: not the melodramatic sentimentalist of the stage; but the real Hamlet, Horatio’s Hamlet, who called his father’s ghost old truepenny, who forged his uncle’s signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room. His tragedy, like Hamlet’s, was the tragedy of an over-powerful will—a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision. It is easy for a weak man to be decided—there is so much to make him so; but a strong man, who can do anything, sometimes leaves everything undone. Fortunately Beddoes, though he did far less than he might have done, possessed so rich a genius that what he did, though small in quantity, is in quality beyond price. ‘I might have been, among other things, a good poet,’ were his last words. ‘Among other things’! Aye, there’s the rub. But, in spite of his own ‘might have been,’ a good poet he was. Perhaps for him, after all, there was very little to regret; his life was full of high nobility; and what other way of death would have befitted the poet of death? There is a thought constantly recurring throughout his writings—in his childish as in his most mature work—the thought of the beauty and the supernal happiness of soft and quiet death. He had visions of ‘rosily dying,’ of ‘turning to daisies gently in the grave,’ of a ‘pink reclining death,’ of death coming like a summer cloud over the soul. ‘Let her deathly life pass into death,’ says one of his earliest characters, ‘like music on the night wind.’ And, in Death’s Jest Book, Sibylla has the same thoughts:
O
Death! I am thy friend,
I struggle not with thee,
I love thy state:
Thou canst be sweet and gentle,
be so now;
And let me pass praying away
into thee,
As twilight still does into
starry night.
Did his mind, obsessed and overwhelmed by images of death, crave at last for the one thing stranger than all these—the experience of it? It is easy to believe so, and that, ill, wretched, and abandoned by Degen at the miserable Cigogne Hotel, he should seek relief in the gradual dissolution which attends upon loss of blood. And then, when he had recovered, when he was almost happy once again, the old thoughts, perhaps, came crowding back upon him—thoughts of the futility of life, and the supremacy of death and the mystical whirlpool of the unknown, and the long quietude of the grave. In the end, Death had grown to be something more than Death to him—it was, mysteriously and transcendentally, Love as well.
Death’s darts are sometimes
Love’s. So Nature tells,
When laughing waters close
o’er drowning men;
When in flowers’ honied
corners poison dwells;
When Beauty dies: and
the unwearied ken
Of those who seek a cure for
long despair
Will learn ...
What learning was it that rewarded him? What ghostly knowledge of eternal love?
If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky
haze,
Heaven’s
blue pall?
—Raise my loved
long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy.—
There are no ghosts
to raise;
Out of death lead
no ways;
Vain
is the call.
—Know’st
thou not ghosts to sue?
No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
And breathe thy
last.
So out of Life’s fresh
crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
Thus are the ghosts
to woo;
Thus are all dreams
made true,
Ever
to last!
1907.
In the whole of French literature it would be difficult to point to a figure at once so important, so remarkable, and so little known to English readers as Henri Beyle. Most of us are, no doubt, fairly familiar with his pseudonym of ‘Stendhal’; some of us have read Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme; but how many of us have any further knowledge of a man whose works are at the present moment appearing in Paris in all the pomp of an elaborate and complete edition, every scrap of whose manuscripts is being collected and deciphered with enthusiastic care, and in honour of whose genius the literary periodicals of the hour are filling entire numbers with exegesis and appreciation? The eminent critic, M. Andre Gide, when asked lately to name the novel which stands in his opinion first among the novels of France, declared that since, without a doubt, the place belongs to one or other of the novels of Stendhal, his only difficulty was in making his choice among these; and he finally decided upon La Chartreuse de Parme. According to this high authority, Henri Beyle was indisputably the creator of the greatest work of fiction in the
But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, M. Barres lays stress upon his ‘sentiment d’honneur,’ and the ‘Beylistes’ see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of his genius. He was born in 1783, when the ancien regime was still in full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble, preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner of Fontenelle, who always spoke of ‘M. de Voltaire’ with a smile ‘melange de respect et d’affection’; and when the Terror came, two representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the result that Beyle’s father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty others)
The fall of Napoleon threw Beyle out of employment, and the period of his literary activity began. His books were not successful; his fortune gradually dwindled; and he drifted in Paris and Italy, and even in England, more and more disconsolately, with thoughts of suicide sometimes in his head. But in 1830 the tide of his fortunes turned. The revolution of July, by putting his friends into power, brought him a competence in the shape of an Italian consulate; and in the same year he gained for the first time some celebrity by the publication of Le Rouge et Le Noir. The rest of his life was spent in the easy discharge of his official duties at Civita Vecchia, alternating with periods of leave—one of them lasted for three years—spent in Paris among his friends, of whom the most distinguished was Prosper Merimee. In 1839 appeared his last published work—La Chartreuse de Parme; and three years later he died suddenly in Paris. His epitaph, composed by himself with the utmost care, was as follows:
QUI GIACE ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE VISSE, SCRISSE, AMO.
The words, read rightly, indicate many things—his adoration of Italy and Milan, his eccentricity, his scorn of the conventions of society and the limits of nationality, his adventurous life, his devotion to literature, and, lastly, the fact that, through all the varieties of his experience—in the earliest years of his childhood, in his agitated manhood, in his calm old age—there had never been a moment when he was not in love.
