Part 9

Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day’s work and the day’s play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as in _Young Goodman Brown_, everyday reality passes into fable and back again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory than any other writer’s since Bunyan. This is generally counted a defect, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world never became less real on account of the fable it bore within it like an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. “Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region,” he wrote of the Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made “such havoc of his wits.” He had to transform his surroundings into a strange land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life. It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns the sin of self-righteousness more than the sins of the flesh. Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I misunderstand _Young Goodman Brown_, Hawthorne is here telling us how he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having given way to temptation. In _The Scarlet Letter_, the egoism of the vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown by the fact that _The Scarlet Letter_ still holds us under its spell in days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel survives--a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like that of Hans Andersen, because, not only does it carry the burden of morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he has left no successors in his kind.

XVI

JONAH IN LANCASHIRE

The author of _Patience_--the other _Patience_, I mean, not the Gilbert opera--is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable poems, _Pearl_ and _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_. Gaston Paris describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,” and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was suggested that he wrote the romance _Sir Gawayne_ in his gaudy youth. Then, having lost a child, he composed in _Pearl_ a passionate lament for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote _Patience_ as an expression of his submission to the will of God. Mr. Bateson will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with the chronology. He regards _Patience_ as the earliest of the poems, and is of the opinion that _Pearl_, far from being a lament for a lost child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not necessarily so. No one denies that the _Song of Solomon_ is a great poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly school of literature. Coming to _Patience_ itself, I fancy that the man who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book of Jonah for comfortable morals. _Patience_ is a sermon addressed to other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and vigour of its narrative.

_Patience_ is the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah is here painted in English colours. He is the Jonah not of a tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one of the sources of _Patience_. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God.

Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne,

we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah, when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing overboard

Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.

The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:

Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste; Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne, Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne, To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.

Both in Tertullian and in _Patience_ Jonah is made not only to sleep but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:

Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.

The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom of the boat,

Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes.

A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the casting of lots:

The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up.

Then came the casting of the lots:

And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas.

The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English:

What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech? What seches thou on see, synful schrewe, With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?

Soon after follows the decision to throw him overboard:

Now is Jonas the Jwe jugged to drowne.

“A wylde walteande whale” comes up opportunely to the side of the boat:

And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened..., With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.

In spite of his safe passage beyond the whale’s teeth, however, Jonah’s plight was not an enviable one:

Lorde! colde was his cumfort, and his care huge.

The poet describes him as passing down the throat like a “mote in at a minster door”:

He glydes in by the gills ...; Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute, Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle; And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about, And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.

So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however, Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:

For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe, Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.

These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English: “For the mote made him--though it were little as compared with him--to feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”

We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God had commanded the whale----

That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,

we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh. The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight, as he lay under it--“so glad of his gay lodge”--is amusingly described. He----

Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.

So contentedly did he “loll” there, indeed--“so blithe of his wood-bine”--that he cared not a penny for any “diet” that day; and when it “nighed to night” and “nappe hym bihoued,” he slept the sleep of the just “vnder leues.” In his account of Jonah’s anger against God, and God’s argument in favour of sparing Nineveh, the poet elaborates as ever the Bible narrative, and the appeal for the right of the inhabitants to live is tenderer than in the more concise original. God pleads, for instance, for the “lyttel bairnes on barme (breast) that neuer bale wrought,” and the reference to “much cattle” becomes:

And als ther ben doumbe bestes in the burgh many.

I do not suggest that _Patience_ is better than the Book of Jonah, or as good, but that it has the vitality of an original work. The poet has a personal knowledge of character--a sense of drama, and a sense of life. Mr. Bateson’s edition of the poem was first published seven years ago. He has now largely recast and rewritten it. I have taken some liberties with his text in quoting it, slightly modernising it in places. It is an edition for students of mediæval literature rather than for the general reader. But with the help of its excellent glossary others than scholars should be able to enjoy it if they are prepared to take a little pains. And it is worth taking pains to become acquainted with so vivid and robust a poet as the author of _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_.

