Part 8
Dickens had no such pretty courtliness, but spoke brusquely of Lady Coldveal and Lady Jemima Bilberry and Lady Scadgers, Lord Snigsworth, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir Morbury Dedlock, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle. But so he spoke of all the world, making names for every creature like a new comic Adam in a new topsy-turvy paradise. All the power of Smollett passed into him to be enlarged to quite new proportions. Smollett could call a bumpkin Hodge Dolt, but only Dickens could invent the gigantic titles of Nicodemus Boffin, Luke Honeythunder the unlaughing philanthropist, the Pardiggles, rapaciously benevolent, or Chevy Slyme. Smollett, indeed, might have called an undertaker Mould, as Dickens did, a visiting nobleman Count Smorltork, a schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, a canting preacher Melchisedech Howler; might even have named Nicholas Nickleby, Betsy Prig, Sally Brass, Miss Mowcher, Mr. Pugstyles, or Zephaniah Scadder; but Smollett could never have attained to Gradgrind, the Cheerybles, Mrs. Kidgerbury the oldest charwoman in Kentish town, Uriah Heep, Septimus Crisparkle, Daniel Quilp, Pecksniff, Podsnap, or the firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles. It is a quality and glory of Dickens that he could caricature words as he did people. Micawber and Skimpole and Pickwick are caricatures no more than the syllables which name them. Humorous hybrids of language, they sometimes seem to suggest parent words, as if Scrooge were the child of _screw_ and _gouge_, and Wardle of _warden_ and _waddle_, but they commonly elude analysis and seem new words for new persons.
Thackeray took certain advantages, not only in the linguistic gargoyles of his burlesques but in the wild words he coined from Germany and Ireland. In English, however, he was rather nearer nature and directories. He has his Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy and the Archbishop of Mealypotatoes, indeed, as well as their humbler brethren of the black cloth, Charles Honeyman the unctuous, Silas Hornblower, missionary, Thomas Tufton Hunt, tufthunter, Felix Rabbits the curate with fourteen daughters, dull Thomas Tusher, and Lemuel Whey, “full of the milk and water of human kindness.” The Earl of Bagwig can, without leaving the Thackerayan world, consort with the Earl of Bareacres, Lord Trampleton, who walks on his dancing partners, Lord Tapeworm, Lord Brandyball, Lord Castlemouldy, Lord Deuceace, or with Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone and Sir Giles Beanfield. Jack Snaffle keeps a livery stable, the Hawbucks are parvenus, George Marrowfat, snob, eats peas with his knife, Poseidon Hicks is a drysalter with a turn for classical poetry, Tom Eaves gossips, Clarence Bulbul has travelled in the Orient, Squire Ballance holds the scales of justice. But these are fun and ornament. Foreigners aside, Thackeray chose to be more real than Dickens, in this matter, though not commonplace. He leaned a little towards distinction and genteel dignity in his families: the Gaunts, Warringtons, Sedleys, Newcomes, Osbornes, Kews, Amorys, Claverings, Crawleys, Esmonds. The Kickleburys, after all, are snobs, and the Hoggartys are Irish.
Meredith the iridescent does not flaunt such colour in his names as one might expect. He has his puns, or nearly: persuasive Lady Blandish, Farmer Broadmead, Squire Uploft of Fallowfield, Mr. Parsley the curate, Isabella Current, prim and kindly and not young virgin, Mabel Sweetwinter, too fair to be always a shepherdess, Sir Willoughby Patterne the world’s model, the swooping Lord Mountfalcon, the blazing Countess of Cressett, Gower Woodseer the poet studied from R. L. S. Meredith has his plain souls: Tobias Winch, of course a green grocer, the immemorial Mrs. Berry, Farmer Blaize, Jonathan Eccles, and Anthony Hackbut. He has his fantastics: Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Pitscrew, Lord Lockrace, Lady Denewdney. But for the most part it is not comedy which names Meredith’s characters, but gentility. Lucy Desborough, Dahlia Fleming, Letitia Dale, Clara Middleton, are dewy and fragrant, as are Carinthia Jane Kirby, Clara Forey, Janet Ilchester, Rose Jocelyn, Diana Antonia Merion. And the gentlemen mount from Evan Harrington, son of a tailor, and Blackburn Tuckham, through Nevil Beauchamp, Normanton Hipperdon, naturally a tory, and the Hon. Everard Romfrey to those superb fathers Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Bart., and Mr. Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy, who made princes laugh.