Beyle’s work falls into two distinct groups—the first consisting of his novels, and the second of his miscellaneous writings, which include several biographies, a dissertation on Love, some books of criticism and travel, his letters and various autobiographical fragments. The bulk of the latter group is large; much of it has only lately seen the light; and more of it, at present in MS. at the library of Grenoble, is promised us by the indefatigable editors of the new complete edition which is now appearing in Paris. The interest of this portion of Beyle’s writings is almost entirely personal: that of his novels is mainly artistic. It was as a novelist that Beyle first gained his celebrity, and it is still as a novelist—or rather as the author of Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme (for an earlier work, Armance, some short stories, and some later posthumous fragments may be left out of account)—that he is most widely known to-day. These two remarkable works lose none of their significance if we consider the time at which they were composed. It was in the full flood of the Romantic revival, that marvellous hour in the history of French literature when the tyranny of two centuries was shattered for ever, and a boundless wealth of inspirations, possibilities, and beauties before undreamt-of suddenly burst upon the view. It was the hour of Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier, Balzac, with their new sonorities and golden cadences, their new lyric passion and dramatic stress, their new virtuosities, their new impulse towards the strange and the magnificent, their new desire for diversity and the manifold comprehension of life. But, if we turn to the contemporaneous pages of Stendhal, what do we find? We find a succession of colourless, unemphatic sentences; we find cold reasoning and exact narrative; we find polite irony and dry wit. The spirit of the eighteenth century is everywhere; and if the old gentleman with the perruque and the ‘M. de Voltaire’ could have taken a glance at his grandson’s novels, he would have rapped his snuff-box and approved. It is true that Beyle joined the ranks of the Romantics for a moment with a brochure attacking Racine at the expense of Shakespeare; but this was merely one of those contradictory changes of front which were inherent in his nature; and in reality the whole Romantic movement meant nothing to him. There is a story of a meeting in the house of a common friend between him and Hugo, in which
This attempt to reach the exactitude and the detachment of an official document was not limited to Beyle’s style; it runs through the whole tissue of his work. He wished to present life dispassionately and intellectually, and if he could have reduced his novels to a series of mathematical symbols, he would have been charmed. The contrast between his method and that of Balzac is remarkable. That wonderful art of materialisation, of the sensuous evocation of the forms, the qualities, the very stuff and substance of things, which was perhaps Balzac’s greatest discovery, Beyle neither possessed nor wished to possess. Such matters were to him of the most subordinate importance, which it was no small part of the novelist’s duty to keep very severely in their place. In the earlier chapters of Le Rouge et Le Noir, for instance, he is concerned with almost the same subject as Balzac in the opening of Les Illusions Perdues—the position of a young man in a provincial town, brought
Il y a [he says] un episode celebre dans ‘Le Rouge et Le Noir,’ la scene ou Julien, assis un soir a cote de Mme. de Renal, sous les branches noires d’un arbre, se fait un devoir de lui prendre la main, pendant qu’elle cause avec Mme. Derville. C’est un petit drame muet d’une grande puissance, et Stendhal y a analyse merveilleusement les etats d’ame de ses deux personnages. Or, le milieu n’apparait pas une seule fois. Nous pourrions etre n’importe ou dans n’importe quelles conditions, la scene resterait la meme pourvu qu’il fit noir ... Donnez l’episode a un ecrivain pour qui les milieux existent, et dans la defaite de cette femme, il fera entrer la nuit, avec ses odeurs, avec ses voix, avec ses voluptes molles. Et cet ecrivain sera dans la verite, son tableau sera plus complet.
More complete, perhaps; but would it be more convincing? Zola, with his statistical conception of art, could not understand that you could tell a story properly unless you described in detail every contingent fact. He could not see that Beyle was able, by simply using the symbol ‘nuit,’ to suggest the ‘milieu’ at once to the reader’s imagination. Everybody knows all about the night’s accessories—’ses odeurs, ses voix, ses voluptes molles’; and what a relief it is to be spared, for once in a way, an elaborate expatiation upon them! And Beyle is perpetually evoking the gratitude of his readers in this way. ’Comme il insiste peu!’ as M. Gide exclaims. Perhaps the best test of a man’s intelligence is his capacity for making a summary. Beyle knew this, and his novels are full of passages which read like nothing so much as extraordinarily able summaries of some enormous original narrative which has been lost.
It was not that he was lacking in observation, that he had no eye for detail, or no power of expressing it; on the contrary, his vision was of the sharpest, and his pen could call up pictorial images of startling vividness, when he wished. But he very rarely did wish: it was apt to involve a tiresome insistence. In his narratives he is like a brilliant talker in a sympathetic circle, skimming swiftly from point to point, taking for granted the intelligence of his
En arrivant sur l’autre rive, Fabrice y avait trouve les generaux tout seuls; le bruit du canon lui sembla redoubler; ce fut a peine s’il entendit le general, par lui si bien mouille, qui criait a son oreille:
Ou as-tu pris ce cheval?
Fabrice etait tellement
trouble, qu’il repondit en Italien: l’ho
comprato poco fa.
(Je viens de l’acheter a l’instant.)
Que dis-tu? lui cria le general.
Mais le tapage devint tellement fort en ce moment, que Fabrice ne put lui repondre. Nous avouerons que notre heros etait fort peu heros en ce moment. Toutefois, la peur ne venait chez lui qu’en seconde ligne; il etait surtout scandalise de ce bruit qui lui faisait mal aux oreilles. L’escorte prit le galop; on traversait une grande piece de terre labouree, situee au dela du canal, et ce champ etait jonche de cadavres.
How unemphatic it all is! What a paucity of epithet, what a reticence in explanation! How a Romantic would have lingered over the facial expression of the general, and how a Naturalist would have analysed that ‘tapage’! And yet, with all their efforts, would they have succeeded in conveying that singular impression of disturbance, of cross-purposes, of hurry, and of ill-defined fear, which Beyle with his quiet terseness has produced?
It is, however, in his psychological studies that the detached and intellectual nature of Beyle’s method is most clearly seen. When he is describing, for instance, the development of Julien Sorel’s mind in Le Rouge et Le Noir, when he shows us the soul of the young peasant with its ignorance, its ambition, its pride, going step by step into the whirling vortex of life—then we seem to be witnessing not so much the presentment of a fiction as the unfolding of some scientific fact. The procedure is almost mathematical: a proposition is established, the inference is drawn, the next proposition follows, and so on until the demonstration is complete. Here the influence of the eighteenth century is very strongly marked. Beyle had drunk deeply of that fountain of syllogism and analysis that flows through the now forgotten pages of Helvetius and Condillac; he was an ardent votary of logic in its austerest form—’la lo-gique’ he used to call it, dividing the syllables in a kind of awe-inspired emphasis; and he considered the ratiocinative style of Montesquieu almost as good as that of the Code Civil.
