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STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
STUDIES 
 
 AND 
 
 APPRECIATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 DARRELL FIGGIS 
 
 LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. 
 ALDINE HOUSE, CO VENT GARDEN 191 2 
 
All rights reserved 
 
To 
 G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Afterthoughts i 
 
 In Praise of Praise ly 
 
 J. M. Synge 23 
 
 The Art of J. M. Synge 34 
 
 Robert Browning's Vision 60 
 
 Falstaff's Nose 89 
 
 The Problem of Mr. William Watson . . .104 
 
 Mr. W. B. Yeats Poetry 119 
 
 Mr. William H. Davies 138 
 
 Mr. Herbert Trench . . .... 148 
 
 Mr. Robert Bridges ig^ 
 
 George Meredith : the Philosopher in the Artist 169 
 
 Charles Dickens and the Novel .... igg 
 
 The Failure of Thackeray 222 
 
 An Aspect of Samuel Butler . ... 234 
 
 The Vitality of Drama .... 240 
 
 vu 
 
STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 AFTERTHOUGHTS 
 
 One must always, it seems, look back upon one's 
 work with a curious mixture of hostility and clandes- 
 tine affection. Particularly is this the case when, as 
 in these random studies, it has been done within 
 a limited space, having in mind some or other 
 definite end that was to be served. Everything is 
 conditioned by the aim it serves, a fact that literary 
 criticism is too often pleased to forget; but when, 
 as in the case of these studies, that aim is definite 
 and articulate, it is inevitable that one's afterthoughts 
 should be prolific of qualifications of the statements 
 made, and adjustments of the points of view taken. 
 Speech is the noblest attribute of man; yet it is a 
 humiliating consideration that even in so noble a 
 function it is impossible for him to arrive at truth. 
 Every statement is a lie, for every statement is a 
 preclusion. Yet the colourless balance between two 
 emphases is a deeper kind of a lie still, for it says 
 nothing when perhaps something should be said. It 
 adds cowardice to falsehood. It is not by the 
 
2 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 exclusion of emphasis that truth may be arrived at, 
 but by the inclusion of a variety of emphasis. Nor is 
 this only in order that one emphasis may qualify 
 another emphasis, but rather that one emphasis may 
 coalesce with another emphasis, and so, truth meeting 
 with truth, the Temple of Beauty may be seen shining 
 in a whiteness compounded of aU colours, dimly 
 through the mists of earth. 
 
 One turns to past examples of literary criticism for 
 curious and contradictory instances of this. When 
 Jeffreys, for instance, cried out on Wordsworth's 
 Excursion, " This wUl never do ! " there is probably 
 no lover of poetry who does not believe that he 
 thereby damned himself as any kind of a judge on 
 the matter. And yet, in a sense, he was right. For 
 there is no one who wUl claim that The Excursion 
 fulfils aU the demands of poetry; and if Jeffreys chose 
 to take his stand on just those demands that it did 
 not fulfil, he was so far justified in saying it would 
 never do. The perversity of the man may not be 
 commendable; but, given his perversity, he was right 
 enough. What he did not see, and what literary 
 critics never yet have succeeded in seeing, is that no 
 poem fulfils all the demands of poetry; and if one 
 choose to stand on just those particular demands it 
 has failed to fulfil, it would be possible to dismiss as 
 summarily any poem in the world. When a poem or 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 3 
 
 a poet has won his rank and authority it may possibly 
 be desirable then to take such a stand momentarily, 
 as a passing discipline, in order not to have one's 
 vision bounded by a single view: though even then 
 it would demand imperative reasons to justify it. 
 But, in the main, no poem can be made to yield any 
 beauty till its own point of view has been conceded 
 and taken. 
 
 " And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love," 
 
 sings Wordsworth of the poet. For it is true, as 
 some one has said, that there was never yet a secret 
 told to them that knew it not before. A critical 
 attitude towards any unveiling of beauty is enough 
 to dismiss and destroy it for ever: though it yet 
 remains beautiful despite the fact that the critic has 
 cancelled his sight of its beauty. It is not for nothing 
 that aU the great schools of initiation have proceeded 
 on the basis of fearlessness, acceptance, and humility; 
 and it is not for nothing that the portals to every 
 great religion have been inscribed with the word 
 Faith. 
 
 This is the supreme value of Art. It not only 
 accepts and rejoices in this great discipline — for any 
 work of art is an irrevocable act of faith: it unfurls 
 some aspect of the central beauty that is more than 
 all aspects. That is to say, each work of art is in 
 
4 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 itself a kind of synthesis. It not only defies the 
 search of analysis, but, in itself, it offers a broader 
 front than any one appreciation of it. It is true to 
 say that criticism, strictly as such, can never be of 
 any final value, and that appreciation is the only 
 way of discovery; but it is also true that appreciation 
 itself may only lay emphasis on one of many possible 
 aspects. What that aspect may be wUl depend on 
 the point of view that occasion or inclination has 
 decreed. But in laying such an emphasis it will 
 appear to diminish, or obviate, other points of view; 
 and so, when the occasion or inclination has passed, 
 it will look like a falsehood: true in itself, maybe, 
 but a falsehood by contrast. Art, and chiefly Poetic 
 Art, in its magnificent patience or its splendid 
 passion, is content to create out of the central stuff 
 of Beauty, and to forbear from judgments. But 
 appreciation must be content to run to and fro, 
 and speak of what it sees from its many points of 
 view. 
 
 Consequently, when this has happened, when such 
 an occasion has passed, certain changes have occurred 
 in one that make it impossible to recover the old 
 mood, or to see how another might regard a certain 
 emphasis on coming to it for the first time. Though 
 we agree with every word that has been written, in 
 having advanced to newer points of view the old 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 
 
 essay looks wayworn. It looks wayworn because 
 that is truly what it is : it is wayworn : it is the way 
 by which one has come to a richer understanding. 
 
 Or, to descend to the particular, it may be that 
 changes have happened, not only in oneself, but in 
 the general attitude toward one's subject. This is 
 more or less true with regard to the essay on " The 
 Art of J. M. Synge," that originally appeared in 
 England in the Fortnightly Review and in America in 
 the Forum. When I wrote it there was not, to my 
 knowledge, any fuU-length appreciation of his work. 
 It was only a short while ago; nevertheless, since 
 then a chorus of indiscriminate praise has arisen that 
 I cannot agree with. To my own personal thought, 
 for a very considerable stretch of years there have 
 been two dramatists pre-eminently that stand out 
 from the ruck of mere journeyman work: Ibsen 
 for breadth and scope, Synge for sheer beauty. Yet, 
 if there is one thing more than another noticeable in 
 Synge's work, it is his small and limited field. And 
 this, in drama especially, is a considerable detraction. 
 It is not small only in its final achievement: it is 
 small also within that achievement, since there is a 
 certain sameness rupning through it. There is also 
 a character of unhealthiness in it that it would be 
 unwise to neglect. The beauty is as indisputable as 
 it is rare: but it also is somewhat hectic. The 
 
6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 vigour, too, is the vigour of unhealthiness : it is 
 brutal; it is bitter. 
 
 To be true, I have not in my essay inferred the 
 contrary of this. But the words in which I spoke 
 are much like the words in which others are speaking; 
 and I do not mean all they mean. Very likely it is I 
 who am wrong: I only wish to define my attitude 
 more clearly for those who may read my essay. 
 Where we are at one is in wonderment at those who 
 have attacked Synge's Playboy of the Western World. 
 The attack has proceeded in aU sincerity; and, 
 ostensibly at least, from the worthiest of motives. 
 It has been said that Synge vilified Ireland in the 
 play. That, if true, would be a serious charge. To 
 vilify that dear land, among the few places in Europe 
 where vision is alive and where the people conse- 
 quently do not perish in herds and factories, might 
 be forgivable in a foreigner, but scarcely in a man 
 like Synge, in whose veins the blood was Irish. But 
 it is interesting to discover that the charge has pro- 
 ceeded on the basis of a well-worn artistic heresy. 
 An artist is under no tribute to people his art with 
 other than the creatures of his own brain. He does 
 not reproduce the semblance that some society at 
 some moment has come to wear. Indeed, it may 
 happen that, if that semblance be an unhappy or an 
 unworthy one, he may remind it of its forgotten 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 
 
 greatness; for the measure of his own greatness is 
 his kinship with those diviner elements, and his 
 power to create of them " forms more real than 
 living man." Shakespeare did not vilify England 
 by the creation of Justice Shallow any more than he 
 flattered her by the creation of Cordelia, He merely 
 peopled his art, and the test of the result was not to 
 be found in England but in Shakespeare. So with 
 Synge. To say that Pegeen Mike is somewhat un- 
 cannily brutal, or Christy Mahon vividly sensuous, is 
 not to say that Synge vilified Ireland, but that, as I 
 have suggested, his passion was somewhat hectic, as 
 his vigour was brutal. Which is quite a different 
 thing. Naturally he had to abide by the exaction on 
 every creator, and find a local habitation for his 
 creations, even as there was one quarter of the earth 
 that fed him with the elements of human nature 
 nearest to those most apt to spring from his own 
 brain and blood. Paris could not do this; Ireland 
 did : and Ireland should be more proud of one of her 
 sons who has succeeded in creating an art that was 
 beautiful, despite its hectic flush, instead of being 
 stirred to anger because some short-sighted critic 
 mistakes that hectic flush for her own. 
 
 With regard to the essay on " Robert Browning's 
 Vision : " this was written as a centenary notice for 
 the English Review in England and the 'North 
 
8 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 American Review in America. Its occasion, not to say 
 its prescribed scope, naturally set out its limitations; 
 yet I was considerably surprised when some of its 
 critics, in England, complained that I did not mention 
 the difficulties that attend the reading of Browning. 
 I could mention a variety of things that I did not 
 mention in the essay. As I have hinted, it is an 
 unfortunate limitation of speech that a man can only 
 say one thing at a time. Yet it had been my chief 
 desire to solve the central difficulty of Browning's 
 poetry so far as I might. It is always unwise to bring 
 theories to Life or Literature: yet it seems to me 
 that there is always some central room in a man's 
 house of art which, if we can reach, wiU make all the 
 dwelling stand around us in order and in harmony, 
 and with a manifest purpose. It was this that I 
 sought to reach in the case of Browning. Why, I 
 asked, did this man always speak through the lips of 
 men and women when it was clear, from the general 
 nature of his choices among them, and the words 
 they spake, that his chief interest was not in any 
 mere objective presentation of character, but in sub- 
 jective intimations of wisdom ? Why was it that one 
 could pick out so many sayings of his men and women, 
 that were vividly characteristic of them, but of which 
 one could affirm positively that they were Browning's 
 triumphant finding of his own philosophy: sayings. 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 
 
 for example, of Abt Vogler, of the Rabbi ben Ezra, of 
 Cleon, Karshish, Andrea del Sarto, Era Lippo Lippi, 
 Pictor Ignotus, and a hundred others, including such 
 as Sludge and Blougram ? On the mention of any of 
 his poems depicting such characters, one could almost 
 inevitably recall the lines that were its pivot and 
 cause of being; and these would almost inevitably 
 echo Browning's own faith. Obviously there was a 
 reason for this. Such a man was clearly not con- 
 cerned in character for its own sake, even though he 
 thought this of himself. I remembered that, always, 
 my difficulty in reading Browning was having to 
 enter into so many diflEerent characters with apparently 
 so smaU a purpose. It seemed so capricious; and I 
 used to wish, with his wife, that he would sing out of 
 his own person — though my adjurations to that end 
 were not quite so seemly as hers doubtless were. It 
 was like wandering in a labyrinth. Then, as I worked 
 to and fro, suddenly I struck on what seemed to me 
 the cause; and I remember what an illumination it 
 flooded through my mind. Each character-study 
 seemed of fresh and separate value. Each passage 
 seemed to lead to one spacious and central hall. As 
 I read, my being thrived (as it is the intent of Litera- 
 ture that Being should thrive thereby) where it had 
 only been puzzled before. And consequently, inas- 
 much as men who write are not in the habit of 
 
lo STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 considering themselves as beneath the average in- 
 telligence, judging that what had meant illumination 
 to me might bring the same to others, and seeing it 
 had not been said before, I worked it out in an 
 essay. Obviously, therefore, it lay outside its scope 
 to deal with those other, incidental, difficulties that 
 were part of the haste of the man to glean the heavy 
 harvest that lay in his fee. 
 
 In " Falstaff's Nose " I struck somewhat fiercely 
 perhaps. Yet perhaps it needs some striking to 
 loosen a stone, false to the structure, inserted nearly 
 two centuries ago. A certain poet, once in my hear- 
 ing, argued the interesting proposition that poets 
 should be at liberty to amend an earlier brother's 
 faults, and to improve and refurbish his lines con- 
 siderably. Yet I think that even he would object to a 
 learned editor exercising this privilege. 
 
 AH the essays on poets writing and living at the 
 present time, together with some others that I have 
 not wished to call up from the shades, appeared in 
 a series that I wrote on " Some Living Poets." 
 The series ended abruptly; but a number of 
 people, kindly disposed, and strangers to me, wrote 
 to me asking that they should be collected together 
 in a volume. It is always a hazardous proceeding to 
 criticise contemporaries; nor is it always desirable; 
 but this counsel is often turned from one of wisdom 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS ii 
 
 to one of mere fear. It does not seem altogether a 
 desirable state of affairs when we find men who 
 profess themselves lovers of Poetry, and who write 
 freely in praise of poets of the past, however small, 
 refusing altogether to read, or write upon, contem- 
 porary poetry. Theirs can scarcely be called a 
 robust faith. 
 
 The lecture on " Meredith : the Philosopher in the 
 Artist," wears the oldest date of all the inclusions in 
 the volume. It was delivered as a lecture after a 
 feat that was also a splendid adventure. For I had 
 just read through Meredith, work by work, prose and 
 poetry, in chronological order of writing. It was 
 like living through another man's life, living through 
 his growth of power and thought, and finding the 
 same wonder in the coming of wisdom. It was 
 altogether thrilling. I remember one stormy morning 
 climbing the " Wetterhorn," as we mounted through 
 the clouds in the growing light of the dawn, how 
 peak was added to peak as we climbed higher, and 
 with what a thrill each rose-gold crest rose into 
 recognition until the wide cloistral fraternity stretched 
 in multitudinous array, as it were, to the shores of 
 infinity, and the whole high scene was mapped 
 in the sunlight at one's feet. It was an exquisite 
 moment. Yet the task was not more arduous, nor 
 the recompense more vivid, than in ascending 
 
12 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the peaks of thought with a mental athlete like 
 Meredith. 
 
 Apart from the personal changes one noticed 
 stealthily coming on oneself (changes, in the main, of 
 small interest to others), even to the poise of carriage 
 or to a tone of voice, the thing that was most impressive 
 was the perception of the organic unity of Meredith's 
 thought. I use the word organic, because it grew 
 upon itself, branched out and throve. The characters 
 had a wonderful interest in themselves; but they 
 seemed to take a new interest as evidences of their 
 creator's mental progress. Nesta Victoria stood over 
 against Lucy Feverel with an altogether new mean- 
 ing, and Sandra-Vittoria stood midway between them 
 as illustrative of the progress from one to the other. 
 It was even more so with regard to those " back- 
 ground characters " of which I speak in the lecture; 
 those men who, in the novels, seem somehow to bear 
 Meredith's banner in the fray; his " choruses," as 
 most creators have their choruses. Austin Went- 
 worth, thin of blood, can be seen giving place to 
 Merthyr Powys, who has richer veins without the 
 spontaneity these should give his mind; to him 
 succeeds Major Percy Waring, where the blood 
 becomes more spontaneous, and Austin Wentworth, 
 where the mind takes an added graciousness ; then 
 comes Tom Redworth, staunch and strong, fuU of 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 13 
 
 blood and firm in its control, yet lacking the nerve 
 and culture of refinement; a clear stepping-stone to 
 Dartrey Fenellan, who, in his quick blood, steady 
 nerves, and strong brain, has all these attributes in 
 spontaneity of manhood, and Matthew Weyburn, 
 who would have them too, with meditation and 
 reflective wisdom moreover, save for the difficulty 
 of being one of the supporters of a necessary plot, 
 as his brothers were not. 
 
 It was no fancied conceit: it grew upon one's 
 thought as one read, or came ever and again with 
 a shock of surprise. And when, with this slow and 
 steady growth, one read the poetry that lay beside it, 
 and expounded the philosophy (if one may use this 
 word after its corruption at the hands of system- 
 mongers) that was exemplified in that growth, it was 
 impossible to resist the conclusion that they were 
 two different impressions of the same thing. Conse- 
 quently I set out to expound for myself this philo- 
 sophy that appeared to mean so much. That it 
 is far, very far, from aU, I am only too well 
 aware. 
 
 The essays on Thackeray and Dickens were both 
 centenary notices. In each I strove to reach the 
 central note that should elucidate the perplexing in 
 each writer. How a man of wonderful gifts and 
 
14 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 abilities should have failed to give that ring of passion 
 that makes enduring characterisation, and why we 
 should always be fascinated by the ntiemory of char- 
 acters that we learn are mere examples of grotes- 
 querie, were the problems I set out to answer in 
 each case. 
 
 It has been particularly interesting to me to notice 
 the coincidence that all the plays of Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw that I have seen staged since I wrote " The 
 Vitality of Drama " have been acted as farce, not 
 as comedy as had previously been the custom. And 
 one of the most curious results of this has been that 
 Mr. Shaw has become, by that fact, a popular 
 dramatist, earning continuous runs from six months 
 to a year in London, instead of being the playwright 
 of a select, and elect, minority. His drama is farce 
 with a meaning in it; but it is farce nevertheless. 
 Even the wit takes a further value from the farcical 
 postulate — as, for example, that of a butler in a 
 middle-class house who is a peer in disguise — and 
 that which is not wit often wears such an appearance 
 for the same reason. It is, in fact, intellectual farce; 
 and since no man can deny his predecessors, however 
 he may try, it sprang very clearly from a very un- 
 healthy state of affairs in the theatre that Mr. Shaw 
 attempted to correct; and which, indeed, he did 
 correct, in his own way. 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 15 
 
 When I wrote the article I was taken mildly to 
 task for saying that the basis of drama is words. 
 And when, more recently, in a study of Shakespeare, 
 I repeated this, I was taken much more severely to 
 task, and in mightier quarters, incurring, indeed, 
 the added penalty of having other and more heinous 
 charges raised against me with regard to other 
 portions of the book, as a kind of final flagellation. 
 Let it rest so. I have only to ask if Hamlet, or 
 Prometheus Bound, or (Edipus be drama? If they 
 be, and if one were to blot out all the words that 
 built them, it would be interesting to discover how 
 much of drama in them would be left. It may well 
 be that if one were to " refer to the derivation of the 
 word Drama " one would " find it to be Action and 
 not the Word." But what precisely the derivation 
 (actual, not dictionary) of the Action is, if not the 
 Word, does not appear. Even if the action were 
 to be conveyed in dumb-show, how is the interpreter 
 to have the value of the action conveyed to him 
 apart from words ? Otherwise, and if the action were 
 a violent one, there might be reprisals. Indeed, one 
 would scarcely heed the objection except that the 
 objector were so justly distinguished a person as 
 Mr. Gordon Craig. 
 
 In conclusion I have to thank the editors of the 
 
i6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Bookman, the English Review, the Fortnightly Review, 
 the Nineteenth Century, the Forum, and the North 
 American Review, the Academy, the New Age, and 
 the Nation, for their courtesy in permitting me to 
 reprint these various essays. 
 
 Darrell Figgis. 
 
 July 3, 1 91 2 
 
IN PRAISE OF PRAISE 
 
 Without contradiction, great is the praise of praise. 
 
 It, like mercy, is a quality quick and keen to 
 
 bless both giver and receiver. Moreover, it is a 
 
 proof in both giver and receiver of royalty in the 
 
 blood. For it is not possible that a criminal should 
 
 praise : he may applaud, but he cannot praise, seeing 
 
 that the function of praise is something that the 
 
 whole heart is participant in, whereas the criminal 
 
 is a house divided against itself, his conscience 
 
 against his purpose, and his purpose against his 
 
 conscience. Yet perhaps even a criminal may praise. 
 
 But he cannot praise crime. To praise, he must 
 
 praise with his whole being; he must take rank 
 
 with his conscience; and thereby he becomes no 
 
 more a criminal, but a man of splendour. The deed 
 
 is his accolade of royalty. 
 
 You may tell the man of splendour by his capacity 
 
 for praise, even as you may teU the age of splendour 
 
 by its capacity for praise. It is a kind of touchstone. 
 
 There are, for instance, certain men at whom History 
 
 stands in perplexity; and at whom History must 
 
 continue to stand perplexed until this touchstone 
 
 has been brought forward to resolve the perplexity. 
 
 17 B 
 
1 8 wSTUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 You may admire Robespierre; you may stand in 
 wonder of his genius; you may see him thrust his 
 way from obscurity to an unrivalled dictatorship, 
 and hold, frail and unlovely though he be, a whole 
 fair France in fear of his slightest nod; and it may 
 stir your blood. Similarly, you may question the 
 real greatness of Mirabeau; you may think him after 
 all but a charlatan, a mimicker of greatness, a mock 
 prophet tricked out in robes the like of which he 
 had seen elsewhere, and had had carefully copied. 
 You may think all this, and yet you will have a 
 sneaking regard for Mirabeau, even as you turn from 
 Robespierre as you would from a very beautifully 
 coloured toad. Then you will have it brought to 
 your mind that Mirabeau must have been able to 
 praise, a big, open, whole-hearted, generous praise, 
 if occasion demanded it, even though no single 
 instance arose to your mind of his having done so; 
 and you would dare wager with any that Robespierre 
 could not so have praised, that his approval must 
 needs have been a poor, watery, grudging kind of 
 plaudit, while he pulled his spectacles down from 
 his forehead to scan your intentions carefully: when 
 the whole perplexity will at once stand resolved to you, 
 and you will take your rank with the charlatan, were 
 he charlatan never so much, and against the man 
 of the Mountain. 
 
IN PRAISE OF PRAISE 19 
 
 And tell me, will you, when was Rare Ben Jonson 
 the better man: when he wrote Sejanus, or when 
 he wrote of the man who had been his great rival in 
 drama, who had defied all rules and principles of 
 Art, such rules and principles as he had laid down 
 magisterially at the Mermaid, and who probably 
 had compelled him to leave writing for the " Globe " 
 or cease his dramatic brawling, that " he loved the 
 man, and did honour his memory on this side idolatry 
 as much as any " ? — that " he was not for an age, 
 but for all time " ? — that he was the " Soul of the 
 Age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our 
 Stage! " Nay, how did Ben earn the epithet of 
 " rare " ? Was it because of his Book ? Was it 
 because he laid down the law heavily of a night, and 
 through to many a merry morn, at the Mermaid? 
 Tyrants are not wont to be dubbed rare. Or was it 
 because he had a soul large enough to praise ? 
 
 You will say, perhaps, that Ben could blame 
 and blame mightily. True; but then it takes a 
 man who can praise to blame. Nay, a man who 
 cannot praise should never on any account be en- 
 trusted with the instrument of blame, for he will 
 not use it properly; he will not blame; he will be 
 merely and weakly censorious, irritably censorious: 
 and a censor is not a blamer. A censor is to a blamer 
 as a sycophant is to a praiser. You must have 
 
20 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 standards of diflFerentiation for the one; you need 
 have none for the other. To blame is to detect 
 blemishes. Ben once detected a blemish to such good 
 effect that Shakespeare was constrained to alter 
 the line accordingly. And therefore blame, like 
 praise, which is its obverse, is a wise function. There 
 was probably never blame that did not imply praise. 
 Once there was a young man who wrote a long poem — 
 which was no ill thing to do — but he wrote it in an 
 age of censors, and in that he was unfortunate. He 
 called his poem Endymton, and he was told to " go 
 back to the shop, Mr. John. Stick to plasters, piUs, 
 and ointment boxes." There has been much good 
 ink used in discussing whether or not a certain 
 fretfulness was induced in Keats as a result of this, 
 weakening him for the scourges of phthisis, and 
 leaving us a decapitated poetry. But it must ever 
 remain a matter of speculation as to what would have 
 happened to him had he fallen into an age of good 
 praisers, who would have hailed him royally, without 
 omitting to point out those blemishes, those vul- 
 garities and immitigable crudities, that he himself 
 declared he was not unaware of. 
 
 For there is a deep principle in this : a principle of 
 life. It is possible to save a soul by praise when no 
 other method could avail. You could raise an age 
 of giants by praise. There is an ancient belief 
 
IN PRAISE OF PRAISE 21 
 
 — that is yet not so ancient — that we grow round 
 our names like peas round a stick : that to call a boy 
 " Bob " from his youth up would make him quite 
 a different man from the probable product had you 
 ever hailed him as " Robert." There is another 
 superstition, which is no superstition, that if you see 
 a friend pale and ill, you may send him to the grave 
 by advising him of the fact, whereas you may save 
 him by proclaiming his robust appearance. So it is 
 with praise. Praise, as has been said, is a wise 
 function; you cannot praise something that is not 
 there; you could not have praised Keats because his 
 poetry was robust and manly. The good praiser 
 would have seen with native perception just what his 
 poetry held worthy of praise, knowing that no man 
 would have published an ambitious book without 
 something worthy of praise in it; and he would have 
 praised that royally. He would have known that no 
 ill could have come of this; that, indeed, no ill can 
 ever come of praise; but that the receiver would have 
 burgeoned to the quality praised in him, filling out 
 its proportions, and coming indeed actually to be the 
 thing he was acclaimed for being, like a boy to the 
 sound of his name. Yes, you could raise an age of 
 giants by praise. 
 
 Instead of which, you will hear it said that praise 
 is forbidden, inasmuch as its avowal would make its 
 
22 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 receiver egoistic. Just as though it were not good 
 to be egoistic! Just as though the salt of the earth 
 were not a healthy egoism! Where, in the name of 
 conscience, will you find a virtue that is not egoistic, 
 that is not the assertion of an abnndant personality ? 
 Men were automatons else: frigid things, mechanical 
 things, not splendid and urgent things. Praise itself 
 is egoistic. Look you, the man who wiU not praise 
 is the man who is not sure of himself, who is so little 
 convinced of his own greatness that he will withhold 
 the thought of that attribute from others for fear 
 lest they outshine and out-distance him. The man 
 who will not praise has never possessed his own soul. 
 He has never risen to the splendour of confidence in 
 himself, and so, instead of royaUy acclaiming others 
 in a spirit of frank equality, he wiU be found for ever 
 fortifying himself and his little prowess by the twin 
 agencies of censure and sycophancy. And therefore 
 praise is not only the acclaimer of greatness; it is 
 not only the creator of greatness; it is the proof of 
 greatness in a man. You may know the little man 
 by a sign; it is stamped on his speech. He wiU be 
 for ever saying that praise is a good thing, and a 
 necessary thing, but that he has not yet found any- 
 thing in his age and generation worthy of his praise. 
 That is to say, that though you could raise an age of 
 giants by praise, it would take an age of giants to do it. 
 
J. M. SYNGE 
 
 It was given to John Millington Synge to achieve 
 one of the supreme paradoxes of literature. He was, 
 of course, not the only one. There was Shakespeare. 
 Of them both it is possible to hear on the one hand 
 that they are the complete expression of their several 
 I national spirits, and on the other that they are 
 ,not national at all, but cosmopolitan and remote. 
 1 Whereas in fact the truth is that they express their 
 (national spirits so completely and finally that they 
 |lift them out of the national into the international. 
 jThey are not hedged by their boundaries, for they 
 are so lofty that they can more readily see each other 
 than the limits of the countries in which they stand. 
 Yet the fact remains that they do indeed really stand 
 in their several countries, and derive their susten- 
 ance — not merely their physical, but rather now 
 their artistic, sustenance — from the national earth in 
 which their feet are planted. They speak in the 
 cosmopolitan upper air; but their emotions come 
 from the red national earth that bred them. It is 
 their stature that makes the paradox. 
 I J. M. Synge himself in figure and temperament 
 Suggested the intense, brooding, imaginative, and 
 
 23 
 
24 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 (teensitive Irish spirit. He was born in 1871 in Rath- 
 farnham, Co. Galway, the youngest son of John 
 Hatch Synge, barrister-at-law, and the owner of 
 some landed property in that county. Tutored 
 for Trinity College, Dublin, he entered there in 1888, 
 graduated there four years later, taking prizes in 
 Hebrew and Gaelic in the interim. Music, too, 
 engaged his attention; and since in the year prior 
 to his graduation he had taken a scholarship in 
 Harmony, he passed, in 1893, to Germany to con- 
 tinue his studies there. But though music in later 
 hours was to unlock secrets for him in the Isles of 
 Aran and Blasket, it ceased to enthral him now; 
 and in 1895 he was in Paris, seeking to qualify 
 himself for literary criticism with a thoroughness 
 characteristic of him. 
 
 Yet, though he leaned thus toward literary ex- 
 pression, the creative impulse was then hardly awake 
 in him. The few poems that mark this time are not 
 so much characteristic of him as they are sympto- 
 matic of the language that marks a certain type of 
 French poetry. It needed the word spoken into 
 him to awaken the impulse to creation: and that 
 word could not be spoken in Paris. Like all great 
 souls he was paradoxical in all things. He was a 
 silent man because he was full of speech. Thus, too 
 he wandered Europe because he could be at home 
 
J. M. SYNGE 25 
 
 only in Ireland. He might have achieved criticism 
 in Paris, because criticism is an aloof function that 
 sees life from without, through literature: he could 
 only have risen to the spontaneity of creation where 
 his soul was attuned to life itself, and this could not 
 have been in alien Paris, Nor had his brooding soul 
 the energy to discover this for himself. 
 
 It was discovered for him by a divine chance. 
 And it was discovered, appropriately enough, by one 
 who with him stands out and above the earnest band 
 that has determined to raise Ireland again to dignity 
 in European literature. During a visit to Paris in 
 1899, W. B. Yeats stayed, where he and a number 
 of other Irishmen were wont to stay, at a little hotel 
 in the Rue CorneiUe, opposite the Odeon Theatre. 
 He here heard of an Irishman who, " even poorer 
 than myself, had taken a room at the top of the 
 house. It was J. M. Synge, and I, who thought I 
 knew the name of every Irishman who was working 
 at literature, had never heard of him." Seeing the 
 man, noting his preoccupation with a literature that 
 had already become obsessed with itself, remote 
 from the warm pulse of life, perceiving, too, how 
 truly he was kin to the soul of Ireland, he bade him 
 leave all these literary forms and expressions, and 
 go to the Aran Islands up the bay of Galway, there 
 " to express a life that has never found expression." 
 
26 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 It was a divine chance : it was, indeed, divination : 
 more so than Yeats could ever have been aware of at 
 the time he spoke. For Synge went to Aran; he 
 left his wanderings over Italy, France, and Germany; 
 and went to Aran, spending large portions of the 
 following few years there. And he wrote of Aran. 
 Or rather, Aran spoke through him; for in reading 
 his account of his life there, we do not so much hear 
 a man speaking of the externals of topography, 
 manner of life, and the like, as the soul of a people 
 speaking through the writer, brushing aside, or 
 greatly assuming, those superficial aspects that the 
 inquisitive eye would seek to be informed of. In 
 fine, a manner of creation was already proceeding: 
 impulsion and the act of writing were springing to 
 spontaneity: intensity of life was speaking through 
 intensity of thought. In Paris he essayed to be a 
 critic of a literature that was already becoming 
 decadent. In Inishmaan and Aranmore he was the 
 living voice of a people that had kept its original awe 
 and native purity truer than any other people in 
 Europe. And this is the more remarkable, because 
 he speaks in his book of not understanding the people, 
 of feeling strangely aloof and alien to them. It was, 
 in fact, because he passed so into their life that he 
 felt he understood them so little, even as a man him- 
 self least knows the aspect of his own face. His 
 
J. M. SYNGE 27 
 
 intense identity with them blotted out the critic in 
 him. Yet he was not of them; for he had a voice, 
 and they had not. 
 
 It was at this time that he was caught up in the 
 dramatic movement that was stirring to life in 
 Dublin. It was, at least, singular that creation 
 should be stirring in him while the vent for it was 
 stirring in Dublin. Even such strange chances is 
 it, giving the colour of divinity to life, that wake 
 words of wonder on men's lips, such as Hamlet's 
 startled observation. Yet, though he was caught 
 up in it, he was the servant of no movement. He 
 did not create it, as Yeats may be said largely to 
 have created it; nor did it create him, as it has 
 created others. He preserved his detachment by 
 the imperious lonely instinct of his soul, brooding on 
 all things, yet subservient to none; and, though it 
 does not appear to be so at first flush, he really ex- 
 pressed the movement better by his detachment than 
 he could have done had he been its servant, even as 
 he expressed the Irish spirit better because he was an 
 artist, and therefore knew how to select and arrange. 
 
 He even brought it to something that was external 
 to it. For the inception of the movement largely 
 arose from a preoccupation with the ancient litera- 
 ture and mythology of Ireland: whereas he came 
 with something of a contempt for the aerial figures 
 
28 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 that meant so much to Mr. Yeats, for example, and 
 A. E. They were engaged deeply and earnestly with 
 Angus, Maeve, and Fand, the " plumed yet skinny 
 Shee." He came from a people living on bare, stern 
 rocks, set in a wild tempestuous sea, at war with 
 Time, Wind, and Tide; men hardened to sudden 
 death and wild sorrow; men who had small place 
 for the phantasies of literature, though their lives 
 brimmed and quivered with psychic wander and 
 adventure, and who knew how to drink deep and 
 live hardily. Love was to him, as to them, not a 
 romance, but a mating; and life was more tragic than 
 tragedy, for there was no elation in it. 
 
 Coming thus, though he remained largely aloof 
 from the initial spirit of the movement, he brought a 
 strong earthy flavour into it that moved and bent the 
 spirit of his fellow-workers to itself. Any who 
 compare Yeats' early Countess Cathleen with his 
 late Green Helmet may see this for themselves. " On 
 the stage one must have reality," he wrote later in 
 the introduction to The Playboy; and he brought 
 reality. He came with two plays : In the Shadow of 
 the Glen, a dramatisation of a story he had heard told 
 on Inishmaan, with subtle and delicate alterations 
 in it eminently characteristic of the man; and 
 Riders to the Sea, a tragedy, or perhaps, rather, a 
 tragic episode, whose site is pitched in Aran. He 
 
J. M. SYNGE 29 
 
 came also with a speech that was the music of the 
 
 language spoken in the West of Ireland rendered in 
 
 smoother and mightier harmonies. How truly this 
 
 speech was the speech of actuality can be heard by 
 
 any who know its harmonies and have heard the 
 
 speech in any old shebeen in Galway ! What process 
 
 of selection and arrangement went forward let the 
 
 following example show. This is how an old man in 
 
 the Aran Islands warned him against bachelordom : 
 
 " Listen to what I'm telling you: a man who is not married 
 is no better than an old jackass. He goes into his sister's house, 
 and into his brother's house; he eats a bit in this place and a bit 
 in another, but he has no home for himself: like an old jackass 
 straying on the rocks." 
 
 This is the first process as memory achieves it. It 
 
 has not the music of high dramatic speech; but it 
 
 has a rare cadence and charm in its truly colloquial 
 
 flavour, the sap of life flowing in it, that await only 
 
 the transmuting touch to swell into great music. And 
 
 this is how Michael James speaks in The Playboy of the 
 
 Western World : 
 
 " What's a single man, I ask you, eating a bit in one house and 
 drinking a sup in another, like an old braying jackass strayed 
 upon the rocks ? " 
 
 A quiet elimination of much, a calm compactness 
 
 of the remainder, a suggestion of antithesis in food 
 
 and drink, a swelling of the movement with an open- 
 
 vowelled adjective and the clean music of a perfect 
 
30 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 tense in the verb: these are the hints of the mind 
 that worked, but it was mind that wrought the 
 miracle, scarce knowing what it did. It was even so 
 the knocking of a neighbour stirred Beethoven to the 
 wonder of his one Violin Concerto. Yet, while the 
 process can be traced in this certain instance, it 
 moved in the same way, calmly and unostentatiously, 
 in aloof rumination, through the speech of all his 
 characters, in varying degree, tUl it broke into magni- 
 ficent flower with Christy Mahon as he discovers the 
 power resident so long in him unsuspected of himself. 
 It was the music of the West of Ireland, even though 
 the West of Ireland could not see it, that spoke 
 through Deirdre as she braced herself to her death: 
 
 " I see the trees naked and bare, and the moon shining. Little 
 moon, Uttle moon of Alban, it's lonesome you'U be this night, 
 and to-morrow night, and the long nights after, and you pacing 
 the woods of Glen Laoi, looking every place for Deirdre and 
 Naisi, the two lovers who slept so sweetly with each other." 
 
 Speech being the highest function of man, to say of 
 a man that he has found speech is to say that he has 
 found himself, that he has found his soul — speech 
 being clearly understood as speech, and not as talk. 
 It was so with Synge. He became a director of the 
 Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He became perhaps its most 
 important, certainly its most debated dramatist. All 
 his previous years seemed an earnest preparation to 
 
J. M. SYNGE 31 
 
 this end, whether roving Europe or furling his soul 
 about with one of the strange still nights in Aran 
 tiU he became so much a part of the scene that he 
 seemed to exist only in perception. Play followed 
 play with unhasting deliberation. The desolation and 
 loneliness of In the Shadow of the Glen led to the wild, 
 fateful Riders to the Sea. In one was seen rebellion 
 against the shackles of monotony, a rebellion that 
 began with Nora joining speech with Patch Darcy 
 as he passed up and " down the lonely road near 
 which their cabin lay, and concluding, even against 
 herself, with her going out with the tramp to 
 hear the " herons crying out over the black lakes," 
 and the " grouse and the owls with them, and 
 the larks and the big thrushes when the day is 
 warm." In the other the soul of a mother set against 
 a tragic and warring Nature, till with her last son 
 taken she turns to a consolation that is more terrible 
 than tears : " No man can be living for ever, and we 
 must be satisfied." In both is heard the speech 
 waked in him; and in both is seen the finished craft- 
 manship learned in Paris. 
 
 Humour took him for awhile then. But it was 
 a strange humour. It became boisterous in The 
 linker's Wedding; it turned shrewdly sardonical, 
 with one exquisite flower of tenderness, in The Well 
 of the Saints. And humour still hung about him 
 
32 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 when he set his hand to The Playboy of the Western 
 World, for it is conceived in the spirit of hunaour, 
 though it passes to something that is not humour nor 
 grief, but the poise of both. If Riders to the Sea be 
 his most perfect gem, wrought with a skill that matches 
 its poignancy, the Playboy is his best and completes! 
 expression. In it, as in all his plays, he brushes past 
 externals and in a few strokes is in business with souls. 
 In The Playboy it is the soul of a youth, stepping to 
 manhood, long shackled, estimated as worthless, and 
 accepting the estimate, but now learning his powers 
 of greatness in the heroic estimate of others. He 
 burgeons and expands in the sunshine of their awe 
 of him, and in the process of burgeoning breaks to 
 perfect flower of speech. It is of a soul that he again 
 treats in the play he was yet working at when he died, 
 Deirdre of the Sorrows. It is the soul of a woman 
 who learns with horror that love may end, and who 
 chooses death for herself and her lover, rather than 
 so bitter and sordid an experience. She takes death 
 in the full heyday of the soul, before it should shrink 
 and shrivel at the touch of Time. 
 
 It was strange, and yet not strange, that he who 
 should have won such rich music out of his prose 
 should have failed so utterly in poetry. There is 
 often incision, and frequently pungency, in his verse; 
 but there is not music. He did not leave much verse. 
 
J. M. SYNGE 33 
 
 In truth, he did not leave any substantial body of 
 work, for he was a fastidious and painstaking crafts- 
 naan, and he was not given many years to work in, 
 dying on March 24, 1909. He had hoped to break 
 new ground of toU. Instead, like his Deirdre, he went 
 to death in the full heyday of his power; and his 
 art remains to us as the enduring expression of his 
 spirit. 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 
 
 There is a fashion of scenery in the West of Ireland 
 of a kind peculiarly apart. A road, maybe, wiU be 
 running like an irregular ribbon of grey over a desolate 
 scene, losing itself in a grey horizon, threading its 
 journey painfully enough through a landscape of 
 brown forbidding bog. Even to the very margin of 
 the road wiU the bog encroach, making the journey 
 seem as though it were poised over abysms. Not a 
 tree stabs the skyline, or lends distinction to the 
 landscape. Where the turf has been cut away, 
 brown puddles gleam purple as they reflect the 
 sweeping mists and clouds. If there is a habitation 
 of man in sight it will not relieve the brooding passion 
 of the scene. A cottage of stone at best, with an 
 enclosure of coal-black soil furrowed for seed and 
 hardly won from the morass, it falls into the formless 
 unity of the universe. Such a scene has no distinc- 
 tion, yet it is passionate with temperament. It 
 holds out no details for the eye to fasten on. It is 
 one large, brooding gesture of magnificence, psychic 
 and strange. The very hills are merged in the gesture. 
 One could imagine it rising to a very fury of energy, 
 but that it does not do so. 
 
 34 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 35 
 
 Such is his country; such was the man John 
 Millington Synge; and of such a sort was his work, 
 for, do what he will, a man cannot make his work 
 other than an effluence of himself. He was a man in 
 whom the very energy of thought turned to brooding, 
 even as in his work the very energy of dramatic 
 instinct achieved results that evade the more obvious 
 meanings of the word dramatic. He was of a type 
 of Irishman that, though pronounced enough in the 
 race, has received but little heed in a day that 
 clutches for the obvious. His very furling himself in 
 undemonstrative emotion was the cry of greatness 
 that sought a friendship that could not be granted it. 
 That he was a peaceful man did not belie the earnest- 
 ness of his Nationalist conviction: it flowed from 
 the very strength of it. His resolution raised him 
 above demonstration. There was something of a 
 contempt for the opposite side in it infinitely more 
 scorching than a fury of words. If greatness be 
 magnificence rather than eccentricity, he was 
 supremely great. Like the landscapes he strode 
 over, not in the manner of an alien waif of humanity, 
 but as very part of them, merged in them, he was not 
 particularly distinct but personally alive. 
 
 In the passage from his account of his life while 
 on the Aran Islands, a phase of this side of him comes 
 out, casting strangely significant lights right and left 
 
36 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 in elucidation of much. " It was one of the dark 
 sultry nights peculiar to September," he says, " with 
 no light anywhere except the phosphorescence of the 
 sea, and an occasional rift in the clouds that showed 
 the stars behind them. The sense of solitude was 
 immense. I could not see or realise my own body, 
 and I seemed to exist merely in my perception of the 
 waves and of the crying birds, and of the smell of the 
 seaweed." That he should have spoken of himself 
 on a crucial event near the end of his days as reading 
 Spinoza is significant; but philosophies do not make 
 a man; a man weaves his philosophy from his 
 temperament, or loves that philosophy to which his 
 soul inclines. Self is itself; and the September night 
 on Aran Island was before Spinoza. 
 
 Nor was he the less himself because he seemed to 
 exist merely in the " perception of the waves and of 
 the crying of birds, and of the smell of seaweed." 
 It is a poor philosophy that sees individuality only 
 in irritability. Spontaneity is the breath of being. 
 And it was because he was spontaneous that mood 
 flowed into mood in him, and emotion succeeded 
 emotion, till in the very quiescence of vital self he 
 passed into a large unity that seemed only perception. 
 Such a temperament will seem little likely to achieve 
 the clash and oppugnancy of dramatic art; and, 
 indeed, it was the cause of the chiefest difficulty in 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 37 
 
 his drama, a difficulty that happens to be its most 
 distinctive beauty. 
 
 It was an extraordinarily fine instinct in Mr. Yeats 
 that sent Synge to the Aran Islands. It might 
 almost be said that they were waiting to cradle him, 
 and wean him to artistic maturity. His art derives 
 from nothing but himself; but so much does he owe 
 those far islands in the Atlantic that, however 
 resolutely one clings to the conviction that the soul 
 of a man is its own sufficiency for the greatness of his 
 utterance, it seems difficult to imagine how he could 
 ever have won to artistic speech in any other sur- 
 roundings. That the Aran Islands should have 
 provided him with the scene for one play, and given 
 him the plot for another, is a small matter. They 
 bred his soul; they fed him with their own great 
 silences; they sang, him the music of speech to 
 which his soul at once responded with the shout of 
 discovery; they found him the cadence he cried for; 
 they steeped his mind in an atmosphere that ever 
 thereafter marked all things he did. His artistic 
 soul came to them a starveling; it went out a grown 
 man in full vigour of health. 
 
 Many instances of this could be adduced. Let two 
 examples be sufficient, seeing that they accord with 
 two distinctive characteristics of his work. 
 
 He says of the people of Aran: " The direct sexual 
 
38 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 instincts are not weak on the island, but they are so 
 
 subordinated to the instincts of the family that they 
 
 rarely lead to irregularity. The life here is still at an 
 
 almost patriarchal stage, and the people are nearly 
 
 as far from the romantic moods of love as they are 
 
 from the impulsive life of the savage." He is, indeed, 
 
 speaking of the people of Aran; but he might well 
 
 be characterising his own plays. The roots of both 
 
 alike are in very homely earth; they both alike have 
 
 little affinity with the stars. In one of his poems 
 
 he passes in review all the great Queens of Romance, 
 
 and adds sardonically: — 
 
 " Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon — 
 And we've the sun on rock and garden." 
 
 In another he regards even the mythology of Ireland, 
 so sacred to the comrades in art with whom he worked, 
 and sings: — 
 
 " Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand, 
 Ye plumed yet skinny Shee, 
 That poets played with hand in hand 
 To learn their ecstasy. 
 
 " We'll stretch in Red Dan SaUy's ditch. 
 And drink in Tubber fair. 
 Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch 
 The badger and the hare." 
 
 It even becomes an Art Creed, for, disavowing 
 exaltations for his poetry, he says, " It may almost 
 be said that before verse can be human again it 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 39 
 
 must learn to be brutal," and the mind inevitably 
 goes back to the Aran mother laughing and mocking 
 at her daughter writhing with the toothache. 
 
 Yet if the strength of earth be characteristic of 
 Synge's work there is another characteristic that 
 links with it, which no less recalls the Isles of Aran. 
 It is the strange and mystic sense of doom that broods 
 —^ver aU his dramas, even though it be a comedy 
 like The Well of the Saints. Like a background of 
 tragical intensity, it is never absent from his work: ^ 
 an impersonal pain significant of impending terror. 1 
 And one remembers what he himself has written oi^ 
 the keening of the women of Aran : " This grief of 
 the keen is no personal complaint for the death of 
 one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain 
 the whole passionate range that lurks somewhere in 
 every native of the island. In this cry of pain the 
 inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself 
 bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings 
 who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that 
 wars on them with wind and seas." Or again, as he 
 speaks with men fishing after having come from 
 a funeral, he says : " I could not help feeling that I 
 was talking with men who were under a judgment of 
 death." The deep sense of doom, or, as he expresses 
 it elsewhere, a " desolation that is mixed everywhere 
 with the supreme beauty of the world," is never 
 
40 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 absent from him. It winds in the very cadence of 
 his speech. 
 
 It was such a man that the Isle of Aran shaped 
 for work. Even though it be true that he coloured 
 the inhabitants with something of his own brooding 
 intensity, the deeper truth is that they waked this 
 mood in him to artistic realisation by the touch of 
 affinity. They made it musical in him, and gave it 
 a voice to speak by. 
 
 When he turned them to dramatic work it was to 
 frame a story he had heard told at Inishmaan into 
 a play. But it was to frame it in the light of a rich 
 discovery. He himself protested later that when 
 he was writing In the Shadow of the Glen he " got more 
 aid than any learning could have given me from a 
 chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where 
 I was staying, that let me hear what was being said 
 by the servant girls in the kitchen." Yet it was 
 Inishmaan and Aranmore that gave him to know 
 that the speech of servant girls and ballad women 
 in Ireland mattered very essentially in his art. A 
 flaming richness of imagination, a haunting and 
 beautiful cadence and construction of speech, they 
 gave him, that under his hands swelled to new 
 harmonies of lovely music. It is not all tramps 
 between Kerry and Mayo speak as Christy Mahon 
 speaks. It is even likely that a good number would 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 41 
 
 repudiate it — Pegeen Mike herself was amazed at it. 
 But, if they did so, it would be the handling of the 
 instrument they would repudiate, not the instrument 
 itself. 
 
 When on the Great Blasket, off the coast of Kerry, 
 Synge once took the violin from the island fiddler 
 and played on it for the people to dance to. They 
 were not happy to his playing as they were to the 
 fiddler they knew; but the fiddler himself recognised 
 the abler power. He saw that whereas he used only 
 the poor middle of his bow, Synge utilised the full 
 sweep; and that where his wrist was stiff, and there- 
 fore his strokes disjointed, Synge's wrist was supple 
 and his strokes mellow in their flow one upon another. 
 Even so it was in the matter of language. An 
 example may serve. For there are two accurate 
 idioms of speech very much on the tongue of the 
 people of the West; and both express the sense of 
 time with extraordinary precision. In answer to 
 such a question as " How's the health ? " the reply 
 may perhaps come, " Faith, I'm after having the 
 Influence," or " I'm well presently, thank God! " 
 The immediate past or the immediate moment (not, 
 be it noted, the corrupt English usage, dating, it may 
 be, from some fatal tendency to procrastination in 
 the race) is thus expressed sharply. But in Synge's 
 idiom there is no sharpness : all is mellow and musical. 
 
42 STUDIES AND A PPRECIATIONS 
 
 How then does he manipulate the above usages? 
 The result is noteworthy; for the " presently " is 
 virtually abolished, while the "after" is drawn 
 into the cadence and stripped of its sharpness. It 
 is scarcely to be detected, whereas in the speech of 
 the people it is very easily detected. The mellow 
 movement of the master-hand has made a richer 
 music echo from the instrument, but the instrument 
 is no less the same as the people use for their simpler 
 purposes. So truly identical is it that it is impossible 
 to recite it comfortably without using the brogue of 
 the people. 
 
 This very fact that he should thus have turned the 
 occasional sharpness of distinction into mellowness 
 of movement is strangely significant. It accords 
 fitly with the mood of the man and the landscapes 
 he stirred in, even as it strikes the dominant note of 
 his plays. The customary conception of the dramatic 
 in art and life is just this very sharpness, sharp- 
 ness even to antithesis. Lear standing watching his 
 daughters, as Regan goes over and takes Goneril's 
 hand — that seems the thought of dramatic tragedy; 
 not an old woman keening over a turf fire. But 
 Riders to the Sea is of a new order of tragedy alto- 
 / gether. It is, perhaps, not so much tragedy as 
 • a fragment of life set in the atmosphere of tragedy. 
 I Even as there is not water in a mist of the hills 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 43 
 
 because it is all moisture, so there is not tragedy in 
 the Riders to the Sea because it is all tragical. It 
 does not, like Macbeth, open in hope and wind to a 
 disaster that falls like a shock; its opening note is 
 conceived in gloom, the movement passes in intensity 
 of gloom, concluding with the scanty relief of hope- 
 lessness. We know, and are vitally interested in 
 Macbeth, and his tragedy is poignant to us with a 
 sense of personal loss. But we do not know Maurya 
 thus. She is not a person to us. She is the soul of 
 a mother set before a cliif of terror. We shudder for 
 all mothers of Aran in her, whereas " Out, out, brief 
 candle! " comes to us from a man whose magnificence 
 won us. 
 
 The interest is the interest of a situation in the 
 wider meaning of that word. And when Maurya 
 comes in slowly, with the undelivered bundle of 
 bread in her hand, and sits over the turf fire keening 
 softly, the whole situation narrows and sharpens to 
 intensity. When, in answer to her daughter's im- 
 patient query " Did you see Bartley ? " she replies, 
 " I seen the fearfullest thing," the senses sharpen to 
 expectation of the doom the very opening words of 
 the play had struck. And this is how it arrives : — 
 
 Nora. Tell us what it is you seen. 
 
 Maurya. I went down to the spring well, and I stood there 
 saying a prayer to myself. Then Bartley came along, and he 
 
44 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 riding on the red mare with the grey pony behind him. {She 
 puts up her hands, as if to hide something from her eyes.) The Son 
 of God spare us, Nora! 
 
 Cathleen. What is it you seen ? 
 
 Maurya. I seen Michael itself. 
 
 Cathleen (speaking softly). You did not, Mother. It wasn't 
 Michael you seen, for his body is after being found in the far 
 north, and he's got a clean burial, by the grace of God. 
 
 Maurya (a little defiantly). I'm after seeing him this day, and 
 he riding and galloping. Bartley came first on the red mare, 
 and I tried to say " God speed you," but something choked the 
 words in my throat. He went by quickly; and " the blessing of 
 God on you," says he, and I could say nothing. I looked up 
 then, and I crying, at the grey pony, and there was Michael upon 
 it — ^with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet. 
 
 Cathleen {begins to keen). It's destroyed we are from this day. 
 It's destroyed, surely. 
 
 With that the situation widens to the conclusion, 
 and therewith Synge makes the only mistake in the 
 play. For the intensity having once been released 
 it win not be possible to sharpen it again. Thus, 
 when the women come in and kneel and keen, and 
 Bartley's body is brought in, the failure of the mind 
 to respond to the horror it has already passed through 
 so shrewdly and so sharply, makes their grief seem 
 overwrought. It is Maurya who, dramatically, saves 
 the situation. She brings the whole action on the 
 lower plane of tragical resignation, saying, as she 
 sprinkles the body with holy water, " It isn't that 
 I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty 
 God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 45 
 
 night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; 
 but it's a great rest I'U have now, and a great sleeping 
 in the long flights after Samhain, if it's only a bit of 
 wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that 
 would be stinking." Six sons, a husband, and a 
 father-in-law has the sea taken in toll from her; and 
 the fullness of sorrow is its own relief. Her closing 
 words are : " No man at all can be living for ever, 
 and we must be satisfied." 
 
 With the exception of its one fault, the fault of 
 a part that is strained, the play is a complete, and 
 perfect movement from start to finish, moving through 
 its action like a foamless roller. The deftest skiU of 
 the intelligent craftsman is necessary to ensure this, 
 hidden away though it be in the excellence of its 
 own workmanship. Turf for the fire in one place, 
 Michael's clothes in another, the ominous white 
 boards, and the forgotten cake in Maurya's hand, 
 all keep the movement in flow past awkward places 
 till its course is accomplished. And it is worthy 
 of note that they each and all come to be symbols of 
 doom, being thus not only aids to the movement, but 
 heightening, moreover, and intensifying the very 
 cause and tragical colour of its being. 
 
 The interest of his earlier play, too, In the Shadow 
 of the Glen, is that of a situation. The outward 
 interest, what may be called the plot, is that of a 
 
46 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 man who, doubting his wife's fidelity, feigns death so 
 as to discover her. Such was the story as Synge 
 had it told him in Inishmaan. In his hands, however, 
 an inner interest appears, and, as one may almost 
 expect, it is the interest of a soul. Even as in the 
 Riders to the Sea, so here, too, the atmosphere is in 
 business to aid this interest. There the atmosphere 
 was heavy with tragedy and poignant with eternal 
 suifering; here it is gloomy with loneliness and 
 isolation, even to oppression. And so the secret of 
 Nora Burke is unlocked. We do not know her in any 
 personal sense; but we see the soul of a young woman 
 hungry for living. Her husband is old, and can find 
 nothing congenial for her. There are no cottages 
 near hers in the glen that is too often heavy with 
 mists to the blotting-out of the sun and all brightness. 
 It all oppresses her; and Life is slipping away from 
 her. So that when Patch Darcy passes to and fro 
 she looks for his coming gladly, to engage words with 
 him; and when Patch Darcy dies she turns to Michael 
 Dara the herd. 
 
 Outer and inner interest develop together aptly 
 and unobtrusively, so that when the mock dead man 
 rises and bids her begone out of his house we are not 
 surprised to hear the tramp invite her to go forth 
 and taste the world with him. " You'll not be 
 getting your death with myself, lady of the house," 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 47 
 
 says he, " and I knowing all the ways a man can put 
 food in his mouth. . . . We'll be going now, I'm 
 telling you, and the time you'll be feeling the cold, 
 and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, 
 and the south wind blowing in the glens, you'll not 
 be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you're after 
 sitting in his place, making yourself old with looking 
 on each day, and it passing you by. You'll be saying 
 one time, ' It's a grand evening, by the grace of God,' 
 and another time, ' It's a wild night, God help us; 
 but it'U pass, surely.' " Or: " Come along with me 
 now, lady of the house, and it's not my blather you'll 
 be hearing only, but you'll be hearing the herons 
 crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing 
 the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and 
 the big thrushes when the days are warm; and it's 
 not from the like of them you'll be hearing a tale of 
 getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the 
 hair off you, and the light of your eyes; but it's fine 
 songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and 
 there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick 
 sheep, close to your ear." 
 
 We are not surprised at the invitation. We are 
 scarcely perplexed at seeing her go. Our interest 
 goes with her, rather, for she goes, if to a hard life, 
 yet to Life and the glory of the earth. Such is drama 
 indeed, but drama as it has not hitherto been known. 
 
48 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 It does not so much progress to a catastrophe as it 
 moves and passes away in music. The action, what 
 action there be, does not break into dramatic detail; 
 it broods in the very spirit of dramatic intensity. 
 It is like a Galway landscape: temperamental but 
 not distinctive; too temperamental to be distinctive. 
 P In his preface to The Tinker's Wedding Synge has 
 something to say in direct criticism of Drama; and 
 
 |it is perhaps not too much to say that there is more 
 of the matter of substantial criticism in his few 
 passing comments than is to be discovered in much 
 jdialectical analysis, for he strikes to the grand first 
 principles of Drama. There he ranks Drama with 
 'the symphony, claiming that it is the function of 
 
 i neither to " teach or prove anything." Since the 
 
 j criticism of creative genius is ever the outer earth- 
 works of its own citadel, this short preface, with its 
 sweeping-aside of " analysts with their problems and 
 teachers with their systems," and its analogy of 
 
 ; drama to symphony, becomes doubly significant. 
 He goes on, however, to speak of the necessity of 
 humour in drama; and therewith his criticism comes 
 more closely home to himself. For as one recalls 
 Falstaff's open mouthful of laughter, or Moliere's 
 subtle laughter of the mind, it will be wondered 
 what fashion of humour so brooding and passionate 
 a mind as Synge's will produce. And, surely enough, 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 49 
 
 what the mind might guess the fact achieves. For 
 the result is so deeply sardonic as nearly to overleap 
 humour into the further deeps of actual tragedy. 
 In The Tinker's Wedding the boisterous conclusion 
 thwarts this, but in The Well of the Saints this is 
 manifest throughout. It is not that the humour is 
 touched with tears; the richest humour is often 
 thus. It is rather that the blade of the dramatist 
 searches too deeply into the secrets of living. It 
 seems sometimes as though the dramatist's energy 
 of thought swept him past his artistic intention, 
 calling into question the very richness of the things 
 he praises so rarely at other times. It is not the less 
 valuable for this. It is, perhaps, more valuable; it 
 is certainly more estimable if the business of art be 
 the unfurling of great minds. 
 
 The initial picture of two wrinkled, ugly, stunted 
 beggars, blind, and therefore each deluded by the 
 countryside into esteeming the other as the final 
 consummation of male or female beauty, has itself 
 gleams of tragedy in it. When the Saint restores, 
 their sight to them, and they come to look on one 
 another amazedly, each reviling the other shrewdly 
 and harshly, after their late deep contentment with 
 each other, it is not only tragical in itself, it cuts at 
 very life. Nor does the next act relieve the pain. 
 In truth,' it drives the blade yet deeper home, for 
 
50 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 both husband and wife are not only separate, but, 
 being no longer blind, are made to labour early and 
 late for the hardiest of fares. There is a humour in it 
 all, notwithstanding; and how shrewdly the humour 
 cuts may be seen from the complaint of Timmy the 
 smith (Martin's master now), that since they received 
 back their sight " it's a queer thing the way yourself 
 and Mary Doul are after setting every person in this 
 place, and beyond to Rathvanna, talking of nothing, 
 and thinking of nothing, but the way they do be 
 looking in the face." 
 
 It is the third act lifts the stern irony from the 
 humour, leaving it whimsical and strangely beautiful. 
 It is the only instance in Synge's work of the laughter 
 that moves in the mind to tenderness. They are 
 blind again, are these two; and though each is glad 
 to have the other back on their old begging-site, they 
 revUe each other. Then the beauty dawns through 
 the darkness. For he bids her remember what she 
 saw when she looked " into a well, or a clear pool, 
 maybe, when there was no wind stirring and a good 
 light in the sky." And she replies : " I'm minding 
 that surely, for if I'm not the way the liars were 
 saying below I seen a thing in them pools put joy 
 and blessing in my heart." Still he reviles her; and 
 then comes this passage, hard to rival, in or out of 
 Synge, in modern drama. 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 51 
 
 Martin Doul. If it's not lies you're telling, would you have 
 me think you're not a wrinkled, poor woman who is looking like 
 three scores, maybe, or two scores and a half ? 
 
 Mary Doul. I would not, Martin. (She leans forward 
 earnestly.) For when I seen myself in them pools, I seen my hair 
 would be grey or white, maybe, in a short while, and I seen with it 
 that I'd a face would be a great wonder when it'll have soft white 
 hair falling around it, the way when I'm an old woman there 
 won't be the like of me, surely, in the seven counties of the East. 
 
 Martin Doul (tenth real admiration). You're a cute thinking 
 woman, Mary Doul, and it's no lie. 
 
 Mary Doul (triumphantly). I am, surely, and I'm telling you 
 a beautiful white-haired woman is a grand thing to see, for I'm 
 told when Kitty Bawn was selling poteen below, the young men 
 itself would never tire to be looking in her face. 
 
 Martin Doul (taking off his hat and feeling his head, speaking 
 teith hesitation). Did you think to look, Mary Doul, would there 
 be a whiteness the like of that coming upon me ? 
 
 Mary Doul (toith extreme contempt). On you, God help you! 
 ... In a short while you'll have a head on you as bald as an 
 old turnip you'd see rolling in the muck. You need never talk 
 again of your fine looks, Martin Doul, for the day of that talk's 
 gone for ever. 
 
 Martin Doul. That's a hard to be saying, for I was thinking 
 if I'd a bit of comfort, the like of yourself, it's not far ofi we'd be 
 from the good days went before, and that'd be a wonder, surely. 
 But I'U never rest easy, thinking you're a grey, beautiful woman, 
 and myself a pitiful show. 
 
 Mary Doul. I can't help your looks, Martin Doul. It wasn't 
 myself made you with your rat's eyes, and your big ears, and 
 your griseldy chin. 
 
 Martin Doul (rubs his chin ruefully, then beams with delight). 
 There's one thing you've forgot, if you're a cute thinking woman 
 itself. 
 
52 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 And tten he imagines timself " in a short while " 
 with " a beautiful, long, white, silken, streaming 
 beard, you wouldn't see the like of in the eastern 
 world " ! As the " good days " of delusion and 
 " great talking " return, the irony is there, but gentle. 
 When the Saint returns to give them back their sight, 
 and they wiU none of it, the humour grows sardonical 
 again, relieved though it be by boisterousness. 
 
 If Riders to the Sea is Synge's loftiest achievement, 
 The Well of the Saints is his most human. And even 
 as these touch one pole and another, so is the famous 
 Playboy of the Western World his greatest, and Deirdre 
 of the Sorrows, despite some strange faults, his most 
 beautiful. But The Well of the Saints and The 
 Playboy of the Western World stand in a manner of 
 illuminative relation one to the other. For while 
 the first is energetic and distinctive in a way strange 
 with him, the latter is brooding and temperamental 
 in a way wholly his own. 
 
 V Once again a dramatic situation in the history of a 
 
 I soul passes before us in musical movements. In In 
 the Shadow of the Glen it had been the cramped hungry 
 soul of a young wife; and now it is the swathed soul 
 of a youth strangely learning his own value. He 
 had grown up under a harsh father's control to reckon 
 himself a fool and worthless. His father genuinely 
 thought it so; and he accepts it so. But one day, 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 53 
 
 provoked to excess, he lifts his loy and strikes his 
 father working in the field, stunning him. No sooner 
 is the blow struck, however, than his old-time 
 pusillanimity asserts itself, and he flies in terror, 
 thinking himself a murderer. 
 
 ^JYet to this is added another crisis in another soul : 
 the soul of a young girl impatient at the littleness of 
 life about her. When Christy Mahon enters her 
 father's shebeen, terrified to think his crime is dis- 
 covered, the manly vigour of the deed strikes on her 
 imagination with a glowing sense of colour. It is no 
 ' matter of moralities with her: the insistent fact is 
 ; that here was a man capable of a divine fury of soul, 
 a man that therefore put to shame the male kind 
 i about her, her betrothed Shawn Keogh especially. 
 iHer glory in his virility glows about Christy like a 
 : summer sun, and he swells to her estimation of him, 
 I the swatJiings dropping away from his soul. He 
 I discovers himself. He is pitted by her against the 
 ,' countryside, and he beats them all at their sports. 
 ■ He becomes the Playboy of the Western World, and 
 Pegeen Mike's accepted lover. 
 
 Then his father returns, and the old terror comes 
 
 back on him; whereas Pegeen turns from him, seeing 
 
 his deed now as not virile at aU but only cowardly. 
 
 , Yet he is not wholly what he once was. It is with 
 
 i some passion that he says, " If you're after making 
 
/•/ 
 
 54 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, 
 you're setting me now to think if it's a poor thing to be 
 lonesome it's worse, maybe, go mixing with the fools 
 of earth." He strikes his father again with a loy 
 'y to win back his heroic halo about him, but to Pegeen 
 now this is merely sordid. " I'll say a strange man 
 is a marvel, with his mighty talk," says she; " but 
 ' what's a squabble in your back-yard, and the blow 
 ^\ of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap 
 between a gaUous story and a dirty deed." But they 
 cannot fend his discovery of himself. When his 
 doughty parent appears yet again he goes out with 
 him, now the master of the two, telling the company 
 " you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, 
 the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime 
 from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." 
 He leaves Pegeen to lament that he is, indeed, the only 
 Playboy of the Western World. 
 
 __The Playboy is thus not alone a well-nigh faultless 
 play; its deeper interest is that it chances to be the 
 play in which Synge most fully found himself. The 
 situation of a soul finding itself caused his brooding 
 genius to expand to the fullest. All the music of 
 speech that he had learned from Aran to Wicklow 
 strikes its richest harmonies as Christy's tongue 
 learns its own power. It is thus he says : " It's well 
 you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 55 
 
 towns with the light shining sideways when the night 
 is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising 
 before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the 
 cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking 
 deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you 
 passing on with an empty stomach failing from your 
 heart," It is thus the eloquence of love comes first 
 on his lips : " It's little you'll think if my love's 
 a poacher's, or an earl's itself, when you'll feel my 
 two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing 
 kisses on your puckered lips, tUl I'd feel a kind of 
 pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in 
 his golden chair." It is thus, when Pegeen turns 
 from him, he cries out on her that " there's torment 
 in the splendour of her like, and she a girl any moon 
 of midnight would take pride to meet, facing south- 
 wards on the heaths of Keel. But what did I want 
 crawling forward to scorch my understanding at her 
 flaming brow ? " In the Preface he says that " in 
 a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured 
 as a nut or apple." But it is not always nor often 
 that a soul could feel such ecstasy in it to swell to 
 such music as this. The mood in Christy Mahon 
 called out the utmost in Synge, and that mood was 
 one of adventurous imagination. 
 
 It is not only in speech, however, that the Playboy 
 excels. Its craftsmanship is of the deftest. The 
 
S6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 lurking figure of his father in the second and third 
 acts seems only to be a preparation for his final 
 entrance. It is that; but it is more also. It carries 
 the movement on past awkward gaps with extra- 
 ordinary skill. The result is that the whole thing 
 swells to its conclusion without a ruffle, one mood or 
 [ movement passing into and becoming part of another 
 I in a manner strangely akin to the mind of the man 
 ! himself. It and he are one in a peculiar sense. 
 ! The same skiU of craftmanship does not mark 
 Deirdre of the Sorrows. Doubtless this was because 
 he died at work on it, and therefore it may not be 
 estimated as a finished piece of work. As it stands, 
 however, the charge holds good. The fault is the 
 worse since it occurs at the very crisis. That Deirdre 
 should beg Conchubor for life for Naisi and herself, 
 despite the fact that she urged their return from 
 Alban fearful lest Naisi's love for her should fail, and 
 desirous of a death together to frustrate this, might 
 have been covered by a hint of fraUty in her, however 
 r-- little likely it might seem. But that, after Naisi has 
 been done to death, she should wail over his body, 
 • speaking in prospect of a long life of miserable retro- 
 spect, is unforgivable. For we know that she is to 
 '^ie at her own hand. And we feel that she is being 
 kept alive tiU Fergus and Conchubor return to witness 
 her death and Emain is burnt. Since the passage 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 57 
 
 of time is not only markedly artificial, but harrowing 
 and painful moreover, rebellion is stirred in reader 
 or witness. The conclusion is ruined despite the 
 high mood wherewith Deirdre goes to her death. 
 The less easily is this to be understood since in the 
 second act Synge displays his dramatic sense at its 
 highest. When Deirdre comes out of her tent and 
 hears Naisi confess to Fergus the possibility that 
 love may fail in him, the situation is critical, not only 
 for her, but for the dramatist. A lesser dramatist 
 would have made her withdraw into the tent, and 
 when subsequently she urges their return to Emain 
 the appeal would have been to irony. Not so Synge ! 
 He lets Naisi know she has overheard him. He takes 
 the sterner task on him, directing the emotion with 
 aU the facts known, making the appeal to stark 
 strength of dialogue. 
 
 It is a beautiful scene this, the most beautiful in 
 all the slender volume of his work. Deirdre chooses 
 death rather than a withering of love, and thereby 
 love is approved in her. " There are as many ways 
 to wither love," she says, " as there are stars in a 
 night of Samhain." " It's a long time we've had, 
 pressing the lips together, going up and down resting 
 in our arms, Naisi, waking with the smell of June 
 in the tops of the grasses, and listening to the birds 
 in the branches that are highest. . . . It's a long 
 
58 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 time we've had, but the end has come, surely." It 
 chastens as the highest beauty ever chastens, and 
 thereto the style is chastened and exalted. He who 
 bade adieu to Angus, Maeve, and Fand, to drink in 
 Tubber fair, was won at length by the higher beauty. 
 He gave it the strength of earth to glory in, while it 
 gave him an exaltation that purged. That the 
 product should be marred at its finish is a pity of 
 pities, for the interest of the psychic demands atten- 
 tion to the end. Had Synge Uved, such a complaint 
 would probably not have had its cause. 
 
 It is permitted to none to rule the future, or to 
 coerce its will. To the artist his art is largely its 
 own end, and the making of Beauty an abundant 
 recompense. Yet in this very making of Beauty he 
 lays hold on Eternity; and, except for such mortal 
 accidents as buried Blake for awhile, the maker of 
 Beauty, so it be Beauty, does, indeed, hold the ages 
 in his fist. Therefore, in asking if the art of J. M. 
 Synge will abide, the question is not if it be clever 
 or forceful, analytical or brUliant, but merely one 
 of the final appeal of Beauty. And by such an 
 appeal there seems little question in the matter. 
 For he brooded on Beauty; the very pages of his 
 prose topography are alive with it. He brooded 
 on the soul of man: even when describing the in- 
 habitants of Aran, Wicklow, or Kerry, he does not 
 
THE ART OF J. M. SYNGE 59 
 
 paint externals, he conveys essences; he does not 
 describe pictures, he carries atmospheres and moods 
 through the mind. He was not one to spring to 
 energy; he brooded in peace. And if his brooding 
 conveys a sense of bitterness and utter desolation, 
 it is yet a " desolation that is mixed everywhere with 
 the supreme beauty of the world." Such a mood 
 does not achieve a bulk of work. Moreover, he died 
 young. But he found his soul; he found Beauty; 
 and he found the Art that could enable him to 
 express one in terms of the other. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 
 
 The seeming inevitableness with which contemporary 
 criticism has gone astray in its judgments on Poets 
 and their Poetry is, from one point of view, one of 
 the humours of English literature. Looking over the 
 calm, imperturbable way in which Poetry has taken 
 its splendid passage through the years, unmindful 
 of any — unmindful chiefly of the clamorous critics 
 who have stood at byways like showmen loudly 
 voicing the claims of their byway to be Poesy's 
 highway, and hurrying up the highway in the end 
 with more speed than dignity — is, in the main, more 
 a happy than an unhappy spectacle. It is, at any 
 rate, a salutary spectacle: though, from the nature 
 of the case, it is difficult to see how it can be other 
 than so to the end of days, seeing it is the especial 
 business of the Poet to bring something that shall 
 increase the vision of men, to which, therefore, the 
 vision of men shall need time to adjust itself. And 
 it is a spectacle that stretches back further than we 
 are inclined to think. For example, we imagine 
 Shakespeare as overtopping handsomely the age 
 which he, with his sovereign, shares in naming; and 
 
 60 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 6i 
 
 we trick his contemporaries out in our own imagina- 
 tions. It is our thought, however: not theirs. It 
 was not for his greatness Shakespeare was praised 
 by his own age; not for the amazing and mingled 
 omniscience and exaltation of him ; but for his sugary 
 sweetness, his fertility and invention, if not indeed 
 his graciousness of person. A careful reading of the 
 literature of the time makes it tolerably clear that 
 to the men of their day it was Ben Jonson and not 
 Shakespeare who overtopped his time. The echo of 
 this can be heard quite clearly in Milton. So, too, 
 when Blake sang, it was Crabbe and not he whom 
 the critics crowned. Not Wordsworth, but Thomas 
 Campbell and Walter Scott won their plaudit. With 
 that plaudit in his ear Campbell jested on Shelley, who 
 was rejected as a " pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, 
 sedition, and sensuality" by those who acclaimed 
 Byron. Not only so : not only content to choose with 
 unerring wrongness the indifferent of two names both 
 with a claim to memory, Keats, as SheUey shrewdly 
 pointed out at the time, was rejected where even the 
 poetical works of Dean Milman were loudly praised. 
 
 After so immediate an unhappy memory singing 
 in their ears, one would have thought that critics, 
 however much they might have desired to laud 
 Tennyson, would have been tender in disparaging 
 Browning. After having dismissed as blasphemous 
 
62 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 and sensual a poet whom all now see as burning in 
 the white light of purity, singular purity, and holy 
 desire, one would have imagined that critics would 
 not so quickly have rushed to say that Browning's 
 phrasing was obscure, and that he was difficult to 
 read, faced by the fact that his phrasing is seldom, 
 if ever, so obscure as Shakespeare's, whereas, apart 
 from Sordello, he is no whit more difficult to read 
 than is MUton. But the trouble sprang from a deep 
 cause. As in the case of Blake and Wordsworth and 
 Shelley, so again in the case of Browning, critics were 
 not willing to accept, they either superciliously 
 rejected or superficially neglected, the poet's point 
 of view; whereas it would seem a commonplace 
 that it is not until a poet's point of view has been 
 accepted that his burning vision can be seen. It is 
 for this reason that a poet seldom sings to his own 
 generation. He must, it seems, always wait till at 
 least another layer beneath shall have formed itself. 
 It is chastening to think that a poet when he sings, 
 sings to an audience that is framing the alphabet in 
 its mind — ^is taking the first steps of progress towards 
 his song and his vision. 
 
 With Browning, however, the interest is heightened 
 by the peculiar nature of the problem he set. Steadily 
 and firmly he has brushed aside one and another, till 
 it is not too much to say that he has emerged, or is 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 63 
 
 like to emerge, in the foremost rank of English poets, 
 with such as Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Words- 
 worth, and Shelley for companions; yet it must be 
 admitted that, standing there, there is an oddness 
 about his presence in that company. His own age, 
 we know, regarded him less as a poet than as a con- 
 summate diner-out; it even attributed the partial 
 success he won with the critics in The Ring and the 
 Book to the operation of that social advantage. In 
 Lockhart's phrase, he did not at all look " like a 
 damned literary man," whereas Tennyson, with 
 whom he naturally stood in contemporary com- 
 parison, looked his part even to the matter of raiment. 
 Nor is it only a matter of personal appearance or 
 habit of life. However much these things may have 
 influenced his contemporaries, they can have little 
 hold on those who have not seen him plain, and have 
 not stopped and talked to him; and yet the mind 
 is so clothed with cant meanings of what poetry is 
 that it will turn with distaste from the shallowness 
 and smugness of The Idylls of the King, and still 
 think of it as undeniable poetry, even while it denies 
 that name to Men and Women, which it may read 
 and re-read with increasing joy. Comparisons are 
 undesirable; nevertheless, as the poets themselves 
 appeared, so their poetry. Tennyson's poetry answers 
 to the immediate and more obvious meaning of the 
 
64 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 word poetry, even when it is least satisfactory, while 
 Browning's poetry seems always to avoid it. 
 
 In his essay on Shelley's poetry Browning divided 
 poets into two main divisions: objective and sub- 
 jective; the fashioner or maker of beings independent 
 of himself, and the seer or diviner of new corre- 
 spondences between the universe and its Deity. It is, 
 as most distinctions are, more an aid to thinking than 
 a glance into the inner shrine of vision; yet it is 
 serviceable as providing a clue to Browning's own 
 procedure. He himself set the seer above the 
 fashioner ; yet, in spite of his sympathy with Shelley's 
 poetry and its marked effect on his early work, it 
 was the fashioner's and not the seer's way of work 
 that was his. The seer sings out of his own person- 
 ality: what he sings is what he himself has seen. 
 Browning seems ever to need some other personality 
 whom he may fashion to sing for him. He seems 
 never to be able to get at grips with Reality till he is 
 able to approach it in the guise of another's soul. 
 In Dramatic Lyrics he sang : — 
 
 " Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
 And the sun looked over the mountain's rim : 
 And straight was a path of gold for him. 
 And the need of the world of men for me." 
 
 It was in very truth a need. To the seer — to such 
 a seer as Wordsworth, for instance — ^Nature means 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 65 
 
 much. Nature is the lap where he may stand and 
 look into the burning face of God. Nature is flaming 
 with signs and hints of correspondences between 
 things that link the universe into an irrefragable 
 unity, so that a metaphor or simile becomes no mere 
 literary exercise, but the startling discovery of some 
 new at-one-ment between things, and imagery, such 
 imagery as trails through the Ode on the Intimations 
 of Immortality, takes rank as authentic vision and 
 not fanciful decoration. To Browning, too, doubtless 
 Nature meant much. There are lines and passages 
 in his poetry that recur to the memory, aspects of her 
 seen or described in such a way as to make it evident 
 that he saw her with far more than merely the 
 painter's eye. Yet she had no direct vision to convey 
 to him. Indeed, he seems almost uncomfortable in 
 her presence, as though irked by the vision he knows 
 there, feels there, but cannot quite see, and anxious 
 to return to his refuge among the world of men, to 
 see with their eyes and grope with their hands. Or 
 as he sang in the roaring Epilogue to Pacchiarotto, 
 in which he smote — so soundly smote and so lustily 
 smote — his inconsistent critics : — 
 
 " Man's thoughts and loves and hates! 
 
 Earth is my vineyard, these grew there: 
 From grape of the ground, I made and marred 
 My vintage; easy the task or hard, 
 
 E 
 
66 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Who set it — his praise be my reward ! 
 
 Earth's yield ! Who yearn for the Dark Blue Sea's, 
 Let them ' lay, pray, bray ' — the addl^-pates! 
 Mine be man's thoughts, loves, hates! " 
 
 " Earth is my vineyard " : so he sings. But earth 
 was more than his vineyard : earth was also his refuge. 
 When " the sun looked over the mountain's rim," 
 then, and chiefly then, as he looked down the " path 
 of gold," the " need of a world of men " became 
 most urgent. In the Prologue to Fifine at the Fair 
 he has a fancy that he " swam out far in the bay," 
 and as he swam there in a manner of flight, heaven 
 above and water beneath, 
 
 "Yes! there came floating by 
 Me, who lay floating too. 
 Such a strange butterfly! 
 Creature as dear as new." 
 
 The butterfly's is flight indeed, in its natural element; 
 his is only a mimicry of flight in an 
 " uncouth play 
 Of limbs that slip the fetter. 
 Pretend as they were not clay." 
 
 He fancies them tasting of flight thus, flight through 
 the heaven that is poetry, the poetry that is heaven, 
 to the Reality of which one is the vision and the 
 other is the splendour. Yet — 
 
 " And meantime, yonder streak 
 Meets the horizon's verge; 
 That is the land to seek 
 
 If we tire or dread the surge: 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION (>^ 
 
 " Land the solid and safe — 
 To ■welcome again (confess!) 
 When, high and dry, we chafe 
 The body, and don the dress. 
 
 " Does she look, pity, wonder 
 At one who mimics flight. 
 Swims — heaven above, sea under. 
 Yet always earth in sight ? " 
 
 But the " world of men " was even yet more than a 
 
 refuge or a vineyard. " I have, you are to know," 
 
 he once wrote to a correspondent, " such a love for 
 
 flowers and leaves, that I every now and then in an 
 
 impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, 
 
 to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent — 
 
 bite them to bits." It is that very impatience that 
 
 thwarts him in seeking to pluck the mystery of things 
 
 for himself. Put a rose into his hand, and what 
 
 does it mean? It makes him impatient; it, as has 
 
 been said, irks him. But put that rose into the 
 
 hands of one of his world of men: into, say, the 
 
 hands of John of Halberstadt: what then? Why, 
 
 then — 
 
 " He with a ' look you! ' vents a brace of rhymes. 
 And in there breaks the sudden rose itself. 
 Over us, under, round us every side. 
 Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs 
 And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all, — 
 Buries us with a glory, young once more. 
 Pouring heaven into this shut house of life." 
 
68 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 It was as if, looking to see what the rose meant to 
 John of Halberstadt, it came upon him with a sudden 
 uprush what the rose meant to him. Not only did 
 the attempt to see reality through the eyes of another 
 give him an intentness and patience that otherwise 
 he might have lacked, but, striking along the lines 
 of his receptivity, it made the world of men his step- 
 ping-stone to reality. 
 
 Thus, he was no mere maker of men and women in 
 the purely objective sense. He was not merely the 
 creator of men in their " thoughts, loves, hates," 
 content if he could present them living as Scott and 
 Crabbe did. His creatures became eyes and ears to 
 him wherewith to see and hear things more sharply 
 and intensely than he himself could. They became 
 as so many cloaks to him, clothed in whom he could 
 enter at once through divers doors of the Temple of 
 Truth. Through them all he could see the much- 
 more that would have escaped a single vision; and 
 in them each he captured the intentness that annulled 
 the irresolution consequent on confusion. For ex- 
 ample: is it the coming of Christianity into the 
 world ? How shall a man such as he, a man with a 
 strong bent for strange philosophical research, a man 
 instinct with classic culture, and a man, moreover, 
 whose whole soul rose insurgent for a revelation of 
 love in a world whose being and whose laws made 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 69 
 
 love a paradox otherwise inconceivable — ^how shall 
 such a man state his attitude to that? His accep- 
 tance he did assert. But how little that expressed 
 him! What worlds remained untold! What said 
 the philosopher there ? How spake the artist whose 
 business it was to make Beauty, and who thereby 
 took into his hands the cup of joy for ever, stirring 
 unquenchable thirsts in him? Not in his proper 
 affirmation could he utter all that. But take the 
 three poems that celebrate the dawn of Christianity 
 into the world! Cleon, as a Greek, may reject the 
 teaching of " a mere barbarian Jew," yet it is clear 
 that the teaching of the mere barbarian Jew brings 
 him just that cool cup that his art has set him athirst 
 for. Karshish, the Arab physician, in An Epistle, 
 and John in A Death in the Desert, on the one hand 
 and the other, show the impact of this new revelation 
 on minds inclined to curious philosophical learning 
 and full of quick personal aspiration. 
 
 Or is it the attitude of the Artist to his Art ? We 
 who have all Browning's work before us know that 
 there was in him the possibility of the artist who 
 could turn away resolutely from vulgar success, in 
 the secrecy of his own soul to work the thing that 
 pleased him; that there was also the artist who could 
 happily take all good things, or seeming good things, 
 as they came (the artist that wrote How we carried. 
 
70 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the good news to Ghent); and also the artist whose 
 labour consistently was to express the thing just 
 beyond his reach, and who knew that to fail to reach 
 forward would be to fall into sterility, perfect or 
 imperfect. He was not one of these, but at one time 
 aU three. Each expressed no more than a facet of 
 himself; and he could discover each facet in turn by 
 looking at Art through such different temperaments 
 as those of Pictor Ignotus, Fra Lippo Lippi, and 
 Andrea del Sarto in the unique trilogy in Men and 
 Women. Nor is it merely that he expressed himself 
 in this way. In expressing himself so he discovered 
 himself so. 
 
 In this he is, in the terms of his own distinction, not 
 only a fashioner, but a seer also. He is a seer through 
 the creatures he has fashioned. Indeed, he is only 
 interested in his creatures at those angles of their 
 lives that are full of crisis — as though it was then, 
 and then only, he could look through them to the 
 realities beyond that caught his interest, they being 
 opaque to him at all other whiles. It was that one 
 vivid situation in Andrea del Sarto's life, that one 
 crucial moment when his life spread itself out before 
 him like a drama, that Browning was interested in; 
 and only in Andrea del Sarto for the sake of that 
 moment. In the picture from which Browning drew 
 his conception, the situation is so vivid that, with the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 71 
 
 poem before us, it is not difficult to see him looking 
 through, it to the interest beyond. A variety of 
 things may help to create such a situation and such 
 a moment : a chance meeting in " Dis aliter visum," 
 an indiscreet discovery in " Fra Lippo Lippi," the full- 
 ness of achievement in " Abt Vogler "; but it is the 
 situation that matters, for it is then that his char- 
 acters become illumined with new meaning. It is 
 only at such moments that the creatures can lend the 
 creator eyes and ears to see and hear withal. 
 
 A " fashioner," or objective poet, is usually in 
 the habit of seeking a dramatic guise for his work- 
 manship; and it is not surprising to see that the 
 majority of Browning's early works are all dramatic. 
 Yet a dramatic poet is interested in his characters 
 for their own sakes, and not merely for what they 
 may mean to him at one moment, of their lives. He 
 may be, and according to the greatness of his genius 
 he will be, interested in the destiny they may suggest ; 
 and this will be suggested in the tragic or comic 
 solution they between them will achieve. In other 
 words, however deeply he may see into them, he 
 sees them from without ; he is not so much concerned 
 with any portion of them that is not employed in 
 the dramatic field, but he is vitally concerned with 
 every whit of them that is so employed. With 
 Browning it is different. He is concerned from 
 
72 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 within outwards. In his dramas there are some 
 
 portions of his characters employed in the dramatic 
 
 field that interest him but little. They are of little 
 
 spiritual consequence to him. On the other hand, 
 
 there are whole phases of character that have no 
 
 dramatic employment that concern him greatly, for 
 
 they are of spiritual importance to himself. In other 
 
 words, his interest is not with the character in his 
 
 deed, but with the character before the deed, with 
 
 the possibility ripe in him for an interesting diversity 
 
 of deed. It is not the action that fascinates his mind, 
 
 but the burning seed-plot of action, for it is there 
 
 the dreadful meanings of man's life shift and shape 
 
 themselves like portents on a stormy sky. As his 
 
 Luria says to Domizia : — 
 
 " To the motive, the endeavour, the heart's self. 
 Your quick sense looks : you crown and call aright 
 The soul o' the purpose, ere 'tis shaped as act, 
 Takes flesh i' the world and clothes itself a king." 
 
 It is with this clue that the pope in The Ring and the 
 
 Book dissevers the tangled webs of the story before 
 
 him, seeking to judge justly and fearlessly, saying: — 
 
 " For I am ware it is the seed of act, 
 God holds appraising in his hollow palm, 
 Not act grown great thence on the world below. 
 Leafage and branchage vulgar eyes admire." 
 
 In his first of dramas, in what, indeed, is his first 
 notable poem, Paracelsus, he is already so much 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 73 
 
 aware of the bent of his own mind that he declared 
 his intention clearly. In the original Preface he 
 wrote: " Instead of having recourse to an external 
 machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis 
 I desire to produce, I have ventured to display some- 
 what minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, 
 and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced 
 and determined to be generally discernible in its 
 effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not 
 altogether excluded; and this for a reason. I have 
 endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama." And 
 it is clear that he has written a poem, not a drama, 
 although he has couched his poem in the dialogue 
 framework inevitably associated with drama. A 
 careful comparison wUl show that there is not so 
 wide a difference between Paracelsus and Sorddlo, 
 the poem he next engaged on, although one he called 
 a dramatic poem and the other a narrative poem. 
 The machinery of one is dialogue even as the machi- 
 nery of the other is narrative; but the chief business 
 of each poem, what may be called the central purpose 
 of each poem, is enacted in the monologues of each 
 character. It is there we see unwind and unfold the 
 ravelled possibilities of action, of success or failure, 
 and of all that is fateful in the eternal destinies of 
 men. In these monologues we are taken behind the 
 scenes. We leave the footlights without, where the 
 
74 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 character rings down the coin that he will elect to 
 
 barter with, the deed that shall give his soul shape 
 
 whatever be the consequence; and we see the soul 
 
 with a variety of coinage, true coin or false counter, 
 
 before him, with a diversity of possible deeds into which 
 
 he may be content to shape himself, but as yet unsold 
 
 and unshaped. There is nothing unimportant there; 
 
 there is no shadow of a possibility there that ranks not 
 
 equal with all other possibilities. Or as Pippa sang : — 
 
 " Say not ' a small event! ' Why ' small ' ? 
 Costs it more pain than this, ye call 
 A ' great event,' should come to pass 
 Than that ? Untwine me from the mass 
 Of deeds which make up life, one deed 
 Power may fall short in or exceed ! " 
 
 A curiosity of mood such as this is essentially 
 dramatic, and yet its very nature is to preclude it 
 from the achievement of Drama. Being concerned 
 with souls before the decision of action, it is obviously 
 concerned with men and women before the moment 
 when their several destinies cross and sway one 
 another; and it is this moment that makes Drama. 
 It might be said that Drama is the result of a number 
 of anterior dramatic decisions. The dramatist 
 assumes such decisions as the basis of his workman- 
 ship; Browning is concerned with the achievement 
 of such decisions. Had Browning had the telling of 
 the tragedy of Othello we should have had a mono- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 75 
 
 logue from lago giving us the story from his point 
 of view, in order that thereby we might be enabled 
 to see the resolution of decision taking shape in his 
 mind, another from Othello, and another from 
 Desdemona, who would have survived long enough 
 to that end, and it would have been left to Cassio to 
 give us the tragic loading of the bed. Each decision 
 would have been dramatic: but it is the sum total 
 of the decisions that would have made Drama. 
 
 It is in this sense that Browning is dramatic; and 
 therefore it is that Pifpa Passes is so characteristic 
 a piece of work of his. In each of the four situations 
 chosen, situations that Pippa conceives as full of 
 happiness, a fateful decision is pending in the balance. 
 In each case the characters of the situation have 
 their hands irresolutely wandering over a bed of 
 flowers, not knowing which bloom to pluck and wear 
 for shame or glory on their souls. It is this situation 
 that fascinates Browning's interest, because it is 
 this situation that reveals to him with vivid and 
 startling illumination the value of the realities beyond 
 that would else have eluded him : and hence the final 
 influence that sends the hand swiftly down to the 
 blossom of its choice becomes momentous and tragic. 
 No matter how slight it may otherwise seem to be, 
 its value becomes of the highest. Pippa's wandering 
 songs on her one annual holiday are no great matter, 
 
'iS STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 it would seem: no more than an idle jest turned 
 against a comrade over wine. But one, as the other, 
 may make or mar a soul for all time. 
 
 It is so more or less in all his plays. In his historical 
 plays there may of necessity be less of this (and 
 therefore Strafford is of little consequence in the body 
 of the work) ; in his later plays it may so overburden 
 the dialogue as to threaten its final disruption into 
 the monologues of Men and Women and Dramatis 
 PersoncE ; but all the while we feel he is waiting till 
 his characters achieve that particular critical angle 
 when they shall scintillate with their hidden and 
 inner illumination. It is this vivid moment he 
 celebrates in his vivid lyric, My Star: — 
 
 " All that I know 
 Of a certain star 
 Is, it can throw 
 
 (Like the angled spar) 
 Now a dart of red. 
 
 Now a dart of blue; 
 Till my friends have said 
 They would fain see, too. 
 My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 
 Then it stops hke a bird ; Uke a flower, hangs furled : 
 
 They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
 What matter to me if their star is a world ? 
 
 Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it." 
 
 In one instance, indeed, destructive of all dramatic 
 intention, this " dartling " even continues beyond 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 77 
 
 the limits of the play. In his last play. In a Balcony, 
 perhaps notably his last play, at its riioment of con- 
 clusion the Queen does not seem even yet to have 
 taken her final decision. It is in her that the play 
 pivots; and when her tragic moment comes, she 
 sees Life snatched from her very hand, and " goes 
 out." What her decision with regard to the lovers 
 is, we are not told. Constance hears the " measured, 
 heavy tread " of the guard, and the hint is that they 
 are coming to take the lovers to their doom. But we 
 knowthat much later in life Browning himself earnestly 
 discussed the possibility that the guard is not heard 
 coming to take away the lovers, but to bear away the 
 dead body of the Queen, she slain by her own hand. 
 The Queen's resolve is never taken. The cloudy por- 
 tents are still to be seen shifting and shaping on the sky. 
 Thus it is not surprising to see, in course of time, 
 the unnecessary and cumbersome business of dialogue 
 or narrative drop away, to leave the self-revealing 
 monologue standing in its naked strength. In the 
 third volume of Bells and Pomegranates, entitled 
 Dramatic Lyrics, Browning had already been looking 
 at Life through the vision of men and women, 
 creatures of his. Only then, though the lyrics were 
 dramatic in the sense that they expressed the moods 
 and emotions of creatures of Browning, and not of 
 Browning himself, they were not dramatic in the 
 
78 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 sense that some vital shaping of character was 
 implicit in them. In a sense all lyrics are dramatic; 
 and the critic who gives to the lyric the sense of 
 personal emotion is only and arbitrarily insisting 
 on calling a passing moment eternity. Every true 
 work of Art was lived, and lived intensely, as it 
 was wrought. Thereafter it takes a detached and 
 separate existence. Shakespeare lived Othello when 
 he made him, even as Wordsworth lived Tintern 
 Abbey when he made it. Then, they were subjective; 
 once finished, they became objective, for the soul of 
 man lives on, and passes on, and changes. It is only a 
 question of phraseology. There is no lyric, surely, that 
 expresses all of a man, or even all of him at that one 
 moment of utterance. A lyric can only express a phase 
 of him : and if he choose to place that phase in circum- 
 stances other than his own in order to see it the better, 
 it does not at all mean that that phase is not his own. 
 Yet it was necessary, if dialogue and narrative were 
 to drop away, that the explanations they oflFered as 
 to the situation implicit in the dramatic resolve or 
 aspiration should be introduced into the monologue; 
 and the suspense of lyric emotion, however long the 
 poem might be in which it is caught and crystallised, 
 is too acute to permit of such explanation. When 
 "Kentish Sir Byng stood for his king, bidding the 
 crop-headed Parliament swing," it was but a great, 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 79 
 
 gay, rollicking hatred of crop-heads and a breezy 
 love of bright attire and wine-cups as all good Parlia- 
 mentarians must feel sometimes at the heart of 
 them, or remain but lean-souled men for the lack of 
 it. There was no better ship-money man than 
 Browning, and yet he lived every moment of that 
 lyric. Biit though it was no more than that, it lent 
 itself very easily to development. It needed but 
 little development to express, by implication, all 
 the various sides of a dramatic situation, if its author 
 were only happy in his choice of a promontory-peak 
 from which the whole country could be viewed with 
 one slow turn of the eye. And it was not likely 
 that the man who sang 
 
 " Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. 
 Or what's a heaven for ? " — 
 
 the man who sang boldly 
 
 " Stake your counter as boldly every whit, 
 Venture as warily, use the same skill, 
 Do your best whether winning or losing it. 
 
 If you choose to play ! — is my principle. 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! 
 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 
 Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. 
 Though the end in sight were a vice, I say " — 
 
8o STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 who maintained that the only man to be held in 
 contempt was he who did not strive loftily and 
 ambitiously, with failure and success as irrelevancies 
 apart — such a man was but little likely to choose 
 a wrong pi^omontory-peak. For his attention was 
 on that which is the secret of all Earth's interest. 
 
 So there came about that great sequence of mono- 
 logues in Men and Women and Dramatis Persona. 
 It seems inconceivable that the two volumes in 
 which Men and Women made their appearance should 
 have met with so slight an attention. One would 
 have conceived that the critics, seeing a writer with 
 such a diversity of riches in his fee, would, if only 
 from curiosity, have endeavoured to assume Brown- 
 ing's point of view in order to discover what his 
 vision was. Instead of which, they vamped inconse- 
 quentialities as to the difficulties of understanding 
 him, whereas the only difficulty was that of dis- 
 covering and assuming his point of view, of searching 
 to see exactly what the monologue meant to him, 
 and why he expressed himself through the lips of 
 fifty others in this way. To deny that Browning 
 has his vices of style would be foolish. Relative 
 pronouns are readily dropped; small words are 
 clipped and chipped mercilessly at times; words are 
 taken across his knee and their quantity broken in 
 order to fit them into some position in a line that 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 8i 
 
 they have rebelled at; strange words are used, not 
 because of their beauty, but because of his erudition. 
 But these make him aggravating to read, not difficult 
 to understand. Once the point of view of a poem 
 is seen, its difficulties are gone. Even the aggrava- 
 tions often take a new meaning: for it would be 
 clearly foolish to expect the same stately beauty of 
 line from Fra Lippo Lippi as we are to receive from 
 Cleon. 
 
 Whether such a development was or was not con- 
 scious and deliberate, matters little: the result was 
 amazing enough, for aU the critics' neglect. Probably 
 with a man of Browning's faculty of mind — ^probing, 
 searching, introspective — it was conscious. If it 
 were so, it would explain the shout of joy with which 
 he came upon The Old Tellotv Book and the story 
 that lay hidden in it in a perplexed series of legal 
 pleadings and cross-pleadings : — 
 
 " Small quarto size, part print part manuscript: 
 A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact 
 Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard. 
 And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since." 
 
 It also explains the story of his at once, on reading 
 the " square old yellow book," taking twelve pebbles 
 from the road and arranging them at equal distances 
 on the parapet bordering it, in representation of the 
 twelve books of the poem; and the fact that he 
 
82 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 penned in the book, in Greek, the line, " But for me 
 the Muse in her strength prepares her mightiest 
 arrow." His Art was awaiting such a consummation. 
 His use of the monologue, as it had developed in his 
 hand, only needed some such occasion. His previous 
 book had been called Dramatis Personce ; but there 
 the dramatis -personee were each of them concerned 
 with his own drama. Their several monologues did 
 not centre round a common story. But the concep- 
 tion of nine dramatis fersona (or rather six dramatis 
 fersonce and three onlookers), each of them in a 
 lengthy monologue teUing a single story from his 
 or her own promontory-peak, each seeing the cir- 
 cumambient countryside differently arranged, each 
 occupied with the history of a soul through the various 
 crises that take the seed of act and develop it into 
 leafage and branchage, giving it shape thereby for 
 aU time — such was a conception that might well 
 thrill any artist; but coming, as it did, at a particular 
 moment in the development of Browning's Art, how 
 much more it meant to him cannot easily be said. 
 
 And how wonderful the result is! Its gifts are so 
 various that it is difficult not to be tempted into 
 language that loses sight of its origin and cause. 
 Apart altogether from portraiture, for example, let 
 one but read in due order the tale told by the 
 three chief participants. Count Guido Franceschini, 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 83 
 
 Giuseppe Caponsacchi, and Pompilia. Each tale 
 passes over the same incidents of the story; and 
 each carries sympathy and conviction — a sympathy 
 and conviction so complete that it is not easy to 
 remember that there are other tales to be told. In 
 itself this is no inconsiderable feat. It is in itself 
 sufficient to show that the monologue was to Brown- 
 ing, in itself and in its implications, the discovery 
 that should vindicate his Art. But there is the 
 portraiture also; and here, it is necessary to say, 
 Browning has not alone added to, but enriched the 
 creatures of the world's literature. The portraits of 
 Men and Women and Dramatis Persona were but 
 sketches beside the human knowledge that went 
 to the creation of such men as Count Guido and 
 Giuseppe Caponsacchi, They touch all sides of 
 human life. They nod at aU points of the compass. 
 The husband pleading for his life on the indictment 
 of murdering his wife, who, when charged with 
 cruelty towards her, does not deny it, but boldly 
 embarks on the attempt to subdue the charge by 
 frank casuistry, and succeeds, and is not merely 
 arguing but expressing himself, is not a less masterly 
 achievement than the " young, frank, personable 
 priest," who, while serving his church daintily in 
 ladies' service, " a fribble and a coxcomb," yet 
 preserves a pure manliness that, at a glance from 
 
84 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 a lovely-souled woman in distress, can stand erect 
 in its challenging strength, never doubting the loveli- 
 ness of her soul in spite of seeming letters to the 
 contrary, finally throwing aside all chance of worldly 
 success for the privilege of merely serving and saving 
 her, afterwards in the teeth of lewd mockery to 
 declare, proudly, that, purely, he loves her. 
 
 These two portraits in themselves were a distinction 
 to any artist. But what of Pompilia ? There is no 
 doubt that she meant more to Browning than we 
 imagine. There is an aloofness about her loveliness, 
 a simple frankness withal, that suggest it. It would 
 have been enough in most women to have been, on 
 the one hand, the touchstone to Caponsacchi's true 
 greatness, and, on the other, to have won from the 
 old Pope so very beautiful and humble a tribute as 
 he gives. But her loveliness and purity are not 
 only a rumour. That were an easy thing, perhaps, 
 for a poet to have achieved. But she has to maintain 
 them and make them real in a monologue of nearly 
 two thousand lines : and she succeeds. Join to these 
 Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis,counsel for Guido, 
 
 " The jolly learned man of middle age, 
 Cheek and jowl all m laps with fat and law 
 
 Ovidian quip and Ciceronian crank, 
 A-bubble in the lar5mx while he laughs, 
 As he had fritters deep down frying there;" 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 85 
 
 Juris Doctor JbKannes Baptista Bottihus the Fisc, who, 
 in his irritating zeal for having something to prove, 
 assumes PompUia's guilt in order to minimise the impor- 
 tance of it; and the old Pope, seeking to judge justly 
 in that light of heaven that is almost falling at his feet : 
 and a gallery of portraits faces us that is not easy to 
 do justice to, save than to say that the poem they help 
 to make is one of the very great things of our literature. 
 In his later work Browning went on to put the 
 monologue to newer uses yet. Instead of merely 
 declaring and defining the implicit drama, instead 
 only of depicting the ravelled possibilities of action 
 to which the crucial moment of decision came, the 
 character chosen undertook, moreover, to defend, 
 in a wonder of casuistry that puzzles the wit, the 
 action it had decided upon. More than a hint of 
 this was heard in Bishop Blougram's Apology and 
 Sludge the Medium, but it was left to Prince Hohen- 
 stiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, and Fifine at the 
 Fair to carry out the process in fuUneSs of detail. 
 Here, too, not less than in the simpler use of the 
 monologue, it is not difficult to see Browning using 
 his characters as agents in order to see things that he 
 might have a difficulty in focussing in his own person. 
 Indeed, in these two poems their very difficulty is 
 just this. Time and time again the casuistry breaks, 
 and Browning, through the eyes of his character, is 
 
86 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 seen looking on the reality beyond. Then the clouds 
 of casuistry roU on again: and it is not easy to say 
 how far or how thoroughly we may trust the vision 
 he seems to have seen. 
 
 It is singular, and yet but fitting, that when he 
 had to see his vision with his own eyes, and declare 
 what he found to say in his own proper person, he 
 lost rather than gained in distinctness. Towards the 
 end of his days a great private loss helped him to 
 make one of his loveliest of the later poems in La 
 Saisiaz. In his earlier days, in Christmas Eve and 
 Easter Day, he made a poem where he told his own 
 story, a poem that his own generation understood 
 where it found in the rest of his work only mystifi- 
 cation. The shock of grief, and the seeking for 
 wisdom in grief, give a quiet sunset beauty to La 
 Saisiaz that is searching, whereas the earlier poem 
 jolts and jars against this and that would-be exponent 
 of Christianity; but in neither one nor the other do 
 we seem to hear the authentic tones of Browning as 
 we hear them when he gazes through this artist, as 
 he struggles to express Beauty, or that musician, 
 whose music kindles in him a passion for the moment 
 when his broken, aspiring harmonies shall be com- 
 pleted, uplifted, and made eternal. 
 
 Both poems, for different reasons, are unsatis- 
 factory. The man who, in Men and. Women, can 
 
ROBERT BROWNING'S VISION 87 
 
 express himself in such a width of sympathy and 
 understanding, in Christmas Eve and Easter Day 
 finds himself at once at loggerheads with people. 
 Instead of desiring to see through men and women, 
 he was content to let his gaze rest on them ; and the 
 result was that they became opaque, and therefore 
 meaningless, to him, and he became unsympathetic 
 and, in the end, brusque. It is hard to conceive that 
 the same man who wrote Bishop BlougranCs Apology 
 and The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's 
 Church should have written Christmas Eve. Similarly 
 with the later poem : it is difficult to believe that the 
 poet who left only one conclusion to be drawn from 
 the intentness of his vision through Karshish and 
 Cleon should have been content to turn to personal 
 argument in La Saisiaz. Both poems lack distinct- 
 ness for the simple reason that he was too wide and 
 various a personality to be able to express himself 
 adequately in his own proper person. He could 
 not bring himself to a focus there; but when he can 
 get another to see for him, then indecision is lost, and 
 we get a clear, ringing shout of discovery. 
 
 In his last magnificent words he expressed himself as 
 
 " One who never turned his back but marched breast forward. 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph. 
 
 Held we fall to rise, are bafS.ed to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
88 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 This was the man who expressed himself most fitly 
 in the creatures of his creation. His world of men 
 expressed him as he expressed them, and they helped 
 him to his vision and the distinctness thereof. They 
 gave him width ; and through them we catch the true 
 accents of his voice. Ajid if to help us to stand 
 equipped in manliness and womanliness, loving 
 Beauty and seeing Truth, ripe in sympathy and 
 understanding, be any measure of greatness, then, 
 even apart from all else, we must echo Landor and 
 say, " Browning, a great poet, a very great poet 
 indeed." 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 
 
 Dr. Johnson gave it as his robust opinion with regard 
 to Shakespearean textual crii^ism, " that the reading 
 of the ancient boolis is probably true, and therefore 
 is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, per- 
 spicuity, or mere iinprovements of the sense. For 
 though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any 
 to the judgment of the first publishers, yet they who 
 had the copy before their eyes were more likely to 
 read it right than we who read it only by imagination." 
 Having said so much in the way of general precept, 
 he states it his personal finding in editorial work that : 
 " As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust 
 it less; and after I had printed a few plays resolved 
 to insert none of my own readings in the text. Upon 
 this caution I now congratulate myself, for every 
 day increases my doubt of my emendations." Such 
 a discovery from a man little given to mental humility, 
 perhaps, is not to be underestimated. Nevertheless, 
 it is true that when he came to Hamlet's speech to 
 Polonius, " For, if the sun breed maggots in a dead 
 dog, being a good kissing carrion," etc., he accepted, 
 and not only accepted but praised in exorbitant 
 terms, Warburton's alteration of " being a god kissing 
 
 89 
 
90 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 carrion " ; whereas the first was not only sense, but 
 very finely exemplary of Hamlet's swift, elliptical, 
 revolted state of mind, and the second, in addition 
 to being but poor sense, was an effort after compact- 
 ness and prettiness very little likely to have been 
 attempted by Hamlet at any time, much less in his 
 wild and stormy hours of thought. 
 
 Still, precepts are more easily learnt than put into 
 practice, and Dr. Johnson's is valuable in the teeth 
 of his several violations of it. Readers of Shake- 
 speare cannot but approve the doughty doctor. After 
 some familiarity with the Shakespearean idiom, it is 
 generally more possible to make sense out of the text 
 of the First Folio than out of most emendations of 
 it; indeed, it will generally be found that such 
 emendations give a strange sense of shock to the 
 acquired idiomatic atmosphere. For example, there 
 are two things that very largely go to creating the 
 Shakespeare idiom : one of these being his impatience 
 with a merely compact and orderly picture, his eager 
 leaping from one swift metaphor to another swift 
 metaphor in a continual forward progression; and the 
 other, an equally swift and elliptical way of thought. 
 The first is an impatience with the formal consecu- 
 tiveness of imagery; and the second, an impatience 
 with the formal consecutiveness of thought. Of both 
 of these his work is full. Now, in the instance 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 91 
 
 already given, both of these are the very atmosphere 
 of the sentence as it stands in the First Folio, but 
 both are dispelled in the orderliness of Warburton's 
 emendation. Therefore, whether or no Warburton's 
 suggestion be better than the First Folio, it is im- 
 possible to come to any other conclusion than that 
 Shakespeare wrote the sentence as it appears in the 
 earlier text. 
 
 But there is another element that goes to constitute 
 the Shakespeare idiom: and that is, a rapid, almost 
 startling, always beautiful picture, sketched in a 
 few words; such a picture, indeed, as must compel 
 us to believe that something similar to it had at some 
 time passed under Shakespeare's observation, and 
 had thus given the hint to his imagination. Instances 
 abound. The most famous would perhaps be, " She 
 sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief," 
 of which, so startling is it, that the lover would be 
 prepared to affirm that, as Shakespeare penned it, 
 he had some or other definite piece of statuary in his 
 mind, which twined itself in his words, swiftly and 
 precisely. 
 
 Did even space permit, it would be unnecessary 
 further to instance this last characteristic of Shake- 
 speare's method of imagery, for by their very nature 
 such instances stand out and claim attention. Yet 
 there is one such that all trace has been lost of in the 
 
92 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 course of textual emendation. In a sense, it is the 
 most beautiful of them all. Certainly it is one of the 
 most noteworthy, seeing it can definitely be traced 
 to his personal experience. Yet in no one present 
 text does it appear. Each editor, and every editor, 
 has conspired to pass it out of memory, and it would 
 probably never have been recovered from darkness 
 had not a fragment of his forgotten biography come 
 to light to give us its clue. 
 
 When, in 1603, Elizabeth died, and James suc- 
 ceeded to the English throne, one of the first acts of 
 the new monarch was to extend a kindly wing over 
 the whole field of dramatic endeavour. Years before, 
 ill 1599, a company of English players had visited 
 Scotland, and he had then an opportunity of giving 
 proof of his kindly disposition towards the drama. 
 For the ministers of Edinburgh had passed an Act 
 of Sessions prohibiting attendance at the plays. 
 Forthwith James had summoned the Sessions before 
 his Council, and commanded them straightway to 
 annul their Act. Now, as King of England, he gave 
 even a more emphatic proof of his regard. To the 
 company playing at the Fortune he granted per- 
 mission to be known as the Prince's men. To those 
 playing at the Red Bull he conceded the right to pass 
 as the Queen's men. But those playing at the Globe 
 he took under his own patronage. Previously, with 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 93 
 
 one break, in fact, since 1594, they had been known 
 as the Lord Chamberlain's men; now they took rank 
 as the " King's servants," and were entitled " freely 
 to use and exercise the arte and facultie of playing 
 comedies, tragedies, histories," and so forth. Not 
 only so, but he proceeded to address all justices, 
 mayors, and sheriffs, saying that not only were the 
 players to be permitted " to show and exercise pub- 
 liquely to the best of their commodite " their " arte 
 and facultie," but that " what further favour you 
 shall shew to these our servantes for our sakes we shall 
 take kindely at y' handes." It was in this company 
 Shakespeare was director and shareholder, having 
 rather more than a " fellowship " in that " cry of 
 players." 
 
 Yet this was not aU. When, in this year, the 
 king's coronation had been celebrated, the plague 
 had been prevalent, and as it was obviously unwise 
 to permit any concourse of the people under the 
 circumstances, the royal progress through the City 
 of London had necessarily been postponed to the 
 following year. On March 15 th, 1604, therefore, 
 this duly came off, and for the purposes of this pro- 
 cession Shakespeare and eight of his colleagues 
 received as a royal grant four and a half yards apiece 
 of scarlet cloth to make their cloaks withal. Whether, 
 in fact, they paced proudly in the procession or not 
 
94 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 must remain a doubtful question. But the grant is 
 sufficient to prove that when Shakespeare's company 
 became known as the King's company this meant 
 that they took rank as part of the King's household, 
 for to all the King's household this grant was made, 
 and only to the King's household. 
 
 A matter of further interest is that in August of the 
 same year Juan Fernandez de Velasco, the Constable 
 of Castile, came over to England on an embassy of 
 peace, and stayed at what is now always known as 
 Somerset House, but what was then frequently 
 spoken of as Denmark House. Here he was greeted 
 by a goodly company, among them some gentlemen 
 clad in the royal scarlet habits and cloaks, in the 
 capacity of attendant grooms. During the whole 
 term of his stay they were there to wait upon him 
 in some or other serviceable capacity. That Shake- 
 speare was among these is known by the fact that 
 Hemynge and PhiUips, as treasurer and business 
 manager of the King's company, were paid for this 
 service, for themselves and " some of their fellows," 
 as " his Ma''«' Groomes of the Chamber and Players, 
 for waytinge and attendinge on his Ma''= service, 
 by commandemente, upon the Spanishe Embassador 
 att Somersette House, for the space of XVIII. 
 dayes." 
 
 Thus it is obvious that Shakespeare held rank, not 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 95 
 
 only as a dramatist and player, but also as a Groom 
 of the Chamber. It is probably from his observation 
 in his duties in this capacity that Shakespeare gleaned 
 that experience that fills his later plays fuU of satirical 
 comments as to the see-saw rivalry for favour in 
 courtly places. But a matter that weighs far more 
 considerably at the moment is that, as a member 
 of the King's household, Shakespeare would have to 
 make his appearance daily at the Board of Green 
 Cloth. This Board was so called because it sat about 
 a table invariably covered with green cloth. It met 
 under the presidency of the Lord High Steward, 
 whose business it was to dispense the household 
 moneys. 
 
 Having once started on this train of thought, the 
 memory cannot but have recalled to its attention that 
 this could not have been Shakespeare's first attend- 
 ance before the Board of Green Cloth. Back in the 
 Christmas festivities of 1594 Shakespeare, together 
 with Richard Burbage and Will Kempe, had acted 
 twice at court. And on March 15 th of the following 
 year they had been required to attend at the meetings 
 of this Board to receive what was, in the money of 
 the time, very excellent payment for their services. 
 The picture of this company seated about a green- 
 covered table could not have failed to imprint itself 
 on his imagination; and it would be strange if he 
 
96 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 could not have wrought out of it some startling 
 imagery that would hold and impress the reading, eye. 
 
 Now it so chances that in the somewhat maligned 
 First Folio, in the second scene of the second act of 
 Henry V., at the Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap, 
 Mistress Quickly had occasion to inform Pistol, Nym, 
 Bardolph, and the boy of the death of rare Sir John 
 Falstaff. She thus described it : " 'A made a fine 
 end, and went away, an it had beene any Christoune 
 Child: 'a parted ev'n just betweene Twelve and One, 
 ev'n at the turning o' th' Tyde: for after I saw him 
 fumble with the Sheets, and play with Flowers, and 
 smile upon his fingers end, I knew there was but one 
 way: for his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen and a 
 Table of greene fields." 
 
 This fell into the hands of the learned Dr. Theobald; 
 and so as to follow the exquisite logic of his train of 
 thought it will be as well to give his note on the 
 passage. Says he : "I have an edition of Shake- 
 speare by me with some marginal conjectures of a 
 gentleman sometime deceased ; and he is of the mind 
 to correct the passage thus : ' for his nose was as a 
 pen, and 'a talked of green fields.' It is certainly 
 observable of people near death, when they are 
 delirious by a fever, that they talk of moving ; as it is 
 of those in a calenture, that they have their heads 
 run on green fields. The variation from Table to 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 97 
 
 talked is not of a very great latitude; though we may 
 still come nearer the traces of the letters by restoring 
 it thus : ' for his nose was as sharpe as a pen, and 
 'a babied of green fields.' " 
 
 Thus the " gentleman sometime deceased," and 
 Dr. Theobald, happily long since deceased, came to 
 the earnest judgment that FalstaflF " talked of 
 moving"; and, moreover, being "in a calenture" 
 " ran his head on green fields." Thus, too. Dr. Theo- 
 bald, in his turn, ran his head also on green fields, but 
 whether in a calenture or not it is unwise to conjecture. 
 And the result has been that a chorus of generous 
 praise has followed this noteworthy emendation; 
 one saying that if Shakespeare did not write it so, 
 at least he would have accepted it so; and another, 
 that the emendation in question is " probably the 
 happiest one ever made in Shakespeare's text." It 
 has not occurred to any to bring to mind of what 
 sort was Falstaff's life and way of thought. Nor 
 does it seem to have occurred to any to bring to mind 
 of what sort was Shakespeare's pathos. Neither 
 Falstaff nor Shakespeare would have indulged in way- 
 ward sentimentalities when direct thought and swift 
 imagery best suited the urgent solemnity of death. 
 Falstaff's thought, at his utmost bent of humour, 
 was always philosophical; and this is proved in the 
 very passage; for to demonstrate that he neither 
 
 G 
 
98 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 ran his head on, nor babbled of, green fields, it is 
 expressly stated that the one word on his lips was 
 " God." Moreover, Shakespeare's pathos is short 
 and sharp, voiceless sometimes; as when Falstaff 
 himself was rejected by Prince Hal. 
 
 But imagine the picture that Shakespeare had 
 before his eye! At his attendance before the Board 
 of Green Cloth he would have seen quill pens lying 
 on the table, with their white edges erect upon the 
 cloth — frail and slender, like fairy scythes on an 
 emerald meadow. He could not fail to have been 
 impressed by the sight. There are numberless in- 
 stances in his work that go to indicate him as one 
 whom a sudden thought of beauty would catch, 
 passing him into a vision of whimsical and timeless 
 contemplation. It swept on him when he had to 
 describe the disfigurement on Imogen's breast; and 
 he passed to gazing into the well of a cowslip. It 
 may have been thus he noted the pens that lay 
 strewn on the green cloth. Or it may have shone 
 on him at the moment of intellectual labour. It is 
 strictly stated that Falstaff played with flowers, 
 and flowers would inevitably suggest the green, 
 and thus lead his instinct back to the pens on the 
 table. 
 
 Yet, in whatever manner the vision swept through 
 his mind, the image required is quite distinct and 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 99 
 
 clear. Moreover, it only demands the alteration of 
 one word, and would read : " for after I saw him 
 fumble with sheets, and play with flowers, and smile 
 upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way ; 
 for his nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green 
 fields." How startling and vivid is the picture that 
 forthwith is awaked. What a well of tears bubbles 
 to the brim of the soul at the thought of gay, fat, 
 old Falstaff brought so low that his nose may be 
 likened to a quiU pen, so thin and frail had it become. 
 How inevitably the eye sees the picture of a quill 
 pen lying on a green table, sharp, slender, and 
 deathly white! How the heart is gripped almost to 
 terror! 
 
 The use of the word " fields " may arise from 
 Shakespeare's habit of heraldic speech. He is for 
 ever falling into it; and one need not be reminded 
 of the player's description of " the rugged Pyrhus," 
 in Hamlet, as having his " dead and black complexion 
 smeared with heraldry more dismal: head to foot 
 now is he total gules." This habit of heraldic speech, 
 like his continual use of terms in falconry, is even 
 more than a mere mannerism in him. It takes rank 
 as part of the Shakespearean idiom. He not only 
 illustrates his meaning thereby, nor is he merely 
 content to pun with it: it often gives an indefinable 
 yet quite distinct colour to many of his phrases. So 
 
loo STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 that when he likened the dying Falstaff's nose to 
 one of the quill pens he had seen at the exchequer 
 committee, so pale and slender was it, his mind may 
 at once have conceived of the green cloth on which 
 the pens had lain as an emerald field, and in the 
 natural idiom of his mental speech, he promptly 
 gave it an heraldic turn, thus making each sense 
 play into the other, each indissoluble from the 
 other. 
 
 Or perhaps, still cleaving to interpretation within 
 the limits of the Shakespearean idiom of speech, the 
 word may have come to be used by the natural 
 ellipsis of his language. It has already been pointed 
 out that FalstafI " played with flowers." If this 
 was the imaginative starting point of the suggested 
 picture, the word would remain as part of the swift 
 imaginative process. The flowers, the green fields, 
 and the thin white pen would be the order of the 
 thought in the rapid progress of imagination. For 
 interpretation must needs always expound a mind 
 and its working. 
 
 It is impossible to miss the weight of this accumu- 
 lated argument, derived as it is, not from any ex- 
 traneous hypothesis, but developed from within the 
 very nature of the case: from historical fact, from 
 the likelihood of Shakespeare's instinct of pity, his 
 idiom of expression, his visionary delight in a swift 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE loi 
 
 startling visualisation, from the completeness of 
 sense demanded by the whole passage, from the 
 demands of consistency in Falstaff's characterisation, 
 and from the claims of the First Folio as being the 
 only edition prepared directly from Shakespeare's 
 manuscripts. All this is sufficient, good measure 
 well pressed down and running over, in rejection 
 of Dr. Theobald's fanciful emendation, which, in a 
 greater or lesser degree, violates each of the above 
 standards of judgment. Yet on the strictly cali- 
 graphic test the mere alteration of " and " for " on " 
 vindicates itself as against the more elaborate altera- 
 tion that holds sway in every modern edition without 
 exception — every modern edition, that is to say, that 
 does not purport to be a reproduction of the First 
 Folio. Strictly speaking, such an alteration means 
 only the deletion of a " d," since " an " and " on " 
 are sufficiently similar in most modern penmanship 
 for their distinction only to be judged by the sense 
 of the phrase. And those who have had cause to 
 examine any old manuscript in the Gothic script will 
 not require to have the presence of such a " d " 
 explained. Flourishes abound. The least occasion, 
 or even the lack of it, is taken advantage of for a 
 flourish. Some flourish down from the upper line 
 launching itself beside the " on " before it journeyed 
 upward to completion, would be sufficient to suggest 
 
I02 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 a " d " to a rapid reader. In this connection it is 
 worthy of note that ordinary writing on an ordinary 
 width of page amounts usually to nine or ten 
 words of fair length, and that the " y " in the word 
 " way " of the previous sentence is at ten words' 
 remove. 
 
 Such details, however, though useful enough as the 
 completion of a demanded sense, are but of little 
 account. What is of considerable account is that 
 Dr. Theobald's violation of the text (a violation, as 
 has been said, that every modern edition has ap- 
 proved) has obscured from us, not only a beautiful 
 and characteristically Shakespearean piece of imagery, 
 but also an eager fragment of personal reminiscence. 
 Nor is this the only instance that we have of Shake- 
 speare's keen observation, retentive memory, and 
 transmuting imagination. But to decline from this 
 on to " babbling of green fields " is to decline indeed. 
 It is not only to decline from a grief that catches 
 at the heart and stifles expression of words, into a 
 mouthing sentimentality. It is to decline from a 
 vision that is sharp and searching into a merely 
 expressive form of words. It is to decline from the 
 poet's eye to the moraliser's mouth. It was a declen- 
 sion worthy of the trim and sophisticated seventeenth 
 century. Yet the declension might have prevailed, 
 and the original beauty passed into forgetfulness, 
 
FALSTAFF'S NOSE 103 
 
 but for the fact that a musty document came to 
 remind us of what once had been Shakespeare's 
 courtly duty. And the fact that the recovery did 
 come in this way is its own proof that it is just 
 and accurate, and that we have indeed caught back 
 to us the mood in which the greatest of humorists 
 passed to his death in the mind of the greatest of 
 dramatists. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. WILLIAM 
 WATSON 
 
 There is a fundamental difficulty lying at the basis 
 of Mr. William Watson's work that does not so much 
 accost the novitiate /it \a^ haunts and perplexes the 
 lover and the student. It catches admiration at the 
 very threshold of enthusiasm, and arrests it forcibly, 
 It baulks affection at the very brink of love, to its 
 own discomfiture. There are probably few that have 
 not been awed and moved by first acquaintance with 
 this poetry that earns best the title of distinguished, 
 and still fewer that have not, on later intimacy, found 
 something baffling in it, something difficult to set 
 out, but still something essentially disconcerting and 
 dissatisfying. It is as though the pomp of his utter- 
 ance had excited the soul to expect a rare repast of 
 grandeur, which, nevertheless, was not forthcoming. 
 And that this perplexity is in Mr. Watson himself 
 rather than in his reader is a conviction that his 
 work brings with it, both in what he has achieved, 
 and in the paucity of that achievement. 
 
 It stretches throughout all his work. When first 
 he came to song romantic glamour was in the sky 
 though the morning of materialism was about him; 
 
 104 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 105 
 
 and true to this romantic glamour he sang of it, his 
 most noble achievement in it being The Princess 
 Quest, which, indeed, in point of length, is the most 
 considerable of aU his work. It is throughout remin- 
 iscent of Morris ; reminiscent, too, of Keats, showing 
 Morris' early indebtedness there no less than his 
 more lineal ancestry from Chaucer. In it he tells us 
 of lands the most romantic and mystical: which is 
 absolutely the very fact: he tells us; yet, however 
 convincingly he tells us, he fails to bring them about 
 us as Keats does in St. Agnes' Eve. It lacks magic; 
 it is all spelt out on the page. And romanticism 
 without occult suggestion and mystical colour is 
 foredoomed to failure : it is not romanticism, in fact, 
 however much it boast the name. Yet The Prince's 
 Quest has in it that peculiar distinction of Mr. Wat- 
 son's work from first to last : the single unforgettable 
 line. Such as, for instance: — 
 
 " Along the margin of thy muttering sands " ; 
 
 or again: — 
 
 " and hear 
 The sighing of the darkness as I go." 
 
 When a poet is discovered putting out an initial 
 volume that contains as its magnum opus a lengthy 
 romantic poem, and then after four years' silence 
 giving to the world a volume of over a hundred 
 epigrams in verse, crystallised and polished with 
 
io6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 manifest effort after refinement, the situation is 
 
 sufficiently illuminating. It is Mr. Watson's own 
 
 criticism of his early work. It is also his decision 
 
 as to what he proposes to make his later work. He 
 
 turns from his unriper effort, feeling it as unexpressive 
 
 of himself as it is obviously unexpressive of the soul 
 
 of romanticism, and seeks to concentrate, and yet 
 
 again to concentrate, filling his lines with meaning 
 
 and making his manner more and more marmoreal. 
 
 In other words, the William Watson of Wordsworth's 
 
 Grave and Apologia begins to emerge. Yet it is 
 
 possible so to refine, that poetry itself has been 
 
 refined away; and it is noteworthy that twenty-five 
 
 years later Mr. Watson seeks to recapture the more 
 
 aerial and elusive muse, with what of success will 
 
 later be seen. * 
 
 But to achieve this compression two things are 
 necessary: a fit vocabulary and a stern regard for 
 form. And that such compression should live, it 
 must step with the metrical mastery of verbal pomp. 
 AU these things we see Mr. Watson striving after in 
 these epigrams, and possessing in full flower of 
 achievement in his next volume containing Words- 
 worth's Grave. There are not many poets that possess 
 a vocabulary as wide as Watson's; yet it is not so 
 much distinguished for its width as for the compact- 
 ness and compression of the words he chooses. They 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 107 
 
 are not wild with beauty so much as concentrated 
 with meaning. He has foresworn great work in 
 great space; he will try and bring great work into 
 small space. His lines come to wear the value of 
 stanzas, and his stanzas of cantos. Simple structures 
 and short poems, therefore, mark his work; and 
 hauteur of spirit and pomp of utterance its manner 
 of delivery. But thereby it becomes more and 
 more self-conscious; it tends rather to the delibera- 
 tion of a craft-master than to the fury and fire of 
 inspiration in supreme inevitableness. The subtlety 
 that raises Coleridge to the supernatural, the intensity 
 awaking the imagery of Wordsworth, the fire of 
 Shelley, all these things must needs be forgone. And 
 the recompense is the echoing line or passage. Such 
 as this epithet for Vergil: — 
 
 " Lord of the incommunicable charm." 
 
 How beautifully it ripples! Or such a passage as 
 this out of Estrangement : — 
 
 " Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim, 
 From Ccisual speech betwixt his warders, learn 
 That June on her triumphal progress goes 
 Thro' arched and bannered woodlands ; while for him 
 She is a legend emptied of concern. 
 And idle is the rumour of the rose." 
 
 Yet in their reserve there is something chill and for- 
 bidding, remaining with the spirit, whether we will 
 
io8 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 or no, when all their magnificence of speech has died 
 through the air. 
 
 Though it lack the divine fervour and riot, his verse 
 at its best has the " large utterance of the early gods "; 
 if inspiration flag a little it comes jeopardously near 
 being rhetoric; and, naturally, when inspiration 
 fails he relies purely on its pomp to see him 
 through, and his hauteur of delivery. Therefore, 
 while his finest passages never precisely fire the 
 reader, his passages of lower order never weary. 
 He leans too securely on his prop of words and their 
 mastery. 
 
 His most noteworthy achievement is of course 
 Wordsworth's Grave. I say of course; despite the 
 fact that by placing Lacrimae Musarum in the fore- 
 front of his Collected Poems he seems to elect it for 
 his preference. Fine passages apart, however, as a 
 whole Lacrimae Musarum fails. There is a distinct 
 gap between effort and achievement in it. This is 
 largely owing to the fact that the odic structure 
 scarcely suits Mr. Watson's genius: it has not sufii- 
 cient compactness; moreover, it demands the fusion 
 of passion, which Mr. Watson has eschewed. An 
 ode, so impelled, so dictated by propelling life, will 
 work out for itself periods and paragraphs on which 
 to move forward. A succession of lines, each com- 
 plete in itself, each arriving at a conclusive fuU-stop, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 109 
 
 nor serving as a platform from which to swing forth on 
 a new aerial flight, such, in fact, as Lacrirnae Musarum 
 is all too full of, is deadly to odic vitality. Moreover, 
 this poem has an incoherence manifest in it that is 
 irritating. Later, in his Coronation Ode, he turns 
 to a similar verse-form, but there, by nature of its 
 theme, classic and marmoreal dignity is alone de- 
 manded of him ; and it is therefore a success. Here, 
 however, aesthetic subtlety is required, and he cannot 
 give it. 
 
 But in Wordsworth's Grave we have him at his best. 
 Its quatrains suit him well, giving him something to 
 refine and polish. And further, the theme is one to 
 his own heart. Here he can play the literary critic 
 to excellent effect; and he does so admirably. 
 Whether verse is a fit place for literary criticism is 
 a debatable matter ; and again whether Mr. Watson's 
 is a true summing up of Wordsworth is another very 
 debatable matter. It cannot be too clearly remem- 
 bered that Wordsworth, particularly the earlier 
 Wordsworth, was an essential Dionysian both in 
 burthen of utterance and in personal habits, and no 
 mere contemplative pastor who had for weary feet 
 a gift of rest. Still, all this apart, the poem is packed 
 with the true substance of poetic thought. It is not 
 surcharged with poetic emotion so hot as to be above 
 all thought, like Tintern Abbey ; we always know 
 
no STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 what Mr. Watson is saying and seeing; it is brain 
 work with poetic colour as accessory, rather than 
 pressure of poetry working this fundamental brain- 
 work; nevertheless, vision is alive in it. As for 
 instance : — 
 
 " Not Milton's keen translunar music thine; 
 Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view ; 
 Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine; 
 Nor yet the wizard twiUght Coleridge knew." 
 
 This is excellent criticism ; it is also poetry, withal wc 
 feel that it is Mr. Watson speaking in poetry rather 
 than poetry speaking through Mr. Watson. Some- 
 times we feel it is Mr. Watson speaking in iambic 
 verse; but this is not often. 
 
 And, indeed, to have spoken in praise of him as a 
 literary critic is to have spoken in praise of a fair bulk 
 of his work. It is certain that no poet having some- 
 thing to say, being burthened with the plenitude of 
 a large inspiration, would be, or could be, content 
 with such a state of affairs. And here a near approach 
 is made to that fundamental difficulty of which I 
 have spoken. For Mr. Watson's poetry causes one 
 to make a very keen analysis, both subjectively and 
 objectively, as to what after all poetry really is. Is 
 it possible for a man to hew him out a most dis- 
 tinguished utterance, compact and resonant, without 
 the flashing eye of impelling inspiration, and yet be 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON in 
 
 a high, poet ? When such a charge is brought against 
 him, he complains in noble language that he found 
 fault with 
 
 " because I bring nought new. 
 Save as each noontide and each spring is new. 
 Into an old and iterative worid, 
 And can but proffer unto whoso will 
 A cool and nowise turbid cup, from wells 
 Our fathers digged ; and have not thought it shame 
 To tread in nobler footprints than mine own. 
 And travel by the light of purer eyes." 
 
 This is certainly a modest aim, and eloquently delivered. 
 But is it Poetry : Poetry, the seer of visions, the teller 
 of secrets, and the prophet of Beauty? He says 
 again in the same poem, Apologia, in what is probably 
 the supremest passage in all his work : — 
 
 " Be it enough to say, that in Man's life 
 Is room for great emotions unbegot 
 Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot 
 Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul ; 
 And one not pale of blood, to human touch 
 Not tardily responsive, yet may kjiow 
 A deeper transport and a mightier thrill 
 Than comes of commerce with mortality, 
 When, rapt from all relation with his kind. 
 All temporal and immediate circumstance. 
 In silence, in the visionary mood 
 That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives 
 Order beyond this coU and errancy, 
 Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone 
 
112 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 And hears the eternal movement, and beholds 
 Above him and aroimd and at his feet. 
 In million-billowed consentaneousness, 
 The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world." 
 
 Supreme, magnificent! But when the glamour fades 
 from off us we make bold to ask, where other than 
 here do we find delivery of these great things? A 
 whole division of his work is given up to criticism of 
 other poets, and in this certainly he defines his own 
 attitude to them. Burns, Wordsworth, Arnold, and 
 Shelley pass in detailed review before him. Bums' 
 withering insight he is in total praise of. SheUey he 
 is perplexed at. He finds him 
 
 " Nourished on air and sun and dew." 
 No mild praise, as it happens ; and again : — 
 
 " All colour and all odour and all bloom 
 Steeped in the moonlight, glutted with the sun. 
 But somewhat lacking root in homely earth." 
 
 Of Arnold he complains that the " deep authentic 
 mountain-thrill ne'er shook his page," but yet is 
 sympathetic and appreciative. Of his attitude to- 
 wards Wordsworth I have spoken already. Save 
 for one suggestion, he seems entirely to miss the 
 mighty mystic and prophet in this exultant lover of 
 hiUs and peasants; that is to say, of sublimity, and 
 the avenue whereby sublimity can best tread with 
 unhampered splendour, simplicity. It is at least 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 113 
 
 ^^^M»iiii i iiiiii«iiiii;.»i wnm i.i !■»■■ ■^^^■^^ 1 11 I . w i I ■■■■■■ ^ I I ■ I I 11 
 
 curious that the two devout Wordsworthians of our 
 literature, Arnold and Mr. Watson, should so have 
 missed the essential Wordsworth. 
 
 Here at least we approach the authentic WiUiam 
 Watson; and we find that he fails completely to 
 grasp the inspired spirit of the two most inspired 
 poets of the nineteenth century. The poet in them 
 appeals to the poet in him, but the merely intellec- 
 tual in him denies the vision that is conjured. He is 
 continually at war with himself; and his work there- 
 fore embodies an internecine conflict. It is manifest 
 everywhere; he is like his ocean, an " athlete mightily 
 frustrate " ; he " feels his lack of wing," he " curses 
 his iron bourne." The intellectual in him denies the 
 interposition and hand of God in things mortal; he 
 says that " the idea of justice " is " the great achieve- 
 ment of the human mind." Nevertheless, let but the 
 Armenians be massacred and the Poet in him flies 
 in insurgent poetic flights to call down the God of 
 Justice! The Intellectual, with imperious gesture, 
 sweeps away such things as hells and heavens; but 
 the Poet turns immediately to constructing a new and 
 terrible hell in which to put " Abdul the Damned." 
 The Poet, unshadowed and rejoicing, sings of 
 
 " The advent of that mom divine 
 When nations may as forests grow, 
 Wherein the oak hates not the pine, 
 
114 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Nor beeches wish the cedar woe, 
 But all, in their unlikeness blend 
 Confederate to one golden end — 
 
 " Beauty: the vision whereunto. 
 In joy, with pantings, from afar. 
 Through sound and odour, form and hue. 
 And mind and clay, and worm and star — 
 Now touching goal, now backward hurled — 
 Toils the indomitable world." 
 
 {The Father of the Forest.) 
 
 The Intellectual interposes, however: — 
 " Nay, on this earth, are we 
 So sure 'tis real ascent 
 
 And very gain we see ? " {The Hope of the World.) 
 
 Shadowed with this, the Poet wails : — 
 
 " Ah, doom of mortals! Vexed with phantoms old. 
 Old phantoms that waylay us and pursue, — 
 Weary of dreams, — we think to see unfold 
 The eternal landscape of the Real and True; 
 And on our Pisgah can but write, ' 'Tis cold. 
 And clouds shut out the view.' " 
 
 {The Blind Summit.) 
 
 Or, to come right to the red-ripe of the matter, he 
 
 says : — 
 
 " God on his throne is 
 Eldest of poets: 
 Unto His measures 
 Moveth the whole." 
 
 In earthly poets, then, one might imagine that some- 
 thing of His spirit ran. But no ! They are " some 
 random throw of heedless Nature's die." 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 115 
 
 Is it wonder, then, that the Poet in him is stifled; 
 or that difficulty greets one through all his work? 
 John Davidson endeavoured, with titanic effort and 
 insurgent speech, to construct poetry out of the very 
 elements of materialism; but Mr. Watson's soul is 
 true to the world ideal, to the verities that are loftier 
 than matter, anterior to matter, and eternal as matter 
 is not, but its song is hedged and cramped. He even 
 in verse seeks to argue out the fitness of the things 
 imperious in him; but the world of merely inductive 
 reasoning shackles him. Bondage is through all his 
 work; and, flowing from this, sadness. His Raven's 
 Shadow falls over all things, 
 
 ■' Till the starry dance be broke, 
 Till the sphery paean pause, 
 And the universal chime 
 Falter out of tune and time," 
 
 and in order to break away resolutely from this, he 
 bursts into the curious and magnificent phantasy 
 The Dream of Man. He imagines man having con- 
 quered all things (by inductive reasoning presumably), 
 and reducing natural laws to his supreme command. 
 He welds the whole wide universe into one splendid 
 scheme, making his habitation in planets and stars. 
 He even and eventually conquers " The Lord of 
 Death, the undying, ev'n Asrael the King." But 
 what is its value ? For futUity overcomes him again; 
 
ii6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 and to give existence a piquancy Asrael has to be 
 resurrected to life and power. 
 
 Not only, however, does materialism hedge his soul 
 and cramp his spirit, but (so true a son is he of the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century) that worst form 
 of all materialism, polemical materialism. How 
 deadly to poetry this is let The Unknown God prove. 
 The wondrous burthen of a star-lit night moves him 
 into the soul-stirring first stanza of that poem; but, 
 having delivered so much, he expounds his theme 
 in argumentative polemic of trivial and transient 
 interest. 
 
 Herein lies the perplexity of his work. The soul of 
 man feels that poetry is something first-hand and 
 vital; but mere literary criticism and polemic are 
 neither first-hand nor vital. He feels this himself; 
 therefore his utterances are sporadic and his periods 
 of silence lengthy. He once attempted to chase these 
 hours of silence away by pursuing a more elusive and 
 daintier muse. But it was somewhat too late in his 
 poetic day, and the effort being scarcely successful, 
 he returned to his more marmoreal manner, to find 
 that, though something of magic has fled from his 
 verse, his skiU is yet all his own, and masterly. He 
 turned to the making of drama; but it lacked vitality 
 for precisely the same reason. 
 
 In fact, Mr. Watson's main strength is that of a 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MR. W. WATSON 117 
 
 supreme craftsman. A careful student of Milton, 
 metrical step and balance have received his most 
 careful attention, with accompanying skill in the 
 choice of words in their music and colour. In this 
 craftsmanship there is only one fault to find; and 
 that is, it is not sufficiently disguised. It is not 
 craftsmanship lying complete and handy for inspira- 
 tion to use. It is rather craftsmanship proceeding 
 in its own graces and charms. 
 
 Yet, this apart, next to Milton I know no craftsman- 
 ship so complete in English verse; I know no poet 
 that can make words march with such pomp and 
 skill. In the passage already quoted from Apologia, 
 take such three lines as these, and note how he 
 deploys his words in the first two, gathering them 
 together to foot forward martially in the third : — 
 
 " In silence, in the visionary mood 
 That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives 
 Order beyond this coU and errancy." 
 
 Or, by merging two syllables into one long one, what 
 extraordinary value he gives to the word " flying " 
 in these: — 
 
 " Again I smite the host at Ethandune, 
 And drive them flying before me to their hold." 
 
 Or take these of Autumn : — 
 
 " Shall see her gorgeous in the brief 
 Pomp of the fated reddening leaf." 
 
ii8 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 But it is not only in iambic verse that Mr. Watson 
 displays his powers. For his Hymn to the Ocean is 
 an admirable example of English elegaics. 
 
 But it is in his short lyrics that Mr. Watson is most 
 truly himself. His gem April has long since delighted 
 us all. So, too, have Scentless Flowers and Thy 
 Voice from Inmost Dreamland Calls, and, among 
 things lengthier, his Ode to Autumn. But if any 
 would wish to discover the daintiest chiselling of 
 verse-form and moulding of subdued imagery, let him^ 
 turn to, and ponder over. Leave-taking. It comes 
 over the lips like the softest soul-breathing, and is a 
 final utterance, " in perfect solution " as Pater would 
 have it. There is no problem here, but perfect joy, 
 even though it be the joy of an infinite sadness. 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 
 
 There is a certain element in Mr. Yeats' poetry, 
 with which it is sometimes interweaved with neat 
 deliberation, and of which it is sometimes compact 
 in its own inspiration, that must always baffle a 
 first reader, and which, in fact, gives it an incom- 
 mensurable quality that will always remain, despite 
 a number of readings. It is not only that he is 
 concerned with a Celtic mythology, the beauty of 
 which has only lately come into its own : it is rather 
 that he finds himself surrounded by a world at the 
 threshold of which the reason falls abashed, a world 
 inhabited by timeless spirits of this earth whose 
 comings and whose goings neither moral decree nor 
 human judgment can decide, a world, indeed, of 
 Peoples with whom the Celt more than those of any 
 other blood are supposed to be familiar. Like every 
 true poet he is a mystic. But this is more, or less, 
 than mysticism. Mysticism, in its highest signifi- 
 cance, is concerned with Beings and Orders that 
 are cosmic and eternal, that are true when material 
 facts are falsehoods, being transient; but these 
 Peoples are attached to earth, and no hint is told of 
 their perpetuity beyond the term of the earth. 
 
 119 
 
120 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 From his earliest days he is always seeking to 
 embody these frail spirits in his poetry, and in his 
 younger work the effort to capture them is more 
 noticeable than its success. In the Wanderings oj 
 Oisin this strange underworld has already begun to 
 live ; and if one notices in it a brush-and-palette 
 effect this is perhaps due rather to the epic nature 
 of that poem than to conscious failure. Yet it is 
 true that in his maturer passion the pressure of 
 inspiration would have been too great for epic 
 deliberation to have been possible. For instance, 
 the first appearance of Niamh is somewhat too 
 deliberate for her to shine with the internal glory 
 she would undoubtedly have worn in later years. 
 But she is witching indeed as she comes — 
 
 " on the dove-grey edge of the sea, 
 A pearl-pale, high-born lady." 
 
 The first work of poets must needs always have a 
 particular interest; the more so since they not 
 infrequently turn away with a sated gesture to erect 
 their maturer work in a wholly different manner. 
 It was so with Mr. Yeats. And in the poems lying 
 between the early Wanderings of Oisin and the 
 complete and ripe Wind Among the Reeds we see him 
 reaching after and studying the form that shall 
 express the glory of his vision. In them the wild 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 121 
 
 spirits of the air come and go fitfully: shining out 
 in sudden glory in the Song of the Happy Shepherd — 
 
 " The woods of Arcady are dead, 
 And over is their antique joy " ; 
 
 teasing with half-glimpsed, distant beauty in The 
 Stolen Child, and dead, dead beyond recall, in 
 Ephemera. Such fluctuations prevail, of course, in 
 all poetry; but in Mr. Yeats' maturity even his 
 failures suggest his successes; in his unriper hours 
 they suggest only themselves. The irresponsibility 
 of the Muse, away directly we seek her, will not 
 account for Anashoya and Vijaya, which is neither 
 Indian nor Irish, though it purports to be the former. 
 In a dedication to an early volume of his poems he 
 has himself told us how they all came to be; and 
 his words are not only of value in the elucidation of 
 his fragile art, they have a beauty and glory in their 
 own commendation. 
 
 " While I have wrought these fitful Danaan rhymes, 
 My heart would brim with dreams about the times 
 When we bent down above the fading coals ; 
 And talked of the dark folk, who live in souls 
 Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees; 
 And of the wayward twilight companies. 
 Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content. 
 Because their blossoming dreams have never bent 
 Under the fruit of evil and of good; 
 And of the embattled flaming multitude 
 
122 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame. 
 And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name, 
 And with the clashing of their sword-blades make 
 A rapturous music, till the morning break. 
 And the white hush end all, but the loud beat 
 Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet." 
 
 It is in such a poem as this that one realises how 
 deliberate is his attempt to snare the unseen peoples 
 of the earth in the toils of his poetry. In fact, it is 
 possible to say that it is somewhat overconscious. 
 The dark folk, the passionate men, the twilight 
 companies, the blossoming dreams under no tribute 
 to moralities, the embattled, flaming multitude, the 
 music of clashing sword-blades, the white hush at 
 the end of aU — these are the substance of aU his 
 work; a kind of synopsis of it; the seedlings of his 
 forest of poetry. And the curiously poised delicate 
 metre, how indicative this is of the manner of delivery 
 he was seeking after, and achieving, at this time! 
 He has told us himself, how, in order that his " verses 
 should hold, as in a mirror, the colours of his own 
 climate and scenery in their right proportion " he 
 seeks to make his " rhythms faint and nervous, and 
 filling his images with a certain coldness, a certain 
 wintry wildness." 
 
 He understands, indeed, that the peculiar thing he 
 has to deliver has its own peculiar manner. More 
 than this, it is not itself until it has found its own 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 123 
 
 peculiar manner, for the matter and the manner are 
 so indissolubly married in all Art that the matter 
 becomes the manner and the manner is the matter. 
 For this reason, until Mr. Yeats finds the appropriate 
 manner the matter cannot be delivered. Until he 
 has set it out the artist himself does not know what 
 it is that burns in him to be uttered. And if it be 
 set out faultily, that is to say if it does not inspire 
 in him the easeful content of final and perfect 
 utterance, he is apt too much to assault himself 
 rather than his use of vehicle. So we find Mr. 
 Yeats, before he discovers the secret of " rhythms 
 faint and nervous," so irked and annoyed by 
 the presence in his work of the " reds and yellows 
 Shelley gathered in Italy," or, in other words, of 
 sub-conscious imitation of his early master, that 
 he takes to " eating little and sleeping upon a 
 board"! 
 
 In a passage of his prose he quotes with appro- 
 bation Blake's division of the universe into the Real 
 and' the Trivial and Transient, the imagination 
 being the sense by which man perceives the former 
 and the processes of the reason being concerned 
 with the latter. In such a division the imagination 
 draws upon all the Great Memory of mankind. Even 
 in the lesser sense this is so. For example, to the 
 reason a rose-bush is no more than a rose-bush; but 
 
124 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 to the imagination, fed only by the memory of a 
 life-time, that selfsame rose-bush may stand as the 
 symbol of the breaking of the casket of love, a dusky 
 evening and the tragedy of two souls. Fed by the 
 high eternal memories of the mind the Rose, with 
 some secret inner symbolism, may arise with a new 
 significance from the spiritual world of Eternal 
 Beauty. It is to capture this that he disciplines 
 both himself and his poetry; for he hears the same 
 voice calling as his friend and compatriot M. hears: 
 " 'Tis the Beauty of all Beauty that is calling for 
 your love." 
 
 With what success that discipline proceeds one 
 may gather from a contrast of the following two 
 poems, one from the Early Poems and one from 
 The Wind Among the Reeds. 
 
 • I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow 
 Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; 
 And then I must scrub and bake and sweep 
 Till stars are beginning to bUnk and peep; 
 And the young lie long and dream in their bed 
 Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head, 
 And their day goes over in idleness. 
 And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress: 
 While I must work because I am old. 
 And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold." 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 125 
 
 II 
 
 The Song of Wandering Aengus 
 
 " I went out to the hazel wood 
 Because a fire was in my head. 
 And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
 And hooked a berry to a thread ; 
 And when white moths were on the wing. 
 And moth-like stars were flickering out, 
 I dropped the berry in a stream 
 And caught a little silver trout. 
 
 " When I had laid it on the floor 
 I went to blow the fire aflame. 
 But something rustled on the floor. 
 And some one called me by my name: 
 It had become a glimmering girl 
 With apple-blossom in her hair 
 Who called me by my name and ran 
 And faded thro' the brightening air. 
 
 " Tho' I am old with wandering 
 Thro' hollow lands and hilly lands, 
 I wUl find out where she has gone, 
 And kiss her lips and take her hands ; 
 And walk among long dappled grass. 
 And pluck till time and times are done 
 The silver apples of the moon. 
 The golden apples of the sun." 
 
 One gropes; but the other is a finished, complete 
 product. Yet both are wrought out of simplicity, 
 for the thing that Mr. Yeats has to deliver is so rare 
 
126 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 that it can only be caught by simplicity heated to the 
 point of intensity. His Art is therefore that of sim- 
 plicity wrought mystical and magical. It deals only 
 with essences. When he succeeds his success is that 
 of pure delight ; when he fails there is either confusion 
 or banality. When he steps out with his magical 
 singing robes flowing about him and his eyes aflame, 
 wonder and mystery quiver in the air; when inspira- 
 tion falls from him and his eye is dulled, his verse 
 becomes merely commonplace for all its careful 
 craftsmanship. There is never the support of past 
 greatness echoing along the lines where present 
 greatness is not: that which we caU Rhetoric. If 
 glory has faded, drabness succeeds. 
 
 In the Song of the Happy Shepherd, already referred 
 to, he sings — 
 
 " O sick children of the world, 
 Of all the many charming things 
 In dreamy dancing past us whirled 
 To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, 
 Words alone are certain good." 
 
 It is a wise creed, for it is a creed by which wisdom 
 may be captured. And the success of Mr. Yeats' 
 endeavour may be seen in The Wind Among the 
 Reeds, for there, in the craft and subtlety of words, 
 he snares an essential beauty with an inevitability of 
 utterance that would defy the cruder activities of 
 
 c 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 127 
 
 man. Often the poems in this volume are wrought 
 
 out of the substance of dreams; often the poet 
 
 distils a haunting mood of waking day in a delicate 
 
 economy of speech. That is to say, inspiration may 
 
 come upon the poet unknowingly and flush his verse 
 
 with her beauty, or the poet may, by a kind of 
 
 emotional and intellectual discipline, snare her and 
 
 make her serve his music. It may be undeliberate, 
 
 or it may be deliberate, for there is often the feeling 
 
 of deliberation: but seldom in this volume is there 
 
 that entire lack of inspiration that marks some of his 
 
 work elsewhere. For example, there is not much 
 
 of deliberation in the mood that conceived (not the 
 
 craftsmanship that wrought) The Song of Wandering 
 
 Aengus. Yet the following poem haunts the mind 
 
 no less, despite the fact that one can perceive the 
 
 mind of the poet quite deliberately seeking his effect. 
 
 " O curlew, cry no more in the air. 
 Or only to the waters in the West; 
 Because your crying brings to my mind 
 Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair 
 That was shaken out over my breast: 
 There is enough evil in the crying of wind." 
 
 It has all the wild sad beauty of a Galway landscape, 
 
 when white mists float over brown bogs, with desolate 
 
 puddles in them, and a grey road runs over towards 
 
 the distant voice of the sea. 
 
 The Wind Among the Reeds is not only the hour of 
 
128 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Mr. Yeats' purest and truest success: it is, indeed, 
 the limit of progress in that direction. The thing 
 he sought for from the first, he achieves here: and 
 thereby closes that path for himself, under the peril 
 of mere repetition. For this mute sincerity has not 
 alone its very severe limitations, its even unpoetic 
 limitations, but it has no less its extreme perils. It 
 has been hinted that he never supports his muse by 
 rhetoric. In fact, he sets his face very deliberately 
 against rhetoric. Yet it would be interesting to ask 
 what this rhetoric is that incurs his artistic anger. 
 Often there is the uncomfortable feeling that, in a 
 kind of special pleading justifiable in an artist, he 
 identifies the colour of tone or the magnificence of 
 speech with rhetoric. But if the colour or the 
 magnificence be authentic, that is if they arise from 
 true moods of colour and magnificence purely con- 
 ceived, it would be a violation of aU meaning to 
 speak of the result as rhetoric. Similarly, muteness 
 is not always sincere ; and in so far as it is not sincere, 
 it is rhetorical. One may lean on a simple device of 
 words not less than on a pompous device of words. 
 
 It is this that is the perU he has incurred in the 
 continual chastening of his verse. He has chastened 
 out one kind of rhetoric; but he has almost chastened 
 himself into another. In one of his early poems the 
 phrase " rim of the world " struck us as a failure to 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 129 
 
 express his idea and a dependence on a manner of 
 speech; and more than once, when his meaning has 
 demanded some subtle and ritual word, he has 
 turned aside and used " druid." To be sure, this is 
 in his early work. Yet in the maturity and fuUness 
 of The Wind Among the Reeds, pure and haunting 
 though the poems be, it is not altogether a happy 
 spectacle to see a poet compelled to elucidate his 
 poems by an appendix of notes, like any learned 
 professor. 
 
 It is, however, The Wind Among the Reeds that 
 comes as a test. Its very success makes it its own 
 limit of progress. If its manner be not wide enough 
 to embrace all that is proper to the understanding 
 of its vision, by reason of an overchastening, it yet, 
 and even thereby, stands up on the borders of possi- 
 bility to point a danger beyond. Its muteness may 
 be sincere : it may have spoken its vision in a sincere 
 economy of simple words: but, since processes will 
 continue themselves if made a law of the mind, how 
 will a further refinement bear any poetic vision at 
 all? We have seen, in the two example? quoted 
 earlier, how Mr. Yeats came to purge imperfection 
 into perfection of simplicity. Over against these 
 let a later example be set, and it wiU be seen that the 
 purging process continues, but that it is poetic vision 
 that has been lost, not imperfection. 
 
 I 
 
130 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 " The fascination of what's difficult 
 Has dried the sap out of my veins, and sent 
 Spontaneous joy and natural content 
 Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt 
 That must^ as if it had not holy blood. 
 Nor on an Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, 
 Shivered under the lash, strain, sweat, and jolt 
 As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays 
 That have to be set up in fifty ways. 
 On the day's war with every knave or dolt. 
 Theatre business, management of men. 
 I swear before the dawn comes round again 
 I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt." 
 
 Like most things said in verse, it tells its concern 
 wiselier far than lies in the possibility of prose; and 
 one need only read it carefully for a sufficient com- 
 mentary on what has been said. It is indeed true 
 that " the fascination of what's difficult has dried 
 the sap out of his veins " : it has dried the poetry 
 out of his verse. His " craft of verse " has become 
 a craft for its own sake. The expression takes a 
 value from its own skill, and not because it expresses 
 anything. And that is a form of rhetoric. It was 
 not so in The Wind, Among the Reeds. There the 
 poet's vision was foremost: as it should be, for a 
 poet without a vision is no poet at all, but a clever, 
 or an otherwise than clever, versifier. It is not his 
 technique that saves a poet from sterility, but his 
 vision. 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 131 
 
 One turns, therefore, to his plays with a peculiar 
 interest; for in them his style is challenged to a 
 sterner test. In his lyrics anything that will not 
 turn to magic can be purged away, and even that 
 which is magical may be destroyed in the process; 
 but in his plays the conditions of dialogue and plot 
 compel the presence of much that would not be 
 endured in a lyric. The necessity is not now the 
 necessity of inspiration, but the necessity of speech 
 and explanation. It is the difficulty of all drama; 
 but it is a difficulty of more than ordinary meaning 
 to a craftsman who regards as rhetorical that richness 
 and pomp of tone, that ornateness of imagery, with 
 which iEschylus and Shakespeare met such occasions. 
 
 Partly he overcomes the difficulty by so casting 
 his play as to avoid their occasion. One remembers, 
 for example, the opening of Deidre. There the ex- 
 position and explanation of the past is put into the 
 mouths of the musicians as they speak. In their 
 words together they weave in so subtly Conchubar's 
 preparation of the bridal bed with the telling of 
 Naisi's first wooing of Deidre and Conchubar's conse- 
 quent thwarting and anger, that one divines the 
 accessories of the issue without actually being told 
 of them. The musing speech of the musicians so 
 fits the chant that Mr. Yeats' verse naturally takes 
 that one scarcely notices the artifice in reading. 
 
132 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Yet artifice it obviously is. Nor is it an artifice that 
 well stands the challenge of acting. Moreover, in 
 the acting it is not so easy to divine much that is 
 not told. 
 
 In such plays, however, as Bane's Stand, or the 
 beautiful Shadowy Waters, where the verse is a-gleam 
 with a pale phosphorescent light, the occasion is 
 avoided even more wisely by choosing the moment 
 and its occasion so deftly that there need scarce be 
 a movement throughout that is not alive with 
 intensity. In the former, to be true, there is an 
 occasion when a retrospect is demanded; and it is 
 met by a dramatic grip that gives the play its 
 strongest moment, though it is significant that he 
 should have rendered it in prose. It is when Cuchu- 
 lain discovers he has slain his own son in the stranger 
 who so unaccountably won his love, and whom 
 he was induced to fight. Cuchulain is wiping his 
 sword with feathers and speaking with the Fool 
 and the Blind Man. He has just learnt from them 
 that his dead antagonist was Aoife's son; and he 
 says : — 
 
 CucH. I had rather he had been some other woman's son. 
 What father had he? A soldier out of Alba? She was an 
 amorous woman — a proud, pale, amorous woman. 
 
 Blind Man. None knew whose son he was. 
 
 CucH. None knew ? Did you know, old listener at doors ? 
 
 Blind Man. No, no; I knew nothing. 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 133 
 
 Fool. He said awhile ago that he heard Aoife boast that she'd 
 never but the one lover, and he the only man that had overcome 
 her in battle. (Pause.) 
 
 Blind Man. Somebody is trembling, Fool? The bench is 
 shaking. Why are you trembling ? Is Cuchulaia going to hurt 
 us ? It was not I who told you, Cuchulain. 
 
 Fool. It is Cuchulain who is trembling. It is Cuchulain who 
 is shaking the bench. 
 
 Blind Man. It is his own son he has slain. 
 
 It is possibly the strongest moment in all his dramatic 
 work; for we tremble too as we learn so obliquely of 
 the terrible thing that has been done. There is 
 another such moment in The King^s Threshold where 
 the strength has been wrought out of a sheer power 
 of dialogue. One remembers that Seanchan has 
 determined to bring shame on the King by dying on 
 his threshold, because of indignity done to the high 
 craft of Poetry in his person. The King brings 
 Seanchan's pupils to him that they may bid him 
 desist. He answers their appeal with wild words; 
 and they tell him that hunger has made him 
 fantastical. Looking at them then, he says quietly : — 
 
 " Why that's the very truth. 
 It is as tho' the moon changed everythiag. 
 
 I had even thought 
 I knew your voice and face, but now the words 
 Are so unlikely that I needs must ask 
 Who is it that bids me put my hunger by." 
 
134 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 It is a quick tension that heightens the pity and turns 
 the dialogue about to a new course of life. 
 
 Yet it is not for such moments of dramatic tension 
 that one turns to Mr. Yeats' drama. He has purged 
 his verse to such effect, and, at its best, made it so 
 sensitive to catch the spirit of the shadowy peoples 
 of the earth, the presences that to him are much of 
 the secret beauty of the world, that it will not readily 
 rise to great dramatic moments save of a peculiarly 
 delicate sort. It is this that one means when it is 
 said that he is truly not a dramatist at all. There 
 is an idle and foolish antithesis sometimes employed 
 between the poetic and the dramatic. It is an idle 
 antithesis, because no such antithesis can be said to 
 exist. The highest and purest drama is always 
 poetic, as the drama of all ages that has perpetuated 
 itself proves by being poetic in substance and form. 
 Yet so are the highest of all moments poetic, for the 
 poetic is the divine memory in man. But since the 
 poetic is wider than the dramatic, there may be 
 poetic moments that are other than dramatic as well 
 as those that are truly dramatic. There are moments 
 of dreams, of phantasies and reveries; and it is 
 chiefly out of such moments that Mr. Yeats has 
 wrought the substance of his plays. Deidre, for 
 example, may be cast in the form of a drama: it 
 may, that is, move through its life in dialogue upon 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 135 
 
 dialogue: but truly it passes like a dream, insub- 
 stantial and remote; like some tale seen on a tapestiry 
 that some gust has caused to billow, while its figures 
 swell up with a semblance of life. 
 
 Even Bailees Stand is of this sort, despite the 
 moment when the tapestry fades and life nearly 
 breaks through the picture. The Shadowy Waters 
 and The King^s Threshold assuredly are. So it is 
 with such plays as The Hour-Glass, Kathleen Ni 
 Houlihan and The Land of Heart's Desire, some, if 
 not all, of which Mr. Yeats wiU doubtless turn into 
 verse some day so as to create the dream-mood more 
 truly. There is a very beautiful lyric in the last 
 that is indicative of this mood, even as it is indicative 
 of so much of his work. 
 
 " The wind blows out of the gates of the day, 
 The wind blows over the lonely of heart. 
 And the lonely of heart is withered away 
 While the fairies dance in a place apart. 
 Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, 
 Tossing their milk-white arms in the air; 
 For they hear the wind laugh, and murmur and sing 
 Of a land where even the old are fair, 
 And even the wise are merry of tongue ; 
 But I heard a reed of Coolaney say, 
 ' When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung. 
 The lonely of heart is withered away,' " 
 
 It is this wind that blows upon all his poetry, in or 
 out of dialogue, giving it its beauty. In the poem 
 
136 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 that is the most notable in all his work, it blows 
 through every line even as it blows through the 
 separate reeds in The Wind Among the Reeds. In 
 a truer sense than in any other play of his The Coun- 
 tess Cathleen is a drama: yet, even so, it is more 
 dream than drama. Moreover, it is worthy of note 
 that it is his only play in which he has not chosen to 
 depict one intense moment, but has given a whole 
 movement throughout its full action. It was written 
 in the days before he had so chastened his verse that 
 it could not make beautiful the lower and less intense 
 moments of song. That it should remain, neverthe- 
 less, as the most beautiful thing he has wrought is 
 a curious commentary on his eflEort continually to 
 tighten the strings of his verse that they might catch 
 more elusive musics. There are registers so high 
 that they wUl not render melodies at all, but only 
 give out notes not greatly dissimilar from one 
 another. 
 
 The spirits he has attempted to catch are not the 
 whole of Beauty. They are not of the height or 
 the depth, neither of the length nor the breadth, of 
 Beauty : and it is doubtful if they are of the centre of 
 Beauty, for "no hint is told of their perpetuity beyond 
 the term of this earth." Yet they are beautiful; and 
 he has caught them. It may be true that in a zeal 
 of craftsmanship, in " the fascination of what's 
 
MR. W. B. YEATS' POETRY 137 
 
 difficult," he has over-refined the verse in which he 
 snared them; but The Wind Among the Reeds and 
 Countess Cathleen, to instance his purest successes, 
 are like nothing else in English poetry in the beauty 
 that they wear, and that is to say they cannot be 
 supposed to pass from memory. 
 
MR. WILLIAM H. DAVIES 
 
 When Wordsworth sought to strike out a new and 
 more natural diction for poetry he achieved two 
 things, which two things became confused in his 
 mind, accounting for much of the confusion one finds 
 in his famous preface. The poetry that burned in 
 him refused to be delivered in the stilted artifice that 
 language, and particularly poetic language, had 
 assumed in his day. Its grandeur he felt to be a 
 mock grandeur; its mystery, where mystery was, 
 a postulate of mystery. Feeling this, with a courage 
 and fearlessness scarcely appreciated at this day, 
 he struck it all away and reduced himself to the bare, 
 simple essentials of language. This his muse seized 
 on, and made poetry of, eagerly enough. But in the 
 glory of first creative fervour he saw poetry in the 
 vehicle rather than in a transcendent use of the vehicle. 
 Later he perceived the error of this, and we know 
 with what care he turned to the question of style. 
 But in his early wonder of discovery We are Seven 
 was sent out with the same gravity and faith as 
 lintern Abbey. Which is not all. For since his day 
 We are Seven, as an exemplary of his achievement, 
 jointly with lintern Abbey, has received no little 
 
 138 
 
MR. W. H. DAVIES 139 
 
 attention. The mind has come to attracting more 
 attention to it than its due is, forgetting that its 
 importance is historic and illustrative rather than 
 intrinsic. 
 
 This fact is important, and from its importance is 
 thrown light of criticism on Mr. Davies' work, for 
 it has some kind of similarity with Wordsworth's 
 simpler, less intense, and less prophetic poems. 
 
 When he succeeds, his utterance has that singular 
 ring of inevitableness that tells it was conceived, as 
 all pure poetry must be and all great poetry is, in 
 the metre of its delivery. Captious analysis fails 
 to enter the thin edge of its criticism between the 
 matter and its utterance. Craftsmanship has its 
 time and place (chiefly preparatory to inspiration); 
 but this is a higher than craftsmanship. For what- 
 ever the thing be worth, high or low, great or slender, 
 there is its finality. This was noticeable in his first 
 volume, The SouVs Destroyer. As when, succeeding 
 to a run of lines with nothing to lift them out of the 
 ordinary, one struck on this — 
 
 " Her presence then a pool of deep repose 
 To break life's dual run from Innocence 
 To Manhood, and from Manhood unto Age, 
 And a sweet pause for all my murmuring." 
 
 This is not metaphor, imagery, or fancy; it is just 
 itself. So with this — 
 
HO STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 " And more subdued her voice, as soft and sweet 
 As Autumn's, blowing thro' his golden reeds." 
 
 Or else one will strike on the sorrow of this, with a 
 gloom as of a grey chasm telling of the ruin of years — 
 
 " Her once blue sapphire eyes had not a gleam. 
 As they would never smUe or weep, again, 
 And had no light to draw the waters up 
 Which staled upon her heart." 
 
 There is nothing magnificent about these; nor have 
 they any of wild beauty in them. They do not come 
 to you with poetic empire in their hands : you have 
 to turn to them as to a woodland shrine. But how 
 beautiful they are at that! The marvel of them is 
 that he should so curiously and suddenly step out 
 with power when so much of his journey has been 
 taken up with stumblings and mishaps. It is this 
 curious indecision of inspiration, or, what is even 
 more bewildering, this utter lack of perception as to 
 what inspiration even is, that marks all his work. 
 To see Nature from a curious and whimsically affec- 
 tionate point of view is not in itself sufficient to create 
 poetry, though it may be a vital assistance to that 
 end. By it the mind may come to penetrate to the 
 true heart of Nature, and learn to abide at that 
 perennial source of all freshness and wide joy and 
 pure felicity; by it the soul may contentedly mingle 
 its essence with the fount of all might and unperturbed 
 
MR. W. H. DAVIES 141 
 
 power, might to might, soul to soul, power to power, 
 and so come to achieve the potentiality of high poetry. 
 But to come to the potentiality of poetry in private 
 experience, and to create power of poetry in the 
 experience of others, are two widely different things. 
 This should be a truism, but unfortunately the two 
 things are too easily confused as the overwhelming 
 mass of poetry comes to testify. It is this confusion 
 that marks the fault of the Lyrical Ballads, and that 
 opposed to it much of the fierce hostility of such men 
 as Lockhart. It took the quiescent genius of Words- 
 worth to perceive that the heart of all poetry lay 
 round about us; that in the calm delight of a Daisy 
 rather than in the sophisticated striving after Night 
 Thoughts lay the essential of poetry. Seeing this, it 
 could be understood how easily he might mistake 
 a daisy for poetry itself rather than seeing it as a 
 symbol to upcall poetry. A daisy is but a wand in 
 the hand of wizard Nature whereby floating visions 
 come upon the seer unfolding the occult destinies and 
 origins of the race. But it may easily so chance that 
 the wand may be there, and the wizard there, and 
 yet no trance come upon the beholder. If such an 
 occasion be transcribed into verse, metrical photo- 
 graphy will ensue, but not poetic vision and inspiration : 
 not poetry. Or to fetch instances from Mr. Davies' 
 work, contrast the following— 
 
142 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 IN SPRING 
 
 " When sparrows twitter in the shutes 
 And swallows lie upright on walls ; 
 When linnets sing on dancing sprays, 
 And loud the merry cuckoo calls; 
 
 " When leafy trees will not allow 
 
 One dot of sky to see their shades ; 
 And, like small insects made of light. 
 The Dewdrops flutter on green blades; 
 
 " When hidden Violets are betrayed 
 By Primroses — those golden boys; 
 And everything that has a tongue, 
 
 Must fill the air with some sweet noise — 
 
 " Then do I bless the hours I live 
 
 From cities where dumb Care is found ; 
 My eyes drink beauty all the day. 
 My ears must suck in every sound." 
 
 THE KINGFISHER 
 
 ' It was the Rainbow gave thee birth. 
 And left thee all her lovely hues ; 
 
 And as her mother's name was Tears, 
 So runs it in thy blood to choose 
 
 For haunts the lonely pools, and keep 
 
 In company with trees that weep. 
 
 ' Go you and, with such glorious hues. 
 
 Live with proud Peacocks in green parks ; 
 
 On lawns as smooth as shining glass. 
 Let every feather show its mark; 
 
MR. W. H. DAVIES 143 
 
 Get thee on boughs and clap thy wings 
 Before the windows of proud kings. 
 
 " Nay, lovely Bird, thou art not vain; 
 
 Thou hast no proud, ambitious mind; 
 I also love a quiet place 
 
 That's green, away from all mankind ; 
 A lonely pool, and let a tree 
 Sigh with her bosom over me." 
 
 He who runs could have seen and written the first, 
 swiftly and fittingly : the second is born of joy con- 
 ceived in meditation. Or, again, contrast In the 
 Country with the typical stanza — 
 
 " No doubt it is a selfish thing 
 To fly from human suffering; 
 No doubt he is a selfish man. 
 Who shuns poor creatures sad and wan." 
 
 Bold and stative as it is, with the curious felicity of 
 so simple a theme as this — 
 
 " I hear leaves drinking rain; 
 
 I hear rich leaves on top 
 Giving the poor beneath 
 
 Drop after drop; 
 'Tis a sweet noise to hear 
 The green leaves drinking near. 
 
 " And when the Sun comes out. 
 
 After this rain shall stop, 
 A wondrous light will fill 
 
 Each dark, round drop; 
 I hope the Sun shines bright; 
 'Twill be a lovely sight." 
 
144 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 The wind of inspiration blows where it lists ; and it is 
 typical of his poetry that Mr. Davies does not dis- 
 tinguish when it rustles in the leaves of his verse, and 
 when it does not. Perhaps had he the oblique eye 
 of criticism to cast on himself as he worked inspira- 
 tion would never have visited him, so ingenuous is his 
 muse. And it is, in a sense, a true instinct in the poet 
 that bids him give more than the purely inspired, for 
 it is by the interpretative light of the lesser that the 
 greater is to be understood. Indeed, it is frequently 
 the uninspired poem that interprets a poet's mind 
 to us more truly than an inspired poem, in the light 
 of which understanding the inspired poem wears a 
 mightier and wider significance. For instance, to 
 turn to Wordsworth again, it is obvious that We are 
 Seven, with all its frailty, throws a rich light on his 
 famous ode. The poet's inspiration is the inspira- 
 tion of his point of view, and we must needs under- 
 stand the point of view before the inspiration can be 
 fully appreciated. How much we need of the lesser 
 work is another matter. 
 
 What poetry gains by being suggestive, and so in 
 some measure symbolic, rather than photographic, 
 by working, that is to say, through the great 
 memory of mankind, even though this memory 
 have tissues in it so fortuitous as literary achieve- 
 ment, not only his poem on The Kingfisher wUl 
 
MR. W. H. DAVIES 145 
 
 demonstrate, but no less the following poem entitled 
 The Sluggard — 
 
 " A jar of cider and my pipe. 
 
 In summer, under shady tree; 
 A book of one that made his mind 
 
 Live by its sweet simplicity: 
 Then must I laugh at kings who sit 
 
 In richest chambers, signing scrolls ; 
 And princes cheered in public ways, 
 
 And stared at by a thousand fools. 
 
 " Let me be free to wear my dreams. 
 
 Like weeds in some maiden's hair, 
 When she doth think the earth has not 
 
 Another maid so rich and fair; 
 And proudly smiles on rich and poor. 
 
 The queen of all fair women then: 
 So I, dressed in my idle dreams, 
 
 WUl think myself the king of men." 
 
 Imagine what the first two lines of the second stanza 
 gain by the simple upcalling of the figure of Ophelia ! 
 The " doth," however, in the third line of the stanza 
 makes this a fitting place to call attention to Mr. 
 Davies' vile habit of using, and depending on, but- 
 tressing " dids." To support a missing syllable in 
 so helpless a way is as unworthy as it is irritating. 
 And, alas! this shouldering verb is scattered over 
 his work with only too lavish a hand. In pure ballad 
 it sometimes gives a thump and a stump that is 
 invigorating enough; but generally it is due to 
 
146 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 faulty craftsmanship, that is due again to mental 
 sloth. 
 
 Yet this very nudity of diction is part of his attain- 
 ment. It would not be true to say that he has 
 brushed aside the diction that poets, and other than 
 poets, have found necessary for the expression of 
 those complicated or intense aspects of beauty that 
 are born of thought and contemplation. It is rather 
 true that he has not been aware of it. Whatever he 
 has is authentic; and that is a rare tribute to any 
 poet. It does not mean that he does not know the 
 past ; nor that he is quite uninfluenced by the memory 
 of literature. In fact, we have seen one instance 
 where that memory brings its own distinct beauty 
 into his verse; and there are many other poems that 
 would probably not have been written had Words- 
 worth and Blake not sung. But his authenticity, his 
 own native sight and song, are yet real possessions. 
 He has approached Life and Nature for himself, and 
 not through others. He has seen for himself; and 
 found for himself a certain contentment, however true 
 it is that that contentment has been the result of 
 shutting away the disturbing influences of Life and 
 Being, not by embracing, subduing, and understanding 
 them. 
 
 It is when one comes to ask what the result of that 
 approach is that one strikes the chief disappointment 
 
MR. W. H. DAVIES 147 
 
 in his work. He may have come for himself; but 
 what has he brought away? He may have seen for 
 himself; but what is it he has seen ? In some lyrics, 
 whose life anthologies of English lyric poetry will 
 ensure, he has noosed in his net of verse moments 
 of a very pure, if small, beauty; but in the mass of 
 his work he has done no more than reduplicate the 
 commonplace appearance of things. And this is not 
 enough for the making of Poetry. Nor does it alter 
 the fact that it is wrought in the metrical garb of 
 Poetry. The full scope of his canvas is small; yet, 
 even so, it is only in rare moments of work that he 
 does rise to what, in that abused yet wise word, we 
 call inspiration. He has forsworn carving in the 
 mountain-side. He has elected to chisel pebbles. 
 And a small handful of such pebbles are moments 
 of peaceful joy that have been excellently caught. 
 To praise so small an achievement in the terms of 
 great poetry is to annul all judgment; yet to reject 
 it because it has been so praised would be to miss 
 a very true source of joy. 
 
MR. HERBERT TRENCH 
 
 If some old-time scop, accustomed to the singing of 
 simple great things, of tempestuous love and war, and 
 of mystical responses between Nature and man, in 
 strong untutored song by camp fires, were to be 
 set to the task of publishing his poetry in modern 
 skilled craftsmanship, a somewhat curious incoherence 
 would result. If, however, in addition to this he 
 were to be caught, not alone in the toils of nineteenth 
 century pessimism and negation, but in the nineteenth 
 century worship of merely intellectual processes, the 
 incoherence would become not only an incoherence 
 of manner but would penetrate to the deeper question 
 of matter. The result of the first would be to make 
 his work somewhat gnarled and unwieldy, so packed 
 as to be surcharged, so impatient as to be elliptical 
 and confused; but the result of the second would be 
 to dry the very founts of inspiration; to make the 
 poet sceptical of all that defies intellectual articulation 
 and intellectual analysis, in other words of inspiration 
 itself. 
 
 Such a poet is Mr. Trench. His two main poems 
 are Deirdre Wedded and Apollo and the Seaman. The 
 first often borders on the inchoate, and for this reason 
 
 148 
 
MR. HERBERT TRENCH 149 
 
 serves to upcall the wild scenes in which the old-time 
 heroes contended, while the latter, over and above 
 its awkward setting, shows the poet walking diffi- 
 dently between polemic and song. But in both is 
 manifested that irritation with the bonds of the 
 craft of verse that vitiates so much of his work. 
 
 Milton laid the axe at the very root of the stumping 
 iamb of, say, such a drama as Gordobuc. With 
 metrical inversion on the one hand, and with the use 
 of elision on the other (a subtler device, this last, and 
 one which showed his careful study of Ben Jonson), 
 he made heroic verse as variable as any possible 
 verse-form. But, with the true instinct of the artist, 
 he was careful to be faithful to the movement of his 
 verse form, and to introduce his variations as quali- 
 fications, but not disruptions, of its time-measure. 
 To say that Mr. Trench breaks his time-measure 
 somewhat too frequently is to be short of the mark, 
 for it is often difficult to discover what his time- 
 measure is. Again, much of his work is in stanza 
 form; but he adopts stanzas only to override the 
 limitations they should impose, carrying on his sense 
 through five, six, and seven stanzas at a time.. Nor 
 are these unimportant questions. For verse-forms 
 have their laws and limitations, to override which is 
 to make the substance they carry shapeless and 
 bewildering. 
 
ISO STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 An old Saxon scop, chanting his songs in a be- 
 raftered hall, had eye, voice, and gesture to supple- 
 ment his meaning, and therefore had no need of metre 
 or stanza. But to claim his freedom for printed verse 
 is to confuse things that differ. One of the results 
 is that when Mr. Trench strictly observes the function 
 of metrical regularity he is apt to be gnomic. He 
 achieves regularity as Meredith too frequently 
 achieved it — by dropping out words that would have 
 upset the rhythm surely enough, but that chanced 
 to be somewhat important to the meaning. 
 
 For work of such slender proportions as his to be 
 set about with such stout difficulties is a considerable 
 drawback to its intelligent appreciation. Yet it has 
 this advantage, that it invests it with the glamour 
 of might. And when, in addition to this, it has for 
 its subject a tale of strength and valour, of wide 
 mountains and combating heroes, the kinship between 
 the initial subject and its setting out will serve to 
 make the poem so created a notable one. Such a 
 poem is Deirdre Wedded. It is his first long poem; 
 and it is his best. Taking the great love story of 
 Irish mythology, it gives it a new setting and a strong 
 one. Moreover, the subject suits Mr. Trench not less 
 than it suits the manner of his song; and that he 
 should have chosen to deliver it minstrel-fashion, 
 through voices of old-time poets singing in different 
 
MR. HERBERT TRENCH 151 
 
 centuries, is indicative how native to him is this kind 
 of strong untutored song. 
 
 The "Voice of Fintan" opens the subject in blank 
 verse that is strong and sinewy. Mellifluity is sacri- 
 ficed to strength, to its loss as music, but with com- 
 pensating gain in that it suggests the colour of the 
 scene it depicts. Its very roughness, too, is not 
 unfitting to the theme. But it is rather when he 
 comes to the freer rhythm in which the " Voice of Cir " 
 continues the tale that Mr. Trench finds the space 
 of treatment more proper to him. Naois' ride with 
 Deirdre, fleeing from the court of Connacher through 
 a wild and heavy country, is full of strength, though 
 one would wish that its strength were more tutored 
 to sweetness of music : that it were rather the strength 
 of wisdom than the strength of force. At its worst 
 it is unwieldy; at its best it is bracing and mighty: 
 as when one sees — 
 
 " Naois assault the ridge, to the wilderness setting his face 
 Expectant, unconscious, as one whom his foes arouse; 
 His heart was a forge, his onset enkindled space. 
 He shook off the gusty leagues like locks from his brows." 
 
 The " Voice of Urmael " takes up the song in stanzas 
 that are awkward to begin with, and are not rendered 
 any the less awkward when Mr. Trench strides from 
 one to another, taking an unbroken meaning with 
 him. The very genius of a poet is to select the fittest 
 
152 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 form in which his song may be sung; and to make 
 that form express its utmost. The form is not 
 adventitious ; the form should be native to the theme, 
 the theme being conceived in that form. For a poet 
 to conceive that it is he who sings his song, and that 
 therefore it matters little in what form it is given, 
 is to miss the essential business of creation. It is 
 for this reason the mind catches the similarity be- 
 tween Mr. Trench and an old-time scop. Such an old- 
 time bard sang his songs ; but a modern poet cannot 
 sing his songs. He is more than mere songster; he 
 is a creator. He has to create a form that shall sing 
 his songs for him. And if he fail to create such 
 a form, however worthy its subject, the total product 
 will stumble. It is for this reason Mr. Trench so 
 frequently fails. We feel it is Mr. Trench singing, 
 and that there is something of chance in the fact 
 that he is singing in the particular form we see. 
 Chanted by him to an audience his themes might be 
 inspiriting enough. A dropped word, a redundant 
 syllable, a misplaced cadence, an overflowing meaning, 
 would matter little: the demand for form would be 
 sunk in the inspiration of the subject. But the 
 day of the singer is over; this is the day of the 
 creator. Even the modern recitation of verse (a 
 question of no small importance) finds it necessary 
 to express feelingly the music of the form no less 
 
MR. HERBERT TRENCH 153 
 
 than the subject of the song: a thing unknown 
 before ! 
 
 This is the difficulty of Deirdre Wedded, strength- 
 ened as it is by a finely conceived subject. But when 
 in Apollo and the Seaman he turns to a subject far 
 from inspiriting, and bordering on polemic, we receive 
 a poem framed on the model of the Ancient Mariner, 
 but with a metre that fails in surefootedness, set in 
 stanzas and defying their setting at one and the 
 same time. 
 
 It is rather when we come to his lyrics that we dis- 
 cover Mr. Trench at his best. For a lyric demands 
 form. It refuses to be conceived apart from form. 
 It demands sure-footed metre too. And since Mr. 
 Trench has been confining his attention to lyrics his 
 work has consequently gained just that which it 
 lacked before, conviction. For example — 
 
 " Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I, 
 Seeing that our footing on the earth is brief — 
 Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die 
 
 Mocking at all that passes their belief. 
 For standard of our love not theirs we take: 
 
 If we go hence to-day- 
 Fill the high cup, that is so soon to break. 
 With richer wine than they. 
 
 " Ay, since beyond these walls no heavens there be 
 Joy to revive or wasted youth repair, 
 I'U not bedim the lovely flame in thee, 
 Nor sully the sad splendour that we wear. 
 
154 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Great be our love, if with the lover dies 
 
 Our greatness past recall, 
 And nobler for the fading of those eyes 
 
 The world seen once for all!" 
 
 This is as it should be, complete and final! To alter 
 anywhere would be to spoil it. Now and then even 
 in these lyrics of his, however, there are noticeable 
 those signs of an unmastered impulsion of song 
 which too often mars Mr. Trench's work. The dif- 
 ference between an unmastered lyric and a mastered 
 lyric is the difference between the finality of joy and 
 the weeping of failure. " Come, let us make love 
 deathless," exemplifies the former; and to it the 
 following may be added, and for reasons other than 
 his excellence — 
 
 " Oh birds of the air — 
 
 Wild birds, buoyant, vagabond, light — 
 Streams may have taught you a stave; 
 
 But how are ye bom so sure of your flight 
 Hence over worlds of the wave ? 
 
 Whose mind remembers in you as it weaves 
 
 Subtlest of houses to sway with the leaves ? 
 We have forgotten the land out of sight — 
 We buUd no house but the grave! " 
 
 Out of such a hopelessness and uncertainty, out 
 of such a mood of uncertainty, what great poetry 
 shall be wrought ? Happily man has not " forgotten 
 the land out of sight," though it may be true that 
 some men deny its existence. 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 The present day is neither spacious nor restful enough 
 for the fit enjoyment of Mr. Bridges' poetry. This 
 does not necessarily mean that his work is bulky, 
 though, in point of fact, it is sufficiently so. The 
 remark does not deal with the achievement so much 
 as the mood that prompted the achievement. The 
 age deals in excitements; most of them superficial 
 enough, but some few of them meritorious and 
 genuine: whereas, in contradistinction to the age, 
 Mr. Bridges has purged all excitement from his verse. 
 All Art has its essential ritual, whether it be the 
 ritual of pomp for the pursuit of magnificence, or the 
 ritual of subtlety for the achievement of inwardness ; 
 and a ritual is the disguise and, at the same time, the 
 articulation of ecstasy, which is a sublime excitement. 
 The chief note of poetry is such ecstasy; and the 
 higher the ecstasy the higher the poetry. Therefore, 
 when we see a poet setting forth with deliberate 
 intention to purge out excitements, the situation is 
 one sufficiently interesting. 
 
 It might, perhaps, be put in another way. A fair 
 portion of Mr. Bridges' work is given up to short 
 lyrics, to say nothing of the lyrics that are strewn 
 throughout the body of his dramatic work. Now 
 
 155 
 
156 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the function of a lyric is to strike the mind with one 
 single choice ecstasy that shall leave it perpetually 
 enriched, even though the memory omit to retain 
 a detailed impression of its cause. The mind passes 
 through a mood of tense joy that it can never utterly 
 disavow. It may be compact of its own emotion, 
 or it may deal in the symbolism of metaphor, but, 
 whichever it is, its business is with a moment of 
 complete ecstasy. Therefore, the expression " a 
 placid lyric " is rea'Uy a contradiction in terms. 
 Nevertheless, Mr. Bridges chiefly deals in placid 
 lyrics. Not wholly; for the memory clings to certain 
 exquisite excitements which lyrics of his have aroused. 
 Which, properly considered, are a sufficient con- 
 demnation of their company. Take, for example, 
 the following sets of two stanzas, chosen for some 
 similarity of mood expressed iiythem, and note how 
 a declension in poetic excitement from the first set 
 to the second implies a declension of poetic value — 
 
 I 
 
 " I have loved flowers that fade. 
 Within whose magic tints 
 Rich hues have marriage made 
 With sweet unmemoried scents: 
 A honeymoon delight, 
 A joy of love at sight. 
 That ages in an hour — 
 My song be like a flower! 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 157 
 
 " I have loved airs, that die 
 Before their charm is writ 
 Along a liquid sky 
 Trembling to welcome it. 
 Notes, that with pulse of fire 
 Proclaim the spirit's desire. 
 Then die, and are nowhere: — 
 My song be like an air ! 
 
 II 
 
 " I made another song, 
 In likeness of my love: 
 And sang it all day long, 
 Around, beneath, above; 
 I told my secret out. 
 That none might be in doubt. 
 
 " I sang it to the sky. 
 That veiled his face to hear 
 How far her azure eye 
 Outdoes his splendid sphere; 
 But at her eyelids' name 
 His white clouds fled for shame." 
 
 The difference in these two is not the important 
 distinction between one fashion of ecstasy from 
 another; it is the root difference between inspiration 
 and its absence, for inspiration is ecstasy in achieve- 
 ment. To achieve poetry it is not merely necessary 
 to depict an external scene or an internal emotion; 
 and never was poetry better proved to be transcen- 
 dental and divine than when a poet sought to achieve 
 
158 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 it by so photographic a method. Let a poet but deny 
 the divinity of the thing he handles, or abjure its 
 fervour, and the result condemns him aS not having 
 achieved poetry, whatever else he may have achieved. 
 This does not mean to say that all poetry is equally 
 exalted. There is the good that is slight not less 
 than the good that is great, though there is a strange 
 and undeniable kinship between them all. For 
 instance, it may be a single, simple, pure emotion 
 passing away on a wave, such as — 
 
 " I love all beauteous things, 
 
 I seek and adore them ; 
 God hath no better praise. 
 And man in his hasty days 
 
 Is honoured for them. 
 
 " I too will some thing make 
 
 And joy in the making; 
 Altho' to-morrow it seem 
 Like the empty words of a dream 
 
 Remembered on waking." 
 
 Or it may be something more notable, such as — 
 
 " Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, 
 Heaving across the bosom of the urgent West ? " 
 
 Or it may be the poignant — 
 
 " I will not let thee go. 
 Ends all our month-long love in this ? 
 Can it be summed up so. 
 Quit in a single kiss ? 
 I will not let thee go." 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 159 
 
 These may all hail each other cousin over the straits 
 of difference; but they would all mutually deny 
 relationship with — 
 
 " Sometimes when my lady sits by me 
 My rapture's so great, that I tear 
 My mind from the thought that she's nigh me. 
 And strive to forget that she's there. 
 
 " And sometimes when she is away 
 Her absence so sorely does try me, 
 That I shut to my eyes, and essay 
 To think she is there sitting by me " ; 
 
 or his account of some or other river-party. One 
 has to search for his moments of inspiration among 
 his lyrics, for they are not many among the mass of 
 them. Moreover, they are sometimes difficult to 
 find, and for the curious reason that they have 
 superficially the same appearance as their uninspired 
 neighbours. It is as though the calm passage of 
 verse after verse sharpened suddenly and unexpected- 
 ly to the cry of intensity, and then passed again 
 into its placid movements. They need to be taken 
 from their context for their full beauty to be seen. 
 But once seen so they cannot fail to be treasured 
 tenderly. 
 
 Too often content with a mood that fails from the 
 necessary fervour, Mr. Bridges appears to have lost 
 the power of judging between his moods. The critical 
 
i6o STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 function of his mind seems either never to have been 
 present in him, or to have declined from its activity 
 through atrophy. So when it is remembered that 
 the goodlier portion of his work is dramatic, this 
 brings the whole interest to an acute pass. For 
 dramatic work demands above all things the critical 
 instinct. It means not only the just analysis of 
 emotions in the characters deployed in whatever 
 action is afoot; it means a mind that hovers critically 
 over the spoken word to judge its fitness, in matter, 
 quality, and quantity. It means also an instinctive 
 sympathy with the mind of the observer, knowing 
 that it is there, and not in the written or spoken word, 
 that the action takes place. 
 
 It is not possible in a drama, as in a book of lyrics, 
 for a reader to select or reject. It comes as a whole; 
 and as a whole it must succeed or fail. Furthermore, 
 a drama demands just that very thing that Mr. 
 Bridges fails to achieve in his lyrics: a high mood 
 wrought to intensity. It might therefore be prog- 
 nosticated that the poet without critical instinct and 
 without passion could never create great poems in 
 dramatic form; and this is true, so far, with regard 
 to Mr. Bridges, that he everywhere fails except when 
 the structure of an ancient story lies to hand for him 
 to fill in its parts. Let him have the business in 
 hand of creating vital beings who shall work out 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES i6i 
 
 their own ends to a destined conclusion, and we 
 receive such a drama Paltcio, which he terms a 
 romantic drama. To say that its characters act 
 inconsistently or foolishly is to say too much, for 
 both those characteristics are, indeed, characteristics ; 
 that is to' say, they imply characters, which, in turn, 
 imply vital beings. But the truth is that, despite 
 some three thousand lines succeeding to them, the 
 names of the dramatis persona yet await actuality. 
 
 In Nero, in the first part, but yet more in the 
 second part, he overcomes this, and does indeed 
 present his personages with life. He becomes a 
 creator, though it is rather the creation of the historian 
 than the creation of the dramatist. But now it is 
 at the cost of dramatic interest ! The story flows on 
 through the first part, and, with a slight change of 
 personnel, flows on through the second part. There 
 seems very little reason to discover why it should 
 not flow on through a third part and a fourth part, 
 except that a man must make end. It is not very 
 difficult to create a set ®f characters who have no 
 destiny to achieve. It is not very difficult to con- 
 struct an interesting story in which puppets shall 
 dance at the author's bidding. It is the eternal 
 problem to create a set of vital beings who shall 
 achieve a destiny of deeper interest than themselves. 
 And that is Drama. 
 
i62 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Even the characters themselves, it must be con- 
 fessed, fail of dramatic interest, and for a reason not 
 difficult to discover. For characters live in the lines 
 they speak; and by the quality of the verse must 
 they be judged. Speaking in the sense of craftsman- 
 ship it is true that the poet that cannot create subtle 
 verse cannot create a Hamlet, and the poet that 
 cannot create mighty and poignant verse cannot 
 create an Othello or a Lear. Therefore, to say that 
 Mr. Bridges has purged out great mental excitement 
 from his verse is to say that he has shut his doors 
 against potent beings in his dramas, and therefore 
 has abjured the drama that overawes. It is fair to 
 say that he feels this himself, and seeks to overcome 
 it. For instance, Almeh in the Christian Captives, at a 
 momentwhen the reader's mind is needed to be attuned 
 to her own emotional stress, speaks of the ocean thus — 
 
 " Thinkst thou that vexM monster 
 Hath any physic in his briny breath 
 For grief like mine ? " 
 
 The intention, conscious or sub-conscious, is obvious. 
 It is the same as when Macbeth on the eve of tragic 
 happenings whips our minds to excitement by speak- 
 ing of " Heaven's cherubim horsed upon the sight- 
 less couriers of the air." But how different! In 
 one we are whipped to excitement co-equal with 
 Macbeth's own mood, scarcely knowing of it. In the 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 163 
 
 other, we see the attempt, and are left unmoved. It 
 is deeply true that the poet cannot achieve in us a 
 mood he is not capable of himself; and Mr. Bridges 
 is too contemplative and meditative for those 
 explosive emotions that go to make great drama. 
 
