Part 10

Here at last is a ray of real light, guiding us miles away from the murky paths of modern French and English poetry, where we have stumbled along, growing despondent in the gloom. To brave life cheerfully, to welcome death gladly, are possible things, after all, and better worth man’s courage and convictions than to dree on Caucasus forever.

It is ludicrous to turn from the poets to the politicians, but nowadays every question, even the old unanswered one, “Is life worth living?” must needs be viewed from its political standpoint. What can be more delightful than to hear Mr. Courthope assert that optimism is the note of the Liberal party, while the Conservatives are necessarily pessimistic?--especially when one remembers the genial utterance of Mr. Walter Bagehot, contending that the very essence of Toryism is enjoyment. “The way to be satisfied with existing things is to enjoy them.” Yet Sir Francis Doyle bears witness in his memoirs that the stoutest of Tories can find plenty to grumble at, which is not altogether surprising in a sadly ill-regulated world; and while the optimistic Liberal fondly believes that he is marching straight along the chosen road to the gilded towers of El Dorado, the less sanguine Conservative contents himself with trying, after his dull, practical fashion, to step clear of some of the ruts and quagmires by the way. As for the extreme Radicals,--and every nation has its full share of these gentry,--their optimism is too glittering for sober eyes to bear. A classical tradition says that each time Sisyphos rolls his mighty stone up the steep mountain side he believes that it will reach the summit; and, its ever-repeated falls failing to teach him any surer lesson, his doom, like that of our reforming brothers, is softened into eternal hope. But it may at least be questioned whether the other inhabitants of Tartarus--none of whom, it will be remembered, are without their private grievances--do not occasionally weary of the dust and racket, and of the great ball forever thundering about their ears, as it rolls impotently down to the level whence it came.

The pessimist, however,--be it recorded to his credit,--is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced. We have, indeed, an anecdote of Dr. Johnson, who broadly asserted upon one occasion that no one could well be happy in this world, whereupon an unreasonable old lady had the bad taste to contradict him, and to insist that she, for one, was happy, and knew it. “Madam,” replied the irate philosopher, “it is impossible. You are old, you are ugly, you are sickly and poor. How, then, can you be happy?” But this, we think, was rather a natural burst of indignation on the good doctor’s part than a distinct attempt at proselytizing, though it is likely that he somewhat damped the boasted felicity of his antagonist. Schopenhauer, the great apostle of pessimism, while willing enough to make converts on a grand scale, was scornfully unconcerned about the every-day opinions of his every-day--I was going to say associates, but the fact is that Schopenhauer was never guilty of really associating with anybody. He had at all times the courage of his convictions, and delighted in illustrating his least attractive theories. Teaching asceticism, he avoided women; despising human companionship, he isolated himself from men. A luminous selfishness guided him through life, and saved him from an incredible number of discomforts. It was his rule to expect nothing, to desire as little as possible, and to learn all he could. Want, he held to be the scourge of the poor, as _ennui_ is that of the rich; accordingly, he avoided the one by looking sharply after his money, and the other by working with unremitting industry. Pleasure, he insisted, was but a purely negative quality, a mere absence from pain. He smiled at the sweet, hot delusions of youth, and shrugged his shoulders over the limitless follies of manhood, regarding both from the standpoint of a wholly disinterested observer. If the test of happiness in the Arabian paradise be to hear the measured beating of one’s own heart, Schopenhauer was certainly qualified for admission. Even in this world he was so far from being miserable, that an atmosphere of snug comfort surrounds the man whose very name has become a synonym for melancholy; and to turn from his cold and witty epigrams to the smothered despair that burdens Leopardi’s pages is like stepping at once from a pallid, sunless afternoon into the heart of midnight. It is always a pleasant task for optimists to dwell as much as possible on the buoyancy with which every healthy man regards his unknown future, and on the natural pleasure he takes in recalling the brightness of the past; but Leopardi, playing the trump card of pessimism, demonstrates with merciless precision the insufficiency of such relief. We cannot in reason expect, he argues, that, with youth behind us and old age in front, our future will be any improvement on our past, for with increasing years come increasing sorrows to all men; and as for the boasted happiness of that past, which of us would live it over again for the sake of the joys it contained? Memory cheats us no less than hope by hazing over those things that we would fain forget; but who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