If this had been all, if we could sum him up simply as an acute and brilliant writer who displays the scientific and prosaic sides of the French genius in an extreme degree, Beyle’s position in literature would present very little difficulty. He would take his place at once as a late—an abnormally late—product of the eighteenth century. But he was not that. In his blood there was a virus which had never tingled in the veins of Voltaire. It was the virus of modern life—that new sensibility, that new passionateness, which Rousseau had first made known to the world, and which had won its way over Europe behind the thunder of Napoleon’s artillery. Beyle had passed his youth within earshot of that mighty roar, and his inmost spirit could never lose the echo of it. It was in vain that he studied Condillac and modelled his style on the Code; in vain that he sang the praises of la lo-gique, shrugged his shoulders at the Romantics, and turned the cold eye of a scientific investigator upon the phenomena of life; he remained essentially a man of feeling. His unending series of grandes passions was one unmistakable sign of this; another was his intense devotion to the Fine Arts. Though his taste in music and painting was the taste of his time—the literary and sentimental taste of the age of Rossini and Canova—he nevertheless brought to the appreciation of works of art a kind of intimate gusto which reveals the genuineness of his emotion. The ‘jouissances d’ange,’ with which at his first entrance into Italy he heard at Novara the Matrimonio Segreto of Cimarosa, marked an epoch in his life. He adored Mozart: ’I can imagine nothing more distasteful to me,’ he said, ’than a thirty-mile walk through the mud; but I would take one at this moment if I knew that I should hear a good performance of Don Giovanni
In his novels this cohabitation of opposites is responsible both for what is best and what is worst. When the two forces work in unison the result is sometimes of extraordinary value—a product of a kind which it would be difficult to parallel in any other author. An eye of icy gaze is turned upon the tumultuous secrets of passion, and the pangs of love are recorded in the language of Euclid. The image of the surgeon inevitably suggests itself—the hand with the iron nerve and the swift knife laying bare the trembling mysteries within. It is the intensity of Beyle’s observation, joined with such an exactitude of exposition, that makes his dry pages sometimes more thrilling than the wildest tale of adventure or all the marvels of high romance. The passage in La Chartreuse de Parme describing Count Mosca’s jealousy has this quality, which appears even more clearly in the chapters of Le Rouge et Le Noir concerning Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole. Here Beyle has a subject after his own heart. The loves of the peasant youth and the aristocratic girl, traversed and agitated by their overweening pride, and triumphing at last rather over themselves than over each other—these things make up a gladiatorial combat of ‘espagnolismes,’ which is displayed to the reader with a supreme incisiveness. The climax is reached when Mathilde at last gives way to her passion, and throws herself into the arms of Julien, who forces himself to make no response:
Ses bras se roidirent, tant l’effort impose par la politique etait penible. Je ne dois pas meme me permettre de presser contre mon coeur ce corps souple et charmant; ou elle me meprise, ou elle me maltraite. Quel affreux caractere!
Et en maudissant le
caractere de Mathilde, il l’en aimait cent fois
plus; il lui semblait
avoir dans ses bras une reine.
L’impassible froideur de Julien redoubla le malheur de Mademoiselle de la Mole. Elle etait loin d’avoir le sang-froid necessaire pour chercher a deviner dans ses yeux ce qu’il sentait pour elle en cet instant. Elle ne put se resoudre a le regarder; elle tremblait de rencontrer l’expression du mepris.
Assise sur le divan de la bibliotheque, immobile et la tete tournee du cote oppose a Julien, elle etait en proie aux plus vives douleurs que l’orgueil et l’amour puissent faire eprouver a une ame humaine. Dans quelle atroce demarche elle venait de tomber!
Il m’etait reserve,
malheureuse que je suis! de voir repoussees les
avances les plus indecentes!
Et repoussees par qui? ajoutait
l’orgueil fou
de douleur, repoussees par un domestique de mon pere.
C’est ce que je ne souffrirai pas, dit-elle a haute voix.
At that moment she suddenly sees some unopened letters addressed to Julien by another woman.
—Ainsi, s’ecria-t-elle
hors d’elle-meme, non seulement vous etes
bien avec elle, mais
encore vous la meprisez. Vous, un homme de
rien, mepriser Madame
la Marechale de Fervaques!
—Ah! pardon,
mon ami, ajouta-t-elle en se jetant a ses genoux,
meprise-moi si tu veux,
mais aime-moi, je ne puis plus vivre privee
de ton amour. Et
elle tomba tout a fait evanouie.
—La voila donc, cette orgueilleuse, a mes pieds! se dit Julien.
Such is the opening of this wonderful scene, which contains the concentrated essence of Beyle’s genius, and which, in its combination of high passion, intellectual intensity, and dramatic force, may claim comparison with the great dialogues of Corneille.
‘Je fais tous les efforts possibles pour etre sec,’ he says of himself. ’Je veux imposer silence a mon coeur, qui croit avoir beaucoup a dire. Je tremble toujours de n’avoir ecrit qu’un soupir, quand je crois avoir note une verite.’ Often he succeeds, but not always. At times his desire for dryness becomes a mannerism and fills whole pages with tedious and obscure argumentation. And, at other times, his sensibility gets the upper hand, throws off all control, and revels in an orgy of melodrama and ‘espagnolisme.’ Do what he will, he cannot keep up a consistently critical attitude towards the creatures of his imagination: he depreciates his heroes with extreme care, but in the end they get the better of him and sweep him off his feet. When, in La Chartreuse de Parme,
The view of Beyle’s personality which his novels give us may be seen with far greater detail in his miscellaneous writings. It is to these that his most modern admirers devote their main attention—particularly to his letters and his autobiographies; but they are all of them highly characteristic of their author, and—whatever the subject may be, from a guide to Rome to a life of Napoleon—one gathers in them, scattered up and down through their pages, a curious, dimly adumbrated philosophy—an ill-defined and yet intensely personal point of view—le Beylisme. It is in fact almost entirely in this secondary quality that their interest lies; their ostensible subject-matter is unimportant. An
—C’en est fait, dit-il avec un gros soupir, ils l’ont assassine.
Je fus saisi d’un des plus vifs mouvements de joie que j’ai eprouve en ma vie. Le lecteur pensera peut-etre que je suis cruel, mais tel j’etais a 5 X 2, tel je suis a 10 X 5 + 2 ... Je puis dire que l’approbation des etres, que je regarde comme faibles, m’est absolument indifferente.
