Critical Studies Part 13

But the bookmakers of the world have no such excuse as this temptation offers; they are merely footmen who have listened with p.r.i.c.ked ears whilst they waited at table on their masters, and when their master is powerless to chastise, sell what they remember or invent. Even where it is not libellous, the sickening intrusion into private life which nowadays disgraces journalism must, to any temper of any refinement and reserve, be an offence irritating beyond endurance. There are flatteries and intrusions beside which censure is sweet and obloquy would be welcome.

There is a great pathos in the fact that the greatest man of these last fifty years, the man of blood and iron, should, as soon as he lies in his coffin, be insulted by such a book as this. The hand in its steel gauntlet, which welded fragments into a nation, is powerless to defend its owner against betrayal and false witness. The vulgar, insatiable curiosity of the general world breeds such traitors as these makers of post-mortem recollections; breeds them, nourishes them, recompenses them. There would be no supply if there were no demand. The general world has a greedy appet.i.te for diseased food; as with its jaws it devours putrid game, decayed oysters, and the swollen livers of tortured geese, so it loves to devour with its frothy brain all that belittles, ridicules, dishonours, or betrays the few amongst it--the very few!--who are above it in mind, in will, in force, in fame. 'Come, come!' they cry to the great man's servants when the great man lies dead; 'tell us, you who saw him in his hours of abandonment, tell us of all that can drag him down nearer to our level! Tell us of his varicocele, tell us of his dyspepsia, tell us of his caprices, tell us of his humours, tell us of his tears when his poisoned dog lay dying--you saw them through the keyhole--tell us of his hasty words, his pettish foibles, his human mortal waywardness--you know so much about them, you who waited behind his chair and filled his tobacco-pouch--come, come, comfort us; his great shadow seems still to lie upon the earth and make us small and crawling insects crushed by his spurred boot--come, come, comfort us!

Tell us, show us, make us happy belittling him; let us, the envious, the puny, the mean, rejoice, for you who cleaned his boot and held his bare foot in your hired hand, can tell us that he, the maker of emperors and of nations, he, the Mighty, had Achilles' heel!' For there is an unwritten law, not of literature but of life, which decrees that the jealousy of the small soul for the great soul shall be cruel and deathless as Fate.[10]

[Footnote 10: Since this was written, the letters of Ruskin and Rossetti have been published: a greater offence against dead men could not be committed.]

IX

AUBERON HERBERT

This little square book, the colour of meadow forget-me-nots, is so modest and simple that it may very easily be pa.s.sed over in a period which has little sympathy with tenderness of feeling and simplicity of expression. The verses, of which this small volume is full, resemble the _stornelli_ and _rispetti_ of Italian songs rather than any kind of verse which has preceded them in English literature, unless it be the earliest and briefest songs of Robert Lytton, with which they have a certain kindred, both in their measure and in their themes. Auberon Herbert is known to the world as a daring and original thinker, a sociologist who lives three centuries before his time, a fearless preacher of new liberties and ideal creeds; in this tiny azure booklet he is also a poet, or, as he would rather himself say, a singer. The verse springs from the depths of his heart, and calls to those who, like himself, have loved and suffered and found nothing endure except the consolations of natural beauty.

'In the West is the golden glory, As the great king goes to his rest; In the East the purple staineth The hills from foot to crest.

'And I stand and look in wonder Till my heart is cleft in twain, Half for the vision of glory, And half for the dying pain.'

Like the Italian _canzone_, these little lyrics, brief as a summer breeze, which momentarily sways the stalks of gra.s.s, must be heard with the ear of the heart. Coldly criticised by the mind alone, they will lie like the gathered field-poppy, inert and colourless. They are the cries of the heart, like those brief verses which the southern lover sings to the sobbing lute beneath the moon. He who has killed his heart in the pressure of the world will find nothing in them. They who are steeped in the chill indifference of mundane interests will no more heed them than such heed the skylark's or the linnet's song, which they resemble. They were not written in the study, or fashioned with the pruning-knife; they were born by the edge of the sea, in the woodland shade, by the clover path of the country hedge, in the falling rain of the peach and pear-blossoms, in the starlight above the olives. They are the elder children of the lonely sh.o.r.es and flowering pastures; they have never known the gaslight of the streets or the electric light of the drawing-room. They are as sweet and pure as violets.