INTERLUDE

THE CULT OF DULLNESS

Many conflicting opinions were expressed on the occasion of the Keats centenary, but everybody appeared to be unanimous on at least one point--contempt for the critics who told Keats to go back to his gallipots. We took it for granted that they were a very unusual sort of critics, and that, if a Keats were born to-day, we should give him a different sort of welcome. It is as though we had forgotten the history of literary genius and of its first reception into a jealous world. Human beings have naturally a profound respect for the great man, but they respect him most when he is dead. A dead demigod is to them infinitely better than a living lion. Their self-respect suffers if they have to live in the same world with some young fellow that overtops them. They feel, unconsciously, that by bringing him down they are raising themselves up. The Greeks pretended that it was the gods, and not themselves, who were jealous of human greatness, and they called this jealousy Nemesis. I suspect, however, that it was human beings who first felt this passion for equality. It is not in this form a noble passion. It is a passion for being equal to the people above us, not for being equal to the people below. This is the passion that cannot forgive wit or beauty in a contemporary. Some men--the finest--are entirely without it. Further, most of us yield to facts and frankly recognise genius when there is no getting away from it. But there always remains a company of the dull and the crabbed who believe till the end that to disparage a good writer is to be, at least on this point, superior to him. They are afraid that if the world welcomes this wit and beauty it will have no welcome for their own dullness. That is the secret fear that is a cause of a great deal of the worst sort of bad criticism. There is a league of dullness constantly making war on wit and beauty. Its malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely intelligent enough to be deliberate. It is founded not on reason, but on the instinct of self-defence.

It is difficult, I admit, to say how far the disparagement of good writing is the result of mere stupidity and how far it is the result of malignity. The longer one lives, the more one is amazed at the incredible achievements of human stupidity.

Possibly, then, the critics who attempted to drag down Keats to the level of bad writers were merely ordinary stupid human beings--good men in the bosoms of their families, but fools anywhere else. They had, after all, standards to which Keats did not conform. They had either to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards--which would have been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages. Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness, but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite for blow. Molière brought great trouble on his head by being witty. He held the mirror up to fools, and in answer the fools baited him. He had not all the critics against him, but only all the stupid critics. That is a distinction that should always be remembered in any discussion on literary criticism. Many writers, wearied by the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, have settled down into the easy conviction that all criticism is a waste of words. Disraeli dismissed the whole brood of critics in the saying that critics are those who have failed in literature. This, of course, is a libel on a reputable art. The success of such critics as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse is literary success as desirable as that of most poets or novelists. At the same time, there is a half-truth in the saying of Disraeli. There is no critic who does more injury to the reputation of his art than the embittered failure--the man who has shouted in the world’s ear and has yet not made himself heard. To speak to a deaf man makes some people angry: to speak to a deaf world has the same effect on many writers. Nature is kind, and she enables writers of this sort to deceive themselves into thinking that their ill-natured egoism is a sort of divine anger on behalf of great art. Their self-righteousness masks itself as literary piety. Coleridge a hundred years ago noticed the irritability of minor poets--“men of undoubted talents but not of genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_ men of genius.” That is the irritation that is the cause of so much bad criticism. The critic who feels irritated should begin to suspect himself, and ask himself whether it is the excellences or the faults of the work he is criticising that have put him in a temper. We are often told in these days that criticism is too gentle. In a world in which such a mass of criticism is being written it is difficult to sum up the tendencies of the whole period in a phrase. There may be an excess of unintelligent praise, but there is also, it seems to me, an excess of unintelligent carping and ill-tempered denigration. The present age, like Coleridge’s, might be described as “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.”

Not that even men of genius have always been just to each other. Byron was unjust to Shakespeare and Keats: Keats was unjust to Pope. But we do not demand sound criticism as a right from a great poet, who may easily feel the partiality of a specialist. The meanness of the mean critic is of quite another sort. He is a fox without a tail, who could only feel important in a world of foxes without tails. He is always in search of a standard according to which even he will have a chance of seeming great. That is why in every generation good writers are attacked and dull writers are exalted by this sort of critic. The cult of the dull, of the mediocre, is necessary in order that he, too, may win some reverence. The whole thing is, it seems to me, a pathetic delusion. The critic may for a time organise fame for dull painters and dull writers, and he may win a year’s or ten years’ praise by doing so. But all the time he is losing that generous and disinterested spirit which is one of the most precious possessions of the artist. The ordinary writer sets out with the hope of qualifying for a place in the temple of fame: he ends too often by merely qualifying for a place in the _Dunciad_. He may be a man of one talent, which would serve well enough if put to proper uses, but he prefers to hide it and to pretend that it is ten, railing all the while at others on the ground that they have only five. I used to think that it was un-Christian of the Founder of Christianity to give the man with one talent so poor a name compared to the man with five or the man with ten. But I have long since come to see that in doing so he spoke out of a profound knowledge of human nature. The man with one talent is the most likely of all to make no use of it. He does not see that even his poverty may be turned into riches, as is obvious when one remembers such Lilliputian and immortal poets as Lovelace. He is blinded by a sense of his insignificance. He has the false humility of the frog, which is not content to be a first-rate frog but must try to swell itself into a bull.