These are the words of a born rebel, and such sentiments are constantly recurring in his books. He is always discharging his shafts against some established authority; and, of course, he reserved his bitterest
It would be a mistake to suppose that Beyle displayed in his private life the qualities of the superman. Neither his virtues nor his vices were on the grand scale. In his own person he never seems to have committed an ‘espagnolisme.’ Perhaps his worst sin was that of plagiarism: his earliest book, a life of Haydn, was almost entirely ‘lifted’ from the work of a learned German; and in his next he embodied several choice extracts culled from the Edinburgh Review. On this occasion he was particularly delighted, since the Edinburgh, in reviewing the book, innocently selected for special approbation the very passages which he had stolen. It is singular that so original a writer should have descended to pilfering. But Beyle was nothing if not inconsistent. With all his Classicism he detested Racine; with all his love of music he could see nothing in Beethoven; he adored Italy, and, so soon as he was given his Italian consulate, he was usually to be found in Paris. As his life advanced he grew more and more wayward, capricious, and eccentric.
And in such a Paradise of Frenchmen we may leave Henri Beyle.
1914
The Pitt nose has a curious history. One can watch its transmigrations through three lives. The tremendous hook of old Lord Chatham, under whose curve Empires came to birth, was succeeded by the bleak upward-pointing nose of William Pitt the younger—the rigid symbol of an indomitable hauteur. With Lady Hester Stanhope came the final stage. The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost its masculinity; the hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had disappeared. Lady Hester’s was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one fancies, towards some eternally eccentric heaven. It was a nose, in fact, altogether in the air.
Noses, of course, are aristocratic things; and Lady Hester was the child of a great aristocracy. But, in her case, the aristocratic impulse, which had carried her predecessors to glory, had less fortunate results. There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course. A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this tendency: that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and darkness. Lady Hester Stanhope’s spirit was still more uncommon; and she met with a most uncommon fate.
She was born in 1776, the eldest daughter of that extraordinary Earl Stanhope, Jacobin and inventor, who made the first steamboat and the first calculating machine, who defended the French Revolution in the House of Lords and erased the armorial bearings—’damned aristocratical nonsense’—from his carriages and his plate. Her mother, Chatham’s daughter and the favourite sister of Pitt, died when she was four years old. The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman of fashion, left her stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses, while ’Citizen Stanhope’ ruled the household from his laboratory with the violence of a tyrant. It was not until Lady Hester was twenty-four that she escaped from the slavery of her father’s house, by going to live with her grandmother, Lady Chatham. On Lady Chatham’s death, three years later, Pitt offered her his protection, and she remained with him until his death in 1806.
Her three years with Pitt, passed in the very centre of splendid power, were brilliant and exciting. She flung herself impetuously into the movement and the passion of that vigorous society; she ruled her uncle’s household with high vivacity; she was liked and courted; if not beautiful, she was fascinating—very tall, with a very fair and clear complexion, and dark-blue eyes, and a countenance of wonderful expressiveness. Her talk, full of the trenchant nonchalance of those days, was both amusing and alarming: ’My dear Hester, what are you saying?’ Pitt would call out to her from across the room. She was devoted to her uncle, who warmly returned her affection. She was devoted, too—but in a more dangerous fashion—to the intoxicating Antinous, Lord Granville Leveson Gower. The reckless manner in which she carried on this love-affair was the first indication of something overstrained, something wild and unaccountable, in her temperament. Lord Granville, after flirting with her outrageously, declared that he could never marry her, and went off on an embassy to St. Petersburg. Her distraction was extreme: she hinted that she would follow him to Russia; she threatened, and perhaps attempted, suicide; she went about telling everybody that he had jilted her. She was taken ill, and then there were rumours of an accouchement, which, it was said, she took care to afficher, by appearing without rouge and fainting on the slightest provocation. In the midst of these excursions and alarums there was a terrible and unexpected catastrophe. Pitt died. And Lady Hester suddenly found herself a dethroned princess, living in a small house in Montague Square on a pension of L1200 a year.
She did not abandon society, however, and the tongue of gossip continued to wag. Her immediate marriage with a former lover, Mr. Hill, was announced: ‘il est bien bon,’ said Lady Bessborough. Then it was whispered that Canning was ’le regnant’—that he was with her ’not only all day, but almost all night.’ She quarrelled with Canning and became attached to Sir John Moore. Whether she was actually engaged to marry him—as she seems to have asserted many years later—is doubtful; his letters to her, full as they are of respectful tenderness, hardly warrant the conclusion; but it is certain that he died with her name on his lips. Her favourite brother, Charles, was killed beside him; and it was natural that under this double blow she should have retired from London. She buried herself in Wales; but not for long. In 1810 she set sail for Gibraltar with her brother James, who was rejoining his regiment in the Peninsula. She never returned to England.
There can be no doubt that at the time of her departure the thought of a lifelong exile was far from her mind. It was only gradually, as she moved further and further eastward, that the prospect of life in England—at last even in Europe—grew distasteful to her; as late as 1816 she was talking of a visit to Provence. Accompanied by two or three English fellow travellers, her English maid, Mrs. Fry, her private physician, Dr. Meryon, and a host of servants, she progressed, slowly and in great state, through Malta and Athens, to Constantinople. She was conveyed in battleships, and lodged with governors and ambassadors. After spending many months in Constantinople, Lady Hester discovered that she was ‘dying to see Napoleon with her own eyes,’ and attempted accordingly to obtain passports to France. The project was stopped by Stratford Canning, the English Minister, upon which she decided to visit Egypt, and, chartering a Greek vessel, sailed for Alexandria in the winter of 1811. Off the island of Rhodes a violent storm sprang up; the whole party were forced to abandon the ship, and to take refuge upon a bare rock, where they remained without food or shelter for thirty hours. Eventually, after many severe privations, Alexandria was reached in safety; but this disastrous voyage was a turning-point in Lady Hester’s career. At Rhodes she was forced to exchange her torn and dripping raiment for the attire of a Turkish gentleman—a dress which she never afterwards abandoned. It was the first step in her orientalization.