 He is even afraid to venture beyond the phrases 
 evolved by the meditative mind, however capable of 
 more eager verse he be. The pioneer spirit entirely 
 lacks in him; and of this a very curious example 
 exists in his wholly rousing and surprisingly boisterous 
 comedy The Humours of the Court. The butt of the 
 comedy is a would-be poet, Nicholas by name, who 
 (with the author's intention to make poetry on his 
 lips ridiculous) speaks thus of love's pain— 
 
 " I have compared it to a sunbeamed tear. 
 Whose single pearl broiders the marble lids 
 Of some tall Sphinx, that with impassive smile 
 Dreams o'er the desert; whence 'twas gathered up 
 Of earthly dew and the pale sparkle of stara, 
 To fall ia silent lightning on the sands; 
 Which, at the touch magnifical, bloom forth 
 In irresistible fecundity. 
 Such is love's pain, as it hath lit on me ; 
 And tinctured by it I would dream my day. 
 Nor count the saUing hour, but when night falls 
 Be closed up, like a belated bee. 
 In the pale lily of death." 
 
 It seems probable that Nicholas with a little care 
 and application would, to judge from this extract, 
 
1 64 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 come in time to make a better poet than his creator. 
 Which is a parable; for Mr. Bridges just lacks that 
 pioneer search for beauty that marks this effort by 
 the child of his brain. The closing simile, which 
 Mr. Bridges holds up to much subsequent ridicule, 
 is one, nevertheless, that the memory refuses easily 
 to part with, finding undeniable beauty in it, however 
 apparently far-fetched. There is certainly more 
 beauty in it than lives in the somewhat effete 
 Christian Captives, save for some passages in Almeh's 
 vision of heaven. Spanish soldiers, or any other 
 soldiers for that matter, of the Middle Ages, or of 
 any other age, were but little likely to spend aU 
 their nights and days in slow procession chanting 
 hymns. There is something infinitely truer to 
 life in the " belated bee in the pale lily of death." 
 But it is born of adventure; it is conceived in 
 vigour. 
 
 It is obvious, therefore, that his mood and craft are 
 best adapted to dramas conceived in the Greek 
 manner, the sudden and adventurous Gothic beauty 
 being beyond his reach. And his work approves this. 
 None who have read his Greek dramas can doubt 
 that matter and manner have coincided in them 
 with the choice happiness of success. In order of 
 merit they are The Return of Ulysses, Demeter, 
 Achilles in Scyros, and Prometheus the Firegiver. In 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 165 
 
 these his purged, even bare, simplicity sometimes 
 rises to great beauty, and is always happy. 
 
 The subjects, and the order of their events, lie to 
 his hand, and therefore there is no call on his inven- 
 tion. Thus he is free to construct his verse imper- 
 turbably. This is not always happy as it happens. 
 For instance, in The Return of Ulysses there being 
 but one undivided action in view, the treatment 
 demanded is one of swiftness, of rapidity amounting 
 almost to suddenness. Whereas some three thousand 
 lines intervene between Ulysses' arrival on the island 
 and his victory over the suitors of Penelope. The 
 mind loses patience over his interminable talk with 
 Emmaeus, and with the suitors and their song, be- 
 cause in these the action is not progressed, as dramatic 
 action should be in speech, but hindered. Yet when 
 the end comes, what joy of intensity is produced in 
 us by the calm verse and its patient progress! How 
 beautiful is the language of the maid that tells 
 Penelope how the fight wages without, and how 
 deftly is the coming of Athena hinted, as with elec- 
 tron spear she transforms Ulysses from his beggar-like 
 fashion! She says — 
 
 " He shield eth himself well, and striketh surely. 
 His foes fall dead before him. Ah! now what see I ? 
 Who Cometh ? Lo ! a dazzling helm, a spear 
 Of silver or electron; sharp and swift 
 The piercings. How they fall. Ha, shields are raised 
 
i66 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man 
 
 Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, ho is yonng. 
 
 O strange! 
 He is all in golden armour. These are gods. 
 That slay the wooers. {Runs to Penelope.) O lady, 
 
 forpve me! 
 'Tis Ares' self. I saw his crispM beard: 
 I saw beneath his hehn his curling locks." 
 
 Such a passage is faultless, for it fulfils its own concep- 
 tion. It proves that Mr. Bridges, having found his 
 proper theme of song, by that same token has struc- 
 tured verse that must needs endure, being beautiful. 
 Achilles in Scyros is as patient in its movement, 
 though by no means so lengthy, and is as balanced in 
 its beauty. The choruses, like most of his choruses, 
 are somewhat too apt to be intricate; and they 
 would gain, being in English song, both in cogency 
 and attraction if they stept to a more definite metre. 
 The involved choruses of the ancient Greek are 
 scarcely adapted to the music sprung from the 
 English tongue. There is, however, a passage in it 
 that rivals the description of Ulysses at fight. It is 
 Lycomedes' description of the Greek fleet at Aulis. 
 Something too lengthy for extended quotation, frag- 
 ments may yet be given — 
 
 " 'Twas such a breathless morning. 
 When all the sound and motion of the sea 
 Is short and sullen, like a dreaming beast. 
 
MR. ROBERT BRIDGES 167 
 
 The morning mist lifted, and lo, a sight 
 
 Unpicturable. — High upon our left 
 
 Where we supposed was nothing, suddenly 
 
 A tall and shadowy figure loomed ; then two. 
 
 And three, and four, and more towering above us: 
 
 But whether poised upon the leaden sea 
 
 They stood, or floated in the misty air, 
 
 That baffling our best vision held entangled 
 
 The silver of the half-awakened sun. 
 
 Or whether near or far, we could not tell. 
 
 — 'twas a fleet of ships, not three or four 
 Now, but unnumber'd: Uke a floating city. 
 If such could be, with walls and battlements 
 Spread on the wondering water ; and now the sun 
 Broke thro' the haze, and from the shields out-hung 
 Blazed back his dazzling beams, and round their prows 
 On the divided water played, as still 
 They rode the tide in silence, all their oars 
 Stretched out aloft, as are the balanced wings 
 Of storm-fowl, which, returned from baffling flight 
 Across the sea, steady their aching plumes 
 And skim along the shuddering clifis at ease." 
 
 With them must be placed Prometheus' words when 
 he says in Prometheus the Firegiver — 
 
 " I see the cones 
 And needles of the fir which by the wind 
 In melancholy places ceaselessly 
 Sighing are strewn upon the tufted floor." 
 
 These are not trophies that Mr. Bridges has won; 
 they are beauties that have come to him in meditative 
 
i68 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 calm, and through him to us. They came when he 
 least sought them. The plays in which they appear, 
 it need scarcely be said, are not all of equal excellence. 
 Nay, they sometimes fail of a unity of effect — ^which 
 is not a fault that can be found of Demeter, for this is 
 the most coherent and orderly of all his works in its 
 structure. It is, moreover, the loveliest treatment 
 in English of the loveliest legend of the Greeks, and 
 takes its place, with unostentatious calm, among the 
 handful of masks in English literature that the passage 
 of Time can neither mar nor stale. 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH: THE PHILOSOPHER 
 IN THE ARTIST 
 
 That no man may make his work other than an 
 effluence of himself is surely an axiom of literary 
 criticism hard to gainsay. Much has been heard, 
 for example, of the " impersonal aspect " of Shake- 
 speare's work; yet when all the dust of words has 
 floated by, and the noise of battle is over, this fact 
 remains, that the lover of Shakespeare feels quite 
 sure of his man. Details of character, certain 
 intimacies of emotion, remain unravelled: but then 
 who knows so much of his dearest friend ? And what 
 matters it so long as the main lines are sure, since it 
 is these main lines that are more indicative of the man 
 than transient vagaries ? Even with this most im- 
 personal of artists his lovers know there are certain 
 things that may most positively be affirmed of him. 
 Who, for instance, believes it possible of the creator 
 of Horatio that he would take generous patronage 
 from an Earl of Essex, later to turn and rend him 
 merely to advance his own forensic career ? 
 
 Ben Jonson, who knew him, declares that he sees 
 Shakespeare's face shining in his works; and we, 
 who know him only in his works, feel this to be deeply 
 
 169 
 
I70 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 true. Yet whatever doubt may chance to exist here, 
 in the case of a man of a fine sensitiveness and an 
 ardent aspiration indeed, but with no co-ordinated 
 philosophy, no such doubts exist with regard to 
 Meredith. Here is a man with a strong philosophy 
 serving for backbone in his life, and serving for back- 
 bone in that work which is the main issue of his life, 
 A creator of vital men and women indeed, throwing 
 them off with their own life and personalities, bidding 
 them breathe their own air, think their own thoughts, 
 have their own aspirations, fight their own battles; 
 and yet a creator greater than his own creations, 
 who in the very fashioning of them gives us a subtle 
 clue to his judgment of them, and who in framing, 
 more or less arbitrarily, the course and consequence 
 of their actions passes judgment on these actions and 
 the personalities that spun them. 
 
 Therefore with Meredith the task is easier than 
 with others, for in certain portions of his poetry, and 
 in certain excrescences embodied in the action of his 
 novels, he has more or less clearly articulated his 
 philosophy. And in his prose, apart from one or two 
 earlier novels not specially characteristic of him, this 
 philosophy is set in action. To say this is not to 
 derogate his work as literature; for indeed all litera- 
 ture is philosophy, somebody's philosophy, set in 
 action: or rather, to speak more truly, philosophy 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 171 
 
 is the desire to know Truth as Truth, while literature 
 is the aspect of the spacious edifice of Truth from the 
 standpoint of temperament, the standpoint of the 
 creations adjusting the standpoint of the creator. 
 This is not to say that Meredith's novels are entirely- 
 given over to the expositidn of his philosophy. Yet 
 that this philosophy does indeed play a vital part 
 in the novels is surely indisputable; and to it he has 
 given his tacit assent by explaining that his poem 
 The Empty Purse is admittedly not poetry, strictly so 
 called, but an exposition of an idea for which he 
 could not find room in the novels. 
 
 What then is this philosophy ? One word utters it; 
 a word that is its birth and its aspiration, its touch- 
 stone and its philosopher's-stone, its crown and its 
 citadel; a word that threads delicately through his 
 whole work; which, when we strike upon it, enables 
 us to know that we have come upon something that 
 is most peculiarly its author's, and which, rightly 
 understood, should furnish the clue to much else. 
 " Eart h " is this mystic, this magic, word; an 
 ordinary word, indeed, but coming to us clad in a 
 glory which Meredith has newly robed upon it. 
 Apart from his virtue as a creator of vital beauty 
 and vital character, indeed in and through this virtue, 
 the position he has at last won for himself and the 
 understanding he has yet to find depend much on 
 
172 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the value he has set to this word, and the philosophy 
 of life he has robed around it. To read his novels 
 merely as tales of interest is to enjoy them truly; 
 but it is to miss their peculiar nutty flavour. To 
 glory in his heroes as men, and to love his heroines 
 as women, is to have heart possessions for ever; but 
 to love them apart from their meaning to him is to 
 lose their special lustre and radiance. Whereas his 
 poems defy recognition or appreciation save as 
 jewels in the special carcanet of his philosophy. 
 There are few poets, the details of whose work live 
 less for themselves than for their glory as a whole: 
 each striking its particular sparkle to light up and 
 aid the radiance of another, and they in turn mutually 
 brilliant to vivify the scheme in which they are set. 
 " Earth," then, is the word : and its correlative is 
 " Man." If Meredith's work be a sumptuous Gothic 
 cathedral, then its altar-piece is his exquisitely 
 chiselled poem Earth and Man. It is a marmoreal 
 poem; and like most marmoreal work, despite its 
 dignity and stateliness, it is cold and hard. But it 
 contains in seed nearly all that is elsewhere manifest 
 in bough and foliage. Here we are introduced to 
 Earth; and here we are introduced to ourselves, our 
 race, her choicest and most noble product — 
 
 " On her great venture Man 
 Earth gazes." 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 173 
 
 From Earth Man has sprung; and from nowhere else: 
 she is his sole origin, and the goal toward which he 
 aspires is the goal toward which she aspires in and 
 through him. Virtue and truth have only meaning 
 to him in relation to this origin and in relation to this 
 goal. The path was through brutes and savagery, 
 the memory and potency of which live yet in his 
 veins; and Progress lies toward the noble brother- 
 hood of Man. The journey entails much suffering: 
 or, rather, the suffering is the flagellation by which 
 the journey is to be accomplished. It matters not; 
 pain is to be embraced, though not necessarily to be 
 sought ; disappointment and grief have to be endured : 
 not with stoical ox-eyed indifference, but with that 
 keen brain-sensitiveness that looks attentively to 
 see what law of our Mother Earth we have broken 
 that has brought this thwacking on us. Seeing it, 
 knowing it, we are taught our lesson; nay, we our- 
 selves have deliberately to learn our lesson, that we 
 may go on our way chastened, humbled, and the 
 more determined to advance on our road. The 
 journey, however, is not unbroken. Man often 
 enough has turned aside from the path; he has more 
 often shrunk from the labour and pain of the journey, 
 evading it by finding consolation in legends and 
 visions. But Earth does not lose hope; she has 
 faith in her great venture; indeed she must not lose 
 
174 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 hope, for apart from him she has failed; he is her 
 great justification — 
 
 " Through Titm hath she exchanged 
 For the gold harvest-robes, the mural crown. 
 Her haggard quarry-features and thick frown 
 Where monsters ranged. 
 
 " And order, high discourse. 
 And decency, than which is Ufe less dear, 
 She has of him: the l3rre of language clear. 
 Love's tongue and source." 
 
 So he sings in two of its most fragrant stanzas. 
 Yet he is not only her justification in himself, and 
 in his march upward to the light; but no less when 
 he turns about and introduces, order and an ordered 
 beauty into his Mother's own " haggard quarry- 
 features." For it is no wild untutored Nature that 
 wins Meredith's special love. Something on this 
 shines in a passage describing the magical Woods of 
 Westermain. 
 
 " here, their worths exchanged. 
 Urban joins with pastoral; 
 Little lost, save what may drop 
 Husk-like, and the rind preserves. 
 Natural overgrowths they top. 
 Yet from nature neither swerves. 
 Trained or savage: for this cause: 
 Of our Earth they ply the laws. 
 Have in Earth their feeding root. 
 Mind of Man and bent of brute. 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 175 
 
 Hear it: is it wail or mirth ? 
 Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled ? 
 None, cind all: it springs of Earth." 
 
 Progress is the order of the journey: from Earth, 
 inspired and propelled by Earth; in Man, through 
 Man, guided and ordered by Man. To achieve this 
 he must neither seek to woo other destinies than this 
 she has set for him, nor must he set his love on 
 fair legends of the past. If he do this, then she 
 must needs scourge him to his task again. For in 
 truth she gives scant sympathy for sorrow and frail 
 encouragement to dreams. 
 
 " Not she gives the tear for the tear: 
 Harsh wisdom gives Earth, no more; 
 In one the spur and the curb: 
 An answer to thoughts or deeds; 
 To the Legends an alien look; 
 To the Questions a figure of clay." 
 
 So he sings in his Faith on Trial; proving indeed 
 that this was a very Faith with him, consolatory in 
 the deepest sorrow, an inspiration in the hour of 
 stress and the day of anxiety. Sorrow is no luxury 
 to such a man, nor is disappointment a mournful 
 theme, though he glories in them indeed with a stern 
 and strange glory. They are the means of growth 
 and occasions of progress; and he finds in his Earth 
 the symbols and lessons of this. Is it Winter, a time 
 of the year that — 
 
176 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 " damps to the bone. 
 Narrows the world to my neighbour's gate ; 
 Paints me life as a wheezy crone " ? 
 
 Then this is " seedtime " ; Spring is on its way, and 
 this is its preparation — 
 
 " Death is the word of a bovine Day, 
 Know you the breast of the springing To-be." 
 
 Is it "Hard Weather," blowing gustful, keen, and 
 biting ? Then, says he — 
 
 " Such meaning in a Dagger-day 
 
 Our wit may clasp to wax in power." 
 For— 
 
 " Behold the life at ease; it drifts. 
 
 The sharpened life commands its cause. 
 
 She winnows, winnows roughly; sifts 
 
 To dip her chosen in her source: 
 
 Contention is the vital force. 
 
 Whence pluck they brain, her prize of gifts, 
 
 Sky of the senses I on which height 
 
 Not disconnected, yet released. 
 
 They see how spirit comes to light. 
 
 Through conquest of the inner beast." 
 
 His whole Nature Poetry is saturated with this idea; 
 over-saturated in fact, to its detriment as an ingenuous 
 and living tissue of being. What this progress is, and 
 what the measure and standard of it are, briefly may 
 be stated both negatively and positively: positively 
 as the acquisition of Brain-power, that which dif- 
 ferentiates, and marks progress, from the brute; 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 177 
 
 and negatively as the elimination and eradication of 
 Self and Egoism. 
 
 We are not concerned with the rights and faults 
 of his perception; nor, now, with the virtue of his 
 faith in Brain-power. It is sufficient to say that 
 he sets it over against the dominion of the sensations; 
 or, as he puts it, with a more questionable designa- 
 tion, Heart-rule. " Ah, what a fruitless breeder is 
 this heart," says he in his Ode to the Camic Spirit — 
 
 " by turns a lump 
 Swung on a time-piece ; and by turns 
 Acquiring energy to jump 
 For seats angelical; it shrinks, it yearns; 
 Loves, loathes ; is flame or cinders ; lastly cloud 
 Capping a sullen crater." 
 
 He wiU none of it. " Let Brain-rule splendidly 
 tower! " is his phrase; and it is worthy of comment 
 that this Brain-rule, this victory over Heart-rule, is 
 very much akin to the icy spirit of monasticism, as 
 he himself sees a little later in the same ode; for 
 he speaks of this — 
 
 " Light of the mind, the mind's discourse, 
 The rational in graciousness, 
 
 as yet disowned 
 Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed 
 To holy work, deems it the heart's intent; 
 Or where a silken circle views it cowled." 
 
178 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 One remembers that, in his last novel, this same vic- 
 tory of Brain-rule that drove Carinthia to tend the 
 wounded, drove her unhappy husband to scourge 
 himself to death in a monastery. 
 
 Yet it is the negative aspect, this scourging of self, 
 that might seem more positive than the positive 
 itself. For now that we are moving on the higher 
 places of thought it is obvious that a more delicate 
 instrument than pain, a subtler scourge than sorrow, 
 is needed. And it is found. It is found in that 
 famous exposition of the Comic Spirit, and of the 
 operations of this elusive faun, that is Meredith's 
 peculiar property in literature. Not only has he 
 given us precept and exposition; he has himself 
 exemplified the operations of his Ariel-spirit in that 
 masterpiece of subtlety The Egoist : every page of 
 whichpeals with silvery laughter swift and scintillating, 
 every chapter of which is vivid with mirth too delicate 
 for the stout guffaw, too essential to be handled, so 
 rare and elusive as almost to escape with a smile, 
 volatile everywhere and piercing always. 
 
 This is the deft flail that, says Meredith, shall whip 
 out the Ego standing ever in Man's destined path of 
 progress: this is the flail, and this is its especial 
 function. He would have men not merely unselfish, 
 but selfless; personal and vital truly, but holding 
 this personality and this vitality at service for his 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 179 
 
 fellows, and, more essentially, at service for the 
 generations to follow, thus absolving himself from 
 any taint of Egoism. In his exquisite Lark Ascend- 
 ing, where the very irresponsible, rippling gaiety of 
 the lark's song seems conveyed to us in the beat and 
 measure of the poet's verse, Meredith sees the bird 
 singing so; not thinking of self and free from all 
 taint. — 
 
 " Was never voice of ours could say 
 Our inmost in the sweetest way, 
 Like yonder voice aloft, and link 
 All hearers in the song they drink. 
 Our vision speaks from failing blood. 
 Our passion is too full in flood. 
 We want the key of his wild note 
 Of truthful in a tuneful note. 
 The song seraphically free 
 Of taint of personality. 
 So pure that it salutes the suns 
 The voice of one for millions. 
 In whom the millions rejoice 
 For giving their one spirit voice." 
 
 It might perhaps be said that, let him extol as he 
 may, or as eloquently as he will, 
 
 " The song seraphically free 
 Of taint of personality," 
 
 the abiding truth remains that such songs are not 
 sung out of the lips of intellectual philosophies. But 
 accepting his mood, expanding and expounding it, 
 
i8o STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the lark's song is thus free and representative because 
 he knows, and not alone knows but instinctively 
 obeys, the secret laws of Mother Earth. Self may 
 play, but self must play within those laws: claim- 
 ing liberties outside them is retrogression; is not 
 only retrogression, but sets up an incongruity, the 
 perception of which is the basis of humour or pathos, 
 each being distinguished from the other more or less 
 by the standpoint adopted. And here steps in the 
 Comic Spirit with its subtle flail ! 
 
 The general perception of such incongruity from 
 the standpoint of mirth is Humour: Humour in 
 the comprehensive sense. If it then attack the 
 emotions, finding outlet in " laughter holding both 
 its sides," or in that tender smile brimful of loving 
 tears, it is humour, humour in the specific sense; 
 if it attack the moral indignation, fetching out the 
 whip that scathes or the mirror that reveals, it is 
 satire; if it touch the founts of whimsical reserve, 
 catching up a spirit playful yet purposeful, not going 
 deep, but keeping firmly upon the surface, it is irony; 
 but if it fly swift to the brain, evoking laughter that 
 is aerial, and subtle to the dividing asunder of joints 
 and marrow, free of aU grosser elements, then this 
 is Comedy. 
 
 Meredith himself has given us an historical and 
 critical, if not final, exposition of the meaning and 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH i8i 
 
 uses of the Comic Spirit. In its most famous passage, 
 unforgettable once read, he says — 
 
 " If you believe that our civilisation is founded in 
 common sense (and it is the first condition of sanity 
 to believe it), you will, when contemplating men, 
 discern a spirit overhead; not more heavenly than 
 the light flashed upward from glassy surface, but 
 luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond 
 them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to 
 them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until 
 its features are studied. It has the sage's brows, and 
 the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the 
 half-closed lips drawn in idle wariness of half-tension. 
 That slim feasting smile, shaped like the longbow, 
 was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the 
 brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The 
 laugh wiU come again, but it wiU be of the order of 
 a smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the 
 mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. 
 Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, 
 as if surveying a fuU field and having leisure to dart 
 on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eager- 
 ness. Men's future upon Earth does not attract it; 
 their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; 
 whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, 
 affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, 
 pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees 
 
i82 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot 
 in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in 
 absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting de- 
 mentedly; whenever they are at variance with their 
 professions, and violate the unwritten but percep- 
 tible laws binding them in consideration one to 
 another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair 
 justice; are false in humility or ruined with conceit, 
 individually or in bulk — the Spirit overhead will 
 look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on 
 them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That 
 is the Comic Spirit." 
 
 " Men's future upon earth does not attract it." 
 No, for a healthy Mother is the happiest augur for 
 a fair child; and Man's To-morrow is born of his 
 To-day. It is Meredith's faith in the future that bids 
 him see to the virtue of the present. It is his faith 
 in Progress that bids him consolidate our past. His 
 faith is in our Civilisation as the present measure of 
 our progress hitherto. We can hear his own voice 
 over Dr. Shrapnel's lips speaking of Society as " Our 
 one tangible gain, our one roofing and flooring in a 
 world of most uncertain structures built on morasses. 
 Towards the laws that support it men hopeful of 
 progress give their adhesion. If it is martyrdom, 
 what then? Let martyrdom be. Contumacy is 
 animalism. The truer the love, the readier the 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 183 
 
 sacrifice! Rebellion against society and advocacy 
 of humanity run counter." Obviously, for To- 
 morrow is null and void if To-day be thwart Nature, 
 or if it be not in the line of the progress that Earth 
 has set for Man. 
 
 It is easy to raise innumerable criticisms. Ques- 
 tions raise imperious brows and ask to know if a 
 rather too comfortable a faith is not given to cant 
 definitions of Civilisation; and if these ideas of 
 destiny are indeed set in the midmost of Man's 
 nature. But there is no doubt that, given Meredith's 
 standpoint, his is an exhilarating and stringent 
 tonic of a faith, even to those who believe that 
 Civilisation is a colossal failure. 
 
 Laws there are, stated in Nature, of sanity and 
 health, whose due observance bring in their train 
 nobility of aspect and inspiration of prospect. This 
 faun-like Comic Spirit hovers ahove, quickly to note 
 Man's departure from them; and with its long, 
 lithe intellectual whip to flick his defalcations. 
 Unhappily it is too often true that they who are 
 defaulters are of so tough a hide that they are imper- 
 vious to the sting. " Sword of common sense " he 
 calls this comic perception. How if its would-be 
 victims claim sole possession of common sense for 
 their own extravagant ways ? An unlooked-for 
 manoeuvre this, surely! Yet the earnest will en- 
 
1 84 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 deavour to swell to conformity to these laws ; and no 
 better way can he do this than by prayer. The 
 accepted notions of praying for exceptional benefits 
 to be received Meredith cannot abide. To him 
 prayer is a discipline, a bringing oneself into line 
 with laws that are the final wisdom for the soul. 
 To quote only one of his sayings in this regard, 
 Dr. Shrapnel (who is no less than Meredith himself, 
 and therefore set to caricature) writes to Nevil 
 Beauchamp : " Take this, my Beauchamp, for the 
 good in prayer, that it makes us repose on the un- 
 known with confidence, makes us flexible to change, 
 makes us ready for revolution — for life, then! He 
 who has the fountain of prayer in him will not com- 
 plain of hazards. Prayer is the recognition of laws; 
 the soul's exercise and source of strength, its thread 
 of conjunction with them. Prayer for an object is 
 the cajolery of an idol; the source of superstition." 
 But while Prayer is for the wise and earnest, the 
 flail of the Comic Spirit for the dull and careless; 
 and the glorious brotherhood of Man, founded on 
 rule of Brain and the despotism of Common Sense 
 and Stern Joy, is the goal of both disciplines. 
 
 Even the death of dear ones, the surrender of rosy 
 ideals of the past, calamities in domestic life or 
 affection, must not disturb or deter; nor must we be 
 led aside from the path by visionary glories or des- 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 185 
 
 tinies the proof of which is not seated in Reason, that 
 prime function of Brain-rule. Man must be great, 
 self-possessed, and calm; vibrant with passion, but 
 with passions schooled to order and discipline. This 
 is Meredith's affinity with the Classic Spirit; not an 
 affinity of facial resemblance, but in kinship of 
 actuating principle. Besides his, indeed, the classi- 
 cism of Swinburne is academic and virtuoso. He 
 himself sees it. Of his Woods of W estermain, which 
 are symbolic of his thought, he says — 
 
 " Banished is the white foam-bom 
 Not from here, nor under ban 
 Phoebus Ijrrist, Phoebe's horn, 
 Piping of the reedy Pan. 
 Loved of £arth of old they were. 
 Loving did interpret her." 
 
 This, then, is the Altar-piece of the Cathedral; 
 worthy of the most detailed examination, for nearly 
 the whole Cathedral is framed to its ideal. To under- 
 stand it is to understand much else that is difficult: 
 it is to understand his Style and the Presentation of 
 his novels; is to understand his conception of his 
 Art as a Novelist; is to understand the ruthless 
 conclusions to Richard Feverel or Beauchamp's 
 Career I the nature of those background characters, 
 his especial heroes, and their development through 
 the novels ; the lesson of Rhoda Fleming, One of Our 
 Conquerors, Lord Ormont, The Amazing Marriage ; 
 
1 86 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the discipline of Evan Harrington; the scourging of 
 General Ople; the failure of such a splendid character 
 as Victor Radnor; the development of such nature 
 characters as Sandra and Carinthia; the special 
 charm of his heroines and their reason of the apparent 
 coldness of some of them, especially the later born of 
 them ; the meanings of Shagfat and Farina ; the 
 catastrophe of Modern Love; and the supreme 
 exposure of Sir WiUoughby Patterne, not to speak 
 of the mighty Richmond Roy. 
 
 Of some of them only it is possible to speak; and 
 obviously the first must be the style and presentation 
 of his novels: his Art, in other words. To speak 
 arbitrarily one might say that the poet's business is 
 with ideal Man, Man with divinity and eternity 
 streaming over his brows; Man, if need be, at con- 
 flict with society, bowing only to eternal rules; and 
 therefore Tragic Man: Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, 
 Lear: not necessarily simple men, but rather complex 
 men fused to simplicity by the grandeur of their 
 passion, and seen so. The novelist's more particular 
 function is with Man in terms of Society and there- 
 fore more divisible to the critical eye. One is Man 
 seen from within; the other Man seen from without. 
 But it has been seen that Meredith has to do with 
 Man ideal and yet social, social and yet ideal: Man 
 progressive and progressing; the son of Earth and the 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 187 
 
 creature of society: Man the supreme fact, and Man 
 a profound problem, clothed with destiny and learning 
 from circumstance. Therefore he is both Poet and 
 Novelist; depicting from inwards and viewing from 
 outwards; lyrical and critical. Style being but the 
 vesture of idea, the cincture of thought, his style must 
 therefore be lyrical and critical; and this not in 
 successive breaths panting quickly upon each other, 
 but in one and the same breath. Language can 
 scarce hold this; and it must needs strain the limits 
 of grammar and clarity. So far as it can be aflfected, 
 Meredith seems to have done it; and therefore it is 
 that he fascinates even when he most annoys. It 
 is a new form of Art he has achieved. For his 
 presentation is like his style, the compaction of the 
 inner emotion and the outer aspect. In his style the 
 metaphor revealing the inner man is followed hard 
 by the metaphor criticising him seen in relation to 
 others; and the presentation leaps from one lyrical 
 and dramatic action to another, with interludes that 
 adjust the proportions and bearings of the emotion 
 achieved. For to Meredith, as we have seen, Man is 
 a mighty figure, but one who has attentively to study 
 and learn in order that he may achieve a mightier 
 and a truer figure. 
 
 So with the conclusions to Richard Feverel and 
 Beauchamf's Career. Lucy's death is cruel, pitiless 
 
1 88 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 to the bursting of strong tears; but it is pitiless and 
 cruel even as Earth, and Life are pitiless and cruel. 
 There is no forgiveness of sins in Life: the deed 
 done, the consequence is irrevocable. Otherwise how 
 should we learn if the consequences of our actions 
 may be avoided? Lucy's death was Richard's 
 punishment; but it was also his lesson, his oppor- 
 tunity for nobler growth. This is the teaching of 
 Earth to Man. With Beauchamp's death it is some- 
 what different. So far as he wished ta bring Next- 
 week into To-day he was a fanatic; though, like 
 most fanatics, he was noble and sincere. Meredith 
 would not have us fix our eyes on To-morrow, but 
 To-day. Beauchamp would not learn his lesson, 
 and so his work was spoiled before the end of the 
 book. More would have been restlessness, would 
 have even been irritation and therefore reactionary. 
 Thus he dies ; dies doing a noble, self-sacrificing deed ; 
 and so grace is found. 
 
 The bearing of Meredith's central thought on those 
 strong men hovering in the background of so many 
 of his novels is obvious. They are his special loves : 
 the toll of them wakes memory of his tenderness 
 over them: Austin Wentworth, Vernon Whitford, 
 Merthyr Powys, Tom Redworth, Matthew Weyburn 
 (though he was in no background!), and the splendid 
 Dartrey Fenellen. Not aU of them are successes; 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 189 
 
 some are, and others come perilously near being, 
 prigs;, but to feel distaste sometimes at Merthyr 
 Powys is no obstruction to a warm glow at Tom Red- 
 worth and an entire love of Dartrey Fenellen. They 
 are nearly all men who have drunk of disappoint- 
 ment, and eaten of sorrow, at the table of adversity; 
 nearly all of them are of poignant experience, having 
 taken the tuition of life — chiefly, be it noted, in some 
 early matrimonial misadventure that had bitten 
 memories into them, throwing an incidental light of 
 how Meredith came by some of his own philosophy. 
 But it is their growth and development through the 
 novels that forms so fascinating a study. Compare 
 the tenderly wise but somewhat blopdless Austin 
 Wentworth with the fuU-blooded, passionate, strong 
 Dartrey Fenellen. It is worthy of meditation in 
 conjunction with the growth of Meredith's philosophy : 
 corrective, moreover! 
 
 So, too, with the development of character in those 
 two great nature women of his, Sandra and Carinthia. 
 To follow the progress of Sandra of Wilming Wier 
 to the Vittoria of La Scala is a lovable study: the 
 progress of the Carinthia of " It is my husband " to 
 the Carinthia of " No more of husband for me " is 
 not so lovable, for, though she is often touched with 
 awe, yet she remains chilling and unsatisfactory 
 despite it all. Yet we can trace in both of them the 
 
190 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 hand of the poet who wrote, in his hour of deepest 
 adversity, " Smite, Sacred Reality! " — though it is 
 permissible to ask whether Carinthia does not finally 
 turn away from Reality, the truer Reality of a deep 
 and noble change in her husband. Yet they are both 
 women who have been lapped in Nature, not in 
 Society. When their hour of trial comes, disillusion- 
 ment sinks slowly into their beings; and the result 
 is they are purged, not soiled; wounded indeed, but 
 made, not broken. Nevertheless, a change has 
 come on them; their whole-heartedness and purity, 
 their simplicity and the bright transparency of 
 mountain brooks that they initially have, clear and 
 unquestioning, go; while maturity, worldly-wisdom, 
 and clear-eyed grace comes on them. " Which is 
 only a way of telling you that the great result of 
 mortal suffering, consciousness, had fully set in: to 
 ripen; perhaps to debase; at any rate to prove," says 
 their creator, speaking of the change in the first. 
 
 We cannot but regret the change. But Meredith 
 makes it apparent that he does not. Heart-rule, the 
 basis of simple intuition, says he sternly, must give 
 place to Brain-rule, the basis of Reason. In Sandra 
 the balance of the two is gracious, and we applaud 
 the result; but in Carinthia the domination of the 
 latter leaves us chilled. Moreover Sandra's deference 
 to Merthyr Powys satisfies the heart; while Carin- 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 191 
 
 thia's infatuation with her frigid brother defies any 
 attempt at advocacy. In it all we can trace 
 Meredith's characteristic philosophy. 
 
 These two may suffice to introduce us to the rest 
 of their sisters by the same creator's hand. And a 
 wonderful sisterhood it is! The ripest, fairest, and 
 most diverse since Shakespeare's own family set out 
 on their triumphant way. But while Shakespeare's 
 children lived in that lofty world where nationality 
 is not, Meredith recognises and expounds nationality 
 to us. English Clara Middleton or Cecilia Halkett, 
 Irish Diana, French Renee, German Ottilia of the 
 ideal age, Italian Vittoria, Austrian Anna von 
 Lenkenstein, they all come to us hand-in-hand; and 
 hard would that man be who could resist them. Yet 
 they are all Meredith's own peculiar property, with 
 the die of his imprint on them. 
 
 In Lord Ormond and His Aminta, Matthew Wey- 
 
 bum wisely advocates the training of boys and girls 
 
 side by side so that each might acquire something of 
 
 the special virtue distinguishing the other. Or as the 
 
 protagonistic sings in Fair Ladies in Revolt — 
 
 " Sir, get you something of our purity. 
 And we will of your strength: we ask no more." 
 
 This is the path of mutual progress; and we can see 
 this strength shining in Meredith's heroines: know- 
 ledge and strength, such as win Nesta Victoria to our 
 
192 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 love. No man has done more for Woman than 
 Meredith : Man and Woman co-equal in their several 
 spheres, each assimilating the virtues and beauties 
 of the other, this is his idea of Progress. It is likely 
 the weak-kneed may shrink, for as he says " we have 
 not yet rounded Cape Turk." But his heroines 
 come to convince us of wisdom. Yet this freedom 
 and interchange are not only necessary for progress; 
 they are vital and necessary to Society, the instrument 
 of progress, for, he says, as deeply as truly, " Where 
 the veil is over women's faces you cannot have 
 society, without which the senses are barbarous, and 
 the Comic Spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness 
 to slake its thirst." Without a free intellectual 
 womanhood there cannot be Society. Therefore 
 there is no play for the Comic Spirit; and Man 
 has not even started on the path of Progress. While, 
 to convince the would-be decorous, the Super-sensi- 
 tive who are the Hyper-gross, Meredith's women 
 step before us demonstrating the sweetness of 
 their womanhood and the virtue of their sex. That 
 some of them are over-cold is unhappily sometimes 
 more than a suspicion; yet this is possibly not 
 the fault of the achievement-to-be so much as the 
 harshness of the intervening process due to man's 
 perversity. 
 
 Shagfat, the first of his prose works, is a fanfare 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 193 
 
 declaring what was to follow : declaring, too, in what 
 manner it was to follow; for though it has not the 
 maturity of experience that was to follow thirty-five 
 years later in One of our Conquerors, nor the crystalli- 
 sation, detail, and intellectual prospect of the later 
 poems, nearly all that is characteristic in Meredith's 
 philosophy is there, wrapped in the mystifying folds 
 of symbolism and allegory. Shibli Bagarag is the 
 man of his heart; and Shagpat's Authentic is the 
 begetter of Superstition, of Ignorance and Sloth, 
 that must therefore be shaved. How it was shaved, 
 and with what of difficulty, do they not know who 
 have read thereof in the pages of the bodk ? It is suffi- 
 cient to say that, before the hero can succeed, he 
 must first have his thwackings. 
 
 " Ye that nourish hopes of fame I 
 Ye who would be known in song ! 
 Ponder old history, and duly frame 
 Your souls to meek acceptance of the thong. 
 
 " Lo I of hundreds who aspire 
 Eighties perish — ^nineties tire! 
 They who bear up, in spite of wrecks and wracks. 
 Were seasoned by celestial haU of thwacks." 
 
 The subtle scourging of the Egoist, whenever he 
 be found in Meredith's works, has a very obvious 
 connection with that philosophy, being, in fact, as 
 has been said, one of its essential supports. Sir 
 
 N 
 
194 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 WiUoughby Patterne's ordeal, for example, is ex- 
 haustive, and of the highest heights of Comedy; for 
 his is the true Egoism, active no less than passive. 
 The bringing low of the mighty Richmond Roy— 
 a creation that is to Meredith what Falstaff was to 
 Shakespeare — is in the region of high Humour j 
 Humour " with lights of Tragedy in it." The failure 
 of Victor Radnor is, however, pure tragedy; and 
 there are few moments in Meredith so terrible or so 
 chastening. So, too, the discipline of Evan Harring- 
 ton, and the cruel exposure of General Ople, have 
 their part and lot in the same connection. It is 
 not that Meredith deliberately makes them always 
 serve the lesson he would point — though more often 
 than not this is so, so self-conscious an artist is he. 
 It is rather that his philosophy is, as philosophies 
 usually are, the expression of his personality, and 
 he cannot avoid its active interposition in the tale 
 he has to tell. 
 
 In his later years, it is true, he became obsessed 
 with some of its aspects. He even declares cate- 
 gorically that his desire is to work a " change in public 
 taste " by his works, coveting that as " the flowering 
 wreath " of his ambition. Yet it was always present; 
 and, indeed, one may see it emerging in his earlier 
 life. The tragedy of Modern Love is undeniably his 
 own tragedy; and it_may_be traced definitely to this 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 195 
 
 identical cause. Does he not himself say, in the 
 stanza that is the pivot of its action — 
 
 " Oh, had I with my daxling helped to mince 
 The facts of life, you still had seen me go. 
 With hindward feather and with forward toe, 
 Her much-adored, delightful Fairy Prince " ? 
 
 If one takes Modern Love and Shagpat as the 
 beginning of his work, and The Egoist as its centre 
 and pivot, Meredith's philosophy is seen to give 
 a very definite unity to the total result. For it 
 cannot be forgotten with what a trilogy it closed. 
 Nothing is more characteristic of the man than the 
 fact that he concluded his life's labour with his eye 
 bravely looking into the spaces of the future. It 
 has been seen that his whole faith in the Destiny 
 that Earth has for Man centres in Man as a whole: 
 that is to say, in women not less than men, and in 
 both as they come into line together, each partaking 
 of the other's nature. And once the fact of sex be 
 introduced, it is clear that his attitude towards 
 marriage becomes a test of his faith. 
 
 In One of our Conquerors, Lord Ormond and His 
 Aminta^ and The Amazing Marriage, therefore, he 
 faces this; and like the sane thinker he was, he 
 holds the balances poised with wonderful equality. 
 He will not be pressed to rash decisions. He only 
 cries, " The subject is too much in darkness; air it; 
 
196 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 air it! " In the meantime he holds firmly by his 
 words through the lips of Dr. Shrapnel : " Contumacy 
 is animalism." For is it not his faith, however little 
 we may agree with him, that " it is the first condition 
 of sanity to believe " that " our civilisation is founded 
 on common sense " ? Therefore, however well suited 
 Victor and Nataly may be to each other, they fall 
 broken to the dust and ruined, while behind them 
 looms the triumphant figure of Mr. Burman as the 
 representative of an outraged society. It was so, 
 indeed, with Edward and Dahlia in Rhoda Fleming, 
 though there the picture had not the same clear 
 application. 
 
 It is an iron creed: but it is not aU his creed. 
 Lord Ormond and The Amazing Marriage had to 
 follow; and in the former the reverse of the medal 
 is discovered. For " Laws," says he, " are necessary 
 instruments of the majority; but when they grind 
 the same human being to dust for their maintenance, 
 their enthronement is the rule of the savage old 
 Deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a 
 society based upon such conditions. An immolation 
 of the naturally constituted individual arrests the 
 general expansion to which we step, decivilising 
 more, and is more impious to the God in inan than 
 temporary revelries of a licence that nature soon 
 checks." And to that dominant his closing two 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 197 
 
 novels are tuned. In the latter of them a hapless 
 and unhappy marriage is broken by mutual lack of 
 understanding and sympathy: barren to nature and 
 society, to Earth and Man. In the former the two 
 who stand apt for one another, who are ripe for the 
 highest service to Earth and to Man, have to challenge 
 " the necessary instruments of the majority " in 
 order to complete that fact. Matthew Weyburn has 
 to claim Aminta from another who is her husband; 
 and it is significant how he does it. " My own soul," 
 he says, " we have to see that we do— -though not 
 publicly, nor insolently — offend good citizenship. 
 But we believe — I with my whole faith, and I may 
 say it of you — that we are not offending Divine law." 
 It is a characteristic speech in all ways, for one 
 remembers that Matthew Weyburn holds his place 
 among those characters that are Meredith's especial 
 heroes. 
 
 And it is Meredith's closing word. That it should 
 bring us to the very feet of the old and eternal 
 challenge between " Divine law " and " good citizen- 
 ship " is profoundly interesting to the thinker who 
 believes in other and more mystical destinies and 
 origins for Man; but this remains outside the scope 
 of a pure exposition. However one regards Mere- 
 dith's philosophy it cannot be denied that it is severe, 
 wholesome, and stern, to an effete day like a well- 
 
198 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 tuned string. He tuned himself to it; and Earth 
 and Man were his two inspirations always. Fittingly 
 and bravely it closed with " the rapture of the 
 forward view " : for his philosophy, although over- 
 intellectual, was never a thing apart from his per- 
 sonality. It dominated him; saturated him: it 
 dominated and saturated his books; and there 
 probably never was a writer whose novels, good and 
 full enough in themselves as they were, more de- 
 manded a proper understanding of the Philosophy in 
 which they were placed, and which they set in action 
 and exemplified. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 
 
 It is when one takes pen in hand to write of Dickens, 
 especially when faced by an occasion such as the 
 centenary of his birth, that the true praise of him 
 emerges. Detraction's voice has been heard; and 
 so ruthlessly that no detail has escaped attention. 
 His pathos has been dismissed as maudlin; his 
 characterisation has been called grotesque and ex- 
 aggerated; his style has been derided as no style at 
 all in the cant meaning of the word, as shapeless and 
 frameless, degenerating often into an uneasy sing- 
 song of halting metre; his craft, for all the care of 
 his scheming, has been scoffed at; his art has been 
 put aside as untrue to life; and even his humour, 
 that which of all things one would have thought 
 would have been left to him, has been called rudi- 
 mentary and crude. It is not difficult to see, in each 
 particular criticism, what is meant: and to see a 
 criticism is to admit its justice, given its point of 
 view. But criticism is the faultiest of all instruments. 
 It is the function of criticism to be analytical; and 
 there is no one thing in the world that cannot be 
 analysed to its degradation. Analysis is too often 
 the coward's subterfuge for escaping the responsibility 
 
 199 
 
200 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 of manly judgment. Such judgment proceeds, not 
 by way of analysis, but by vision, which is the per- 
 ception of a synthesis. And it is conceivable that 
 one might find no virtue, or little virtue, in any detail 
 of a work of art, of an achievement of the creating 
 imagination, and yet find oneself strangely thrilled 
 by the whole and total effect. It is certainly almost 
 impossible to decide what contribution any one 
 detail, good or bad, makes to the total effect that is 
 the only thing that, in the end, matters. 
 
 For example, it is lamented that Wordsworth had 
 not the critical facility to see what was good in his 
 work and what was bad, so that he might have 
 suppressed the bad and left the good in all its pure 
 loveliness. Criticism (that has always seen so well 
 what is good and what bad in Literature and the 
 High Arts) has declared that to Wordsworth aU was 
 of the same value in his work: that he put out a 
 bad poem with all the solemnity and sense of its 
 importance as a good poem. And, in that. Criticism 
 has spoken better than it thought. For to Words- 
 worth (or to Blake, for that matter) each poem was 
 indeed of the same solemn value; because each poem 
 was regarded as a separate contribution to that more 
 important synthesis that he struggled to fill-in and 
 complete. He was not, like Herrick, so much con- 
 cerned with the making of separate poems as with 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 201 
 
 the delivery of a vision ; and in the utterance of that 
 vision each poem was important. This Wordsworth 
 felt; and, did we truly examine ourselves, we would 
 find that we do so also. The Wordsworth of the 
 Complete Works takes his place in the front rank 
 of English poets, with Shakespeare, Milton, and 
 Shelley for companions. The Wordsworth of 
 Matthew Arnold's selection falls back behind Keats 
 and even Byron. 
 
 Thus it is always necessary to be assured that one 
 has seen a man's vision, or that one has perceived 
 the particular quality of his artistic attempt, before 
 it is even possible to speak of the faults of his work- 
 manship; for it may so happen that what may, on 
 its own merits, appear to be a grave fault may be a 
 necessary adjunct to the attainment of that vision 
 or that artistic attempt. It is this that the mind 
 perceives in the case of Dickens, even as it is this 
 that enables us to discover the true praise of him. 
 It has, for example, been laid to his charge that his 
 characters, in the main, have no semblance to reality ; 
 that they are grotesque and exaggerated. It would 
 be interesting to contrast this assertion with the 
 constant exclamation that one meets in daily life 
 that certain people and certain actions are typically 
 " Dickensian " ; as though he were the court of appeal 
 for life, instead of life being the court of appeal for 
 
202 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 him. Yet on its own merits the criticism is found 
 to be illuminating. It is meant to be destructive; 
 but one suddenly recalls that aU the great characters 
 of the world's literature are either grotesque or 
 exaggerated. If Bumble be overdrawn as a work- 
 house official, he is not more overdrawn than the 
 immortal Shallow as a Justice of the Peace. If 
 Samuel Pickwick, Esq., be grotesque as a wandering 
 merchant, he is at least not so grotesque as the 
 inimitable Don Quixote as a wandering knight. We 
 do not remember Sancho Panza or Panurge or the 
 Antient Pistol because they are imitations of Life, 
 but because they are grotesque examples of what 
 Life can give us out of its exceeding riches. We do 
 not admire Achilles or Hamlet or FalstafI, each in 
 his own way, because he is like the thin thing all 
 round us that we are pleased to call Life, but because 
 he is a splendid, or, if we will, exaggerated, example 
 of what Life could be if we were content to trust it. 
 They are, strictly, creations; and we hold them in 
 memory not because they are a mere mimicry of the 
 smaller side of us, but because they remind us of all 
 the splendour and wonder and laughter that resides 
 behind the small show that we present to the outer 
 world. They do not portray us to ourselves: they 
 reveal us to ourselves. For Art is the Great 
 Revelation. 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 203 
 
 When Dickens, therefore, created Bumble, he did 
 more than merely ridicule or shatter a system. To 
 ridicule or to shatter a system is, relatively, a small 
 achievement. It truly is a remarkable fact about 
 Dickens that he did succeed in bringing about reform 
 in several matters that urgently needed reform. 
 That is to say, he succeeded in having a system that 
 had worn itself .into decay supplanted by another 
 system that was as yet new. But reforin, like most 
 matters political, is in itself worth no more than the 
 paper its enactment is printed upon. Dickens may 
 have succeeded in dismissing the Circumlocution 
 Office by the power of his laughter; but the new 
 office that took its place would soon become another 
 Circumlocution Office. He may have succeeded in 
 abolishing the coarse brutality of Mr. Squeers; but 
 there is many a schoolboy to-day who, were the choice 
 given him, would considerably prefer the coarse 
 brutality of Squeers to the refined and solicitous 
 cruelty under which it is his lot to suffer. While 
 Man remains the same, one system, however word- 
 perfect, is as valueless as another, however word- 
 imperfect. And the fact that Dickens succeeded in 
 effecting certain substitutions of systems is no tribute 
 to his Art, but rather only a testimony to his amazing 
 and almost unexampled popularity. But when he 
 created Bumble he did more than shatter a system. 
 
204 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 He illustrated what is the essential weakness of all 
 systems. Bumble stands up as the eternal type of 
 what it is in human nature to become under the joint 
 influence of power and importance: a fact that we 
 admit in the daily habit of our speech; for the word 
 " Bumbledom " is our continual attestation of the 
 truth of the vision of Dickens. On him depends, not 
 alone the execution of the system that Dickens 
 scourged with his bitter laughter, but the execution 
 of aU other systems whatsoever. Bumble is at one 
 time a Creation and a Revelation. 
 
 In this way Bumble may stand as a sign and 
 ensample to us of his creator's work. He, and a score 
 of others even truer to the heart of life than he, are 
 almost nearer to us, and therefore more real to us, 
 than we are to ourselves. It is because they are so 
 near to us that we are apt to lose a distinct sense of 
 their outline and proportion. And we are won by 
 them accordingly. It is for this reason that so many 
 have stumbled at the works of Dickens. They have 
 regarded them as Novels; and in the Novel they 
 have grown accustomed to compilation rather than 
 to creation, to portraiture and depicture rather than 
 to revelation and illumination. The Novel, as an 
 Art-form, has been notably complaisant; and it is 
 for this very reason that it is a perplexed question 
 as to how truly the Novel is a durable Art-form. 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 205 
 
 Matter that, in the severe and searching discipline of 
 Poetry, would not for a moment be suffered an 
 entrance, passes without let or hindrance into the 
 Novel, and is even accounted an adornment to it. 
 But the adornment is the chief weakness that attends 
 the Novel in its attempt to pass muster in the austere 
 ranks of Art; what was thought to be a gain is found 
 to be a loss; that which we have called, in a phrase 
 that we have been careful not to expound, " fidelity 
 to life," has been the very thing that has obviated 
 the necessity for that creation on which all Art 
 depends ; and the result is that the Novel has always 
 been the thing of an age, and not the thing of all time. 
 The Iliad, the Divina Commedia, Shakespeare's 
 Tragedies, Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound — all 
 these are as young as the day on which they were 
 written. But Fielding and Smollett, even Thackeray 
 and George Eliot, belong to their own time, and can 
 only be approached through the age in which they 
 were written. One is, in the true significance of 
 the word, creation; and the other is that compilation 
 that is often miscalled creation: and therefore one 
 wears divine youth on its brow; whereas the other 
 is like a stage-piece in a foreign tongue, that cannot 
 truly be known till the foreign tongue be mastered. 
 
 Now this is the peculiar praise of Dickens: that, 
 with all his shortcomings (of which he had not a few), 
 
2o6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 he, with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Bunyan, has lifted 
 prose into this divine youth, this eternal significance, 
 that has been thought the special prerogative of 
 Poetry. Even in the face of their achievement it is 
 hard to conceive of prose as other than journeyman 
 toil, a perishable medium : without that achievement 
 it would be in a poor way indeed. So much is this 
 the case that it is no strange thing to hear such a 
 character as Sam Weller being spoken of as " a 
 poetic creation." And so, in a manner of speaking, 
 he is. It matters little that he rose out of a Victorian 
 hostelry, as Pantagruel out of sixteenth - century 
 France, Sancho Panza out of post-Romantic Spain, 
 and Christian out of Puritan England. It is not 
 what they rose out of, but what they rose into. They 
 rose, each of them, out of a particular age, even 
 bearing its particular brand and currency; but they 
 rose into a perpetual significance that we call Poetry. 
 So we arrive at another of the faults that Criticism 
 has discovered in Dickens' work. It is complained 
 of him that he lacks skill of craftsmanship, and that 
 his books are structureless; that, having begun, as 
 begin they must, they continue without order and 
 conclude without reason: so that even those who 
 have undertaken his defence have been compelled 
 to concede the criticism, and to ask in return why 
 they should ever end. 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 207 
 
 The criticism, as criticism, is well placed; but, in 
 the manner of criticism, it has endeavoured to judge 
 the works of Dickens by laws other than the laws 
 of their own being. Those who have advanced it 
 have considered his books as Novels. That is to say, 
 since the Novel is as yet without adequate definition, 
 certain standards have been raised, that prevail in 
 their utmost rigour only with a small portion of the 
 whole .field of prose literature, and an attempt has 
 been made to make them the rallying centre of a vast 
 division of it. Thomas Hardy is the supreme example 
 of the craftsman who has introduced into prose 
 literature somewhat of the technique, in a necessarily 
 loosened form, of the Drama (or, in Architecture, 
 since he was once an architect, of the classic arch, 
 which is much the same thing); and the result has 
 been truly astonishing. Yet who would think of 
 judging Rabelais, or Cervantes, or Bunyan for that 
 matter, by a law so alien ? 
 
 Thus it was no mere chance, but somethmg of a 
 divine instinct, that led Dickens to write his first 
 book in the form of Pickwick Papers. It is unneces- 
 sary to go into a discussion of all that preceded the 
 writing of the book. It is enough to say that Dickens 
 would have satisfied the demands of his publishers 
 equally well had the " Papers " been shaped and 
 disciplined into an outline as orderly and as shapely 
 
2o8 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 as the Best. But his instinct impelled him otherwise; 
 and the result is that we do not think oi The Post- 
 humous Papers of the Pickwick Club as we think of 
 The Return of the Native, but rather as we think of The 
 Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha or The 
 Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua. Nor does it 
 avail to throw up the word Novel in defence or in 
 attack. There are those who say that Cervantes is 
 the father of the modern Novel, even as there are 
 those who say that Pickwick Papers is no Novel. 
 The truth is that the Novel, according to the protes- 
 tations of some of its own exponents, is not so much 
 a definite Art-form as a hotch-pot. It would be fair 
 to say that the Novel is always novel. 
 
 Pickwick Papers is therefore almost something of 
 a talisman in Dickens' work. Where he becomes 
 most " Pickwickian " there he becomes most himself, 
 and his inspiration is most sure; and when he has 
 least of the peculiar quality that marks those Papers, 
 even though it lead to a result so fine as Great Expec- 
 tations, one feels that, with all its strength, it lacks 
 the pecuUar and perpetual significance that gave 
 eternal youth to Pickwick. There may be more 
 strength in the latter half of his work : there may be 
 less of bathos in it and more of maturity and circum- 
 spection: but the truth remains that the full magic 
 'of the first has become dimmed in the second. This 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 209 
 
 may best be seen when some similar quality marks 
 both, an early and a later work. For instance, both 
 Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities are melo- 
 dramatic; but the glitter of the first is a magical 
 glitter, whereas the glitter of the second is sometimes 
 perilously near like tinsel. And this, despite the 
 fact that A Tale of Two Cities is more reserved in 
 strength, and therefore more instant in its appeal, 
 than anything Dickens ever did. 
 
 In all the earlier portion of his work this strange 
 quality, this quality of perpetuity, of poetic achieve- 
 ment, prevails in its fullest power. We do not 
 remember Barnaby Rudge because of its historical, 
 or unhistorical, attempt to recount the matter of the 
 Gordon Riots, or Oliver Twist because of its attempt 
 to shatter a Poor-Law system, any more than we 
 remember Gargantua or Pantagruel because of their 
 endeavour to burlesque certain forgotten ecclesiastical 
 abuses, or Don Quixote because its author (who of all 
 men most lived a life of romantic adventure) sought 
 to make romantic adventure perish for ever in the 
 soft fire of his laughter. None of these stand with 
 their feet planted on the revolutions of Time, for Time 
 to bear past us and away. They are all, by a subtly 
 transmuting touch, lifted into the air, to float there 
 eternally while Time hastes steadily on beneath them. 
 
 Yet, although, as book succeeds book, the breath 
 
2IO STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 of change is seen passing over the first inspiration, 
 although what one may call the poetic quality of 
 Pickwick is seen to be becoming more and more spent 
 until in Dombey and Son its colours are false and its 
 ring is unreal, yet it is not till one comes to David 
 Copperfidd that one finds a change in fuU operation. 
 There it is actively at work; and for an obvious 
 reason. For in David Copperfield Dickens had made 
 upi his mind fully to unloose the autobiographic 
 instinct that resides in every man. He had, in fact, 
 determined to make the story of David Copperfield 
 the tale of himself; so much so that he was pleased 
 beyond measure when it was pointed out to him that 
 the initials of David Copperfield's name were the 
 inverted initials of his own. And consequently his 
 creative faculty had to move within a limited scope. 
 He was harnessed to circumstances; with all the 
 restrictions that that meant. Either inadvertently, 
 not knowing that it meant a cleavage from his past 
 way of work, or deliberately, as the result of Criticism, 
 with its cry of impossible characters, he set himself 
 the task of compilation instead of creation; and 
 having once put his hand to the work the habit grew 
 on him, tiU, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the book 
 he died at work on, he came to lean wholly on skill 
 and secrecy of plot, so removing himself to the utmost 
 extreme from Pickwick Papers. 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 211 
 
 In this very book David Copperfield, however, his 
 instinct may be seen in revolt from the work of com- 
 pilation he set himself. It is always so, more or less, 
 to the end of his work; but here it is most marked. 
 For, as the story opens and proceeds, David Copper- 
 field's personality begins to be built up and to expand. 
 It is the intention of the book that this should be 
 so; it is, in fact, the prime cause and purpose of the 
 book; but such an intention, limited by fact and the 
 circumstance of relation, is clearly the very thing 
 most calculated to extinguish the subtle poetic 
 creation that went to make Pickwick Papers so eter- 
 nally fresh and rare. But the old instinct asserts 
 itself; with the result that David Copperfield, as a 
 book, grows in interest as it proceeds— and grows in 
 a peculiar way. David, instead of becoming more 
 and more important and personal, becomes less and 
 less so; till at last he becomes no more than was 
 Nicholas Nickleby, a name-centre around which, in 
 varying clusters, the real personages gather. As 
 he declines the others burgeon and swell: Micawber 
 becomes more truly himself; Traddles takes his true 
 proportions; Uriah becomes powerful instead of 
 merely monotonous; Dora comes into being — and 
 punch is drunk, as punch was drunk in Pickwick. It 
 is these things, and these people, that lift the book 
 into evergreen memory; not the mere narration of 
 
212 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the life of David Copperfield, who matters little 
 enough, although his history purports to be the dim 
 autobiography of Dickens himself. 
 
 But such things and such people demand, clearly, 
 their own adequate atmosphere to move in. It is 
 this that has at all times been the most stubborn 
 difficulty in the path of poetic creation. Characters 
 that are compilations of ourselves, no more than 
 imitations of that life of ours that we present to the 
 outward view (which passes with the passing of the 
 outward view), can live and move in scenes that are 
 copied from daily habit. But it has always been the 
 problem with the creator to create with his characters, 
 with his people who are ourselves and more than our- 
 selves, being revelations of ourselves, so adequate a 
 scenery for them to move in that there shall be no 
 shock to the contemplation. Among the poets pure 
 and true, Shakespeare, for example, pitched his 
 scenery at some remote distance of time or place: 
 in Venice, where Othello could find a freer play for 
 his tremendous personality without striking against 
 some incongruity of scene, or in ancient Britain, 
 where Lear could shake the earth. With Homer and 
 the Greek dramatists the necessary elevation was 
 given by the thought of War and the ritual of religious 
 ceremony. Among those who wrote in prose, Bunyan 
 created a whole new world; Cervantes transmuted 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 213 
 
 the Spanish landscape into a new strange earth; and 
 in our own day Thomas Hardy has fashioned a new 
 individual province for himself, which he has named 
 Wessex, and where the very towns have been given 
 new names in order to lift them away from us. 
 
 Dickens' answer to this problem is particularly 
 interesting; and nowhere is it better illustrated than 
 in the subtle change that so slowly passes over David 
 Copperfield. The nature of it can be discovered by 
 first turning to one of the earlier novels, such as 
 Oliver Twist, or to such a phantasy as ^ Christmas 
 Carol. In both of these the scenery is the streets of 
 London; yet though the streets are given their 
 habitual names, by which they can be identified, 
 they are changed and altered; something has so 
 transmuted them that we scarcely think of them as 
 streets of London at all. It is not sufficient to say 
 that the times have changed; and that therefore 
 what seems to us a transmutation might have been 
 but a faithful portrayal. There is no reader of A 
 Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist but must come to the 
 conclusion that there never at any time was such 
 a house as that in which Scrooge lived, or such streets 
 as those through which he walked, or Fagin or Bill 
 Sikes walked. The internal emotion is sufficient to 
 indicate this. But, apart from such internal evidence, 
 there is external evidence; for Thackeray's streets 
 
214 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 have nothing of that wildness or that remoteness 
 from commonplace reality. Nor is it possible to say- 
 that the dream-phantasy of the Carol is responsible 
 for one, as the overdrawn, melodramatic iaightmare 
 horror of Oliver Twist is responsible for the other. 
 There is the same strangeness, the same wild and 
 fantastic remoteness, about the scenery of Nicholas 
 Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. And the 
 result is that the London Dickens has drawn has no 
 relevance to the London that now is or ever was, 
 save in an identity of street plan; so that those who 
 talk of seeking out " Dickens' London " are, in a 
 manner of speaking, in search for something that can 
 never be found. 
 
 In David Copperfield — ^in, that is to say, the book 
 that brought about the change in his way of work — 
 this peculiar significance of atmosphere is an interest- 
 ing study. For it has been seen that a change passes 
 over the book as it develops itself. The first decision 
 to write a simple straightforward narrative, com- 
 pilation rather than creation, never really leaves the 
 book, influencing it to its conclusion; but the older 
 inspiration, that made Pickwick so truly a book by 
 itself, asserts itself as the narrative proceeds, trans- 
 figuring it. Now side by side with this change in 
 characterisation the scenic atmosphere begins to 
 change also. It is a thing difficult to define, for it 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 215 
 
 is a thing that one either feels or does not feel. The 
 scenery at first is as sharp and as definite as the green 
 that Betsy Trotwood guarded with such zeal. It 
 becomes dimmer and more fantastic as the book grows 
 older. 
 
 Certainly whatever be the result in David Copper- 
 field itself, the result in the sequence of Dickens' 
 books, before and after Copperfield, is clear. It has 
 already been illustrated, in another connection, by 
 comparing the first and last of the books, Pickwick 
 Papers and Edwin Drood. But it may even be 
 illustrated by taking the two books immediately before 
 and after David Copperfield: Dotnbey and Son and 
 Bleak House: in spite of the fact that the latter of 
 these is better than the former, because the change is 
 seen coming in the former, whereas it has already 
 arrived in the latter. Dombey and Son is, admittedly, 
 a failure among Dickens' works; Bleak House is 
 admittedly a success. Yet it is true that in the first 
 we may divine the poetic creation at work, however 
 much it may have failed of success; whereas in the 
 latter we miss its peculiarly transmuting power, and 
 are therefore constrained to admit that the success 
 is of a different order, and of a lower order. The first 
 is a failure, but a high failure ; the latter is a success, 
 but a lower success. And David Copperfield stands 
 as a landmark between two periods — not only a 
 
2i6 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 landmark, indeed, but actually one of the causes 
 of the change. 
 
 This is not to say that that which gave, not only 
 such distinction, but such significance, to Dickens' 
 first period, vanished thereafter, never to reappear. 
 A man may never deny, or abjure, his most distinctive 
 self; and Dickens could never whoUy write either 
 such distinguished compilation as that of Thackeray 
 or such strong compilation as that of George Eliot. 
 In the sure, though subtle, matter of scenic atmos- 
 phere, taking that for a sign of the hand at work, he 
 is to be discovered to be the same throughout his 
 work. His streets, his houses, and his skies, never 
 become wholly those of actuality; but they become 
 measurably near actuality in his later work, whereas 
 in his first fervour they remain immeasurably remote. 
 And as his streets are so are his people also, for it is 
 at the demand of his people that his streets are 
 transmuted. 
 
 Dombey and Son is, however, interesting for another 
 reason. A man's typical failure is always illustrative 
 of his special weakness; and this is even more than 
 usually true in the case of Dombey and Son, by reason 
 of some of the causes of its failure. As is well known, 
 this was the first novel in which Dickens found his 
 flowing invention failed him. He complained of it, 
 in its early stages, that, as he worked at it, he could 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 217 
 
 not induce it to start itself and move forward. The 
 truth was that his early success had intoxicated him, 
 and his successive tours through America and the 
 Continent had brought restlessness into his blood. 
 That is to say, through one cause and another, his 
 genius had to be compelled to do its work; and 
 genius, when so compelled, may yet display qualities 
 most distinctive of itself, but it wiU display them 
 in colours that are false and in an emphasis out of 
 proportion to the occasion. And this is just what 
 happens in Dotnbey. 
 
 Thus, as in Pickwick one may best find what is the 
 peculiar praise of Dickens, so in Dotnbey one may 
 discover his peculiar blemishes and restrictions. The 
 colours, we see, are garish; and the characters, in 
 attempting to achieve dignity, fail hopelessly. The 
 scene between Carker and Edith Dombey, for instance, 
 is melodrama unmitigated and crude; yet throughout 
 it we can perceive the attempt that was not achieve- 
 ment, by virtue of which it continues to live. The 
 truth is that dignity was outside the compass of 
 Dickens; and that therefore exaltation and the high 
 purging ritual of tragedy was impossible to him. 
 Always about the figure of Don Quixote there is an 
 incomparable dignity; always over his brow there 
 shines the radiance of a high exaltation; with the 
 result that intermixed with our laughter at the sight 
 
21 8 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 of him there are always those rare tears that ennoble 
 us. We are not only broadened by reading Cer- 
 vantes; we are heightened. But there is little of 
 this in Dickens; indeed, there is nothing of it. He 
 not only failed in Dombey and Son to achieve dignity, 
 but he failed in that attempt generally throughout 
 the body of his work. For example, in Oliver Twist 
 he made a clear bid for Terror. Now Terror is ever 
 one with mysticism and exaltation; Terror is only 
 felt by the soul in its moments of awe and dignity; 
 because in Terror it is faced by something that 
 transcends the common round of its experience. 
 But such a mood, such a dignity and awe, is alien 
 to Dickens (or, more truly, Dickens is an alien to such 
 moods), and the result is that where he attempted 
 Terror he achieved only Horror, which is fantastic 
 and crude. 
 
 It is this that is meant when it is said that his style 
 is no style at all. When it is said that his language 
 never stiffens itself into structure, it is meant that 
 his characters and scenes never erect themselves into 
 dignity. They are each manifestations of the same 
 inability in the creator. Similarly when it is said 
 that in none of his sentences is there a haunting music 
 or mystical cadence, it is meant that his sentences tell 
 out aU they have to say on the page, empty their 
 whole cargo on the wharf, because their author is so 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 219 
 
 little in correspondence with the world beyond worlds 
 that he both can and must say all he has to say. He 
 is never in labour to express the thing just beyond 
 his reach. His difficulty is, rather, to avoid saying 
 the thing well within his reach twice over. Those 
 magic sentences in the world's literature that teU us 
 so much more than they say, are never his, because 
 the Furthermore is for ever beyond him. Faced by 
 Death, we get the death of Paul Dombey. He 
 attempts Tragedy, and achieves Melodrama; he 
 attempts Terror, and gives us Horror; he attempts 
 Dignity and we have stilts; he attempts mystery 
 and we receive a detective story; he attempts an 
 historic revolution, and we have a few squalid 
 characters and the trial-scene of Charles Darnay. 
 And so he is always thrown back, when attempting 
 to wing high, by the irrevocable concave of his 
 limitations. 
 
 It is always necessary to see a man's blemishes 
 clearly before his praise can be truly said. On the 
 other hand, it is always necessary to see a man's 
 cause of praise before his blemishes can be discovered, 
 for it may happen that what appear to be blemishes 
 are but the natural reverse of his virtues. With 
 Dickens it was so. If he could not win his way up 
 to the heights he certainly made the earth most 
 wonderful. If when he attempted the mystical 
 
220 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 he only achieved the fantastic, confining himself to 
 the fantastic he made it so wonderfully fantastic 
 that he raised the whole result into the realm of true 
 creation. If when he attempted dignity he succeeded 
 only in giving us stilts, in giving us people who 
 always went through life on stilts, he makes them so 
 incredibly funny that he fills our minds with laughter. 
 So, too, if in desiring Tragedy he falls into Melodrama, 
 in desiring Melodrama he transmutes it into some- 
 thing that is both rich and strange, something blown 
 upon with the breath of creation till it takes a new 
 and perpetual life. 
 
 In his earlier work up to and including David 
 Copperfield, Dickens wrote books that we call Novels, 
 in a poverty of expression, but which are novels no 
 more than the works of Cervantes, Rabelais, and 
 Bunyan. In his later work Dickens took up the 
 same pen (seeing that it was the only one he had), 
 but dipped it in a different ink. He wrote Novels, 
 comparable with those of Thackeray and George 
 Eliot. Whether his novels are better or worse than 
 those of his contemporaries is a matter of opinion. 
 That is to say, the comparison exists. But in Pick- 
 wick, and the books following hard upon Pickwick, 
 there is no comparison, because the things are not 
 alike. We treasure Don Quixote as we may treasure 
 The Heart oj Midlothian or One of Our Conquerors ; 
 
DICKENS AND THE NOVEL 221 
 
 but we do not compare them, because they work in 
 diflferent mediums. And it is on these earlier books 
 Dickens establishes his fame, because it is in them 
 that he is most himself. The later books very 
 largely take their excellence from the wind that 
 blows on them from the earlier inspiration. For in 
 them, as always, Dickens created immortals. He 
 always, in some degree, reveals us to ourselves in his 
 characters; and therefore, as they gather round us, 
 and we call each by name, we feel that the fame of 
 their creator is very safe in their keeping. 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 
 
 All the great Victorians have passed from among us. 
 For in no true sense of the word can Thomas Hardy 
 be called a Victorian. We may sit beside him perhaps 
 in a theatre to-day, and we may notice the hand 
 of age on him, proclaiming him as one the splendour 
 of whose days fetches back to the time when Brown- 
 ing, Meredith, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and 
 George Eliot were in their height of fame. But 
 a man's tribe is a matter of ancestry, not the hazard 
 of environment; and by that infallible test Thomas 
 Hardy is discovered to be an alien among those that 
 we call the Victorians, recognising a certain bond 
 among them that he has not. His very choice of an 
 alien form is an outward symbol proclaiming the 
 diflFerence. We think of Adam Bede, David Coffer- 
 field, and Pendennis, and we see in each of them, 
 through their individual distinctions, a certain 
 common spirit uttering itself in various fashions. 
 We go on, and in the infinitely richer, more various 
 work of one but lately gone from us, we see the same 
 spirit articulating itself in Evan Harrington and 
 Harry Richmond. But there the semblance arrests 
 itself; and by that token we may know the Victorian 
 
 222 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 223 
 
 age is finally closed and completed, awaiting yet the 
 final summary of its achievement. 
 
 One by one, then, the great names of that age are 
 stepping to the arresting challenge of their centen- 
 aries ; and among them, William Makepeace Thackeray 
 is the first of the novelists who has to undergo this 
 exacting ordeal. In a certain sense it would be just 
 to say that the age was chiefly characterised by the 
 special glory of the Novel, in spite of the fact that 
 the names of Tennyson, Browning, and, remotely, 
 Francis Thompson are to be included in it. Yet it 
 must be remembered that the first two of these 
 names in poetry themselves gave witness to the 
 priority of the Novel in the fact that they obviously 
 shaped much of their poetry having the Novel in 
 mind. It is difficult to imagine The Ring and the 
 Book or Maud being written in any other age but 
 one chiefly addicted to the Novel. Yet in the very 
 matter of form the Novel is again distinctive, and for 
 a wholly different reason. It may be safely said, for 
 instance, that such novels as Vanity Fair, Pendennis, 
 and The Newcomes have been seen for the last time. 
 To this result Thomas Hardy has contributed as 
 much as any. Strictly, it may be true that the 
 Novel derives primarily from Bunyan and Cervantes 
 in final indebtedness, but actually Dickens and 
 Thackeray, as the chief makers of the nineteenth- 
 
224 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 century Novel, reach back through Scott no further 
 than Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. From 
 them the inspiration came, and from them came, too, 
 the rambling, formless fashion of the final result. 
 But now the mystic word Architectonic has been 
 breathed over a disordered, yet somewhat splendid, 
 chaos; and so the parts have begun actively to 
 arrange and fashion themselves, and a final, well- 
 ordered, and, it is to be hoped, not too exclusive 
 a cosmos has begun to loom ahead for the Novel. 
 Novelists have already begun to speak, with an 
 adequately bated breath, of " mastering the medium," 
 and with that word we may see at once Jiow far we 
 have travelled since Thackeray and Vanity Fair. 
 
 Thus, save for one triumphant exception, it 
 happens that in celebrating Thackeray's Centenary 
 we are also taking our leave of him as a Novelist. 
 That does not seem to say, necessarily, that there 
 shall be no more novels as long as Vanity Fair or 
 Pendennis: it means, rather, that however lengthy 
 novels may be, it shall be required of them that they 
 shall proceed with the matter they have undertaken 
 to tell, and that if their author is possessed of the 
 very legitimate desire to tell us the thoughts touching 
 the weighty things of Life that his matter has awoken 
 in him, he shall convey them preferably in the colour 
 and happenings of his narrative, or at least cause 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 225 
 
 them materially to explain and progress the business 
 in hand. In this it is sometimes difficult to keep 
 patience with Thackeray. Hi^jgrolixity is not the 
 fault of an abundant narrative : it is rather the fault 
 of the showman (and, it must be confessed, too often 
 the impertinent showman), who mingles with his 
 characters, not to laugh with them or weep with 
 them, but chuckle unhappily at them, with sidelong 
 glance, or sneer openly at them to their faces. Nothing 
 can be imagined more calculated to irritate the mind 
 than this. We can abide the voice in our ear that 
 excitedly explains the course of the action to us. We 
 can even tolerate the showman who seeks to aid our 
 sense of illusion — as moral reflections and subtle 
 expositions and diagnoses may well do. But such 
 a showman as this but excites our impatience and 
 stirs our distaste, because he, even he whose business 
 it is to throw a glamour of desirable illusion about us, 
 is also in league against us to destroy it by his 
 cynicism. 
 
 This faculty was ever prevalent in Thackeray's 
 work. It has been said that in none of his novels 
 is there a character for whom we are not some- 
 times stirred to contempt. Harry Esmond (his 
 creator himself said it) is not a little of a prig; 
 Beatrix, Esmond in his most dignified and most 
 manly of moments turned away from himself, as 
 
226 wSTUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 heartless and vapid for all her brilliance of charm; 
 Major Pendennis is of the world worldly, and empty 
 at that; even Colonel Newcome only holds us com- 
 pletely at the moment of his death. To say that the 
 fault of this lay with Thackeray himself will seem 
 to be like announcing the obvious, since it was he 
 who made them. But the statement is true in a 
 subtler way than appears to be the case at first flush. 
 For if ever one of hi^ characters seemed hy any chance 
 to be sTiaping for the noble, at once the showman 
 would step forward arid seek to make him of her 
 appear lugubrious by some or other unhappy sug- 
 gestion of mixed motives. This was so when 
 Thackeray was engaged depicting the gay and heroic. 
 When, therefore, he turned to a show of Life that 
 was in itself of questionable repute, the result was to 
 immerse the reading mind in an odour and flavour 
 of things that it turned from in distaste. After a 
 continuous and lengthy reading of Vanity Fair, a 
 fierce south-westerly gale on hill-tops, or a crystal 
 frost, or pine woods in spring when young buds are 
 awake, are required to purge and clarify the mind 
 again. There is nothing impure in Life or on Earth- 
 save the minds of men ; and therefore we feel that it is 
 Thackeray chiefly who is responsible for our distaste, 
 and not Life. That is to say, he has not dealt 
 honestly with Life, with his own soul, or by us. 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 227 
 
 The lamentable pity of all this is that through all 
 his work we are perpetually haunted by a sense of his 
 genius. Few^ouIHrbe so lugubrious on occasion as he ; 
 yet, even when ,®Q§t_lost..to a sense of fitness and 
 dignity, through his faults there flash continually on 
 us strange lights in revelation of his genius. It is 
 declared that as he wrote the famous chapter in 
 Vanity Fair where Rawdon Crawley discovers 
 Becky's faithlessness, the ejaculation broke from 
 him, " Genius by God! " Who can h^lp but approve 
 the cause of his exclamation or fail to think of many 
 other marked instances that could supply a cause 
 not less sufficient? But the fact is, that even when 
 we are least positive of the genius, we are most certain 
 ^th»t we could not affirm its absence. It is this 
 elusive charm about him that binds us to him even 
 when we are most dissuaded by his unhealthy side- 
 long glance at Life. Where, for example, can one 
 discover a more delicate balance of style, a purer 
 charm of expression, than his? Even when he left 
 it most unchastened one can always divine the inner 
 beauty beyond the excrescences. Where shall one 
 know a more adequate or more natural conveyance 
 of dialogue ? Or where may we seek to find a more 
 restrained dignity of deportment in his characters 
 when occasion requires it? Take the scene already 
 mentioned where Colonel Crawley finds Lord Steyne 
 
228 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 with Becky, with, by way of instance, such a strangely 
 contained and riveting sentence as, " And he struck 
 the peer twice over the face with his open hand, and 
 flung him bleeding to the ground." Take Esmond's 
 repudiation of his Jacobite faith, his breaking of his 
 Jacobite sword, before the face of the last Jacobite 
 libertine, in Henry Esmond. Or the justly famous 
 death of Colonel Newcome, with the wonderful last 
 paragraph beginning " At the usual evening hour the 
 chapel bell began to toll." Their strength is in their 
 restraint. Comparisons are invidious, but one is 
 puzzled to think what Dickens would have made of 
 such scenes. 
 
