From a Cornish Window Part 23

"'Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!

Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!'"

Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith--whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only 'dull fools' suppose--beside the great poets who have been his contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later.

"Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have hold of a man. You know--as surely, for example, as while you are listening to Handel--that the stuff is masculine, and great at that."

"That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why?

Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand write _Christabel_ and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may, on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as the saying is) n.o.bly to the last, and vex us all the while with his asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet.

Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is, They have philosophy."

"You are on the old tack again: the old 'to katholoy'!"

"Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch land, so you may e'en fill another pipe and play the interlocutor. . . . You remember my once asking why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for that their stuff is rotten we agreed). The reason is, they are engaged in mistaking the part for the whole, and that part a non-essential one; they are setting up the present potency of Great Britain as a triumphant and insolent exception to laws which (if we believe in any G.o.ds better than anarchy and chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and may even regulate 'the most ancient heavens.' You may remember my expressed contempt for a recent poem which lauded Henry VIII because--"

"'He was l.u.s.tful, he was vengeful, he was hot and hard and proud; But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.'

"--A worse error, to my mind, than Froude's, who merely idolised him for chastising the clergy. Well, after our discussion, I asked myself this question: 'Why do we not as a great Empire-making people, ruling the world for its good, a.s.sa.s.sinate the men who oppose us?'

We do not; the idea revolts us. But why does it revolt us?

"We send our armies to fight, with the certainty (if we think at all) that we are sending a percentage to be killed. We recently sent out two hundred thousand with the sure and certain knowledge that some thousands must die; and these (we say) were men agonising for a righteous cause.

Why did it not afflict us to send them?--whereas it would have afflicted us inexpressibly to send a man to end the difficulty by putting a bullet or a knife into Mr. Kruger, who _ex hypothesi_ represented an unrighteous cause, and who certainly was but one man.

"Why? Because a law above any that regulates the expansion of Great Britain says, 'That shalt do no murder.' And that law, that Universal, takes the knife or the pistol quietly, firmly, out of your hand. You send a battalion, with Tom Smith in it, to fight Mr. Kruger's troops; you know that some of them must in all likelihood perish; but, thank your stars, you do not know their names. Tom Smith, as it happens, is killed; but had you known with absolute certainty that Tom Smith would be killed, you could not have sent him. You must have withdrawn him, and subst.i.tuted some other fellow concerning whom your prophetic vision was less uncomfortably definite. You can kill Tom Smith if he has happened to kill Bob Jones: you are safe enough then, being able to excuse yourself--how?

By Divine law again (as you understand it). Divine law says that whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed--that is to say, by you: so you can run under cover and hang Tom Smith. But when Divine law does not protect you, you are powerless. At the most you can send him off to take his ten-to-one chance in a battalion, and when you read his name in the returns, come mincing up to G.o.d and say: 'So poor old Tom's gone!

How the deuce was _I_ to know?'

"I say nothing of the cowardice of this, though it smells to Heaven. I merely point out that this law 'Thou shalt do no murder'--this Universal-- must be a tremendous one, since even you, my fine swashbuckling, Empire-making hero, are so much afraid of it that you cannot send even a Reservist to death without throwing the responsibility on luck--_nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_--and have not even the nerve, without its sanction, to stick a knife into an old man whom you accuse as the wicked cause of all this bloodshed. If you believed in your accusations, why couldn't you do it? Because a universal law forbade you, and one you have to believe in, truculent Jingo though you be. Why, consider this; your poets are hymning King Edward the Seventh as the greatest man on earth, and yet, if he might possess all Africa to-morrow at the expense of signing the death-warrant of one innocent man who opposed that possession, he could not write his name. His hand would fall numb. Such power above kings has the Universal, though silly poets insult it who should be its servants.

"Now of all the differences between men and women there is none more radical than this: that a man naturally loves law, whereas a woman naturally hates it and never sees a law without casting about for some way of dodging it. Laws, universals, general propositions--her instinct with all of them is to get off by wheedling the judge. So, if you want a test for a masculine poet, examine first whether or no he understands the Universe as a thing of law and order."

"Then, by your own test, Kipling--the Jingo Kipling--is a most masculine poet, since he talks of little else."

"I will answer you, although I believe you are not serious. At present Mr. Kipling's mind, in search of a philosophy, plays with the contemplation of a world reduced to law and order; the law and order being such as universal British rule would impose. There might be many worse worlds than a world so ruled, and in verse the prospect can be made to look fair enough:--"

"'Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience-- Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.

Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!'

"Clean and wholesome teaching it seems, persuading civilised men that, as they are strong, so the obligation rests on them to set the world in order, carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its bloodstained corners. Yet as a political philosophy it lacks the first of all essentials, and as Mr. Kipling develops it we begin to detect the flaw in the system:--

"'The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone; 'E don't obey no orders unless they is his own; 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about, An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.

Etc.'

"What is wrong with this? Why, simply that it leaves Justice altogether out of account. The system has no room for it; even as it has no room for clemency, mansuetude; forbearance towards the weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it--even verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations are obliged to put constraint upon uncivilised ones which shock their moral sense beyond a certain point--as by cannibalism or human sacrifice. But such interference should stand upon a nice sense of the offender's rights, and in practice does so stand. The custom of polygamy, for instance (as practised abroad), horribly offends quite a large majority of His Majesty's lieges; yet Great Britain tolerates polygamy even in her own subject races. Neither polygamy nor uncleanliness can be held any just excuse for turning a nation out of its possessions.

"And another reason for insisting upon the strictest reading of justice in these dealings between nations is the temptation which the least laxity offers to the stronger--a temptation which Press and Pulpit made no pretence of resisting during the late war. 'We are better than they,' was the cry; 'we are cleanlier, less ignorant; we have arts and a literature, whereas they have none; we make for progress and enlightenment, while they are absurdly conservative, if not retrogressive. Therefore the world will be the better by our annexing their land, and subst.i.tuting our government for theirs. Therefore our cause, too, is the juster.' But therefore it is nothing of the sort. A dirty man may be in the right, and a clean man in the wrong; an unG.o.dly man in the right, and a G.o.dly man in the wrong; and the most specious and well-intentioned system which allows justice to be confused with something else will allow it to be stretched, even by well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying and flat piracy.

"Are you trying to prove," demanded X, "that Mr. Kipling is a feminine poet?"

"No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion that in his worse mood he is a sham-masculine one. The 'Recessional' proves that, man of genius that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. But too often he is trying to dodge it with sham law. A woman would not appeal to law at all: she would boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an undoubted but misguided man, has to find some other way out; so he takes a twopenny-halfpenny code as the mood seizes him--be it the code of a barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew--and hymns it l.u.s.tily against the universal code: and the pity and the sin of it is that now and then by flashes--as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat'--he sees the truth.

"You remember the figure of the Cave which Socrates invented and explained to Glaucon in Plato's 'Republic'? He imagined men seated in a den which has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are turned to the wall of the den, and they sit with necks and legs chained so that they cannot move. Behind them, and between them and the light, runs a raised way with a low wall along it, 'like the screen over which marionette-players show their puppets.' Along this wall pa.s.s men carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, others silent; and as the procession goes by the chained prisoners see only the shadows pa.s.sing across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the voices echoed from it, suppose that the sound comes from the shadows.

"To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse one might take this famous picture and make one fearsome addition to it. There sits (one might go on to say) among the prisoners a young man different from them in voice and terribly different to look upon, because he has two pairs of eyes, the one turned towards the light and realities, the other towards the rock-face and the shadows. Using, now one, now the other of these two pairs of eyes, he never knows with which at the moment he is gazing, whether on the realities or on the shadows, but always supposes what he sees at the moment to be the realities, and calls them 'Things as They Are.' Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of the greater vision, and he speaks enchantingly when he discourses of the shadows on the rock, thereby deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom his genius has played the crimp to, enticing them into the den and hocussing and chaining them there. For, seeing the shadows pa.s.s to the interpretation of such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed behold Things as They Are, and that these are the only things worth knowing.

"The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:--"

"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' G.o.d, I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three; I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' h.e.l.l, And--ye--would--make--a Knight o' me!'"

"Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this for his pains:--

"'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old--I am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye.

I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do--with a palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.'

"He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole--his novels and poems together--this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise it--for it is far too multifarious and complex--but to say the first and the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his own into the warning, _ne tu pueri contempseris annos_. He has never grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish, for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':--"

"'Keep the young generations in hail, And bequeath them no tumbled house.'

"To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment supreme,' and perhaps the bitterest words this master of Comedy has written are for the seniors of the race who--

"'On their last plank, Pa.s.s mumbling it as nature's final page,'

"And cramp the young with their rules of 'wisdom,' lest, as he says scornfully:--

"'Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay, Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain, And ancients musical at close of day.'

"'Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet:--

"'Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.'

"But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges gall, is usually cheerful with the cheerfulness of health. Sometimes he consciously expounds it; oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always (I believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at the base of everything he writes.

"The next thing to be noted is that he does not hope in youth because it is a period of license and waywardness, but because it is a period of imagination--

"'Days, when the ball of our vision Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,'

"And because it therefore has a better chance of grasping what is Universal than has the prudential wisdom of age which contracts its eye to particulars and keeps it alert for social pitfalls--the kind of wisdom seen at its best (but its best never made a hero) in Bubb Doddington's verses:--

"'Love thy country, wish it well, _Not with too intense a care_; 'Tis enough that, when it fell, Thou its ruin didst not share.'

"Admirable caution! Now contrast it for a moment with, let us say, the silly quixotic figure of Horatius with the broken bridge behind him:--

"'Round turned he, as not deigning Those craven ranks to see: Nought spake he to Lars Porsena, To s.e.xtus nought spake he; But he saw on Palatinus The white porch of his home--'

"I protest I have no heart to go on with the quotation: so unpopular is its author, just now, and so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the boyish tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what Mr. Meredith chooses to trust rather than Bubb Doddington's, and he trusts it as being the likelier to apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius with an army in front and a broken bridge behind him was a n.o.bler figure than Bubb Doddington wishing his country well but not with too intense a care; and not only n.o.bler but--this is the point--more obedient to divine law, more expressive of that which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trusts youth, it is as a time of imagination; and if he trusts imagination, it is as a faculty for apprehending the Universal in life--that is to say, a divine law behind its shows and simulacra.

"In 'The Empty Purse' you will find him instructing youth towards this law; but that there may be no doubt of his own belief in it, as an order not only controlling men but overriding angels and demons, first consider his famous sonnet, 'Lucifer in Starlight'--to my thinking one of the finest in our language:--