To those who know, and respect as they should be respected, the virile and original philosophies of the writer, there is an added charm in these tender blossoms in the fact that they spring from the same intelligence as that which proclaims individualism in its boldest forms and attacks the tyrannies of social and political superst.i.tions.

They are but little songs, short as a ripple of music from a woodlark's throat, of no more account, if you will, than the blue stars of mouse-ear by the brook's side, than the dog-rose on the bank; too simple it may be said, speaking of emotions too trite, of sorrow too common, of sights too familiar, in language that the dullest can scarce fail to understand. Yes; no doubt, they are like field-flowers, like hedge-birds; they claim to be no more than these; they were not wrestled for as Wordsworth wrestled for an ode beneath the shadow of Rydal, or as Coleridge strove with the rebellious forces of a halting sonnet when lying down face foremost amongst 'the common gra.s.s.' They are spontaneous utterances, as natural as the ripple of the water over the cresses in a brook's bed beneath willow and alder. It may be easy to dismiss them with indifference, to underrate them with hypercritic sneer, and a.s.suredly those who take pleasure in the strained archaic obscurities of much modern verse will find no more charm in them than the languid aesthete, musing over the pages of Verlaine and Mallarme, would find in a sea-wet breeze blowing across a hayfield at early morning. There is no studied mannerism, no sought-for darkness of expression, no exaggerated ecstasy or pessimism; there is such a natural feeling, of joy as of sorrow, as comes to the soul at once robust and sensitive; and these are expressed with frank, unstudied _navete_, with the candour as of a child, and the self-control of a man blent in their simplicity. 'Look in your own heart and write,' has been the only precept which their creator has obeyed.

The most intense attachment in them is for the sea. The sea, whether those grey sad tides which sway from the sands of Christchurch to the rocks of Freshwater, or that azure radiance which rolls from the headland of Antibes to the gardens of Porto Fino, has the same magic for Auberon Herbert that it has for Algernon Swinburne; a charm much calmer and more peaceful, but not less strong. Many of these little poems speak of the sea only; are full of that happy sense of return and recognition which so many amongst us feel when, after absence from the sea, we tread again its wet salt sands, and feel its white spray dance against our cheek. Swinburne is the great laureate of ocean, the chords of whose mighty lyre reverberate with the ocean storm and echo the thunder of breakers breaking upon iron sh.o.r.es, and of billows sweeping from pole to pole. The song of Auberon Herbert is the homing cry of the sea-swallows swaying on the crest of the waves.

'Back to the Sea Mother' he calls these yearning lines:--

'Kindest of mothers, from whom I have strayed, Back again, tired, I come to thee, Chaunting and crooning the old wave-song; Sing it, oh! sing it again to me!

'Weary and spent as the hour draws near, Hush me to sleep with the soft wave-song; Wash all the cares away, wash all the strifes away, All the old pains that to living belong.

'Down at thy side I place me to rest; Slowly my senses are stealing from me; Pa.s.sions and pleadings have ceased in my breast, Gently my spirit floats away free.'

And yet again:--

'Thou great strong sea, fast lock'd in dreams, Clouds journeying to and fro, Whose tender blue the stars come through, I can but love ye so!

'Ye take possession of my heart, And all my life renew; Like grain of dust I grow a part, A small stray part of you.

'Thy sounds, O storm, are far and faint, As thou stridest over the sea; And we need thy breath from many a taint To set us clean and free.

'But when thou comest on mighty wings, Deal gently with forest and tree, For my heart is woe for the goodly things That to-morrow will cease to be.

'Yes! I shall go and you will dream, And drink the pale blue sky, Beneath the hill that hugs you round As silver days go by.

