Part 6

She it was who now took the hand of Cratesicleia as she was led forth by the soldiers, held up her robe for her, and bade her be of good courage. And Cratesicleia herself was not one whit dismayed at death, but asked one favour only, that she might die before the children died. However, when they were come to the place of execution, first the children were slain before her eyes, and then Cratesicleia herself was slain, making but one cry at sorrows so great: “O children, whither are ye gone?” Then the wife of Panteus, girding up her robe, vigorous and stately woman that she was, ministered to each of the dying women calmly and without a word, and laid them out for burial as well as she could. And, finally, after all were cared for, she arrayed herself, let down her robe from about her neck, and suffering no one besides the executioner to come near or look on her, bravely met her end, and had no need of any one to array or cover up her body after death. Thus her decorum of spirit attended her in death, and she maintained to the end that watchful care of her body which she had set over it in life.

That “decorum of spirit” is, for Plutarch, the finishing grace of the noble life. And he summarises his creed in the triumphant comment on the Spartan women: “So then, Sparta, bringing her women’s tragedy into emulous competition with that of her men, showed the world that in the last extremity Virtue cannot be outraged by Fortune.”

Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue, and gently though he scans his brother man--does he not forgive the baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature, which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence, cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?--in spite of this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of temperance--of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother, when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,” he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife with a devil--the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their inspired hour: he pities them in the hour of their ruin. Thus he does not love men at the expense of truth, as some preachers do, or tell the truth about men at the expense of love, as some cynics do. His imagination holds the reins both of the heart and of the mind. That is the secret of his genius as a biographer.

X

HANS ANDERSEN

Almost the last story Hans Andersen wrote was a sentimental fable, called “The Cripple,” which he intended as an apologia for his career as a teller of fairy-tales. It is the story of a bed-ridden boy, the son of a poor gardener and his wife, who receives a story-book as a Christmas present from his father’s master and mistress. “He won’t get fat on that,” says the father when he hears of so useless a gift. In the result, as was to be expected, the book turns out to have a talismanic effect on the fortunes of the family. It converts the father and mother from grumblers into figures of contentment and benevolence, so that they look as though they had won a prize in the lottery. It is also indirectly the cause of little Hans recovering the use of his legs. For, while he is lying in bed one day, he throws the book at the cat in order to scare it away from his bird, and, having missed his shot, he makes a miraculous effort and leaps out of bed to prevent disaster. Though the bird is dead, Hans is saved, and we leave him to live happily ever afterwards as a prospective schoolmaster. This, it must be confessed, sounds rather like the sort of literature that is given away as Sunday-school prizes. One could conceive a story of the same kind being written by the author of _No Gains Without Pains_ or _Jessica’s First Prayer_. Hans Andersen, indeed, was in many respects more nearly akin to the writers of tracts and moral tales than to the folklorists. He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such as he himself had been. He loved the poor, the ill-treated, and the miserable, and to illuminate their lives with all sorts of fancies. His miracles happen preferably to those who live in poor men’s houses. His cinder-girl seldom marries a prince: if she marries at all, it is usually some honest fellow who will have to work for his living. In Hans Andersen, however, it is the exception rather than the rule to marry and live happily ever afterwards. The best that even Hans the cripple has to look forward to is being a schoolmaster. There was never an author who took fewer pains to give happy endings to his stories.

His own life was a mixture of sadness and the vanity of success. “The Ugly Duckling” is manifestly the fable of his autobiography. Born into the house of a poor cobbler, he was at once shy and ugly, and he appears to have been treated by other children like the duckling which “was bitten and pushed and jeered at” in the farmyard, and upon which “the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought himself an emperor, blew himself up like a ship in full sail and bore straight down.” His father died early, and at the age of eleven Hans ceased to go to school and was allowed to run wild. He amused himself by devouring plays and acting them with puppets in a toy theatre which he had built, till at the age of eighteen he realised that he must do something to make a living. As he did not wish to dwindle into a tailor, he left his home, confident that he had the genius to succeed in Copenhagen. There his passion for the theatre led him to try all sorts of occupations. He tried to write; he tried to act; he tried to sing; he tried to dance. “He danced figure dances,” wrote Nisbet Bain, “before the most famous _danseuse_ of the century, who not unnaturally regarded the queer creature as an escaped lunatic.”

By his persistence and his ugliness, perhaps, as much as by the first suggestions of his genius, he contrived at last to interest the manager of the Royal Theatre, and, through him, the King; and the latter had him sent off to school with a pension to begin his education all over again in a class of small boys. Here, one can imagine, the “ugly duckling” had a bad time of it, and the head master, a man with a satirical tongue, seems to have been as merciless as the turkey-cock in the story. Hans’s education and his unhappiness went on till he was in his twenties, when he escaped and tried his hand at poetry, farce, fantasy, travel-books and fiction. We hear very little of his novels nowadays--in England at any rate; but we know how they were appreciated at the time from some references in the Browning love-letters, within a few years of their being published. The first of them appeared in 1835, when the author was thirty, and a few months later an instalment of the first volume of the fairy-tales was published. Andersen described the latter as “fairy-tales which used to please me when I was little and which are not known, I think.” The book (which began with “The Tinder-Box” and “Little Claus and Big Claus”) was, apart from one critic, reviewed unfavourably where it was reviewed at all. Andersen himself appears to have been on the side of those who thought little of it. His ambition was to write plays and novels and epics for serious people, and all his life he was rather rebellious against the fame which he gradually won all over Europe as a story-teller for children. He longed for appreciation for works like _Ashuerus_, described by Nisbet Bain as “an aphoristic series of historical tableaux from the birth of Christ to the discovery of America,” and _To Be or Not to Be_, the last of his novels, in which he sought to “reconcile Nature and the Bible.”

We are told of his vexation when a statue was put up in Copenhagen, representing him as surrounded by a group of children. “Not one of the sculptors,” he declared, “seems to know that I never _could_ tell tales whenever anyone is sitting behind me, or close up to me, still less when I have children in my lap, or on my back, or young Copenhageners leaning right against me. To call me the children’s poet is a mere figure of speech. My aim has always been to be the poet of older people of all sorts: children alone cannot represent me.” It is possible, however, that Andersen rather enjoyed taking up a grumpy pose in regard to his stories for children. In any case he continued to publish fresh series of them until 1872, three years before his death. He also enjoyed the enthusiastic reception their popularity brought him during his frequent travels in most of the countries of Europe between England and Turkey. Nor did he object to turning himself into a story-teller at a children’s party. There is a description in one of Henry James’s books of such a party at Rome, at which Hans Andersen read “The Ugly Duckling” and Browning “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” followed by “a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with [W. W.] Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.” Nor does Andersen seem to have thought too disrespectfully of his fairy-tales when he wrote “The Cripple.”

Probably, however, even in his fairy-tales Hans Andersen has always appealed to men and women as strongly as to children. We hear occasionally of children who cannot be reconciled to him because of his incurable habit of pathos. A child can read a fairy-tale like “The Sleeping Beauty” as if it were playing among toys, but it cannot read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” without enacting in its own soul the pathetic adventures of the frog-girl; it cannot read “The Snow Queen” without enduring all the sorrows of Gerda as she travels in search of her lost friend; it cannot read “The Little Mermaid” without feeling as if the knives were piercing its feet just as the mermaid felt when she got her wish to become a human being so that she might possess a soul. Even in “The Wild Swans,” though Lisa’s eleven brothers are all restored to humanity from the shapes into which their wicked step-mother had put them, it is only after a series of harrowing incidents; and Lisa herself has to be rescued from being burned as a witch. Hans Andersen is surely the least gay of all writers for children. He does not invent exquisite confectionery for the nursery such as Charles Perrault, having heard a nurse telling the stories to his little son, gave the world in “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard.” To read stories like these is to enter into a game of make-believe, no more to be taken seriously than a charade. The Chinese lanterns of a happy ending seem to illuminate them all the way through. But Hans Andersen does not invite you to a charade. He invites you to put yourself in the place of the little match-girl who is frozen to death in the snow on New Year’s Eve after burning her matches and pretending that she is enjoying all the delights of Christmas. He is more like a child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens, indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his comedy. But how delightful is the fun at the end of “Soup on a Sausage Peg” when the Mouse King learns that the only way in which the soup can be made is by stirring a pot of boiling water with his own tail! And what child does not love in all its bones the cunning in “Little Claus and Big Claus,” when Big Claus is tricked into killing his horses, murdering his grandmother, and finally allowing himself to be tied in a sack and thrown into the river?

