Last night, at Prince’s Hall, Mr Whistler1 made his first public appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind. Mr Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty aria on prehistoric history, describing how in earlier times hunter and warrior would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at home making cup and bowl for their service. Rude imitations of nature they were first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and form developed, and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase was fashioned. Then came a higher civilization of architecture and arm chairs, and with exquisite design, and dainty diaper,2 the useful things of life were made lovely; and the hunter and the warrior lay on the couch when they were tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank from the bowl, and never cared to lose the exquisite proportion of the one, or the delightful ornament of the other; and this attitude of the primitive anthropophagous3 Philistine formed the text of the lecture, and was the attitude which Mr Whistler entreated his audience to adopt towards art. Remembering, no doubt, many charming invitations to wonderful private views,4 this fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat aghast, and not a little amused, at being told that the slightest appearance among a civilized people of any joy in beautiful things is a grave impertinence to all painters; but Mr Whistler was relentless, and with charming ease, and much grace of manner, explained to the public that the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness, and that on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes of art in the future.
The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature Mephistopheles5 mocking the majority! He was like a brilliant surgeon lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their maladies were, and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms of health on their part would be. In fairness to the audience, however, I must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr Whistler that no matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight, and half closing his eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy. Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the speed and splendour of fireworks, at the archaeologists, who spend their lives in verifying the birthplaces of nobodies, and estimate the value of a work of art by its date or its decay; at the art critics who always treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at dilettanti in general, and amateurs in particular, and (O mea culpa!) at dress reformers6 most of all. ‘Did not Velásquez7 paint crinolines? what more do you want?’
Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr Whistler turned to Nature, and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace,8 Bank holidays, and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one that occurs in Corot’s9 letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces, and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.
Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them, Mr Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama10 on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he had succeeded in completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant paradoxes, and, at times, his real eloquence. Of course, with regard to the value of beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact, he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle. That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to live with magenta ottomans and Albert blue11 curtains in their rooms in order that some painter may observe the side lights on the one and the values of the other. Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting. I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is a wide difference. As long as a painter is a painter merely, he should not be allowed to talk of anything but mediums and megilp,12 and on those subjects should be compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he becomes an artist that the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed to him. For there are not many arts, but one art merely – poem, picture, and Parthenon, sonnet and statue – all are in their essence the same, and he who knows one, knows all. But the poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche.13 However, I would not enjoy anybody else’s lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr Whistler’s lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a masterpiece. Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will it be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages – passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze those who had looked on Mr Whistler as a master of persiflage merely, and had not known him, as we do, as a master of painting also. For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr Whistler himself entirely concurs.
‘How can you possibly paint these ugly three-cornered hats?’ asked a reckless art critic once of Sir Joshua Reynolds.1 ‘I see light and shade in them,’ answered the artist. ‘Les grands coloristes,’ says Baudelaire, in a charming article on the artistic value of frock coats, ‘les grands coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate blanche, et un fond gris.’2
‘Art seeks and finds the beautiful in all times, as did her high priest Rembrandt, when he saw the picturesque grandeur of the Jews’ quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks,’ were the fine and simple words used by Mr Whistler in one of the most valuable passages of his lecture. The most valuable, that is, to the painter: for there is nothing of which the ordinary English painter needs more to be reminded than that the true artist does not wait for life to be made picturesque for him, but sees life under picturesque conditions always – under conditions, that is to say, which are at once new and delightful. But between the attitude of the painter towards the public, and the attitude of a people towards art, there is a wide difference. That, under certain conditions of light and shade, what is ugly in fact may, in its effect, become beautiful, is true; and this, indeed, is the real modernité of art; but these conditions are exactly what we cannot be always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly3 in the glaring vulgarity of the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background. Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro4 about with us, as we do our umbrellas, all would be well; but, this being impossible, I hardly think that pretty and delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress as ugly as it is useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, even on the chance of such a master as Mr Whistler spiritualizing them into a symphony, or refining them into a mist. For the arts are made for life, and not life for the arts.
Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr Whistler has been himself always true to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the dress of his age and of his actual surroundings; far be it from me to burden a butterfly5 with the heavy responsibility of its past: I have always been of opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite-street6 been thrilled with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in peplums, for pastels?7
Whatever comes from Mr Whistler’s brush is far too perfect in loveliness, to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even his own: for Beauty is justified by all her children, and cares nothing for explanations; but it is impossible to look through any collection of modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor Gallery,8 without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting, and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche.
Are we not all weary of him, that venerable impostor, fresh from the steps of the Piazza di Spagna,9 who, in the leisure moments that he can spare from his customary organ, makes the round of the studios, and is waited for in Holland Park?10 Do we not all recognize him, when, with the gay insouciance of his nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer exhibitions, as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is, glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan, here beaming as a brigand from the Abruzzi?11 Popular is he, this poor peripatetic professor of posing, with those whose joy it is to paint the posthumous portrait of the last philanthropist who, in his lifetime, had neglected to be photographed – yet, he is the sign of the decadence, the symbol of decay.
For all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up. And so, were our national attire delightful in colour, and in construction simple and sincere; were dress the expression of the loveliness that it shields, and of the swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its lines break from the shoulder, instead of bulging from the waist; did the inverted wineglass cease to be the ideal of form: were these things brought about, as brought about they will be, then would painting be no longer an artificial reaction against the ugliness of life, but become, as it should be, the natural expression of life’s beauty. Nor would painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded, and in which they would grow up. For Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance, a single delicate line, or delightful proportion in the dress of the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their architecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats, and dress improvers, might have built the Pantechnicon,12 possibly, but the Parthenon, never. And, finally, there is this to be said: art, it is true, can never have any other aim but her own perfection, and, it may be, that the artist, desiring merely to contemplate and to create, is wise in not busying himself about change in others; yet wisdom is not always the best; there are times when she sinks to the level of common sense; and from the passionate folly of those, and there are many, who desire that Beauty shall be confined no longer to the bric-à-brac of the collector, and the dust of the museum, but shall be, as it should be, the natural and national inheritance of all – from this noble unwisdom, I say, who knows what new loveliness shall be given to life, and, under these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born? Le milieu se renouvelant, l’art se renouvelle.13
Speaking however from his own passionless pedestal, Mr Whistler in pointing out that the power of the painter is to be found in his power of vision, not in his cleverness of hand, has expressed a truth which needed expression, and which, coming from the lord of form and colour, cannot fail to have its influence. His lecture, the Apocrypha14 though it be for the people, yet remains from this time as the Bible for the painter, the masterpiece of masterpieces, the song of songs. It is true he has pronounced the panegyric of the Philistine,15 but I can fancy Ariel praising Caliban16 for a jest: and, in that he has read the Commination Service17 over the critics, let all men thank him, the critics themselves indeed most of all, for he has now relieved them from the necessity of a tedious existence. Considered, again, merely as an orator, Mr Whistler seems to me to stand almost alone. Indeed, among all our public speakers, I know but few who can combine, so felicitously as he does, the mirth and malice of Puck,18 with the style of the major prophets.
This is undoubtedly an interesting book, not merely through its eloquence and earnestness, but also through the wonderful catholicity of taste that it displays. Mr Noel has a passion for panegyric. His eulogy on Keats is closely followed by a eulogy on Whitman, and his praise of Lord Tennyson is equalled only by his praise of Mr Robert Buchanan.1 Sometimes, we admit, we would like a little more fineness of discrimination, a little more delicacy of perception. Sincerity of utterance is valuable in a critic, but sanity of judgement is more valuable still, and Mr Noel’s judgements are not always distinguished by their sobriety. Many of the essays, however, are well worth reading. The best is certainly that on ‘The Poetic Interpretation of Nature’, in which Mr Noel claims that what is called by Mr Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy of literature’2 is in reality a vital emotional truth; but the essays on Hugo3 and Mr Browning are good also; the little paper entitled ‘Rambles by the Cornish Seas’ is a real marvel of delightful description, and the monograph on Chatterton4 has a good deal of merit, though we must protest very strongly against Mr Noel’s idea that Chatterton must be modernized before he can be appreciated. Mr Noel has absolutely no right whatsoever to alter Chatterton’s ‘yonge damoyselles’ and ‘anlace fell’5 into ‘youthful damsels’ and ‘weapon fell’, for Chatterton’s archaisms were an essential part of his inspiration and his method. Mr Noel in one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasize the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton’s music. In the modernized version he gives of the wonderful ‘Songe to Ælla’, he mars by his corrections the poem’s metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs the music of its echo. Nineteenth-century restorations6 have done quite enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr Noel writes again about Chatterton he will quote from the poet’s verse, not from a publisher’s version.