She passed the next two years in a triumphal progress. Her appearance in Cairo caused the greatest sensation, and she was received in state by the Pasha, Mehemet Ali. Her costume on this occasion was gorgeous: she wore a turban of cashmere, a brocaded waistcoat, a priceless pelisse, and a vast pair of purple velvet pantaloons embroidered all over in gold. She was ushered by chamberlains with silver wands through the inner courts of the palace to a pavilion in the
Outside Damascus, Lady Hester was warned that the town was the most fanatical in Turkey, and that the scandal of a woman entering it in man’s clothes, unveiled, would be so great as to be dangerous. She was begged to veil herself, and to make her entry under cover of darkness. ‘I must take the bull by the horns,’ she replied, and rode into the city unveiled at midday. The population were thunderstruck; but at last their amazement gave way to enthusiasm, and the incredible lady was hailed everywhere as Queen, crowds followed her, coffee was poured out before her, and the whole bazaar rose as she passed. Yet she was not satisfied with her triumphs; she would do something still more glorious and astonishing; she would plunge into the desert and visit the ruins of Palmyra, which only half-a-dozen of the boldest travellers had ever seen. The Pasha of Damascus offered her a military escort, but she preferred to throw herself upon the hospitality of the Bedouin Arabs, who, overcome by her horsemanship, her powers of sight, and her courage, enrolled her a member of their tribe. After a week’s journey in their company, she reached Palmyra, where the inhabitants met her with wild enthusiasm, and under the Corinthian columns of Zenobia’s temple crowned her head with flowers. This happened in March 1813; it was the apogee of Lady Hester’s life. Henceforward her fortunes gradually but steadily declined.
The rumour of her exploits had spread through Syria, and from the year 1813 onwards, her reputation was enormous. She was received everywhere as a royal, almost as a supernatural, personage: she progressed from town to town amid official prostrations and popular rejoicings. But she herself was in a state of hesitation and discontent. Her future was uncertain; she had grown scornful of the West—must she return to it? The East alone was sympathetic, the East alone was tolerable—but could she cut herself off for ever from the past? At Laodicea she was suddenly struck down by the plague, and, after months of illness, it was borne in upon her that all was vanity. She rented an empty monastery on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, not far from Sayda (the ancient Sidon), and took up her abode there. Then her mind took a new surprising turn; she dashed
Thus, almost accidentally as it seems, she came to the end of her wanderings, and the last, long, strange, mythical period of her existence began. Certainly the situation that she had chosen was sublime. Her house, on the top of a high bare hill among great mountains, was a one-storied group of buildings, with many ramifying courts and out-houses, and a garden of several acres surrounded by a rampart wall. The garden, which she herself had planted and tended with the utmost care, commanded a glorious prospect. On every side but one the vast mountains towered, but to the west there was an opening, through which, in the far distance, the deep blue Mediterranean was revealed. From this romantic hermitage, her singular renown spread over the world. European travellers who had been admitted to her presence brought back stories full of Eastern mystery; they told of a peculiar grandeur, a marvellous prestige, an imperial power. The precise nature of Lady Hester’s empire was, indeed, dubious; she was in fact merely the tenant of her Djoun establishment, for which she paid a rent of L20 a year. But her dominion was not subject to such limitations. She ruled imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical Empress. When a French traveller was murdered in the desert, she issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the French Chamber. It seems probable, however, that it was the Sultan’s orders rather than Lady Hester’s which produced the desired effect. In her feud with her terrible neighbour, the Emir Beshyr, she maintained an undaunted front. She kept the tyrant at bay; but perhaps the Emir, who, so far as physical force was concerned, held her in the hollow of his hand, might have proceeded to extremities if he had not received a severe admonishment from Stratford Canning at Constantinople. What is certain is that the ignorant and superstitious populations around her feared and loved her, and that she, reacting to her own mysterious prestige, became at last even as they. She plunged into astrology and divination; she awaited the moment when, in accordance with prophecy, she should enter Jerusalem side by side with the Mahdi, the Messiah; she kept two sacred horses, destined, by sure signs, to carry her and him to their last triumph. The Orient had mastered her utterly. She was no longer an Englishwoman, she declared; she loathed England; she would never go there again; and if she went anywhere, it would be to Arabia, to ’her own people.’
Her expenses were immense—not only for herself but for others, for she poured out her hospitality with a noble hand. She ran into debt, and was swindled by the moneylenders; her steward cheated her, her servants pilfered her; her distress was at last acute. She fell into fits of terrible depression, bursting into dreadful tears and savage cries. Her habits grew more and more eccentric. She lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on—talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past—stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the Duchess of Devonshire—mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long pipe, loomed through the tobacco-smoke like some vision of a Sibyl in a dream. She might be robbed and ruined, her house might crumble over her head; but she talked on. She grew ill and desperate; yet still she talked. Did she feel that the time was coming when she should talk no more?
Her melancholy deepened into a settled gloom when the news came of her brother James’s death. She had quarrelled with all her English friends, except Lord Hardwicke—with her eldest brother, with her sister, whose kind letters she left unanswered; she was at daggers drawn with the English consul at Alexandria, who worried her about her debts. Ill and harassed, she hardly moved from her bedroom, while her servants rifled her belongings and reduced the house to a condition of indescribable disorder and filth. Three dozen hungry cats ranged through the rooms, filling the courts with frightful noises. Dr. Meryon, in the midst of it all, knew not whether to cry or laugh. At moments the great lady regained her ancient fire; her bells pealed tumultuously for hours together; or she leapt up, and arraigned the whole trembling household before her, with her Arab war-mace in her hand. Her finances grew more and more involved—grew at length irremediable. It was in vain that the faithful Lord Hardwicke pressed her to return to England to settle her affairs. Return to England, indeed! To England, that ungrateful, miserable country, where, so far as she could see, they had forgotten the very name of Mr. Pitt! The final blow fell when a letter came from the English authorities threatening to cut off her pension for the payment of her debts. Upon that, after dispatching a series of furious missives to Lord Palmerston, to Queen Victoria, to the Duke of Wellington, she renounced
1919.
Clio is one of the most glorious of the Muses; but, as everyone knows, she (like her sister Melpomene) suffers from a sad defect: she is apt to be pompous. With her buskins, her robes, and her airs of importance she is at times, indeed, almost intolerable. But fortunately the Fates have provided a corrective. They have decreed that in her stately advances she should be accompanied by certain apish, impish creatures, who run round her tittering, pulling long noses, threatening to trip the good lady up, and even sometimes whisking to one side the corner of her drapery, and revealing her undergarments in a most indecorous manner. They are the diarists and letter-writers, the gossips and journalists of the past, the Pepyses and Horace Walpoles and Saint-Simons, whose function it is to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history itself was once real life. Among them is Mr. Creevey. The Fates decided that Mr. Creevey should accompany Clio, with appropriate gestures, during that part of her progress which is measured by the thirty years preceding the accession of Victoria; and the little wretch did his job very well.
