Letters on Literature Part 7

That seems to me an example of the human touch that Rochefoucauld never allows for, the natural goodness, pity, kindness, which can a.s.sert itself in contempt of the love of self, and the love of revenge. This is that true clemency which is a real virtue, and not "the child of Vanity, Fear, Indolence, or of all three together." Nor is it so true that "we have all fort.i.tude enough to endure the misfortunes of others." Everybody has witnessed another's grief that came as near him as his own.

How much more true, and how greatly poetical is that famous maxim: "Death and the Sun are two things not to be looked on with a steady eye." This version is from the earliest English translation of 1698. The _Maximes_ were first published in Paris in 1665. {8} "Our tardy apish nation" took thirty-three years in finding them out and appropriating them. This, too, is good: "If we were faultless, we would observe with less pleasure the faults of others." Indeed, to observe these with pleasure is not the least of our faults. Again, "We are never so happy, nor so wretched, as we suppose." It is our vanity, perhaps, that makes us think ourselves _miserrimi_.

Do you remember--no, you don't--that meeting in "Candide" of the unfortunate Cunegonde and the still more unfortunate old lady who was the daughter of a Pope? "You lament your fate," said the old lady; "alas, you have known no such sorrows as mine!" "What! my good woman!" says Cunegonde. "Unless you have been maltreated by _two_ Bulgarians, received _two_ stabs from a knife, had _two_ of your castles burned over your head, seen _two_ fathers and _two_ mothers murdered before your eyes, and _two_ of your lovers flogged at two autos-da-fe, I don't fancy that you can have the advantage of me. Besides, I was born a baroness of seventy-two quarterings, and I have been a cook." But the daughter of a Pope had, indeed, been still more unlucky, as she proved, than Cunegonde; and the old lady was not a little proud of it.

But can you call _this_ true: "There is n.o.body but is ashamed of having loved when once he loves no longer"? If it be true at all, I don't think the love was much worth having or giving. If one really loves once, one can never be ashamed of it; for we never cease to love. However, this is the very high water of sentiment, you will say; but I blush no more for it than M. le Duc de Rochefoucauld for his own opinion. Perhaps I am thinking of that kind of love about which he says: "True love is like ghosts; which everybody talks about and few have seen." "Many be the thyrsus-bearers, few the Mystics," as the Greek proverb runs. "Many are called, few are chosen."

As to friendship being "a reciprocity of interests," the saying is but one of those which Rochefoucauld's vanity imposed on his wit. Very witty it is not, and it is emphatically untrue. "Old men console themselves by giving good advice for being no longer able to set bad examples."

Capital; but the poor old men are often good examples of the results of not taking their own good advice. "Many an ingrate is less to blame than his benefactor." One might add, at least I will, "Every man who looks for grat.i.tude deserves to get none of it." "To say that one never flirts--is flirting." I rather like the old translator's version of "Il y a de bons mariages; mais il n'y en a point de delicieux"--"Marriage is sometimes convenient, but never delightful."

How true is this of authors with a brief popularity: "_Il y a des gens qui ressemblent aux vaudevilles, qu'on ne chante qu'un certain temps_."

Again, "to be in haste to repay a kindness is a sort of ingrat.i.tude," and a rather insulting sort too. "Almost everybody likes to repay small favours; many people can be grateful for favours not too weighty, but for favours truly great there is scarce anything but ingrat.i.tude." They must have been small favours that Wordsworth had conferred when "the grat.i.tude of men had oftener left him mourning." Indeed, the very pettiness of the aid we can generally render each other, makes grat.i.tude the touching thing it is. So much is repaid for so little, and few can ever have the chance of incurring the thanklessness that Rochefoucauld found all but universal.

"Lovers and ladies never bore each other, because they never speak of anything but themselves." Do husbands and wives often bore each other for the same reason? Who said: "To know all is to forgive all"? It is rather like "On pardonne tant que l'on aime"--"As long as we love we can forgive," a comfortable saying, and these are rare in Rochefoucauld.

"Women do not quite know what flirts they are" is also, let us hope, not incorrect. The maxim that "There is a love so excessive that it kills jealousy" is only a corollary from "as long as we love, we forgive." You remember the cla.s.sical example, Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier des Grieux; not an honourable precedent.

"The accent of our own country dwells in our hearts as well as on our tongues." Ah! never may I lose the Border accent! "Love's Miracle! To cure a coquette." "Most honest women are tired of their task," says this unbeliever. And the others? Are they never aweary? The Duke is his own best critic after all, when he says: "The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is going beyond the mark." Beyond the mark he frequently goes, but not when he says that we come as fresh hands to each new epoch of life, and often want experience for all our years. How hard it was to begin to be middle-aged! Shall we find old age easier if ever we come to its threshold? Perhaps, and Death perhaps the easiest of all. Nor let me forget, it will be long before _you_ have occasion to remember, that "vivacity which grows with age is not far from folly."