Such thoughts are not cheerful companions; but if they stand the test of application, it is useless to call them morbid. The pessimist does not contend that there is no happiness in life, but that, for the generality of mankind, it is outbalanced by trouble; and this flinty assurance is all he has to offer in place of the fascinating theory of compensation. It would seem as though no sane man could hesitate between them, if he had the choice, for one pleasant delusion is worth a hundred disagreeable facts; but in this serious and truth-hunting age people have forgotten the value of fiction, and, like sulky children, refuse to play at anything. Certainly it would be hard to find a more dispiriting literature than we enjoy at present. Scientists, indeed, are reported by those who have the strength of mind to follow them as being exceedingly merry and complacent; but the less ponderous illuminati, to whom feebler souls turn instinctively for guidance, are shining just now with a severe and chastened light. When on pleasure bent they are as frugal as Mrs. Gilpin, but they sup sorrow with a long spoon, utterly regardless of their own or their readers’ digestions. Germany still rings with Heine’s discordant laughter, and France, rich in the poets of decadence, offers us Les Fleurs du Mal to wear upon our bosoms. England listens, sighing, while Carlyle’s denunciations linger like muttering thunder in the air; or while Mr. Ruskin, “the most inspired of the modern prophets,” vindicates his oracular spirit by crying,

“Woe! woe! O earth! Apollo, O Apollo!”

with the monotonous persistency of Cassandra. Mr. Mallock, proud to kneel at Mr. Ruskin’s feet as “an intellectual debtor to a public teacher,” binds us in his turn within the fine meshes of his exhaustless subtleties, until we grow light-headed rather than light-hearted under such depressing manipulation. Mr. Pater, who at one time gave us to understand that he would teach us how to enjoy life, has, so far, revealed nothing but its everlasting sadness. If the old Cyrenaics were no gayer than their modern representatives, Aristippus of Cyrene might just as well have been Diogenes sulking in his tub, or Heraclitus adding useless tears to the trickling moisture of his cave.

Even our fiction has grown disconcertingly sad within the last few years, and with a new order of sadness, invented apparently to keep pace with the melancholy march of mind. The novelist of the past had but two courses open to him: either to leave Edwin and Angelina clasped in each other’s arms, or to provide for one of them a picturesque and daisy-strewn grave. Ordinarily he chose the former alternative, as being less harassing to himself, and more gratifying to his readers. Books that end badly have seldom been really popular, though sometimes a tragic conclusion is essential to the artistic development of the story. When Tom and Maggie Tulliver go down, hand in hand, amid the rushing waters of the Floss, we feel, even through our tears,--and mine are fresh each time I read the page,--that the one possible solution of the problem, has been reached; that only thus could the widely contrasting natures of brother and sister meet in unison, and the hard-fought battle be gained. Such an end is not sad, it is happy and beautiful; and, moreover, it is in a measure inevitable, the climax being shadowed from the beginning, as in the tragedy of the Greeks, and the whole tale moving swiftly and surely to its appointed close. If we compare a finely chiseled piece of work like this with the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at present passing muster for novels, we feel that beauty of form is something not compounded of earthly materials only, and that neither the savage strength of French and Russian realism, nor the dreary monotony of German speculative fiction, can lift us any nearer the tranquil realms of art.

Nor can we even claim that we have gained in cheerfulness what we have lost in symmetry, for the latest device of the pessimistic story-writer is to marry his pair of lovers, and then coldly inform us that, owing to the inevitable evils of life, they were not particularly happy after all. Now Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), that loving student and impersonator of Shakespeare’s heroines, has expressed her melancholy conviction that the gentle Hero was but ill-mated with one so fretful and paltry-souled as Claudio; and that Imogen the fair was doomed to an early death, the bitter fruit of her sad pilgrimage to Milford-Haven. But be this as it may,--and we more than fear that Lady Martin is rightly acquainted with the matter,--Shakespeare himself has whispered us no word of such ill-tidings, but has left us free, an’ it please us, to dream out happier things. So, too, Dorothea Brooke, wedded to Will Ladislaw, has before her many long and weary hours of regretful self-communings; yet, while we sigh over her doubtful future, we are glad, nevertheless, to take our last look at her smiling in her husband’s arms. But when Basil Ransom, in The Bostonians, makes a brave fight for his young bride, and carries her off in triumph, we are not for a moment permitted to feel elated at his victory. We want to rejoice with Verena, and to congratulate her on her escape from Mr. Filer and the tawdry music-hall celebrity; but we are forced to take leave of her in tears, and to hear with unwilling ears that “these were not the last she was destined to shed.” This hurts our best feelings, and hurts them all the more because we have allowed our sympathies to be excited. It reminds us of that ill-natured habit of the Romans, who were ungrateful enough to spoil a conqueror’s triumph by hiring somebody to stand in his chariot, and keep whispering in his ear that he was only human, after all; and it speaks volumes for the stern self-restraint of the Roman nature that the officious truth-teller was not promptly kicked out in the dust. In the same grudging spirit, Mr. Thomas Hardy, after conducting one of his heroines safely through a great many trials, and marrying her at last to the husband of her choice, winds up, by way of wedding-bells, with the following consolatory reflections: “Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by day-dreams rich as hers.... And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate, she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” “What should a man do but be merry?” says Hamlet drearily; and, with this reckless mirth pervading even our novels, we bid fair in time to become as jocund as he.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] The Sons of Cydippe, by Edmund Gosse.