This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr Noel’s book. The fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art that are criticized. It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work. Byron, for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called ‘twaddling about trees and babbling o’ green fields’; Byron who cried, ‘Away with this cant about nature! A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America,’ is claimed by Mr Noel as a true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley; and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely suggests that Endymion is ‘a parable of the development of the individual soul’. There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does not possess. The latter is Mr Noel’s method, and in his anxiety to glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.
Mr Noel also is constantly the victim of his own eloquence. So facile is his style that it constantly betrays him into crude and extravagant statements. Rhetoric and over-emphasis are the dangers that Mr Noel has not always succeeded in avoiding. It is extravagant, for instance, to say that all great poetry has been ‘pictorial’, or that Coleridge’s ‘Knight’s Grave’ is worth many ‘Kubla Khans’, or that Byron has ‘the splendid imperfection of an Æschylus’, or that we had lately ‘one dramatist living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that was Richard Hengist Horne’,7 and that ‘to find an English dramatist of the same order before him we must go back to Sheridan if not to Otway’.8 Mr Noel, again, has a curious habit of classing together the most incongruous names and comparing the most incongruous works of art. What is gained by telling us that Sardanapalus9 is perhaps hardly equal to ‘Sheridan’, that Lord Tennyson’s ballad of ‘The Revenge’ and his ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ are worthy of a place beside Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’,10 that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr Alfred Austin11 are artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron,12 and that if Sappho13 and Milton ‘had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as sensational’? And surely it is a crude judgement that classes Baudelaire, of all poets, with Marini14 and medieval troubadours, and a crude style that writes of ‘Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,15 for a mortal should not thus intrude upon the immortals, even though he be guilty of holding with them that Cain16 is ‘one of the finest poems in the English language’. It is only fair, however, to add that Mr Noel subsequently makes more than ample amends for having opened Parnassus17 to the public in this reckless manner, by calling Wilson an ‘offal-feeder’, on the ground that he once wrote a severe criticism of some of Lord Tennyson’s early poems. For Mr Noel does not mince his words. On the contrary, he speaks with much scorn of all euphuism and delicacy of expression and, preferring the affectation of nature to the affectation of art, he thinks nothing of calling other people ‘Laura Bridgmans’,18 ‘Jackasses’ and the like. This, we think, is to be regretted, especially in a writer so cultured as Mr Noel. For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always makes a poor critic.
On the whole, Mr Noel’s book has an emotional rather than an intellectual interest. It is simply a record of the moods of a man of letters, and its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating what he would criticize for us. The best that we can say of it is that it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature,19 the worst that any one could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.
To convey ideas through the medium of images has always been the aim of those who are artists as well as thinkers in literature, and it is to a desire to give a sensuous environment to intellectual concepts that we owe Mr Pater’s last volume. For these Imaginary or, as we should prefer to call them, Imaginative Portraits of his, form a series of philosophic studies in which the philosophy is tempered by personality, and the thought shown under varying conditions of mood and manner, the very permanence of each principle gaining something through the change and colour of the life through which it finds expression. The most fascinating of all these pictures is undoubtedly that of Sebastian Van Storck. The account of Watteau is perhaps a little too fanciful, and the description of him as one who was ‘always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all’, seems to us more applicable to him who saw Mona Lisa1 sitting among the rocks than to the gay and debonair peintre des fêtes galantes.2 But Sebastian, the grave young Dutch philosopher, is charmingly drawn. From the first glimpse we get of him, skating over the water-meadows with his plume of squirrel’s tail and his fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness of boyhood, down to his strange death in the desolate house amid the sands of the Helder,3 we seem to see him, to know him, almost to hear the low music of his voice. He is a dreamer, as the common phrase goes, and yet he is poetical in this sense, that his theorems shape life for him, directly. Early in youth he is stirred by a fine saying of Spinoza,4 and sets himself to realize the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, separating himself more and more from the transient world of sensation, accident or even affection, till what is finite and relative becomes of no interest to him, and he feels that as nature is but a thought of his, so he himself is but a passing thought of God. This conception, of the power of a mere metaphysical abstraction over the mind of one so fortunately endowed for the reception of the sensible world, is exceedingly delightful, and Mr Pater has never written a more subtle psychological study, the fact that Sebastian dies in an attempt to save the life of a little child giving to the whole story a touch of poignant pathos and sad irony.