OF VERS DE SOCIETE

_To Mr. Gifted Hopkins_.

My Dear Hopkins,--The verses which you have sent me, with a request "to get published in some magazine," I now return to you. If you are anxious that they should be published, send them to an editor yourself. If he likes them he will accept them from you. If he does not like them, why should he like them because they are forwarded by _me_? His only motive would be an aversion to disobliging a _confrere_, and why should I put him in such an unpleasant position?

But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the _premiere representation_ of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces and Loves." An old-fashioned preamble, and of the lengthiest, and how do you go on?--

Golden hair is fairy gold, Fairy gold that cannot stay, Turns to leaflets green and cold, At the ending of the day!

Laurel-leaves the Muses may Twine about your golden head.

Will the crown reward you, say, When the fairy gold is fled?

Daphne was a maid unwise-- Shun the laurel, seek the rose; Azure, lovely in the skies, Shines less gracious in the hose!

Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to _bas-bleus_, if not indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors will think so, I fear. Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold _that cannot stay_." If _Fairy Gold_ were a _horse_, it would be all very well to write that it "cannot stay." 'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs of the _salon_.

This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. You kindly ask my opinion on _vers de societe_ in general. Well, I think them a very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer from this, that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a model--the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff. It was a present, you remember, to the wife of his friend Nicias, the physician of Miletus. The Greeks of that age kept their women in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias would have liked it if Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan or a jewel. But there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all the compliments to the lady, "the dainty-ankled Theugenis," turn on her skill, and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV., no mean authority, called this piece of _vers de societe_ "a model of honourable gallantry."

I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes of the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature of the lighter verse than this of Alcman's--[Greek text]. Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"?

"Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire, Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire, Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing, Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring."

It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for his limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the honey- voiced girls.

The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a _boudoir_ decorum is, or ought always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into pa.s.sion, and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment." Honest women were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.

The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannot expect the genius of Catullus not to "surge into pa.s.sion," even in his hours of gayer song, composed when

_Multum lusimus in meis tabellis_, _Ut convenerat esse delicatos_, _Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum_.

Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, are addressed to _men_, his friends, and thus they scarcely come into the category of what we call "Society Verses." Given the character of Roman society, perhaps we might say that plenty of this kind of verse was written by Horace and by Martial. The famous ode to Pyrrha does not exceed the decorum of a Roman _boudoir_, and, as far as love was concerned, it does not seem to have been in the nature of Horace to "surge into pa.s.sion." So his best songs in this kind are addressed to men, with whom he drinks a little, and talks of politics and literature a great deal, and muses over the shortness of life, and the zest that snow- clad Soracte gives to the wintry fire.

Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so prettily in a _villanelle_, may come within the scope of this Muse, for it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness in its play.

Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, these old French forms seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry that was written in the exotic measures of Greece. There is a foreign grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the _English ballade and villanelle_, as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics. I would not say so much, on my own responsibility, nor trespa.s.s so far on the domain of scholarship, but this opinion was communicated to me by a learned professor of Latin. I think, too, that some of the lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well wedded with the verse of Horace. But perhaps no translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace every man must be his own translator.

It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing _vers de societe_, only he never troubles himself for a moment about the "decorum of the _boudoir_." Do you remember the lines on the ring which he gave his lady? They are the origin and pattern of all the verses written by lovers on that pretty metempsychosis which shall make them slippers, or fans, or girdles, like Waller's, and like that which bound "the dainty, dainty waist" of the Miller's Daughter.

"Ring that shalt bind the finger fair Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare; Thou hast not any price above The token of her poet's love; Her finger may'st thou mate as she Is mated every wise with me!"

And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured, this fortunate jewel:

"In vain I wish! So, ring, depart, And say 'with me thou hast his heart'!"

Once more Ovid's verses on his catholic affection for all ladies, the brown and the blonde, the short and the tall, may have suggested Cowley's humorous confession, "The Chronicle":

"Margarita first possessed, If I remember well, my breast, Margarita, first of all;"

and then follows a list as long as Leporello's.

What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of _vers de societe_ is not so much his lack of "decorum" as the monotonous singsong of his eternal elegiacs.

The lightest of light things, the poet of society, should possess more varied strains; like Horace, Martial, Thackeray, not like Ovid and (here is a heresy) Praed. