presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether.
The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a spirit passed?
As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of disembodiment.
There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is that we return from our winter’s walk with something sacred in our hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear.
But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for the children:
O the big red sun,
And the wide white world,
And the nursery window
Mother-of-pearled;
And the houses all
In hoods of snow,
And the mince-pies,
And the mistletoe;
And Christmas pudding,
And berries red,
And stockings hung
At the foot of the bed;
And carol-singers,
And nothing but play–
O baby, this is
Christmas Day!
XXII
ON RE-READING WALTER PATER
It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true disciples–so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his graver spell–not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible to parody him–after the fashion of Mr. Mallock’s brilliancy in _The New Republic_–as a writer of “all manner and no matter,” nor is it possible any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of a facile “Epicureanism,” is seen, properly understood, to involve something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. “Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had entered Rome,” he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the murmur comes to him of “the lively, reckless call to ‘play,’ from the sons and daughters of foolishness,” “it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him.” Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the “Conclusion” to _The Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that “it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall,” is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, “in the reception of metaphysical _formula_, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall–the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
That Pater’s philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable man was an “epicurean”–but one, to quote Meredith, “whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden”; and the statement made by the critic in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage describing the demoralizing book in question:
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him…. It was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of _Decandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping shadows….
For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.
The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer–I have good reason for thinking that it was _A Rebours_ by Huysmans–and how any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater’s _The Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that Oscar Wilde was one of those “young men” misled by Pater’s book, for whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to “that soil of human nature” into which a writer casts his seed. If that which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something wrong with the soil.
Let us briefly recall what this apparently so “dangerous” philosophy of Pater’s is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that once-suppressed “Conclusion” to _The Renaissance_:
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch…. Well! we are all _condamnes_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve–_les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis_: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the less true that another application of it led Marius to something like Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and serener path of spiritual vision.
Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer’s exact meaning be brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in the Horatian maxim of _carpe diem_, is one thrillingly charged with exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that precept. We are to get “as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations shall be the finest. Whether or not it is “simply for those moments’ sake,” our attempt must be to give “_the highest quality_,” remember, to those “moments as they pass.” And who can fail to remark the fastidious care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of Pater’s pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the “strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours,” but rather “the face of one’s friend,” ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic shock of simplicity, almost incongruity–or “some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement,” or “any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment.” There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, and a vulgar gospel of “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die,” whether or not both counsels start out from a realization of “the awful brevity” of our mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the aspiration of this tenderly religious passage:
Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls and whatever our souls touch upon–these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, and the intercourse of society.
Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater’s own words once more, “the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories.” That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world’s practical application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on this, “that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair life.” Such, too, was Pater’s nature, and such his practical usefulness as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather than ecclesiastically smoothed over–the facts of death and pain and struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his “message” leave unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it is beauty. _Marius the Epicurean_ is a great and wonderful book, not merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the most _beautiful_ books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on “Style,” and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called “Euphuism” in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the matter:
That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things as really being, with important results, thus, rather than thus–intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model within.
This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity.
There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative qualities of Pater’s prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a wonderful evocative power: “the long reign of these quiet Antonines,” for example; “the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills”; “far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home”; “Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers.” What could be simpler than these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral country-house of Marius’s boyhood, “White-Nights,” “that exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa”–“Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles.” Take again this picture:
The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple.
And again this picture of a wayside inn:
The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.
Those who judge of Pater’s writing by a few purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and particularly running water, “green fields–or children’s faces.” His lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of atmosphere which pervades his _Marius_, an atmosphere which might be termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, body-beauty as beautiful prose.
Considering _Marius_ as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and the story be told. And Pater’s _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is a real story, no mere German scholar’s attempt to animate the dry bones of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne’s famous praise of Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater’s masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as
The golden book of spirit and sense, The holy writ of beauty,
it is _Marius the Epicurean_.
It has been natural to dwell so long on this “golden book,” because Pater’s various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later “Apollo in Picardy” and “Hippolytus Veiled” properly belong. It is only necessary to recall the exquisitely austere “Sebastian Van Storck” and the strangely contrasting Dionysiac “Denys L’Auxerrois” to justify one’s claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no less dry than Spinoza’s, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It gives their value to the studies of _The Renaissance_, but perhaps its finest flower is to be found in the later _Greek Studies_. To Flavian, Pater had said in _Marius_, “old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself,” and with what marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later developed sundry of those “untried, unexpressed motives,” as in his studies of the myths of Dionysus–“The spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines”–and Demeter and Persephone–“the peculiar creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it”–no reader of Pater needs to be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself to be of the company of the great humanists.
Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something childlike. He has written of her, “the presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters,” to whom all experience had been “but as the sound of lyres and flutes,” and he has written of “The Child in the House.” Among all “the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, and work of the artist’s hands,” one never misses “the face of one’s friend”; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water.
It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers and artists of our time.
XXIII
THE MYSTERY OF “FIONA MACLEOD” [1]
[1]_William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)_. A Memoir, compiled by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) _The Writings of Fiona Macleod_. Uniform edition. Arranged by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)
In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the thickening dusk.
“Will,” Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not confide–more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her husband’s make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, been but little drawn upon.
Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future “Fiona Macleod,” for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_ was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, and how we were both somewhat _intrigue_ by a certain air of mystery which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp’s earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in _Pharais_ of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had previously struck me in one of his _Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy_, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain that “Fiona Macleod” and William Sharp were one, if not the same. Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my friend had fulfilled his wife’s prophecy by such fuller and finer expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a review I wrote for the London _Star_. My review brought me an urgent telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God’s sake, to shut my mouth–or words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me.
When I say “confided to me,” I must add that in the many confidences William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, or any of us–with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp–know the whole truth about “Fiona Macleod.” Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp’s interesting revelations of her husband’s temperament that “the whole truth” could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very evidently in “Fiona Macleod” we have to deal not merely with a literary mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends after his death: “This will reach you,” he says, “after my death. You will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. ‘The rest is silence.’ Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP.”
“It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the author–in the literal and literary sense–of all written under the name of ‘Fiona Macleod.'”
“Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain.” Does “I cannot explain” mean “I must not explain,” or merely just what it says? I am inclined to think it means both; but, if so, the “must not” would refer to the purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to intrude, and the “cannot” would refer to that psychological mystery which we are at liberty to investigate.
William Sharp’s explanation to myself–as I believe to others of his friends–was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he only had actually _written_ the “Fiona Macleod” fantasies and poems, but–yes! there was a real “Fiona Macleod” as well. She was a beautiful cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended introducing her to three of his friends and no more–George Meredith, W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving book-case, and said “That is Fiona!” I affected belief, but, rightly or wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, whose remembrance of her husband goes back to “a merry, mischievous little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt,” tells us that this “love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification also,” was a marked characteristic of his nature–a characteristic developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym.
That William Sharp’s affirmation of an actual living and breathing “Fiona Macleod” was, however, virtually true is confided by this significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp’s biography. Mrs. Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of 1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and exuberance of vital and creative energy.
There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for–as he stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death–he realized that it was “to her I owe my development as ‘Fiona Macleod,’ though in a sense of course that began long before I knew her, and indeed while I was still a child,” and that, as he believed, “without her there would have been no ‘Fiona Macleod.'” Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature.
From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication of _Pharais_ to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter to “E.W.R.” dealing for the most part with “Celtic” matters, but containing these more personal passages:
Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication to you of this study of alien life–of that unfamiliar island-life so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Toir of friendship there are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the same way.
The letter ends with this: “There is another Paras (Paradise) than that seen of Alastair of Innisron–the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of my heart, this book of vision and dream.”
“Fiona Macleod,” then, would appear to be the collective name given to a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical “other self” of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general _litterateur_, as known to his friends and reading public. “Fiona Macleod” would seem to have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at the wand-like touch of E.W.R.–the creative stimulus of a profound imaginative friendship–a new power of expression had been given to him–a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp’s previous acknowledged writings.
To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William Sharp _could_ be “Fiona Macleod.” Of course, his work had been that of an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his _Sospiri di Roma_; but, for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the delightful features of Mrs. Sharp’s biography bear witness. In himself William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we say, so much more than his books–so immeasurably and delightfully more–that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one’s heart, as one does sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: “What a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being William Sharp? Why spoil ‘William Sharp’ by this inadequate and misleading translation?”
The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, after “Fiona Macleod” had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so long as “Fiona Macleod” must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes with much insight:
From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of the intellectually observant, reasoning mind–the actor, and of the intuitively observant, spiritual mind–the dreamer, which differentiated more and more one from the other, and required different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct opposition between those two natures which made it extremely difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were equally imperative in their demands upon him.
His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the keen active interest “William Sharp” took in all the movements of the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of him a great amount of applied study and work.
The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that much of it was a needless, even trivial “expense of spirit,” and regret that, when “Fiona Macleod” had so manifestly come into her own, William Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing of which must have been the necessity of keeping up “Fiona Macleod’s” correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and precarious, for the finer productiveness of “Fiona Macleod.” But William Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, “Should the secret be found out, Fiona dies,” and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier–she and her husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret–he makes this interesting statement: “I can write out of my heart in a way I could not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous anonymity…. This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this _cosmic ecstasy_ and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and tyrannical as that need is…. My truest self, the self who is below all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts, emotions, and dreams, _must_ find expression, yet I cannot save in this hidden way….”
Later he wrote: “Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the avenues and vistas of her heart….”
At one time, I thought that William Sharp’s assumption of a feminine pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, if he had published the “Fiona Macleod” writings under his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount of so-called “criticism” which is really foregone conclusion based on personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit (employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp’s biography, however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken as virtually sincere.
A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in his consciousness of that “dual nature” of which we hear so much, and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp’s “Celtic” seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he wrote: “The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I loved so well.” Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: “The ‘we’ who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his ‘kinswoman’ is his other self.” Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: “There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will do–particularly in _The Mountain Lovers_. It seems passing strange to be here with her alone at last….” I confess that this strikes me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a “dual personality”–after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius are largely feminine–but it is another to dramatize one’s consciousness in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was right in thinking that the real “Fiona Macleod” was asleep at the moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been endowed with what I suppose one has to call “psychic” powers–though the word has been “soiled with all ignoble use”–and to be the possessor in a considerable degree of that mysterious “sight” or sixth sense attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves dashing against the house. “A telegram had come for him that morning,” writes Mrs. Sharp, “and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. I knocked, louder, then louder,–at last he opened the door with a curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: ‘Ah, I could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'”
His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: “About three o’clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of joyous recognition, ‘Oh, the beautiful “Green Life,” again!’ and the next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, ‘Ah, all is well!'”
“The green life” was a phrase often on Sharp’s lips, and stood for him for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge himself, of which too his writings as “Fiona Macleod” prove him to have had “invisible keys.” It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this responsiveness to her mystic spiritual “intimations,” that give to those writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of which he has thus written: “From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians.” For two months he had “taken the heather” with, and had been “star-brother” and “sun-brother” to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well might he write to Mrs. Janvier: “I have had a very varied, and, to use a much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its external aspects.” Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words of his friend Walter Pater, that “to burn ever with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” then indeed the life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success.
And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are _The Writings of “Fiona Macleod”_.
XXIV
FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION
The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated and “intrigued” the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we wonder–wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of immortal promise.
Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the debris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully picked-up shakings of November boughs.
Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number have bade us, those professional “farewells” that remind one of that dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated “Everlasting farewells! and again and yet again reverberated–everlasting farewells!” In Forbes-Robertson’s case, however, apart from our courteous taking the word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take the ghost’s word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word “farewell.” His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art.
In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream” bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor of sorrow and renunciation.
It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the spiritual exaltation which “great poetry” implies. From first to last, however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world.
When I say “first,” I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a “modern conscience” may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson’s acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ is present in all Forbes-Robertson’s acting. It was that which strangely stirred us, that first night of _The Profligate_. We meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in _The Light That Failed_, and of course we meet it supremely in _Hamlet_. In fact, it is that quality which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet the classical Hamlet of his time.
Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before _The Profligate_, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations than that of Hamlet. When a man can play _Hamlet_ so supremely, it may be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play _Mice and Men_, or even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, _Caesar and Cleopatra_. I trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two plays to say that such plays in a great actor’s repertoire represent less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most of all.
To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson’s other parts is that they have “fed” his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine _Romeo_, for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In _Hamlet_ all his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all an ambitious actor’s experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely play, but _is_, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he is able to produce.
Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor’s personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of himself. That is the academic theory of “character-acting,” and of course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage phrase, “bring their bodies on”; yet it would go hard with some of our most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone.
What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, “He is a man, he is man, he is the whole of man.”
Time was when _Hamlet_ was little more than an opportunity for some robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of “new readings.” For example, instead of saying:
The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,
you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the quartos, read the line:
The air bites shrewdly; _is_ it very cold?
with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the difference.
