Part 5
The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There was a man--dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....” So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes) “is not Emily.” There is no love in the _Odyssey_, none in _Robinson Crusoe_, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in _Gil Blas_. The animalism in _Tom Jones_, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites, and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist. It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray. Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss them and go home--to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a flame--if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr. Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour--but do we believe it, or are we the less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.
In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say, from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy, with much intensive imagining about it, _non ragioniam di lor_. They were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!” Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex, passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they _were_ the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to be a redaction of life. For, _pace_ Herr Freud, all life is not sex. One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: _Daphnis and Chloe_, for instance, _Manon Lescaut_. One could not have filled the old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form, and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.
Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied novelist wrote _à priori_. Observation ceased to procure novels to be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action, observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was “crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex: in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed, for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.
That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan, that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word, implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.
“‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only chance samples of folk you may see pass your window now, at this moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are passing--passing--all day long, each with a story. And some little thing you see, a meeting, a parting, may make the next hour the turning point of existence.... This is a tale made up of trifles.’”
What he made of those stored and treasured-up trifles, with what humour, with what tenderness, what wisdom he combined and related them, what in fact was the harvest of his quiet eye, cannot be entered upon here. De Morgan had been harvesting for sixty-five years when he began! To me his books seem to be the wisest of our time. I know of none which, as Matthew Arnold said of Homer, produce the sense in the reader “of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life presented to him.” They contain--like the _Iliad_ in that, like _Tom Jones_, like _David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_, and _War and Peace_--sufficient of the world to create in us a strong illusion of the whole labouring, blundering, groaning, laughing, praying affair.
But De Morgan is too good for the end of an essay--he who has inspired so many. And he will write no more of his friendly, wise and comprehending books. And he is not the point. The point is that the novelist has bled his art down and out by urging it to make a poem of itself instead of a digest. I say nothing now of the pamphlet and the tract. Those things also the novelist has done without leaving the other undone. He, or his novel, is now dying of exhaustion, self-induced. Worst sign of all--he is beginning to note his own symptoms.
IMMORTAL WORKS
An editor--one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of him--an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was to be “What poets since Wordsworth, _especially what living poets_, and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:
“Dear Sir,--I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so. It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons, many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he could.
“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the existing Golden Treasury? _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, of course; but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that, before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you were serious.”
So much for the editor of ----. We do not know, indeed, though we sometimes think and always hope that we do, what makes for immortality. Shakespeare, you say? Who (except Shakespeare himself) thought Shakespeare immortal on the day when he was alive and dead? Who thought Johnson’s Dictionary immortal? Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_? Yes, I fancy that any serious reader of that book, when it was published, knew in his heart that it would live. But take smaller things. Why, out of all Landor’s verse, was _Rose Aylmer_ taken, and why were others left, many of them technically as perfect? You don’t know. Nor do I. Well, then, which out of the beautiful numbers of _A Shropshire Lad_ will live for six hundred years--as long as Chaucer? Which out of the quatrains of Fitzgerald’s _Omar_? We may think that we know. But do we? Really, all that we do know is that among the copious poets (and Landor was very copious) some produced more perdurable lyrics than others. We know that Burns did, that Heine did: we don’t know how or why. Universality we say goes to immortality. It certainly does: the thing must go home to everybody. So does heart, whatever that is; the “lyric cry,” the sense of tears. Look at _Auld Robin Gray_: that is immortal. Look at _The Wife of Usher’s Well_. Those things might last as long as Homer or the Bible. The exact proportion, the exquisite admixture of those qualities I have mentioned, with others--felicity, limpidity, grace, and so on--do make certain poems as immortal as you please; and the want of them cuts others out. That is all there is to say.
On the whole, it is a good thing that we don’t know the recipe. It is one of several things we had better not know. Immortality in this world, immortality in another! Suppose that we were as certain of the latter as we are of getting to Paris by the 11 a.m. from Victoria. Either the world would be emptied by suicide, or--it wouldn’t! Suppose that immortality for a poem was a matter of formula. Take of universality so much, of heart so much, of grace so much: add tears, so much, and simmer gently till done ...! What would be the result? Everybody’s poems would be immortal. The Golden Treasury would stretch from here to Easter. It would be as bad as the Order of the British Empire. Nobody would want to be in it. And the result of that would be that mortal poems would be the only immortal ones. To be too bad for the Golden Treasury would be a real title of honour. And somebody would compile a Platinum Treasury to put you in.
BALLAD-ORIGINS
Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any man who ever lived--Professor Child, to wit--knew so much about them that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory; and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.
Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere, according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something like spontaneous generation--a truly daring conception, one which makes ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing, such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else, unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to ballad-poetry? _Queste cose non si fanno._ These things are not done.
However, when Professor Gummere argues that the folk-ballads originated in folk-dancing he is building his house of theory upon a footing of rock. _Ballare_ means “to dance”; there’s no escape from that; and if ballads, or ballets, had nothing to do with dancing, why were they called ballads or ballets? Then he can put forward the refrains or burthens which a goodly number of ballads still retain: jingles like “Bow down,” like “Eh, wow, bonnie,” like “Three, three, and thirty-three.” The first of those describes an act of dancing; the second is foolishness unless you dance it; the third, even now, insists on being danced. If he had left it at that, without piling upon it his additament of spontaneous generation, I don’t think Professor Pound could have done any good with her crowbar. But he was too ingenious by half; he soared--he soared into the inane. So down he comes, and we are where we were before.
With all respect for the courage and learning of Professor Pound, I don’t think she has disproved the close connection of song and dance in my country’s youthful days. But “dance” is a word of special connotation now, and it is necessary to remember a much wider application of it in times gone by. It was once a word of ritual significance, as when “David danced before the Lord,” as now when the Canons of Seville dance at Easter; and it was once a word of sport. That, in all probability, is the right connotation of it where ballads are concerned. In certain phases of the dance as a game drama comes in. Drama involves dialogue, and may easily involve narration. “Here we go round the mulberry bush” is both drama, dance, and narration. “Sally, Sally Waters” is the same. So too “Ring a ring of Roses.” But to say of such things, as I suppose Professor Gummere says, that the dancing-game generated the dialogue or narration is to put the cart before the horse. If, as I have said, the jingle “three, three and thirty-three” insists on being danced, is it not more reasonable to suppose that in all cases the jingle, or lilt, or sentiment--“the broom blooms bonnie and says it is fair”--inspired the dance? Personally, I can conceive of spontaneous throng-generation of a dance much more readily. Let the Professor try it, when next he has a throng of children in his garden. Let him begin to jig up and down, saying repeatedly “three, three, and thirty-three,” and see what happens.
I am not at all concerned to say that all ballad-poetry originated in dancing-games, nor concerned to argue against Professor Pound when she suggests that they began in church. She has there the support of the fact, for what it is worth, that the earliest ballads we can find are concerned with religion. That is a fact, though it will not take her as far as she would like. Unfortunately very few such things can be dated before the fifteenth century; and the Professor must remember that preoccupation with religion was by no means confined to the clerical caste. The thirteenth century was the flowering time of the friars. They carried religion into corners where no cleric would ever have set his foot. If religious balladry had a religious origin it would be Franciscan. She does not insist upon all this, however, and certainly I do not. All the concern I have with a possible religious origin of ballad-poetry is with the certainty it affords that, if the friars had anything to do with the beginning of popular epic-narration, as they undoubtedly had to do with that of popular drama, their efforts were addressed to the populace rather than to the court, to the market-square and village green rather than to the hall.
What does Professor Pound herself believe about this obscure matter? She quotes, and quarrels with, Andrew Lang, who said that “Ballads spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man.... The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up from its shores.” That seems to me so obviously true of most of the ballads that I should require a stronger case than Professor Pound’s, and a case less weakened by strange oversights, to cause me to think twice of it. Apparently Professor Pound’s main belief about ballads is that they were by origin “literary.” Being literature, that may be supposed by anybody without taking a body very far. But if she means by that that they were composed by professional “literary men,” and not by or for the peasants, I have to suggest to her that there is much in the peasantry and much in the ballads themselves which she has not brought into account; and that that must be sought _within_ the peasantry, and _within_ the ballads, rather than round about them. It is, for instance, a serious error to assume a courtly origin--courtly poet or courtly auditory--in all ballads which deal with courtly people--Lord Thomases, Estmere Kings, Child Horns, Little Musgraves, and so on. Such personages are the stock-in-trade of romance, from Homer to the _Family Herald_. Reasoning of that kind will land the Professor in uncharted seas. There is a fallacy in it comparable to that in “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Not a doubt of it but Professor Child’s great book contains a number of courtly ballads--“Chevy Chase” and the like; it needs nothing but a knowledge of literature and the texts to settle it. I should compute the number of such in Child to be between a third and a half of the whole.