Denys l’Auxerrois is suggested by a figure found, or said to be found, on some old tapestries in Auxerre, the figure of a ‘flaxen and flowery creature, sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable streets’ of the town itself. From this strange design Mr Pater has fashioned a curious medieval myth of the return of Dionysus5 among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god, making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel of music from reed and pipe, and slain at last in a stage-play by those who had loved him. In its rich affluence of imagery this story is like a picture by Mantegna,6 and indeed Mantegna might have suggested the description of the pageant in which Denys rides upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment and, for head-dress, a strange elephant scalp with gilded tusks.
If Denys l’Auxerrois symbolizes the passion of the senses and Sebastian Van Storck the philosophic passion, as they certainly seem to do, though no mere formula or definition can adequately express the freedom and variety of the life that they portray, the passion for the imaginative world of art is the basis of the story of Duke Carl of Rosenmold. Duke Carl is not unlike the late King of Bavaria,7 in his love of France, his admiration for the Grand Monarque8 and his fantastic desire to amaze and to bewilder, but the resemblance is possibly only a chance one. In fact Mr Pater’s young hero is the precursor of the Aufklärung9 of the last century, the German precursor of Herder and Lessing and Goethe himself, and finds the forms of art ready to his hand without any national spirit to fill them or make them vital and responsive. He too dies, trampled to death by the soldiers of the country he so much admired, on the night of his marriage with a peasant girl, the very failure of his life lending him a certain melancholy grace and dramatic interest.
On the whole, then, this is a singularly attractive book. Mr Pater is an intellectual impressionist. He does not weary us with any definite doctrine or seek to suit life to any formal creed. He is always looking for exquisite moments and, when he has found them, he analyses them with delicate and delightful art and then passes on, often to the opposite pole of thought or feeling, knowing that every mood has its own quality and charm and is justified by its mere existence. He has taken the sensationalism of Greek philosophy and made it a new method of art criticism. As for his style, it is curiously ascetic. Now and then, we come across phrases with a strange sensuousness of expression, as when he tells us how Denys l’Auxerrois, on his return from a long journey, ‘ate flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his delicate fingers in a kind of wild greed’, but such passages are rare. Asceticism is the keynote of Mr Pater’s prose; at times it is almost too severe in its self-control and makes us long for a little more freedom. For indeed, the danger of such prose as his is that it is apt to become somewhat laborious. Here and there, one is tempted to say of Mr Pater that he is ‘a seeker after something in language, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all’. The continual preoccupation with phrase and epithet has its drawbacks as well as its virtues. And yet, when all is said, what wonderful prose it is, with its subtle preferences, its fastidious purity, its rejection of what is common or ordinary! Mr Pater has the true spirit of selection, the true tact of omission. If he be not among the greatest prose writers of our literature he is, at least, our greatest artist in prose; and though it may be admitted that the best style is that which seems an unconscious result rather than a conscious aim, still in these latter days when violent rhetoric does duty for eloquence and vulgarity usurps the name of nature, we should be grateful for a style that deliberately aims at perfection of form, that seeks to produce its effect by artistic means and sets before itself an ideal of grave and chastened beauty.