One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of business, when, for example, in Hamlet’s scene with his mother, the prince comes to:
Look here upon this picture, and on this.
An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition of the acted _Hamlet_–I mean Wilson Barrett–used to make much of taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast.
But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysees.
Forbes-Robertson’s acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted.
His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth’s day, with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage saying, “This is Elsinore.”
One could hardly say more for one’s sense of the reality of Forbes-Robertson’s acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them.
With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our fathers–though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us of today–that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world.
When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well thought of him,–Ophelia and Horatio,–and as one who saw him only as he sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his knees.
Ophelia’s
Courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword, The expectancy and rose of the fair state;
the “sweet prince” of Horatio’s “good-night”–the soldier for whose passage Fortinbras commanded
The soldier’s music and the rites of war.
We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humourist.
Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak–that side of which comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a world.
In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won.
The soldier–if necessary, the fighter–is there as supple and strong as a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the “something dangerous,” for all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness–have a care!–is that of an unusually masculine restraint.
In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson’s tenderness was almost terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little uncomprehending flower!
“I never gave you aught,” as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: “I gave you all–all that you could not understand.” “Yet are not you and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. _Is_ it your father?”
Along with Forbes-Robertson’s spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his imaginative revitalization of the great old lines–lines worn like a highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine graphically phrased it, “How he revives for us the splendour of the text!”
The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the text is we, of course, all know–know so well that we take it for granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation of such a world of transcendent words.
Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show.
It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling up beneath the voice–springs fed from those infinite sources which “lie beyond the reaches of our souls.”
Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors–or readers of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that matter–have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and Horatio:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors’ club, and, generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing _Hamlet_.
Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are playing–Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as
Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow,
and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare’s moods, so well understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul.
Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France lovingly haunt the Saltpetriere. As I look back, I wonder how we tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death and immortality that only such words could create:
Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain To hear my story …
The rest is silence….
How different it is when Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet dies! All my life I seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in _Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant–death, life, immortality, what you will–of a surpassing loveliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.
Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the implication has not always appeared to be obvious.
He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror.
XXV
A MEMORY OF FREDERIC MISTRAL
There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again–even here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic.
Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term “minor poet” seems to have fallen into desuetude.
Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a veritable king, such as Frederic Mistral is today in Provence. In our time, Bjoernson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he held his position as actual “father of his people” for very much the same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He was simply Norway incarnate.
So, today in Provence, it is with Frederic Mistral. He is not only a poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to its greatest man, would point out–a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say:
“_Provence–c’est moi!_”
We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country that has a poet for a king.
On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was “Mistral”–not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the honey-tongued “Master.” Our innkeeper–O the delightful innkeepers of France!–on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip through the Midi–as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence–said, for his first aid to the traveller: “Then, of course, you will see our great poet, Mistral.” And he promptly produced a copy of _Mireio_, which he begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself.
“Ah! Mistral,” he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have borrowed from his lips, “Mistral is the King of Provence!”
Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a philological battle fought over the letter “s” in a room behind one of the Marseilles bookshops between “the amateurs of trivialities, the rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers,” and the young innovators of the “felibrige.”
But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood.
The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. Briefly, it is this:
The Provencal language, the “langue d’oc,” was, of course, once the courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have sprung the beginnings of Italian literature.
But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern France, the “langue d’oil,” gradually took its place, and when Mistral was born, in 1830, Provencal had long been regarded as little more than a _patois_.
Now it was the young Mistral’s dream, as a school-boy in the old convent school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was secretly cherishing the same dream.
The master, looking over his pupil’s shoulder one day, found that, instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in translating the Penitential Psalms into Provencal. Instead of punishing him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently confided Provencal verses of his own making. From that moment, though there was a dozen years’ difference between their ages, Mistral and Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille’s death, a friendship of half a century.
Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles or in Avignon–Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giera, Brunet, and Tavan–after the manner of Ronsard’s “Pleiade,” and Rossetti’s “P.R.B.”–formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great work of regeneration.
They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to talk things over in the old castle of Font-Segugne, or, as Mistral more picturesquely puts it: “It was written in heaven that one blossoming Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle of Font-Segugne.” Several suggestions were made for a name for this brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ is represented as discoursing in the temple with “the seven felibres of the Law.”
“Why, that is us!” exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral finished, and there on the spot “felibre” was adopted as the password of their order, Mistral coining the word “felibrige” to represent the work they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of Provencal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral’s rallying cry.
But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced–and one need only glance through a recent _Anthologie du Felibrige_ to realize what a wealth of true poetry the word “felibrige” now stands for–there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains Mistral’s own work, as it was his first great poem, _Mireio_, which first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be contemptuous, to the Provencal renaissance.
Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on _Mireio_. Mistral read some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the great Lamartine–who has left some charming pages descriptive of his visit,–read some of _Mireio_ to him, and was hailed by him as “the Homer of Provence.”
The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. “The Mistral it appears,” said one pitiful punster, “has been incarnated in a poem. We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind.” Such has been the invariable welcome of great men in a small world.
But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, after a few days’ stay, we find him once more quietly at home at Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy–the praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), _Mireio_ came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine:
“To thee I dedicate _Mireio_; it is my heart and my soul; it is the flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its leaves–a rustic’s offering.”
With the publication of _Mireio_ Mistral instantly “arrived,” instantly found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary of the Provencal language–a _Thesaurus of the Felibrige_, for which work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs.
In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize for himself, but used it to found the Musee Arlesien at Arles, a museum designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to the history and life of Provence–antiquities, furniture, costumes, paintings, and so forth.
It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of _Mireio_, that Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized version of his _Mireio_ was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might feel, from his mouldering palace hard by.
In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the street. Sang a very different poet–
They grind us to the dust with poverty, And build us statues when we come to die.
But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the “langue d’oil,” and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs–as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called “the Homer of Provence”–as Virgilian, too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way from Marseilles to Tarascon.
Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet–here and there a farmhouse (“mas,” as they call them in Provence) snugly sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage–and far aloft in the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of Mont Ventoux–the Fuji Yama of Provence.
At last the old, time-worn village came in sight–it lies about ten miles north-east of Tartarin’s Tarascon–and we entered it, as was proper, with the “Master’s” words on our lips: “Maillane is beautiful, well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from the month of May.
“Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere–and one would rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris.”
It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlesien caps. At first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was understood that we were seeking the house of the “Master” we inspired immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees.
We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty years–there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying American mind.
Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and “bossing” them by turns. “Elise”–I think her name is–is a “character” almost as well known in Provence as the Master himself.
So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral which had been given me by a humble associate of the “felibres,” a delightful _chansonnier_ we had met at Les Baux. With this she went indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, one representing him with his favourite dog.
Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar’s study, lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day.
At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day one of those “queens of beauty” whom the “felibres” elect every seven years at their floral fetes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much animation and charm.
We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in anything but Provencal, might carry his artistic creed into his conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished French–for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to understand Provencal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the road.
It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author–Fenimore Cooper. _Le Feu-Follet_ had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This we identified as _The Fire-Fly_.
He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact of our walking our way through the country–as also at the length of the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous undertaking.
“You Americans,” he said, “are a wonderful people. You think nothing of going around the world.”
We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American politics.
“It must be a terribly difficult country to govern,” he said. And then he asked us eagerly for news of our “extraordinary President.” We suggested Mr. Wilson.
“Oh, no! no!” he explained. “The extraordinary man who was President before him.”
“Colonel Roosevelt?”
Yes, that was the man–a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an enthusiastic Bull Mooser.
Of course, we talked too of the “felibrige,” and it was beautiful to see how M. Mistral’s face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the great movement to his dead friend.
“But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille,” said he, “when you go to Avignon, and say that I sent you”–for Roumanille’s widow still lives, one of the most honoured muses of the “felibrige.”
When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by “Elise” from Mistral’s own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank “A l’Amerique!”
Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon.
On the 30th of this coming September that great old man–the memory of whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us forever–will be eighty-three.
February, 1913.
XXVI
IMPERISHABLE FICTION
The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to “bring forth fruit with patience” that finally won out and survived the others.
These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to over-take the much-advertised “masterpieces” of the present.
I read somewhere a ballade asking–where are the “best sellers” of yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with Villon: “Mother of God, ah! where are they?” During the last twenty years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even are still on the lips of men–whereas several quieter books published during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament.
What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest periods of gestation?
Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose _Dr. Nikola_ is perhaps still remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern machine-made methods.
I had read in a newspaper that he did his “writing” by phonograph, and chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without “side” or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good literature too well–Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his idols–to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home.
Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable prize fowls.