It might almost be said that Thomas Creevey was ’born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly.’ At any rate, we know nothing of his youth, save that he was educated at Cambridge, and he presents himself to us in the early years of the nineteenth century as a middle-aged man, with a character and a habit of mind already fixed and an established position in the world. In 1803 we find him what he was to be for the rest of his life—a member of Parliament, a familiar figure in high society, an insatiable gossip with a rattling tongue. That he should have reached and held the place he did is a proof of his talents, for he was a very poor man; for the greater part of his life his income was less than L200 a year. But those were the days of patrons and jobs, pocket-boroughs and sinecures; they were the days, too, of vigorous, bold living, torrential talk, and splendid hospitality; and it was only natural
Certainly he was not over-given to the praise of famous men. There are no great names in his vocabulary—only nicknames: George III. is ’Old Nobs,’ the Regent ‘Prinney,’ Wellington ‘the Beau,’ Lord John Russell ‘Pie and Thimble,’ Brougham, with whom he was on friendly terms, is sometimes ‘Bruffam,’ sometimes ‘Beelzebub,’ and sometimes ’Old Wickedshifts’; and Lord Durham, who once remarked that one could ’jog along on L40,000 a year,’ is ‘King Jog.’ The latter was one of the great Whig potentates, and it was characteristic of Creevey that his scurrility should have been poured out with a special gusto over his own leaders. The Tories were villains, of course—Canning was all perfidy and ‘infinite meanness,’ Huskisson a mass of ’intellectual confusion and mental dirt,’ Castlereagh ... But all that was obvious and hardly worth mentioning; what was really too exacerbating to be borne was the folly and vileness of the Whigs. ‘King Jog,’ the ‘Bogey,’ ‘Mother Cole,’ and the rest of them—they were either knaves or imbeciles. Lord Grey was an exception; but then Lord Grey, besides passing the Reform Bill, presented Mr. Creevey with the Treasurership of the Ordnance, and in fact was altogether a most worthy man.
Another exception was the Duke of Wellington, whom, somehow or other, it was impossible not to admire. Creevey, throughout his life, had a trick of being ‘in at the death’ on every important occasion; in the House, at Brooks’s, at the Pavilion, he invariably popped up at the critical moment; and so one is not surprised to find him at Brussels during Waterloo. More than that, he was the first English civilian to see the Duke after the battle, and his report of the conversation is admirable; one can almost hear the ’It has been a damned serious business. Bluecher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,’ and the ’By God! I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there.’ On this occasion the Beau spoke, as was fitting, ’with the greatest gravity all the time, and without the least approach to anything like triumph or joy.’ But at other times he was jocular, especially when ‘Prinney’ was the subject. ’By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is. Then he speaks and swears so like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with him.’
When, a few years later, the trial of Queen Caroline came on, it was inevitable that Creevey should be there. He had an excellent seat in the front row, and his descriptions of ‘Mrs. P.,’ as he preferred to call her Majesty, are characteristic:
Two folding doors within a few feet of me were suddenly thrown open, and in entered her Majesty. To describe to you her appearance and manner is far beyond my powers. I had been taught to believe she was as much improved in looks as in dignity of manners; it is therefore with much pain I am obliged to observe that the nearest resemblance I can recollect to this much injured Princess is a toy which you used to call Fanny Royds (a Dutch doll). There is another toy of a rabbit or a cat, whose tail you squeeze under its body, and then out it jumps in half a minute off the ground into the air. The first of these toys you must suppose to represent the person of the Queen; the latter the manner by which she popped all at once into the House, made a duck at the throne, another to the Peers, and a concluding jump into the chair which was placed for her. Her dress was black figured gauze, with a good deal of trimming, lace, &c., her sleeves white, and perfectly episcopal; a handsome white veil, so thick as to make it very difficult to me, who was as near to her as anyone, to see her face; such a back for variety and inequality of ground as you never beheld; with a few straggling ringlets on her neck, which I flatter myself from their appearance were not her Majesty’s own property.
Mr. Creevey, it is obvious, was not the man to be abashed by the presence of Royalty.
But such public episodes were necessarily rare, and the main stream of his life flowed rapidly, gaily, and unobtrusively through the fat pastures of high society. Everywhere and always he enjoyed himself extremely, but his spirits and his happiness were at their highest during his long summer sojourns at those splendid country houses whose hospitality he chronicles with indefatigable verve. ‘This house,’ he says at Raby, ’is itself by far the most magnificent and unique in several ways that I have ever seen.... As long as I have heard of anything, I have heard of being driven into the hall of this house in one’s carriage, and being set down by the fire. You can have no idea of the magnificent perfection with which this is accomplished.’ At Knowsley ’the new dining-room is opened; it is 53 feet by 37, and such a height that it destroys the effect of all the other apartments.... There are two fireplaces; and the day we dined there, there were 36 wax candles over the table, 14 on it, and ten great lamps on tall pedestals about the room.’ At Thorp Perrow ’all the living rooms are on the ground floor, one a very handsome one about 50 feet long, with a great bow furnished with rose-coloured satin, and the whole furniture of which cost L4000.’ At Goodwood the rooms were done up in ’brightest yellow satin,’ and at Holkham the walls were covered with Genoa velvet, and there was gilding worth a fortune on ’the roofs of all the rooms and the doors.’ The fare was as sumptuous as the furniture. Life passed amid a succession of juicy chops, gigantic sirloins, plump fowls, pheasants stuffed with pate de foie gras, gorgeous Madeiras, ancient Ports. Wine had a double advantage: it made you drunk; it also made you sober: it was its own cure. On one occasion, when Sheridan, after days of riotous living, showed signs of exhaustion, Mr. and Mrs. Creevey pressed upon him ‘five or six glasses of light French wine’ with excellent effect. Then, at midnight, when the talk began to flag and the spirits grew a little weary, what could be more rejuvenating than to ring the bell for a broiled bone? And one never rang in vain—except, to be sure, at King Jog’s. There, while the host was guzzling, the guests starved. This was too much for Mr. Creevey, who, finding he could get nothing for breakfast, while King Jog was ’eating his own fish as comfortably as could be,’ fairly lost his temper.