Madame Ristori’s1 Etudes et Souvenirs is one of the most delightful books on the stage that has appeared since Lady Martin’s2 charming volume on the Shakespearean heroines. It is often said that actors leave nothing behind them but a barren name and a withered wreath; that they subsist simply upon the applause of the moment; that they are ultimately doomed to the oblivion of old play-bills; and that their art, in a word, dies with them, and shares their own mortality. ‘Chippendale, the cabinet-maker,’ says the clever author of Obiter Dicta,3 ‘is more potent than Garrick4 the actor. The vivacity of the latter no longer charms (save in Boswell); the chairs of the former still render rest impossible in a hundred homes.’ This view, however, seems to me to be exaggerated. It rests on the assumption that acting is simply a mimetic art, and takes no account of its imaginative and intellectual basis. It is quite true, of course, that the personality of the player passes away, and with it that pleasure-giving power by virtue of which the arts exist. Yet the artistic method of a great actor survives. It lives on in tradition, and becomes part of the science of a school. It has all the intellectual life of a principle. In England, at the present moment, the influence of Garrick on our actors is far stronger than that of Reynolds on our painters of portraits, and if we turn to France it is easy to discern the tradition of Talma,5 but where is the tradition of David?6
Madame Ristori’s memoirs, then, have not merely the charm that always attaches to the autobiography of a brilliant and beautiful woman, but have also a definite and distinct artistic value. Her analysis of the character of Lady Macbeth, for instance, is full of psychological interest, and shows us that the subtleties of Shakespearean criticism are not necessarily confined to those who have views on weak endings and rhyming tags, but may also be suggested by the art of acting itself. The author of Obiter Dicta seeks to deny to actors all critical insight and all literary appreciation. The actor, he tells us, is art’s slave, not her child, and lives entirely outside literature, ‘with its words for ever on his lips, and none of its truths engraven on his heart’. But this seems to me to be a harsh and reckless generalization. Indeed, so far from agreeing with it, I would be inclined to say that the mere artistic process of acting, the translation of literature back again into life, and the presentation of thought under the conditions of action, is in itself a critical method of a very high order; nor do I think that a study of the careers of our great English actors will really sustain the charge of want of literary appreciation. It may be true that actors pass too quickly away from the form, in order to get at the feeling that gives the form beauty and colour, and that, where the literary critic studies the language, the actor looks simply for the life; and yet, how well the great actors have appreciated that marvellous music of words which in Shakespeare, at any rate, is so vital an element of poetic power, if, indeed, it be not equally so in the case of all who have any claim to be regarded as true poets. ‘The sensual life of verse,’ says Keats, in a dramatic criticism published in the Champion, ‘springs warm from the lips of Kean,7 and to one learned in Shakespearean hieroglyphics, learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur, his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees8 and left them honeyless.’ This particular feeling, of which Keats speaks, is familiar to all who have heard Salvini,9 Sarah Bernhardt,10 Ristori, or any of the great artists of our day, and it is a feeling that one cannot, I think, gain merely by reading the passage to oneself. For my own part, I must confess that it was not until I heard Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre11 that I absolutely realized the sweetness of the music of Racine. As for Mr Birrell’s statement that actors have the words of literature for ever on their lips, but none of its truths engraved on their hearts, all that one can say is that, if it be true, it is a defect which actors share with the majority of literary critics.
Mr Stopford Brooke1 said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision and would touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold. What Art gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a problem that is not easy to solve. It is, however, certain that Socialism starts well equipped. She has her poets and her painters, her art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her clever writers. If she fails it will not be for lack of expression. If she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force. The first thing that strikes one, as one looks over the list of contributors to Mr Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour, is the curious variety of their several occupations, the wide differences of social position that exist between them, and the strange medley of men whom a common passion has for the moment united. The editor is a ‘Science lecturer’; he is followed by a draper and a porter; then we have two late Eton masters and then two boot-makers; and these are, in their turn, succeeded by an ex-Lord Mayor of Dublin, a bookbinder, a photographer, a steel-worker and an authoress. On one page we have a journalist, a draughtsman and a music-teacher, and on another a Civil servant, a machine fitter, a medical student, a cabinet-maker and a minister of the Church of Scotland. Certainly, it is no ordinary movement that can bind together in close brotherhood men of such dissimilar pursuits, and when we mention that Mr William Morris is one of the singers, and that Mr Walter Crane has designed the cover and frontispiece of the book, we cannot but feel that, as we pointed out before, Socialism starts well equipped.
As for the songs themselves, some of them, to quote from the editor’s preface, are ‘purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone; there are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while many are of a highly ideal and visionary character’. This is, on the whole, very promising. It shows that Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula. She welcomes many and multiform natures. She rejects none and has room for all. She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past. And all of this is well. For, to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
They are not of any very high literary value, these poems that have been so dexterously set to music. They are meant to be sung, not to be read. They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and familiar. Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease. The transpositions that have been made are rather amusing. ‘ ’Twas in Trafalgar Square’2 is set to the tune of ‘ ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay’; ‘Up, Ye People!’ a very revolutionary song by Mr John Gregory, boot-maker, with a refrain of
Up, ye People! or down into your graves!
Cowards ever will be slaves!
is to be sung to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ the old melody of ‘The Vicar of Bray’3 is to accompany the new Ballade of Law and Order – which, however, is not a ballade at all – and to the air of ‘Here’s to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen’ the democracy of the future is to thunder forth one of Mr T. D. Sullivan’s most powerful and pathetic lyrics. It is clear that the Socialists intend to carry on the musical education of the people simultaneously with their education in political science and, here as elsewhere, they seem to be entirely free from any narrow bias or formal prejudice. Mendelssohn is followed by Moody and Sankey;4 the ‘Wacht am Rhein’ stands side by side with the Marseillaise;5 ‘Lillibulero’, a chorus from Norma, ‘John Brown’ and an air from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony6 are all equally delightful to them. They sing the National Anthem in Shelley’s version and chant William Morris’s ‘Voice of Toil’ to the flowing numbers of ‘Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon’. Victor Hugo talks somewhere of the terrible cry of ‘Le Tigre Populaire’, but it is evident from Mr Carpenter’s book that should the Revolution ever break out in England we shall have no inarticulate roar but, rather, pleasant glees and graceful part-songs. The change is certainly for the better. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning – at least, inaccurate historians say he did; but it is for the building up of an eternal city that the Socialists of our day are making music, and they have complete confidence in the art instincts of the people.
They say that the people are brutal –
That their instincts of beauty are dead –
Were it so, shame on those who condemn them
To the desperate struggle for bread.
But they lie in their throats when they say it,
For the people are tender at heart,
And a wellspring of beauty lies hidden
Beneath their life’s fever and smart,
is a stanza from one of the poems in this volume, and the feeling expressed in these words is paramount everywhere. The Reformation gained much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists seem determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people. However, they must not be too sanguine about the result. The walls of Thebes7 rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city indeed.
Mr Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry.1 Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and cried out against those who sit in high places both in heaven and on earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart, and laid upon us the heavy burden of Bothwell. Then he retired to the nursery, and wrote poems about children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, an entire lack of any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject. His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to dominate him. Alliteration tyrannizes over him. Mere sound often becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.
Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:
The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his fervent lips,
More keen than a sword’s edge fiercer than fire, falls full on the plunging ships.
The pilot is he of their northward flight, their stay and their steersman he;
A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to constrain the sea.
And the host of them trembles and quails, caught fast in his hand as a bird in the toils;
For the wrath and joy that fulfil him are mightier than man’s, whom he slays and spoils,
And vainly, with heart divided in sunder, and labour of wavering will,
The lord of their host takes counsel with hope if haply their star shine still.
Somehow, we seem to have heard all this before. Does it come from the fact that of all poets who ever lived Mr Swinburne is the one who is the most limited in imagery? It must be admitted that he is so. He has wearied us with his monotony. ‘Fire’ and the ‘Sea’ are the two words ever on his lips. We must confess also that this shrill singing – marvellous as it is – leaves us out of breath. Here is a passage from a poem called ‘A Word with the Wind’:
Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,
Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,
Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded
Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled.
Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary
Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird:
Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary
Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred.
Let the clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token
How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine:
Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind’s broad back broken,
Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.
Verse of this kind may be justly praised for the sustained strength and vigour of its metrical scheme. Its purely technical excellence is extraordinary. But is it more than an oratorical tour-de-force? Does it really convey much? Does it charm? Could we return to it again and again with renewed pleasure? We think not. It seems to us empty.
Of course, we must not look to these poems for any revelation of human life. To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr Swinburne’s aim. He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave. The roar of the fire is ever in his ears. He puts his clarion to the lips of Spring and bids her blow, and the Earth wakes from her dreams and tells him her secret. He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his own personality, and he has succeeded. We hear the song, but we never know the singer. We never even get near to him. Out of the thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing. We have often had man’s interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature’s interpretation of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.