But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used the fairy-tale continually as a means of teaching and warning them. In one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans Andersen, however, like Ibsen in _Peer Gynt_, believes in redemption through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative representation of that gospel--a gospel that so easily becomes mush and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator, as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a schoolboy. He endows everything he sees--china shepherdesses, tin soldiers, mice and flowers--with the similitude of life, action and conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women. He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But there was nothing else like it in the fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in _Two Visits to Denmark_, a book in which everything is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into the balcony and bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below--‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century, the magician of the flock of wild swans.

XI

JOHN CLARE

Mr. Arthur Symons edited a good selection of the poems of John Clare a few years ago, and Edward Thomas was always faithful in his praise. Yet Messrs. Blunden & Porter’s new edition of Clare’s work has meant for most of its readers the rediscovery of a lost man of genius. For Clare, though he enjoyed a “boom” in London almost exactly a hundred years ago, has never been fully appreciated: he has never even been fully printed. In 1820 he was more famous than Keats, who had the same publisher. Keats’s 1820 volume was one of the great books of English literature, but the public preferred John Clare, and three editions of _Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery_ were sold between January 16 and the end of March. It was not that the public had discovered a poet: it was merely that they had discovered an agricultural labourer who was a poet. At the same time, to have been over-boomed was bound to do Clare’s reputation harm. It raised hopes that his verse did not satisfy, and readers who come to an author expecting too much are apt in their disappointment to blame him for even more faults than he possesses. It is obvious that if we are asked to appreciate Clare as a poet of the same company as Keats and Shelley, our minds will be preoccupied with the feeling that he is an intruder, and we shall be able to listen to him with all our attention only when he has ceased to challenge such ruinous comparisons. I do not know whether the critics of 1820 gave more praise to Clare than to Keats. But the public did. The public blew a bubble, and the bubble burst. Had Clare, instead of making a sensation, merely made the quiet reputation he deserved, he would not have collapsed so soon into one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the nineteenth century.

In order to appreciate Clare, we have to begin by admitting that he never wrote either a great or a perfect poem. He never wrote a “Tintern Abbey” or a “Skylark” or a “Grecian Urn” or a “Tiger” or a “Red, Red Rose” or an “Ode to Evening.” He was not a great artist uttering the final rhythms and the final sentences--rhythms and sentences so perfect that they seem like existences that have escaped out of eternity. His place in literature is nearer that of Gilbert White or Mr. W. H. Hudson than that of Shelley. His poetry is a mirror of things rather than a window of the imagination. It belongs to a borderland where naturalism and literature meet. He brings things seen before our eyes: the record of his senses is more important than the record of his imagination or his thoughts. He was an observer whose consuming delight was to watch--to watch a grasshopper or a snail, a thistle or a yellow-hammer. The things that a Wordsworth or a Shelley sees or hears open the door, as it were, to still more wonderful things that the poet has not seen or heard. Shelley hears a skylark, and it becomes not only a skylark, but a flight of images, illumining the mysteries of life as they pass. Wordsworth hears a Highland girl singing, and her song becomes not only a girl’s song, but the secret music of far times and far places, brimming over and filling the world. To Clare the skylark was most wonderful as a thing seen and noticed: it was the end, not the beginning, of wonders. He may be led by real things to a train of reflections: he is never at his best led to a train of images. His realism, however, is often steeped in the pathos of memory, and it is largely this that changes his naturalism into poetry. One of the most beautiful of his poems is called “Remembrances,” and who that has read it can ever forget the moving verse in which Clare calls up the playtime of his boyhood and compares it with a world in which men have begun to hang dead moles on trees?