My blood beginning to boil, I said: ’Lambton, I wish you could tell me what quarter I am to apply to for some fish.’ To which he replied in the most impertinent manner: ‘The servant, I suppose.’ I turned to Mills and said pretty loud: ’Now, if it was not for the fuss and jaw of the thing, I would leave the room and the house this instant’; and dwelt on the damned outrage. Mills said: ’He hears every word you say’: to which I said: ‘I hope he does.’ It was a regular scene.
A few days later, however, Mr. Creevey was consoled by finding himself in a very different establishment, where ’everything is of a piece—excellent and plentiful dinners, a fat service of plate, a fat butler, a table with a barrel of oysters and a hot pheasant, &c., wheeled into the drawing-room every night at half-past ten.’
It is difficult to remember that this was the England of the Six Acts, of Peterloo, and of the Industrial Revolution. Mr. Creevey, indeed, could hardly be expected to remember it, for he was utterly unconscious of the existence—of the possibility—of any mode of living other than his own. For him, dining-rooms 50 feet long, bottles of Madeira, broiled bones, and the brightest yellow satin were as necessary and obvious a part of the constitution of the universe as the light of the sun and the law of gravity. Only once in his life was he seriously ruffled; only once did a public question present itself to him as something alarming, something portentous, something more than a personal affair. The occasion is significant. On March 16, 1825, he writes:
I have come to the conclusion that our Ferguson is insane. He quite foamed at the mouth with rage in our Railway Committee in support of this infernal nuisance—the loco-motive Monster, carrying eighty tons of goods, and navigated by a tail of smoke and sulphur, coming thro’ every man’s grounds between Manchester and Liverpool.
His perturbation grew. He attended the committee assiduously, but in spite of his efforts it seemed that the railway Bill would pass. The loco-motive was more than a joke. He sat every day from 12 to 4; he led the opposition with long speeches. ‘This railway,’ he exclaims on May 31, ‘is the devil’s own.’ Next day, he is in triumph: he had killed the Monster.
Well—this
devil of a railway is strangled at last.... To-day
we
had a clear majority
in committee in our favour, and the promoters
of the Bill withdrew
it, and took their leave of us.
With a sigh of relief he whisked off to Ascot, for the festivities of which he was delighted to note that ‘Prinney’ had prepared ’by having 12 oz. of blood taken from him by cupping.’
Old age hardly troubled Mr. Creevey. He grew a trifle deaf, and he discovered that it was possible to wear woollen stockings under his silk ones; but his activity, his high spirits, his popularity, only seemed to increase. At the end of a party ladies would crowd round him. ’Oh, Mr. Creevey, how agreeable you have been!’ ’Oh, thank you, Mr. Creevey! how useful you have been!’ ’Dear Mr. Creevey, I laughed out loud last night in bed at one of your stories.’ One would like to add (rather late in the day, perhaps) one’s own praises. One feels almost affectionate; a certain sincerity, a certain immediacy in his response to stimuli, are endearing qualities; one quite understands that it was natural, on the pretext of changing house, to send him a dozen of wine. Above all, one wants him to go on. Why should he stop? Why should he not continue indefinitely telling us about ‘Old Salisbury’ and ‘Old Madagascar’? But it could not be.
Le temps s’en va, le
temps s’en va, Madame;
Las! Le temps non, mais
nous, nous en allons.
It was fitting that, after fulfilling his seventy years, he should catch a glimpse of ‘little Vic’ as Queen of England, laughing, eating, and showing her gums too much at the Pavilion. But that was enough: the piece was over; the curtain had gone down; and on the new stage that was preparing for very different characters, and with a very different style of decoration, there would be no place for Mr. Creevey.
1919.
Algarotti, 144, 145, 152
Anne, Queen, 106
Arnold, Matthew, 10
Arouet. See ‘Voltaire’
Bailey, Mr. John, 4-7, 9-12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21,
22
Balzac, 220, 221, 225, 226, 227
Barres, M., 220, 21, 234
Beddoes, Dr. Thomas, 194-196
Beddoes, Thos. Lovell, 193-216
Beethoven, 237
Berkeley, 106
Bernhardt, 23
Bernieres, Madame de, 96, 107
Bernstorff, 76
Berry, Miss, 67, 68
Beshyr, Emir, 247
Bessborough, Lady, 243
Bevan, Mr. C.D., 196
Beyle, Henri, 219-238
Blake, 36, 63, 179-190
Bluecher, 255
Boileau, 62
Bolingbroke, 99, 101, 103, 104, 111
Bonaparte, 222
Boswell, 59
Boufflers, Comtesse de, 76
Boufflers, Marquise de, 75
Bourget, M., 220, 221
Brandes, Dr., 43, 51
Brink, Mr. Ten, 43
Broome, Major, 101
Brougham, 255
Browne, Sir Thomas, 27-28
Buffon, 80, 154
Burke, 76
Butler, Bishop, 29, 106