But Mr Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind, and calling out of the depths of the sea. Romantic ballads in Border dialect2 have not lost their fascination for him, for this last volume contains some very splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry. The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say ‘mither’ instead of ‘mother’ seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr Swinburne’s mastery over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. ‘The Weary Wedding’ has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque. The ballad of ‘The Witch-Mother’, a medieval Medea who slays her children because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its horrible simplicity. The ‘Bride’s Tragedy’ with its strange refrain of
In, in, out and in,
Blaws the wind and whirls the whin:
The ‘Jacobite’s Exile’,
O lordly flow the Loire and Seine,
And loud the dark Durance:
But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
Than a’ the fields of France;
And the waves of Till that speak sae still
Gleam goodlier where they glance:
‘The Tyneside Widow’, and ‘A Reiver’s Neck-verse’, are all poems of fine imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce intensity of passion. There is no danger of English poetry narrowing itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect. It is too vital a growth for that. So we may welcome Mr Swinburne’s masterly experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a very lovely lyric entitled ‘The Interpreters’.
In human thought have all things habitation;
Our days
Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
That stays.
But thought and faith are mightier things than time
Can wrong,
Made splendid once with speech, or made sublime
By song.
Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
Wax hoary,
Gives earth and heaven, for song’s sake and the soul’s,
Their glory.
Certainly ‘for song’s sake’ we should love Mr Swinburne’s work, cannot indeed help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he. But what of the soul? For the soul we must go elsewhere.
When I first had the privilege – and I count it a very high one – of meeting Mr Walter Pater, he said to me, smiling, ‘Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.’
It was during my undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet1 should be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason.
I may frankly confess now that at the time I did not quite comprehend what Mr Pater really meant; and it was not till I had carefully studied his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully realized what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-writing really is, or may be made to be. Carlyle’s stormy rhetoric, Ruskin’s winged and passionate eloquence, had seemed to me to spring from enthusiasm rather than from art. I don’t think I knew then that even prophets correct their proofs. As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too exuberant; and Queen Anne2 prose appeared to me terribly bald, and irritatingly rational. But Mr Pater’s essays became to me ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’.3 They are still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiased opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.
But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr Pater’s new volume to degenerate into an autobiography. I remember being told in America that whenever Margaret Fuller4 wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had always to send out to borrow some additional capital ‘I’s’, and I feel it right to accept this transatlantic warning.
‘Appreciations’, in the fine Latin sense of the word,5 is the title given by Mr Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite essays, of delicately wrought works of art – some of them being almost Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others medieval in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realize the nineteenth century,6 one must realize every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathize, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the essays contained in the present volume is that on ‘Style’. It is the most interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high authority that comes from the noble realization of things nobly conceived. It is the least successful, because the subject is too abstract. A true artist like Mr Pater is most felicitous when he deals with the concrete, whose very limitations give him finer freedom, while they necessitate more intense vision. And yet what a high ideal is contained in these few pages! How good it is for us, in these days of popular education and facile journalism, to be reminded of the real scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, ‘being a true lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy’, will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means, by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind in style. I think I have been wrong in saying that the subject is too abstract. In Mr Pater’s hands it becomes very real to us indeed, and he shows us how, behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul.
As one passes to the rest of the volume, one finds essays on Wordsworth and on Coleridge, on Charles Lamb7 and on Sir Thomas Brown,8 on some of Shakespeare’s plays and on the English kings that Shakespeare fashioned, on Dante Rossetti, and on William Morris. And that on Wordsworth seems to be Mr Pater’s last work, so that on the singer of the ‘Defence of Guenevere’9 is certainly his earliest, or almost his earliest, and it is interesting to mark the change that has taken place in his style. This change is, perhaps, at first sight not very apparent. In 1868 we find Mr Pater writing with the same exquisite care for words, with the same studied music, with the same temper, and something of the same mode of treatment. But, as he goes on, the architecture of the style becomes richer and more complex, the epithet more precise and intellectual. Occasionally one may be inclined to think that there is, here and there, a sentence which is somewhat long, and possibly, if one may venture to say so, a little heavy and cumbersome in movement. But if this be so, it comes from those side-issues suddenly suggested by the idea in its progress, and really revealing the idea more perfectly; or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the charm of chance; or from a desire to suggest the secondary shades of meaning with all their accumulating effect, and to avoid, it may be, the violence and harshness of too definite and exclusive an opinion. For in matters of art, at any rate, thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, recognizing its dependence upon moods and upon the passion of fine moments, will not accept the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theological dogma. The critical pleasure, too, that we receive from tracing, through what may seem the intricacies of a sentence, the working of the constructive intelligence, must not be overlooked. As soon as we have realized the design, everything appears clear and simple. After a time, these long sentences of Mr Pater’s come to have the charm of an elaborate piece of music, and the unity of such music also.