Gentlemen and ladies are not the special care of Thomas Hardy, and yet he has done well by them: witness Elfride Swancourt, passionate, thwarted Eustacia Vye, the Earl of Uplandtowers, Barbara Grebe, who married him, Swithin St. Cleeve, merely a curate’s son, and Lady Viviette Constantine, who loved him. One of Hardy’s tricks is to match with stout Saxon words others that come from Greece or Rome or Judea, as Cytherea Aldclyffe, Damon Wildeve, Aeneas Manston, Bathsheba Everdene. The effect is like that of the ruins of Roman Britain which always stand behind the scene to lend it depth and tragic atmosphere. And the Saxon words have hints in them. Caroline Aspent is a trembling, uncertain creature, like Thomas Leaf; Donald Farfrae is a wanderer from his own heath; Gabriel Oak will not bend; Sue Bridehead carries into middle age the shock and fear of the bride. Philology, ready servant of art, makes the difference between Smollett’s stolid rustics and such as Anne Garland, Fancy Day, Tabitha Lark, Phyllis Grove, Diggory Venn, Giles Winterbourne, and Thomasin Yeobright. Philology, too, makes the comedy more subtle in comic names which Shakespeare could not better: Laban Tall, Joseph Poorgrass, Cain Ball, whose mother had misheard the scripture, Anthony Cripplestraw, the distressed lovers Suke Damson and Tim Tangs, Tony Kytes, who wooed too many, and Unity Sallet, who declined him. Not even to speak of his dialect and place names, which are unspeakably rich, Thomas Hardy’s well-christened children are enough to show that his knowledge goes to the roots of the language.
Of all these, smaller novelists being left out for brevity, which have been conscious of the full savour and perfume of their syllables? What traits come out in the choice? What had the age of each of them to do with it? Who saw the sober hues in Defoe and Richardson, the candid puns of Fielding and Smollett, the large fecundity of Scott, the hugeness and exuberance of Dickens, the polyglot mockeries of Thackeray, the flash and fragrance of Meredith, the deep, native colour of Thomas Hardy? Words, words, words!
PICTURES OF THE PAST
When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants, abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities. We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations.
If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details. On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that, while many in his audience would have known better if they had been questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel. Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions, though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like. Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship.
The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel, even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as _Salammbô_, examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that, having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters, he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape, much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds, that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world.
THE GREAT LABORATORY
Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of human life.
No other laboratory can ever compare with this in importance for us. Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day, as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men, exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and vexed.
The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in Greek experience enough that is analogous with our problems, because Greece had so simple and circumscribed an existence and lived in a world so little complicated by machinery, means no more than to say that in a laboratory generations of guinea-pigs succeed one another with a lower mortality than in Guinean jungles, or that diamonds may be made out of their raw materials without the geological convulsions of which in nature they are admirable but accidental byproducts. That is what laboratories are for, to exhibit simply the behaviour of complex things. And the parallel between laboratories for matter and laboratories for mind has more than a fanciful value. Life in Greece was reduced to the simple facts of the human intelligence, leaning less than anywhere else upon mere tradition, upon mere materials, upon mere superfluities. Much as we have grown in range of knowledge by our study of the physical universe, and little as we can afford to reject any wisdom founded upon it, we need often to remember that in practice the centre of our universe is still the mind of man, that for the most part we have to conduct our affairs as if really the Ptolemaic system were good astronomy, as it is very fair politics and morals. The study of the material universe and all sorts of highly specialized studies tend to draw us away from these central facts, as pedants and casuists are continually being drawn away from fundamental principles. The principles, however, are still fundamental.
VI. LONG ROADS
THE COSMIC IRONIES
The Cosmic Ironies sat on a bright island in the midst of the Galaxy, holding a caucus over the universe’s affairs. Boötes flamed, Orion glowed, Scorpio glittered, Ursa Major sulked, Eridanus sprawled and yawned, Canis Major and Canis Minor eyed each other distrustfully, Centaurus and Pegasus huddled close and whispered at intervals. Boötes, it appeared, had just been speaking, and there were still reverberations of his great voice in the ether, while the glare of difference or assent with which he had been greeted by his fellows played upon him from every quarter and illuminated the enormous scene, now red with fire, now blue with space, now opaline with shifting moods of the Ironies.