“These are the things I care about,” he said, “and I write the stuff for which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to buy them!”
Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the bargain.
Then Boothby took me into his “study,” the entire literary apparatus of which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the point of beginning it!
Boothby’s method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of production.
I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with his “Where’s your Willie Shakespeare now?”
Even Balzac’s titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like verbal spawning, with his famous “labour of the file” and his counsel to writers “to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear.” It is to be feared that “the monument more enduring than brass” is not erected with such rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher’s recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: “This book goes with a rush and ends with a smash.” Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending of all literary rockets.
Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers.
_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart?
Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten–_Gil Blas_. Published in 1715–that is, its first two parts–it has now two centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the issue of the fourth and final part in 1735.
A still older book that is still one of the world’s best sellers, _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. _Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of its author’s books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy’s book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, solitary life.
“I, Robinson Crusoe,” we read, “do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety not to be met with in this world.”
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits “brought forth with patience” all round.
_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: “I here present you with the labours of some years of my life”; and it need scarcely be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated experience of Fielding’s very human history.
Yes! Whistler’s famous answer to Ruskin’s counsel holds good of all imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he asked it for “the training of a lifetime”; and it is this training of a lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant be their workmanship.
For this reason books like George Borrow’s _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_, failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of life-giving “ichor.” To quote from Milton, “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which followed his fiftieth birthday.
The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_ he had conceived at twenty.
Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray’s _Elegy_ owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which Gray polished and repolished it through eight years.
If we are to believe Poe’s _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their composition.
But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for an age of “get-rich-quick” _litterateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the poet’s infanticidal desire.
But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott’s “immense fecundity of invention” and “careless, masterly ease.”
“I cannot compete with that,” he says–“what makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks.”
Scott’s speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that “training of a lifetime” to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott’s faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw.
Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this speed was by no means all “ease,” as witness the almost tragic composition of _The Bride of Lammermoor_. If ever a writer scorned delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely read than he is were it not for those too frequent _longueurs_ and inert paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship.
Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing three of her best-known novels, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_ between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Yet _Pride and Prejudice_, which practically survives the others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately “lived.”
Charlotte Bronte was a year in writing _Jane Eyre_, spurred on to new effort by the recent rejection of _The Professor_; but to write such a book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers how much of _Jane Eyre_ was drawn from Charlotte Bronte’s own life, and also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from their earliest childhood.
Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. “He considered,” says Forster, “three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and four an excellent, day’s work.”
_David Copperfield_ was about a year and nine months in the writing, having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. _Bleak House_ took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, and completed in August, 1853. _Hard Times_ was a hasty piece of work, written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it cannot be considered one of Dickens’s notable successes.
George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, _Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_, was also written during that period.
George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam Bede_ cost her little more than a year’s work. Her novels, however, as a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the course of their creation, she used often to suffer from “hopelessness and melancholy.” _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this paper, is probably a stranger.
It may turn out [she says], that I can’t work freely and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don’t consent; so that I may feel it was something–however small–which wanted to be done in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work.
Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in _Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, “the world will not willingly let die,” was as conscientious in his work as he was brilliant.
Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_:
“He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there, and which was found there at last.”
The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: “I studied the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist.” His commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which he had found so serviceable.
To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy’s novels would seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, _The Return of the Native_, was on the stocks for four years, though a year seems to have sufficed for _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of his method is worth catching again.
The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably penned it himself, with exceeding care…. If the first copy did not please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories again.
Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, spirit of the true artist to all his work, but _The Scarlet Letter_ was written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ had been in Hawthorne’s mind for many years. The story of its beginning is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife.
One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: “I am turned out of office.” To which she–God bless her!–cheerily replied: “Very well! now you can write your book!” and immediately set about lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his work.
The book was _The Scarlet Letter_, and was completed by the following February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing “immensely” on it day after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had anything for him to publish.
“Who,” asked Hawthorne gloomily, “would risk publishing a book from me, the most unpopular writer in America?”
“I would,” was Field’s rejoinder, and after some further sparring, Hawthorne owned up.
“As you have found me out,” said he, “take what I have written and tell me if it is good for anything”; and Fields went away with the manuscript of what is, without any question, America’s greatest novel.
Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of romance–even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for him by his “disciples.”
George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a description of her method:
To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated herself before her table at ten o’clock, with scarcely a plot and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had written itself in full and another was unfolding.