Canning, George, 243, 247, 255
Canning, Stratford, 243, 247
Caraccioli, 76
Carlyle, 93, 137, 144, 160
Caroline, Queen, 256
Carteret, 106
Castlereagh, 255
Cellini, 68
Chasot, 152, 153
Chateaubriand, 225
Chatelet, Madame du, 113, 141-143
Chatham, Lady, 242
Chatham, Lord, 241
Chesterfield, Lord, 63
Choiseul, Duc de, 79
Choiseul, Duchesse de, 70, 85, 86
Chuquet, M., 220, 221, 223, 238
Cicero, 68
Cimarosa, 230
Claude, 17
Coleridge, 16, 30, 62, 63
Colles, Mr. Ramsay, 194, 195
Collins, Anthony, 110, 111
Collins, Churton, 93, 98, 103
Condillac, 230
Congreve, 101
Conti, Prince de, 96
Corneille, 80, 129
Correggio, 231
Cowley, 196
Creevey, Mr., 253-260
D’Alembert, 70, 75, 131, 162, 166
Dante, 10
d’Argens, 152
d’Argental, 72
Darget, 152
Daru, 222
Davy, Sir Humphry, 195
Deffand, Madame du, 67-89, 97
Degen, 203
d’Egmont, Madame, 72
Denham, 62
Denis, Madame, 149, 150
d’Epinay, Madame, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171-174
Descartes, 113
Desnoiresterres 93
Devonshire, Duchess of, 247
d’Houdetot, Madame, 171
Diderot, 70, 166-175
Diogenes, 115
Donne, 62
Dowden, Prof., 42, 43, 45, 49, 51
Dryden, 4, 22, 29, 62
Durham, Lord, 255
Ecklin, Dr., 203, 204
Edgeworth, Miss, 195, 196
Euler, 154, 155
Falkener, Everard, 98
Fielding, 80, 197
Flaubert, 220, 221
Fleury, Cardinal, 112
Fontenelle, 73, 222
Foulet, M. Lucien, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103, 105
Fox, Charles James, 76, 78
Frederick the Great, 137
Fry, Mrs., 243, 244, 247
Furnivall, Dr., 42, 43
Gautier, 225
Gay, 102
George III, 247, 255
Gibbon, 29, 76, 80
Gide, M. Andre, 219, 220, 227
Goethe, 237
Gollancz, Sir I., 43, 49
Goncourts, De, 10
Gosse, Mr., 27-31, 35, 115, 204, 205
Gramont, Madame de, 79
Granville, Lord, 242
Gray, 60, 62
Grey, Lord, 255
Grimm, 166-174
Hardwicke, Lord, 248
Hegetschweiler, 202
Helvetius, 230
Henault, 72, 75
Herrick, 38
Higginson, Edward, 100
Hill, Dr. George Birkbeck, 59, 63
Hill, Mr., 243
Hugo, Victor, 62, 225
Hume, 30, 112, 114, 167, 169
Huskisson, 255
Ingres, 3
Johnson, Dr., 22, 28-30, 32, 59-63, 103, 221
Jordan, 140
Jourdain, Mr., 154
Keats, 211
Kelsall, Thomas Forbes, 200, 203, 204, 209
Klopstock, 186
Koenig, 155
La Beaumelle, 154
Lamb, Charles, 30, 188, 194
Lambton, 258
La Mettrie, 152-154, 158
Lanson, M., 93, 100
Latimer, 31
Lecouvreur, Adrienne, 95
Lee, Sir Sidney, 43
Leibnitz, 155
Lemaitre, M., 4-6, 17, 18
Lemaur, 70
Lespinasse, Mlle. de, 70, 71, 75, 86, 238
Leveson Gower, Lord Granville, 242
Locke, 29, 110, 112, 113, 115
Louis Philippe, 222
Louis XIV., 71
Lulli, 70
Luxembourg, Marechale de, 77, 83
Macaulay, 137
Macdonald, Mrs. Frederika, 164-173
Maine, Duchesse du, 71, 74
Malherbe, 62
Marlborough, Duke of, 105
Marlborough, Duchess of, 101
Marlowe, 197
Massillon, 74
Matignon, Marquis de, 84
Maupertuis, 153-156, 158, 159, 161
Mehemet Ali, 244
Merimee, Prosper, 223
Meryon, Dr., 243, 247, 248
Middleton, 111
Milton, 10, 16, 211
Mirepoix, Bishop of, 142
Mirepoix, Marechale de, 76
Moliere, 134
Moncrif, 72
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 241
Montespan, Madame de, 74
Montesquieu, 78, 107, 230, 238
Moore, Sir John, 243
Morley, Lord, 110, 167, 172
Moses, 115
Mozart, 23, 230
Musset, 225
Napoleon, 67, 230, 231, 234, 238
Necker, 84
Nelson, 221
Newton, Sir Isaac, 100, 106, 112, 113
Pascal, 36, 112
Pater, 31
Peterborough, Lord, 102, 103
Pitt, William, the younger, 241-243, 247
Plato, 185
Poellnitz, 152
Pompadour, Madame de, 143
Pont-de-Veyle, 72, 75
Pope, 4, 22, 34, 38, 103, 106, 211
Prie, Madame de, 71, 94, 96
Prior, 63
Proctor, Bryan Waller, 200, 203
Puffendorf, 76
Quinault, 70
Racine, 3-24, 80, 129-131, 225, 237
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 45, 179, 183, 185
Regent, the Prince, 255
Reni, Guido, 231
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 30, 186, 188
Richardson, 80
Richelieu, 73
Rohan-Chabot, Chevalier de, 94, 96, 98
Rossetti, 183
Rousseau, 85, 165-175, 230
Rubens, 34
Russell, Lord John, 255
Sainte-Beuve, 10, 12, 18, 61, 167, 220
Saint-Lambert, 172
Saint-Simon, 80, 179-183
Sampson, Mr. John, 179-183
Sanadon, Mlle., 84
Shaftesbury, 110
Shakespeare, 3, 4, 14, 34, 41-56, 80, 112, 132, 221,
225
Shelley, 23, 38
Sheridan, 257
Sophocles, 132
Spenser, 211
Stanhope, Lady Hester, 241-249
‘Stendhal.’ See Beyle, Henri
Stephen, Sir James, 211
Sully, Duc de, 95, 105
Swift, 29, 101, 104, 106
Swinburne, 184
Taine, 220, 221
Thevenart, 70
Thomson, 63
Tindal, 111
Toland, 110, 111
Tolstoi, 228
Toynbee, Mrs. Paget, 67-69, 75
Turgot, 70, 169
Velasquez, 34
Vigny, 225
Virgil, 14, 23
Voltaire, 69, 70, 72, 75, 79-81, 83, 93-117, 121-134,
137-162, 174, 188
Walpole, Horace, 30, 63, 67, 68, 69-71, 75, 76, 78-80,
86-89, 103, 104, 106
Webster, 36
Wellington, Duke of, 255
White, W.A., 180
Winckelmann, 237
Wolf, 138
Wollaston, 111
Woolston, 111
Wordsworth, 16, 62, 63, 184
Wuertemberg, Duke of, 156
Yonge, Miss, 134
Young, Dr., 101
Zola, 220, 227, 228