'When others come your love to claim, You still, you pale blue sea, Oh, shall you mean for them the same, That once you meant for me?

'And shall they look on you with eyes As tender true as mine, And love each changing gleam that flies Across that face of thine?'

I dislike the translation of expression from one art to another, otherwise I would call these verses impressionist. They have the quickly-captured forms, the frail fugitive colour, the infinite suggestiveness, which are the notes of the highest impressionism in painting.

See these eight lines:--

'The sun is at rest--for the storms are o'er; Just touch'd with the hand of night, And a line of shadow creeps to the sh.o.r.e, Then flashes in silver light--

'Like a note that stops in its flight and droops, And clings for a while to the ground; Then trembles and wakes from its trance and breaks Into pa.s.sion and glory of sound.'

How entirely true are these to the breaking of a smooth, pale expanse of water into motion and light; the sudden flashing as of a million spears with which the sea, when smitten by the sword of the Sun, rises to the challenge of Morning. And yet by what simple and common words this strong effect is produced!

Or this:--

'Only a bit of land-locked bay, With a haunting face on the further side; Yet the ocean as well might bar the way, So far from each other our lives divide.

'For you jest at times, and at times you pray, And you tread a path that cannot be mine; And the world is with you from day to day, And all that you are I dare not divine.'

Or this:--

'In the glory of youth the young man went; His heart with pride was stirred; "They should yield," he cried, "to the message sent, And force of the burning word."

'The long years pa.s.sed and a wearied man Crept back to the old home door: "I have spoken my word and none has heard, And the great world rolls as before."'

Or this:--

'Forward we look, and we gild it all, Rich is the picture and tender and fair, Backward we look, and the blue mists fall, Veiling the troubles that once were there.

'Ah! well, and ah! well, and lighter the load, If heart the enchanter weave his web; If he tells love-stories to cheat the road, And binds in our dreams the purple thread.'

Or this:--

'Ah! love so sweet, and patient, and fond, I wandered far from thy sight, And I said to myself that the world beyond Was a garden rich with delight.

'And there rose an image from morn to morn Of new bewildering days, Till my heart grew proud and I thought with scorn Of the peaceful homely ways.

'For the young are light, and I never had learnt To know the false from the true, And my feet were drawn where the far lights burnt With their wonder strange and new.

'And now how bitter to heart is the taste, And gone are the folly and pride; And I save what I can from the years of waste And stand once more at thy side.'

It will be seen that the store of words at the singer's command is limited; his palette is set with few colours; his lute has but few strings; and it is in this that he resembles the singers of the Italian folk-songs and couplets which have only the limited vocabulary of the peasant to express so many of the deepest chords of human feeling. These English verses might, like those Italian _canzone_, be created by one to whom all the stores of knowledge and of culture were sealed books. They are cast in the simplest of all possible forms of expression, and there is not one which would not suit the plaintive measure of a crooning ballad sung in twilight by the embers of a cottage hearth. They suggest their own music, and it would be difficult to read them aloud without falling into some rhythmical balance of their lines.

Auberon Herbert is, we know by his prose works, master of rich stores of language and of scholarship; therefore this simplicity of style in his verses springs, not from poverty of resources, but from correctness of instinct. These songs are _naf_ as a child's prayer at its mother's knee at eventide; were they ornate or elaborate they would cease to be, as they are now, the frank and spontaneous utterances of the soul, natural, I have said, as song of linnet or of lark.

Let those who love pure, simple, unstudied, and unborrowed things send for the little azure book, and read it for themselves; not in noisy railway train, or metropolitan library, or fashion-filled country house; but in the solitude of some quiet rural place, beside some nameless streamlet where the willow-leaves touch the blue brook-lime and the bees hum amidst the flowering thyme.

When we take it home, as the day dies, let us place it on a shelf between the hymns of George Herbert and those earliest love-songs which were signed Owen Meredith. There it will find its fit companionship.