I have suggested that the essay on Wordsworth is probably the most recent bit of work contained in this volume. If one might choose between so much that is good, I should be inclined to say it is the finest also. The essay on Lamb is curiously suggestive; suggestive, indeed, of a somewhat more tragic, more sombre figure, than men have been wont to think of in connection with the author of the Essays of Elia. It is an interesting aspect under which to regard Lamb, but perhaps he himself would have had some difficulty in recognizing the portrait given of him. He had, undoubtedly, great sorrows,10 or motives for sorrow, but he could console himself at a moment’s notice for the real tragedies of life by reading any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio edition. The essay on Sir Thomas Browne is delightful, and has the strange, personal, fanciful charm of the author of the Religio Medici, Mr Pater often catching the colour and accent and tone of whatever artist, or work of art, he deals with. That on Coleridge, with its insistence on the necessity of the cultivation of the relative, as opposed to the absolute spirit in philosophy and in ethics, and its high appreciation of the poet’s true position in our literature, is in style and substance a very blameless work. Grace of expression, and delicate subtlety of thought and phrase, characterize the essays on Shakespeare. But the essay on Wordsworth has a spiritual beauty of its own. It appeals, not to the ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross confusion of ethical with aesthetical problems, but rather to those who desire to separate the gold from the dross, and to reach at the true Wordsworth through the mass of tedious and prosaic work that bears his name, and that serves often to conceal him from us. The presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s art, is, of course, recognized by Mr Pater but he touches on it merely from the psychological point of view, pointing out how this quality of higher and lower moods gives the effect in his poetry ‘of a power not altogether his own, or under his control’; a power which comes and goes when it wills, ‘so that the old fancy which made the poet’s art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost true of him’. Mr Pater’s earlier essays had their purpurei panni,11 so eminently suitable for quotation, such as the famous passage on Mona Lisa, and that other in which Botticelli’s strange conception of the Virgin is so strangely set forth. From the present volume it is difficult to select any one passage in preference to another as specially characteristic of Mr Pater’s treatment. This, however, is worth quoting at length. It contains a truth eminently suitable for our age:
That the end of life is not action but contemplation – being as distinct from doing – a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this principle in a measure; these, by their sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned contemplation. Their work is not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends, but to withdraw the thoughts for a while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man’s existence which no machinery affects, ‘on the great and universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature’ – on ‘the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on fear and sorrow’. To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like Wordsworth’s is a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature full of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature, passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connection with the grandeur and beauty of the natural world: images, in his own words, ‘of man suffering, amid awful forms and powers’.
Certainly the real secret of Wordsworth has never been better expressed. After having read and re-read Mr Pater’s essay – for it requires re-reading – one returns to the poet’s work with a new sense of joy and wonder, and with something of eager and impassioned expectation. And perhaps this might be roughly taken as the test or touchstone of the finest criticism.
Finally, one cannot help noticing the delicate instinct that has gone to fashion the brief epilogue that ends this delightful volume. The difference between the classical and romantic spirits in art has often, and with much over-emphasis, been discussed. But with what a light sure touch does Mr Pater write of it! How subtle and certain are his distinctions! If imaginative prose be really the special art of this century, Mr Pater must rank amongst our century’s most characteristic artists. In certain things he stands almost alone. The age has produced wonderful prose styles, turbid with individualism, and violent with excess of rhetoric. But in Mr Pater, as in Cardinal Newman,12 we find the union of personality with perfection. He has no rival in his own sphere, and he has escaped disciples. And this, not because he has not been imitated, but because in art so fine as his there is something that, in its essence, is inimitable.