THE CAVALIER.

“An evil reputation is light to raise, but heavy to bear, and very difficult to put aside. No Rumor which many people chatter of altogether dieth away; she too is, after her kind, an immortal.” So moralizes Hesiod over an exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had forced itself upon man’s unwilling convictions; and while many later philosophers have given caustic expression to the same thought, few have clothed it with more delicate and agreeable irony. Rumor is, after her kind, an immortal. Antæus-like, she gains new strength each time she is driven to the ground, and it is a wholesome humiliation for our very enlightened minds to see how little she has suffered from centuries of analysis and research. Rumor still writes our histories, directs our diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we have grown to think that this is probably what is meant by the _vox populi_, and that any absurdity credited by a great many people becomes in some mysterious way sacred to the cause of humanity, and infinitely more precious than truth. When Wodrow, and Walker, and the author of The Cloud of Witnesses, were compiling their interesting narratives, Rumor, in the person of “ilka auld wife in the chimley-neuck,” gave them all the information they desired; and this information, countersigned by Macaulay, has passed muster for history down to the present day. As a result, the introduction of Graham of Claverhouse into Mr. Lang’s list of English Worthies has been received with severely qualified approbation, and Mr. Mowbray Morris has written the biography of a great soldier in the cautious tone of a lawyer pleading for a criminal at the bar.

If ever the words of Hesiod stood in need of an accurate illustration, it has been furnished by the memory of Claverhouse; for his evil reputation was not only raised with astonishing facility, but it has never been put aside at all. In fact, it seems to have been a matter of pride in the grim-visaged Scottish saints to believe that their departed brethren were, one and all, the immediate victims of his wrath; and to hint that they might perhaps have fallen by any meaner hand was, as Aytoun wittily expressed it, “an insult to martyrology.” The terror inspired by his inflexible severity gave zest to their lurid denunciations, and their liveliest efforts of imagination were devoted to conjuring up in his behalf some fresh device of evil. In that shameless pasquinade, the Elegy, there is no species of wickedness that is not freely charged, in most vile language, to the account of every Jacobite in the land, from the royal house of Stuart down to its humblest supporter; yet even amid such goodly company, Claverhouse stands preëminent, and is the recipient of its choicest flowers of speech.

“He to Rome’s cause most firmly stood, And drunken was with the saints’ blood. He rifled houses, and did plunder In moor and dale many a hunder; He all the shires in south and west With blood and rapine sore opprest.”

It is needless to say that Claverhouse, though he served a Catholic master, had about as much affinity for the Church of Rome as the great Gustavus himself, and that the extent of his shortcomings in this direction lay in his protesting against the insults offered by a Selkirk preacher to King James through the easy medium of his religion.

Now it is only natural that the Covenanters, who feared and hated Dundee, should have found infinite comfort in believing that he was under the direct protection of Satan. In those days of lively faith, the charge was by no means an uncommon one, and the dark distinction was shared by any number of his compatriots. On the death of Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, the devil, who had waited long for his prey, manifested his sense of satisfaction by providing an elaborate funeral cortége, which came over the sea at midnight, with nodding plumes and sable horses, to carry off in ostentatious splendor the soul of this much-honored guest. Prince Rupert was believed by the Roundheads to owe his immunity from danger to the same diabolic agency which made Claverhouse proof against leaden bullets; and his white dog, Boy, was regarded with as much awe as was Dundee’s famous black charger, the gift of the evil one himself. As a fact, Boy was not altogether unworthy of his reputation, for he could fight almost as well as his master, though unluckily without sharing in his advantages; for the poor brute was shot at Marston Moor, in the very act of pulling down a rebel. Even the clergy, it would seem, were not wholly averse to Satan’s valuable patronage; for Wodrow--to whose claims as an historian Mr. Morris is strangely lenient--tells us gravely how the unfortunate Archbishop of St. Andrew’s cowered trembling in the Privy Council, when Janet Douglas, then on trial for witchcraft, made bold to remind him of the “meikle black devil” who was closeted with him the last Saturday at midnight.