 What, then, is the cause of this dissatisfaction he 
 so often stirs in us ? Some have said that he is a 
 cynic: others, that he is a sentimentalist. Is it 
 possible to discover the central thing in him that 
 shall explain these several, and seemingly contrarious, 
 impressions his work leaves on various minds ? For 
 one thing, it should never be forgotten the manner 
 of man he was. Objective art or subjective art, no 
 man can write other than the things that are in him, 
 and no man can help but write out the things that 
 are in him. Thackeray was no exception to this. 
 Firstly he was an Englishman; and, except for the 
 fact that there was very little of the Falstaff in him, 
 he might fitly be called a very typical Englishman. 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 229 
 
 That is to say, all those noble impulsions that go to 
 make the very loftiest art he was not only afraid of, 
 he was -half ashamed of them. Art is compact of 
 nothing so much as the grand passions of the soul; 
 and when those came upon Thackeray, he cast his 
 eye hurriedly right and left to see what others thought 
 of the figure he was cutting. He never knew any- 
 thing of the grand abandon of the soul on fire. As 
 has been said, he was afraid and ashamed of the 
 divine fury the things he handled would awake in 
 him: he sought refuge from it; and he found his 
 refuge in only three possible retreats. Either he 
 took refuge in a punctilious and meticulous rectitude : 
 when he became a prig. Or he found shelter in a 
 half-faltering scepticism at the expense' of the 
 genuineness of the passion awakened: when he 
 promptly took shape as a cynic. Or he sought to 
 baulk the passion of its urgency by turning half of it 
 astray, and letting the lesser half of the stream filter 
 maudlin-fashion down his page: when at once he 
 was a sentimentalist. 
 
 Now, at one time or another, Thackeray is all of 
 these things. Nothing can better test such a type 
 of man than to give him Poetry to write or read. 
 A blushing face, a smirking smile, and a stammering 
 demeanour are the inevitable result: and the more 
 genuine and potent the emotions stirred in him by 
 
230 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 its appeal, the more marked and inevitable are these 
 characteristics. And so it is with Thackeray. Take 
 this verse he gives to his Jeames for the expression 
 of his love — 
 
 " When moonlike ore the hazure seas, 
 
 In soft effulgence swells. 
 When silver jews and bahny breeze 
 
 Bend down the Lily's bells ; 
 When calm and deep, the rosy sleap 
 
 Has lapt your soul in dreams, 
 RHangeline! R lady mine I 
 
 Dost thou remember Jeames ? " 
 
 How extraordinary it is! He cannot deny himself 
 the impulsion to loveliness and beauty; but it suffuses 
 hipa with blushes, and so he endeavours to turn it to 
 burlesque. It is said of him that he ever blushed 
 furiously as he penned his love-scenes. That can very 
 well be believed. Probably he imagined himself being 
 watched by some fellow-member of the Garrick Club. 
 The effect of this was all the more marked since he 
 was possessed of so extraordinarily receptive a mind. 
 There were few things that passed him that passed 
 unperceived by him; and what he perceived, he 
 analysed, criticised, and retained. Had he only 
 possessed the god-like faculty of absolute abandon 
 there is no telling what he might not have achieved. 
 But this demands the instinct of faith and a healthy 
 life. The man who said, " My vanity would be to 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 231 
 
 go through life as a gentleman, as a Major Pendennis," 
 was obviously debarred from it. Not that he meant 
 what he said, though it is evident that he meant a good 
 deal of it. But that he should have said it was quite 
 sufficient : fortherebyhe sought to denythe best in him. 
 Yet this very faculty, while it leads to the faults 
 that have already been noticed, leads also to his 
 one supreme excellence. Truly speaking, the more 
 restrained he is, the more supreme he is. The 
 avoidance of abandon that led to his cynicism, his 
 desire for satire and caricature, his sentimentalismi 
 his priggishness, led also, when instinct guided him 
 aright, to the strength of restraint. In all the 
 passages from his works that outstand as the memory's 
 great landmarks, this is the virtue that characterises 
 them all. And when he elected, not only to restrain 
 his characters and his manner of narration, but also 
 to restrain himself by the severe ordeal of subduing 
 his hand and mind to the autobiographic narration 
 of one of his own creations, why, then he mounted 
 to his one perfect flower of achievement in Henry 
 Esmond, and the wholly different, yet not less success- 
 ful, Barry Lyndon. In both of them the showman 
 is dismissed, and in the first of them at least the style 
 has a certain grace of expression not to be outdone 
 in or out of his work. Some have said that the 
 affinity between the styles of the eighteenth and 
 
232 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 nineteenth centuries was proved in the fact that 
 when Thackeray desired to achieve the earlier manner 
 it was only necessary for him to chasten slightly his 
 ordinary style, and make such slight conversational 
 alterations as, for example, "'tis" for " it's." But 
 this is not wholly so. The chastening of the style was 
 due to the necessity of personal restraint. And, for 
 the rest, he himself in life and spirit was always more 
 attuned to the eighteenth century than to his own age. 
 Of his life we do not know much. Wisely, perhaps, 
 he ordained that there should be no official biography 
 of him. The completest hints we have yet had are 
 to be found in the biographical introductions his 
 daughter has supplied to the centenary edition. 
 Yet these are written with what is, perhaps, a justi- 
 fiably pious grace, rather than with a desire to let the 
 utmost be known. From these, however, and from 
 the friendly biographies already printed, a very 
 accurate impression of the man and his life can be 
 gathered. And it is even such a man, and even such 
 a life, as one would have expected. It is almost the 
 typical life of a man in the eighteenth century. A 
 haunter of taverns and clubs, he might have been the 
 associate of Steele and Addison rather than a liver 
 in the nineteenth century. Thus it was that when 
 he came to write Henry Esmond he had only to 
 depict his own desires and emotions to achieve a 
 
THE FAILURE OF THACKERAY 233 
 
 perfect verisimilitude. Yet it left its brand. Nature 
 never blew through the eighteenth century: Nature 
 never blew through Thackeray's life: Nature never 
 blows through Thackeray's novels. They are of the 
 town, towny; and a little stuffy withal. 
 
 There is always, therefore, a feeling of tragedy in 
 reading the work which is his testimony for after- 
 times. Unlike other workers in the Novel he is never 
 sincerely himself just because he is always afraid of 
 himself. There is power everywhere: but it is a 
 power he is not willing to trust. There are always 
 hints of beauty, in pure essence and in the delicate 
 cadence of his style: but it is a beauty that makes 
 him flush sensitively, and we are too often compelled 
 to see it through cynicism or sentimentality, neither 
 of which things belonged to his essential self. He 
 paid the price of the Artist who was not content to be 
 all Artist in the faith of the truth and ultimate value 
 of his Art. He not only traded with the other camp, 
 he preferred to be considered of the other camp. 
 Therefore, the power, that was his, went astray in 
 the clouds that obscured its strength. Yet it wins 
 through nevertheless; and it is impossible, to read 
 any portion of him without realising that here, if ever, 
 was a man of genius, if he had only been content 
 absolutelyand fearlessly to trust that genius, and to dare 
 it in the face of proprieties and smug conventionalities. 
 
AN ASPECT OF SAMUEL BUTLER 
 
 In spite of Mr. Shaw's eulogy in the introduction to 
 Major Barbara, the works of Samuel Butler have still 
 to receive that attention they deserve. We can 
 scarcely imagine a Booklover worthy the name that 
 does not hold in affectionate memory such books as 
 his posthumous novel, The Way of All Flesh, or those 
 two subtle and cutting satires Erewhon and Erewhon 
 Revisited. To call Butler a refreshing genius would 
 perhaps be to err. Refreshing he certainly was — 
 though refreshing as a plunge in a frosty stream is 
 refreshing, stripping much of sentimental nonsense 
 out of one. But Butler's own philosophy obviates 
 the use of the word genius. Yet if it be genius to see 
 circumstances from a totally new standpoint; to 
 throw new sharp crosslights that call into quick 
 question much that custom in its lethargic way 
 stoutly adheres to: if this be genius, then Butler 
 was unquestionably a genius. He wrote, of course, 
 much more than merely the three books already 
 named. Indeed, his works wind out to a sufficiently 
 lengthy list. But it is by the three named that he 
 stands or falls; for they are not only far and away 
 his best, but they comprise all his genuinely creative 
 
 234 
 
AN ASPECT OF SAMUEL BUTLER 235 
 
 work. They are books properly so called. His 
 other works are more or less journeyman literature^- 
 uncreative, transient. Nevertheless, they all enshrine 
 his particular philosophy. Carlyle, with colour and 
 eloquence, aided by uncommon sagacity, waged 
 mighty war on the world of humbug. Butler laughs 
 at it. Sometimes his laughter comes near to being 
 a withering scorn; but generally it is free of those 
 bitter elements that bring him down to the measure 
 of the things he mocks at. Generally he is above 
 them, and his laughter is broad and free, sly at times 
 if you will, exquisitely subtle and too remote for 
 mere mirth at others, but perishing and deadly 
 always. His was a surer way of exposing shams 
 than was Carlyle's; withal, it was more cruel. Yet 
 even Butler, despite his subtle and keen weapon, 
 was not always able to pierce between things that 
 differ. In other words, he was wont sometimes to 
 make mirth of things that were far from shams. 
 Carlyle's method of general denunciation left him 
 clear of so particular a charge. 
 
 To the methods of satire all pretensions are lawful 
 prey. Nor is it always possible to distinguish between 
 pretensions that are justified and pretensions that 
 are unjustified. Hence satire is apt to upcall some 
 indignation that is meet and just, and the proper 
 objects of its criticism know well how to escape in the 
 
236 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 confusion so caused. So it is with Butler. Preter- 
 natural and supernatural are all of a piece to him too 
 frequently; though often he flashes out a thought, 
 such as his insistence of the wisdom of instinct as 
 against mere reason, that lets us know he is not blind 
 to the differences of the things he satirises. This 
 confusion in Butler becomes confusion twice-confused 
 in his disciple Mr. Shaw — for Mr. Shaw has avowed 
 himself as in some measure a disciple. The high and 
 mighty pretensions of the would-be romantic lover 
 is anathema to Butler, but he does not ruthlessly 
 sweep away all romance in love as does Mr. Shaw. 
 In contradistinction to Mr. Shaw's attitude of im- 
 patient exclusion, Butler hangs aloof in wide tolerance, 
 waiting to see the slightest display of unreality and 
 pose; and then, but only then, out comes his laughter, 
 playing above his subjects like summer lightning. 
 He may perhaps mistake reality for unreality, sin- 
 cerity for humbug. He sometimes does, but at least 
 his intention is to divide between false and true. At 
 his best Butler is inimitable. Not so cutting nor so 
 broad, in the worst sense, as Swift, he has more sap 
 and kindliness in him. He is even more original, and 
 therefore more creative, than Swift, though he has 
 by no means the brilliance of Swift. Who, in that 
 great book The Way of All Flesh, has not been struck 
 by his handling of the rela^tionship between Ernest 
 
AN ASPECT OF SAMUEL BUTLER 237 
 
 Pontifex and his father ? Ernest was his father's son. 
 
 It was the irony of nature, for this was the sole per- 
 
 , functory tie between them. There was no kinship 
 
 between them ; and neither could, by any conceivable 
 
 force, have managed to love the other. Therefore, 
 
 Butler refuses to recognise any tie or any obligation 
 
 existing between them. How perfectly refreshing 
 
 and free of aU cant this is! Ernest himself did not 
 
 see this at first, and until he did see it he and his 
 
 father continued to cause each other untold misery. 
 
 He was rather more his mother's son, and Butler 
 
 recognises more of obligation existing there. But 
 
 only in a lesser degree; that is, only in so far as any 
 
 real kinship existed. 
 
 The Way of All Flesh is a great book; and in its 
 
 genuine portrayal of real life lies the cause of its 
 
 greatness. The two Erewhons are not so mighty, but 
 
 they are even more original. To the latter of them 
 
 Butler prefixes a quotation from the Iliad, which 
 
 he translates thus — 
 
 " Him do I hate even as I hate Hell-fire, 
 Who says one thing, and hides another in his heart." 
 
 It is his purpose to smite this hypocrisy, and he does 
 so by showing us a world of Topsy-Turveydom. In 
 Erewhon nothing is as it is here. Moral defects are 
 as illness with us, to be duly confessed, as a mere 
 matter for the practitioner, who is called a Straightener. 
 
238 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Misfortune and illness, however, are deadly crimes. 
 In an embezzlement, for instance, , he whom we call 
 a culprit is condoled with, and puts his case into the 
 Straightener's hands for treatment; whereas the 
 victim is abhorred and put straight into prison as 
 a criminal. Poverty, smallpox, and phthisis were 
 enormous crimes against the community, and were 
 to be punished by terms of severe imprisonment or 
 by death. The Erewhonians had no religion. They 
 gave perfunctory attendance to Musical Banks, how- 
 ever; the coinage of which was absolutely valueless, 
 though, of course, much displayed. The cashiers of 
 these were " sinister-looking persons in black gowns " ! 
 Their injunctions were paid great heed to while the 
 devotees (chiefly women, for the men seldom attended, 
 though they were careful to join) were at the Banks. 
 When they left, however, they followed the wholly 
 different and contrary cult of Idgrun — a specious 
 anagram for Grundy. 
 
 It is all delightful, and no less salutary. He 
 escapes, at length, from Erewhon, with Arowhena, 
 with whom he has fallen in love, in a balloon that he 
 has made to his specifications for experimentation. 
 Nevertheless, he longs to return to Erewhon, for it 
 fascinated him, and, after twenty years, on the death 
 of Arowhena, he does so. Now, however, to his 
 horror, he finds himself worshipped by the whole 
 
AN ASPECT OF SAMUEL BUTLER 239 
 
 country as the Sunchild! The Musical Banks and 
 Universities have taken him up. His balloon is 
 transformed into a flaming chariot, and four storks 
 that were very inquisitive over his ascent have become 
 four black and white horses sent by his father, the 
 Sun, to escort him back thither ! Temples are erected 
 to him everywhere, his manner of clothing adopted, 
 and the two men that give themselves over to the 
 exposition of his Sayings, most of which he fails to 
 recognise, are Professors Hanky and Panky! In 
 Erezohon Revisited there is at times a sadness most 
 impressive that appears nowhere else in Butler's 
 work. It is not so great as its predecessor, but it is 
 warmer. The two of them, with The Way of All 
 Flesh, have yet to bring Samuel Butler into his own. 
 But they will do so, nevertheless, for Butler's name 
 belongs to EngHsh literature. 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 
 
 So sure is the present mind that we are on the eve, 
 
 nay, already in the first flush of Dawn, of a great 
 
 awakening in Drama, that it is well nigh to venture 
 
 a platitude to refer to it. By this is meant, not that 
 
 Drama shall be given more heed to by the people, 
 
 which indeed might well be difficult of achievement 
 
 if the attendance at all that now boasts itself under 
 
 the wide name of Drama be remembered, but rather 
 
 that Drama shall wear a new inspiration on its brow; 
 
 that it shall cease to deck itself in tawdry and ribbons 
 
 of a day outworn, but shall be vestured in a clean 
 
 sweet raiment but lately off the loom of inspiration. 
 
 And this seems to make the present moment of 
 
 peculiar interest in the light of the immediate past. 
 
 As one turns back, as far as one may legitimately 
 
 turn back in a single review, two influences seem to 
 
 stand out as pre-eminently full of disaster for the 
 
 English stage. These two influences, while in some 
 
 sense influences that sought only their expression in 
 
 personalities, are better discovered and examined 
 
 in the personalities who were their chief exponents 
 
 and so their chief inspirers. These are Sir Henry 
 
 Irving and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. 
 
 240 
 
T^E VITALITY OF DRAMA 241 
 
 So great is the average Englishman's love of great 
 names and picturesque personalities that it wiU seem 
 a little ungracious to speak of Sir Henry Irving in 
 this connection. And, indeed, it is largely this very 
 thing that enables a man, if he have sufficiently 
 large a personality, not only to arrest and atrophy 
 the legitimate because vital development of the 
 movement he represents, but also to start and 
 establish a tradition to that effect, with irreparable 
 results. The very measure of his personal success 
 becomes the very measure of the failure of his cause 
 — or rather, the cause that should be his. If in the 
 intensity of his effort he fuse himself into the move- 
 ment of his large unselfish love, then the cause wUl 
 be swelled out and enriched by just so much as he 
 himself is in might and stature. But if he tower 
 above his work idiosyncraticaUy, then he must 
 increase, but the movement he represents will be 
 everlastingly the poorer. The ethics of this, though 
 fascinating enough, are not the present business. 
 It now only suffices to say that the truer artist is he, 
 who, when he comes as the herald of a new thing and 
 finds this new thing expanding above him, can say, 
 " It must increase, and I must decrease," and be 
 content at that. 
 
 An excellent test of this is afforded. If an artist 
 has enriched and ennobled his art, then his art will 
 
 Q 
 
242 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 in turn ensure his name and enshrine his personality. 
 But if an artist has enfeebled and vitiated his art 
 by the development of his idiosyncratic personality, 
 then he must ensure himself, and by only one method. 
 By the establishment of institutions and traditions. 
 And therein lies his far-reaching effect of evil. For 
 these institutions and traditions, even if they fail to 
 perpetuate his name, nevertheless continue to vitiate 
 the art of his profession, because it is the first law 
 of their being to do so. 
 
 Of such institutions Sir Henry Irving established 
 three that were noteworthy, though he did not 
 originate them all. They were. Actor-managership, 
 Single-part Plays, and Panoramic Scenery: each of 
 which insidiously corrupted certain portions of 
 Drama that were vital to its well-being; all of which 
 have waxed more and more potent since the day of 
 their establishment, until at this present moment, 
 in that portion of Drama that may fitly be termed 
 the Theatre of Commerce, they in their triune omni- 
 potence have usurped the place of, and cast out the 
 person of, authentic Drama., 
 
 I imagine were one to seek a definition of Drama 
 that represented the general finding of thought, and 
 yet contained the irreducible minimum of the opinion 
 of aU, it would shape itself in something of this 
 fashion: A conflict of vital characters, either among 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 243 
 
 themselves primarily, or among themselves second- 
 arily and with, an external society primarily, inter- 
 preted by actors for the benefit of an audience. This 
 does not enter into the general metaphysic of Drama, 
 but assumes to be what all drama aims at being. 
 Nor does it touch upon the mere empiric of Drama 
 in questions of ideal fulfilment in fit representation. 
 It merely says: excellent drama is an excellent 
 fulfilment of these conditions; poor drama is a poor 
 fulfilment of these conditions. 
 
 Now, this being so, the part that accessories have 
 to play is set out with a sure and inevitable hand. 
 And, moreover, what are accessories is discovered 
 with equal swiftness as being all those adjuncts that 
 lie outside the borders of the definition. This is to 
 say, all that lies outside the borders of the definition 
 is only of value in so far as it aids the interpretation 
 of aU that lies within; and then only within the 
 severe limits of apt function; that is, never being 
 permitted to exceed to such an extent that it in- 
 trudes and attracts attention to itself. Otherwise the 
 action will most inevitably be encumbered in its 
 movement; or may possibly even be strangled to 
 extinction. All this may sound ruthlessly dogmatic. 
 But purporting to be the irreducible minimum, it is 
 only dogmatic as first principles are dogmatic. 
 
 In the light of this it will be profitable to examine 
 
 Q2 
 
244 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 the three institutions referred to that Sir Henry 
 Irving exemplified most fully in his practice, and 
 which he established so surely that to this day they 
 remain supreme in the vast majority of our drama. 
 It will be well to start with the midmost, that is to 
 say, the matter of Single-part Plays. 
 
 In the heyday of Irving's success the ardent play- 
 goer did not pay pilgrimage to the Lyceum to see the 
 drama Faust : he went to see Sir Henry Irving as 
 Mephistopheles in a play whose title chanced to be 
 Faust, but might well have been Misalliance for all 
 that it mattered to him. How far Shakespeare was 
 concerned in Henry Fill, did not concern him, and 
 properly so; but whether or not it was a good play 
 equally well did not concern him, and improperly so. 
 But that Sir Henry acted as Cardinal Wolsey in such 
 a play was to him all and in all. The Man's the 
 thing wherein to catch the reason of the Play, seemed 
 a fitting maxim for such a mood. Indeed, so ardent 
 was this movement that it mattered little to the 
 appreciative audience that Cardinal Wolsey was but 
 little likely to have his gait, speech, and manner vital 
 and quivering with the mannerisms of a man born 
 some few centuries after his decease, unsubdued and 
 unrestrained. And so has this tradition grown that 
 we may at any moment find an actor, happening 
 by chance not to have a play before the footlights. 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 245 
 
 compelling equally large and appreciative audiences 
 at the variety theatre by repeating either plaintive 
 or bombastic rhetoric before them ! 
 
 The bearing of this on the definition we have 
 accepted is obvious. How there can be any conflict 
 of characters in an arrangement where one is under- 
 scored to vast predominance while all the rest are 
 graciously and fittingly grouped round it, fails to 
 appear. How there can be any clash of personalities 
 (at least, that is to say, of such sufficient import as 
 to draw a considerable number of people together 
 in one place to view it) when one personality stalks 
 highly and mightily through a host of comparative 
 dwarfs, is another perplexity. The very basis of 
 Drama is cut at. So much so that the mind pictures 
 the actor declaring verse with fitting gesture before 
 a music-hall audience as one who has boldly and 
 fearlessly advanced to the logical conclusion of the 
 movement. 
 
 This means two things. It means the debasing 
 of pure emotion, which implies conflict, into weak 
 setitiment, which implies maudlin opposition: a 
 subject demanding subsequent and more detailed 
 treatment. It means, too, that, since colour has 
 been washed out of the vitality of character in this 
 way, other and more adventitious aids must be 
 employed to introduce colour. One such aid would be 
 
246 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 furious movement and excitable by-play. Another 
 leads us to the third of Sir Henry Irving's institutions, 
 that of Panoramic Scenery. 
 
 It is inevitable that where panoramic scenery holds 
 the boards strong acting must be dispensed with. 
 In a recent and famous representation, for instance, 
 of The Merchant of Venice, the first act was but 
 simply staged in comparison to the others. The 
 result was that the articulation of the words was 
 clear, the gestures simple, the acting vibrant and 
 strong. The whole act lives in one's memory as 
 powerful. In a later scene the Ghetto was depicted 
 with prodigal and elaborate scenic effect. The result 
 was inevitable : for the acting was confused, strained, 
 and turbulent; it was only when darkness fell over 
 the scene, to blot out the nuisance of details, that 
 anything like strength in acting was recovered. The 
 scene lives chiefly in one's memory by virtue of a 
 certain curious rippling of water cleverly contrived 
 in a far-distant canal. And that this was all that 
 concerned one's neighbours was unfortunately too 
 patent. They were not to blame: for the mind 
 refuses to contain two strong things at one time; 
 and certainly it justly refuses to give predominance 
 to acting when suniptuous and elaborate scenery 
 demands primary attention by sheer magnificence. 
 Thus an accessory, something clearly without the 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 247 
 
 bounds o£ our definition, something having nothing 
 to do with Drama pure and simple, has thrust aside 
 .the conflict of , characters and assumed priority of 
 importance. 
 
 Nor is this all. For panoramic scenery has brought 
 other evils in its train, two of which, at least, are 
 vitaUy important. Take, for instance, Construction! 
 Modern drama has decreed that for a three hours' 
 entertainment three or four changes of scene only 
 are permissible. More may be accepted, but will 
 be looked askance at; less will be welcomed. In 
 other words, a subsidiary movement shall at least 
 last a whole hour without change of scene! In such 
 a crude massing of movements what subtlety of 
 , construction can there be ? And the pity of pities is 
 since construction of all others is the subtlest equip- 
 ment of the dramatist. To write a whole play in one 
 act, lasting an hour, is one thing: it is its own art, 
 and has its own governing rules of beauty. But to 
 write a play sufficiently lengthy to last three hours, 
 and to compress it into three movements, is deliber- 
 ately to forego some of the deftest adjustments of 
 scene and psychology. But the difficulty of. moving 
 elaborate scenery many times in the time allotted 
 has decided that it shall be so compressed. 
 
 Or take the question of Atmosphere! For a man 
 in modern attire to step into a sumptuous modern 
 
248 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 drawing-room and indulge in soliloquy strikes un- 
 naturally, for all that we have all known it done, and, 
 may be, under powerful stress of emotion, have done 
 it ourselves. Yet most dramatists possess a secret 
 love for soliloquy, and lament its elimination from 
 drama. And they are right. For soliloquy is an 
 unfurling of soul, which unfurling is the main business 
 of drama. Conflict has awoke^^it; but the conflict 
 need not be afoot at that moment. Much action is 
 born in reflection; but modem drama does not allow 
 for reflection. And surely it is more proper for a 
 man to unfurl his soul in loneliness, than for him to 
 do so in dialogue with his mortal foe! But for a man 
 to stand in some perfectly simple scene with no 
 atmosphere save such as he himself shall create, and 
 then to indulge in soliloquy, what impropriety or 
 unfitness is there in that ? It is his words we hang 
 on then, and they bring their own laws. In other 
 words. Drama is creating its own conditions, and not 
 having its conditions ruled out for it by accessory 
 causes. 
 
 The same applies, for example, to such scenes as 
 the last in Hamlet. This is objected to as a shambles. 
 But would it be objected to as a shambles if the 
 scenery was so simple, subtle, and remote of sugges- 
 tion that the audience were induced to see men as 
 gods contending rather than men as courtiers wrang- 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 249 
 
 ling? Indeed, the fact that so much of Shakespeare 
 strikes one as violent when set in modern conditidns 
 is the severest indictment of modern conditions. 
 They would not be violent if seen in the conditions 
 for which they were .written, and acted with vibrant 
 simplicity and loftiness.^ 
 
 In fact, it is because of the elemental conditions 
 of its setting that Shakespeare's drama is so vital; 
 and it is because of these institutions that the type 
 of drama under review now has been bled of aU 
 vitality. They have destroyed the only conditions 
 under which pure emotion, and pure emotion in 
 conflict, could exist; with the inevitable result that 
 where emotion once reigned, sentimentality and froth 
 are in querulous possession. Where great words (the 
 basis of drama) once meant mighty emotion, they 
 now too often mean only bombast. Nor could these 
 two institutions referred to possibly have been main- 
 tained had it not been for Actor-managership. The 
 native vitality of Drama, the most vital of aU art- 
 forms, would have burst them off had it not been 
 for this incubus. The actor-manager decrees, and 
 has the power to decree, that any play he accepts 
 shaU provide him with one noteworthy part, and that 
 it shall be massed in construction. 
 
 ' I may be forgiven perhaps for commenting that, since the above 
 was written, I have worked this matter out with some attempt at care 
 and fullness in my Shakespeare : A Sti*dy. 
 
250 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 At this juncture Mr. Shaw came along — ^he being, 
 in Mr. Arnold Bennett's elegant phrase, " The symbol 
 of the whole shindy." In so far as Mr. Shaw des- 
 troyed the baneful influences that prevailed in Drama 
 all about him he did doughty service indeed. Yet 
 he did it in a curious way. For the baneful influences 
 had resulted in turning the half of emotion out of 
 character, leaving weak sentimeritalism ; so Mr. 
 Shaw turned the other half out, leavinjg arid intel- 
 lectualism. Which was lamentable; for it so happens 
 that emotion in character is vitality in character. 
 Character is the potentiality of emotion. Such 
 emotion can only be directed into the sphere of 
 practical operations through the agency of mind. 
 If this mind be cultured and refined we speak of it 
 as intellect. If it be not cultured we are content to 
 speak of it merely as mind. But the important fact 
 is that the point of collision in the impact between 
 emotion and emotion is mind. Even in swordplay 
 and fisticuffs it is so; but most manifestly is it so 
 in that type of alert conflict with which drama has 
 to do. So while mind seems to contend against 
 mind, in reality it is not so ; it is truly that emotion 
 contends against emotion through the agency of 
 mind. 
 
 That the point of conflict should be mind is im- 
 portant; but may well be over-important. It is 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA - 251 
 
 important as serving to show that the higher the mind 
 the sharper the conflict. It may well be over- 
 important when the author's bodiless intelligence 
 in one utterance comes into conflict with the author's 
 characterless intelligence in another utterance; when, 
 in fact, one point of view opposes another point of 
 view to maintain the semblance of a conflict, while 
 character, the body of emotion, is everywhere lacking. 
 In such a case the agencies of conflict are there indeed, 
 and it may be in vivid and witful oppugnancy; but 
 they are directing into the fleld of combat nothing 
 but themselves. No emotion and characters appear 
 there; only wit and titles. It is not conflict, but 
 oppugnancy. It may be very entertaining; but can 
 scarcely be called great Drama. 
 
 For example, two of the most influential emotions 
 in mankind, the two most primal and potent, the two 
 that recur most persistently in History and absorb 
 Art, are perhaps Religion and Love. Not theology 
 and erotic standards, which are their appearance in 
 intellect after the impact of action; but the native 
 emotions of Religion and Love. An important 
 distinction appears here. For mind directed them 
 into operation in the sphere of will; but mind also 
 codified its experience in the sphere of intelligence. 
 
 Now it so happens that in one of Mr. Shaw's best 
 plays its chief character professes to be actuated by 
 
252 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 these two very emotions. Major Barbara professes 
 to be swayed and ruled in the primary actions of her 
 life by the forceful and unanswerable dictates of these 
 two pure vitalities of character. And not only so. 
 She professes to be their slave in their most illogical 
 imperativeness. For Cusins, her betrothed (I was 
 almost about to say " lover," except that that word 
 strikes so preposterously across the facts of his course 
 of action), is so wholly removed, both by social caste 
 and by personal disposition, from Barbara's manner 
 of life, seeming almost in some sense an adventurer, 
 that to have chosen him for a life partner betokens 
 in her an infatuation indeed. So for a young lady of 
 society to take up with religious zealotry is scarcely 
 the most common of experiences ; but for such a lady 
 to join the Salvation Army as an intense and active 
 street propagandist, maintaining meanwhile her 
 society life, is surely an uncommon case of religious 
 fervour. These things are, however, the postulates 
 of the play. But where does Barbara, in the action 
 of the play, manifest either lover-like or any religious 
 emotion? In other words, where does she demon- 
 strate these to be the vital characteristics of a vital 
 person? Who seeing her with Cusins would hazard 
 any so wild and desperate a proposal as that she loved 
 him ? Who seeing her play the Major would imagine 
 that Salvationism, let alone Christianity, had ever 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 253 
 
 touched emotion or zeal in her ? Where does vitality 
 swell out her part ? The play is, of course, fascinating 
 and arresting (it is by Mr. Shaw), but Barbara is no 
 more than a postulate in a theme to be worked out. 
 Yet this is not Drama ; it is an argument fascinatingly 
 conducted. 
 
 So with Man and Superman. John Tanner pro- 
 tests at the conclusion that he does indeed love Ann. 
 We would like very much to believe him; but after 
 aU is said and done there seems very little reason why 
 he should marry Ann rather than Ann's mother. 
 The chase after him was all very exciting; neverthe- 
 less Ann herself is not very convincing. Ann is not 
 Ann; Tanner is not Tanner (that is to say, they have 
 not vital personalities behind their names to ring 
 conviction on their actions); Ann and Tanner are 
 rather postulates in the argument that Man cannot 
 be Superman because he is for ever enmeshed in the 
 nets of sex. It is another argument fascinatingly 
 conducted xmder the conditions of Farce. But this 
 is not vitality; this is ingenuity. Men and women 
 do not contend in stressful action, striving for master 
 in forceful will power; but conception oppugns con- 
 ception, accepting as their law an end foreseen and 
 aimed at. If it be Drama, then it is only Drama in 
 a subsidiary sense. 
 
 Indeed, Mr. Shaw is trying to impose the conditions 
 
254 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 of a new witful and intellectual Farce on the higher 
 business of great Drama. 
 
 The end of all this could have been foreseen. For 
 even as in Man and Superman the third act is in a 
 sense the goal of the play, so Getting Married and 
 Misalliance are the logical bent and intention of 
 Mr. Shaw's development. In his earlier plays he 
 preserved the pretence of action where the first 
 rational cause of aU action was lacking, vitality of 
 character. The intellectual postulates went through 
 all the semblance of potential and personal relation- 
 ship; but the conditions were too full of unreality; 
 they were annoying not less to their maker than tb 
 their hearers and readers. Therefore the conditions 
 of potentiality had to be dropped, and static con- 
 ditions adopted. In other words. Getting Married 
 had to succeed to Major Barbara. His characters 
 had not to combine the semblance of loving and 
 struggling; they had but to state their argumentative 
 point of view. Which was an admirable and manly 
 admission of his limitations by Mr. Shaw. But, 
 with the air so cleared, to claim for it the name of 
 mighty Drama is surely somewhat egregious. 
 
 Sometimes to cast one's eyes backward is to cast 
 one's eyes forward; and to cast one's eyes forward 
 is to stand still. The future we do not know. Mean- 
 while the Past stands behind us full of lessons. The 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 255 
 
 Future is the realm of unlearned precept: the Past 
 is stout and buxom with healthy practice. Or to 
 translate this into dramatic example : problem plays 
 are no new things; Lear was a problem play. But 
 it was not a thesis play; which is all the difference 
 in the world, for a thesis play is not a problem play 
 (however loudly it claim it), since by very virtue of its 
 propounding a thesis the problem was satisfactorily 
 concluded in the author's mind before ever the play 
 was entered upon. A problem play -sets out the 
 nature of the problem in the very personalities or 
 agencies that constitute it, leaving them to contend 
 according to the vital and stressful conditions of 
 their own natures. The personality of the author 
 does not intrude in the course of its action, though 
 it may before the action in the choice of his char- 
 acters — except in the minor sense of human frailty, 
 in an inability to express emotions outside the limits 
 of his nature. The action is to proceed in the light 
 of the sun, not in the limelight of the author's own 
 mind. In this way a play is a problem as life is a 
 problem, some fragment of life as seen by the drama- 
 tist's own radiant vision. All the conditions of the 
 problem are there, sometimes in such poise and balance 
 of contention as to confute all theorems set to fit it. 
 But a thesis, being a thesis, deliberately sets aside 
 some of the conditions and propounds a philosophy. 
 
256 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 For example, compare, with all the inequality of 
 comparison between a tragedy and a comedy, Antony 
 and Cleopatra and Man and Superman. Assuming 
 that in the latter the prospective superman is tripped 
 up in his pursuit of power by the feubtle meshes of 
 sex: we see it, perceive it, and, though the pro- 
 position may startle us and awaken thought, yet it 
 leaves us no whit more touched than a proposition 
 set verbally before us by apothegm or precept. But 
 in seeing so mighty a man as Antony entrapped and 
 brought to futility, pity is alive in us, the woe and 
 calamity of it echo through our souls. Why? Be- 
 cause Antony lives for us. We see him struggling, 
 loving, contending; we see Cleopatra: we know her 
 for a woman, and perceive her in actual exercise of 
 the eternal charm of her sex. We must love her too; 
 and so our emotions are mingled, and sympathy 
 brought nearer home to us. And when the catas- 
 trophe falls, and the man of mighty possibilities is 
 spilt in the sands of futility, we are purged with pity 
 and terror, as with awe and sorrow brought home 
 to our very hearts. Actuality lives in it, burns in it, 
 throbs through it. It is the sternest of realism: 
 it is the only realism. It is actuality made tremen- 
 dous. So-called and professing realism is gossamer 
 and moonshine to it, without any of the weird beauty 
 of gossamer and moonshine. And being actual, it is 
 
THE VITALITY OF DRAMA 257 
 
 vital. The only vitality is that of realism throbbing 
 with emotion. Romeo calling for his Juliet echoes 
 to the end of time with sheer and eternal reality, 
 voicing the experience of aU realists, that is, men of 
 heart and experience. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has written against, and appealed against, 
 Shakespeare. But he, more than any other man, is 
 driving us back to Shakespeare (not the clipped and 
 shorn Shakespeare of the Actor -manager). Shake- 
 speare is not the end of all things. There is room for 
 greater than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's mistakes, 
 in character, faulty conception, loose structure, 
 fustian and wasteful speech, are before us to learn 
 from. But there seems small chance of learning so 
 long as Mr. Shaw's plays stand across the future to 
 prove that in Shakespeare vital men and women 
 moved and contended (the only basis of true conflict) 
 in contradistinction to Mr. Shaw's postulates in an 
 argument (the basis of artificial opposition). 
 
 There is not only Shakespeare. There is Ibsen. 
 The distinction between Ibsen and Shakespeare is 
 one of species and degree; the difference between 
 Mr. Shaw and Ibsen is one of genus and kind. Ibsen's 
 characters may be, and are, vastly different to Shake- 
 speare's; but each is a creator of living beings, that, 
 being deployed in action, play out their own per- 
 sonalities. But the difference between Man and 
 
258 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
 Superman and The Master Builder is precisely this : 
 that Hilda and Solness really do sway each other's 
 destinies by the impact of real life on real life, whereas 
 John Tanner and Ann step their measures like 
 puppets to their author's bidding. In one we know 
 Hilda and Solness; in the other we only see Mr. 
 Shaw's somewhat sardonic philosophy. 
 
 There is also J. M. Synge. His characters may 
 be disembodied souls, but they are real disembodied 
 souls; the disembodied souls of intensely true and 
 vital beings. It is at least not Synge we see every- 
 where, but souls of men and women. He does not 
 weary us with iteration of himself. Nevertheless, 
 Mr. Shaw, like J. M. Synge in his totally different 
 way, has rendered Drama a considerable service above 
 and beyond his onslaught on mere theatricality; and 
 it is a service that only a vigorous mind could have 
 achieved. He has taught us to give heed to the 
 undeniable basis of all great Drama: Words. He, 
 too, has taught us to hear, and, through hearing, to 
 see more than the eye can give us. 
 
 THE END 
 
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