Into this circle, before one of those present had had time to break the meditative silence, came a brisk invader in burning yellow who walked round the seated group and was obviously chagrined to find that no place had been kept for him.
“I say, brothers of the universe,” he began, “it seems to me this committee has been closed long enough. It needs new blood. One of you move over and let me in.”
If any heard him, at least there was no sign. The reverberations of Boötes’s words travelled farther away and the light from his listeners gradually ceased playing upon him; but the charmed occasion was not apparently disturbed.
“Well, it doesn’t seem very hospitable. I sent word I was coming, and look how you receive me. And, as they say on the Earth, I think it isn’t representative. The Solar System has a right to be here and a right to be heard. Perhaps we are a little younger than some of you, but that excuse won’t hold for ever. Youth, as they say on Jupiter, is no crime.”
Somewhere a star exploded and threw a momentary brilliance over the caucus, so that the gems on the brows of the Ironies sparkled as if they were actually Betelgeux and Aldebaran and Spica and Arcturus and Capella and Sirius and Altair. None of the brooding figures started at the explosion, however, much less at the accusations of the Solar Irony.
“Have I got to repeat all I told you before about the ironic work I and my helpers have done in the Solar System? I must say I am tired of telling it. You ought not to close your minds the way you do to new inventions and discoveries. The first thing you know you’ll all be so out of date that this radical doctrine about the moral government of the world will spread and ruin all your schemes. If you don’t wake up pretty soon it won’t matter whether you ever wake.”
From one of the Ironies a red glow and from another a blue flame and from yet another a white radiance swept around the circle as if looking to see who would speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled in the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement with gorgeous colours.
“Take what’s going on in Mars today if you want to test my right to sit in this conclave. I have bilked the Martians into thinking that their everlasting messages to Earth are understood. So those philanthropists have wasted a mountain of treasure making instruments to carry their pompous flashes, and they babble wisdom into the void—as if their wisdom actually mattered or as if Earth would or could pay any attention to it if it ever reached there! You strike me as glum enough, but if you could only see the prophets and poets crowding around that transmitter and pouring all they have and are into it, and then going back to their business with the thick smirk of a duty performed—if you could see that you would laugh a month. That’s what I’ve done in the Solar System: I’ve trained the higher beings to prattle wisdom till they are hoarse and then not to practise it any more than if they were deaf and had never heard of it.”
It may have been some vibration of sympathy which ran through the Ironies or it may have been merely deeper thoughts stirring them to resume the huge discourse.
“For that matter, take Earth alone as evidence of what I can do when I try. The scrawny race of bipeds who think they manage Earth have come up from the slime by the exercise of their wits, trampling the slower races under their heels for thousands of years to make a bare living, and yet, now they have explored all the paths of Earth and dug up its riches and learned to cultivate its fruits, they are acting as if they couldn’t imagine any better future than to take the path back again into the slime. But do they listen to even the petty wisdom a few of them have got at? No, they strut about as they always have, blown up with pride that they are human and not like the other beasts which they have driven into the wilds or else made into slaves. Man, proud man! You should see him. And I have taught him both to be all this and to admire himself. Now why can’t I come into the caucus?”
Surely something was stirring in the moods of the Ironies. Ursa Major, who had been almost grey in his sullenness, darted awakened glances around the circle, coruscating, it seemed, with thought. Orion sent out an iridescent gleam, fanned by quicker and quicker breath. The whole place grew so bright that each ironic countenance shone in comparison with the waves of the Galaxy which beat upon the island.
“But I have done more than all that to win my seat. Those same bipeds, who have been clever enough to map and weigh the stars, have made them gods in their own scrawny image and have laid out heavens on the plan of their desires. And I have taught them to lay the blame of their follies on their gods and to call the consequences their just punishment; I have taught them, moreover, to endure whatever comes, no matter how much the fault of men, in the confidence that they will shortly die and be born again into a world which will make good their wrongs and agonies; I have, in fact, persuaded that tiny race, on its mortal star, that it is the heart and heir and purpose and crown of the universe.”