But even our delighted appreciation of these very interesting and characteristic legends cannot altogether blind us to the dubious quality of history based upon such testimony, and it is a little startling to see that, as years rolled by, the impression they created remained practically undimmed. Colonel Fergusson, in the preface to his delightful volume on The Laird of Lag, confesses that in his youth it was still a favorite Halloween game to dress up some enterprising member of the household as a hideous beast with a preternaturally long nose,--made, in fact, of a saucepan handle; and that this creature, who went prowling stealthily around the dim halls and firelit kitchen, frightening the children into shrieks of terror, was supposed to represent the stout old cavalier searching for his ancient foes the Covenanters. Lag’s memory appears to have been given up by universal consent to every species of opprobrium, and his misdeeds have so far found no apologist, unless, indeed, Macaulay may count as one, when he gracefully transfers part of them to Claverhouse’s shoulders. Mr. Morris coldly mentions Sir Robert Grierson as “coarse, cruel, and brutal beyond even the license of those days;” Colonel Fergusson is far too clever to weaken the dramatic force of his book by hinting that his hero was not a great deal worse than other men; and Scott, in that inimitable romance, Wandering Willie’s Tale, has thrown a perfect glamour of wickedness around the old laird’s name. But in truth, when we come to search for sober proven facts; when we discard--reluctantly, indeed, but under compulsion--the spiked barrel in which he was pleased to roll the Covenanters, in Carthaginian fashion, down the Scottish hills; and the iron hook in his cellar, from which it was his playful fancy to depend them; and the wine which turned to clotted blood ere it touched his lips; and the active copartnership of Satan in his private affairs,--when we lay aside these picturesque traditions, there is little left save a charge, not altogether uncommon, of indecorum in his cups, the ever-vexed question of the Wigtown martyrs, and a few rebels who were shot, like John Bell, after scant trial, but who, Heaven knows, would have gained cold comfort by having their cases laid before the council. On the other hand, it might be worth while to mention that Lag was brave, honest, not rapacious, and, above all, true to his colors when the tide had turned, and he was left alone in his old age to suffer imprisonment and disgrace.

But if the memory of a minor actor in these dark scenes has come down to us so artistically embellished, what may we not expect of one who played a leading part through the whole stormy drama? “The chief of this Tophet on earth,” is the temperate phrase applied to Claverhouse by Macaulay, and it sufficiently illustrates the position popularly assigned him by his foes. Rumor asserted in his behalf her triumphant immortality, and crystallized into tradition every floating charge urged by the Covenanters against his fame. So potent and far-reaching was her voice that it became in time a virtuous necessity to echo it; and we actually find Southey writing to Scott in 1807, and regretting that Wordsworth should have thought fit to introduce the Viscount of Dundee into the sonnet on Killiecrankie, without any apparent censure of his conduct. Scott, who took a somewhat easier view of poetical obligations, and who probably thought that Killiecrankie was hardly the fitting spot on which to recall Dundee’s shortcomings, wrote back very plainly that he thought there had been censure enough already; and nine years later he startled the good people of Edinburgh, on his own account, by the publication of that eminently heterodox novel, Old Mortality. Lockwood tells us that the theme was suggested to Sir Walter by his friend Mr. Joseph Train, who, when visiting at Abbotsford, was much struck by the solitary picture in the poet’s library, a portrait of Graham of Claverhouse.

“He expressed the surprise with which every one who had known Dundee only in the pages of the Presbyterian annalists must see for the first time that beautiful and melancholy visage, worthy of the most pathetic dreams of romance. Scott replied that no character had been so foully traduced as the Viscount of Dundee; that, thanks to Wodrow, Cruikshanks, and such chroniclers, he who was every inch a soldier and a gentleman still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian desperado, who rode a goblin horse, was proof against shot, and in league with the devil.

“‘Might he not,’ said Train, ‘be made, in good hands, the hero of a national romance, as interesting as any about either Wallace or Prince Charlie?’

“‘He might,’ said Scott, ‘but your western zealots would require to be faithfully portrayed in order to bring him out with the right effect.’”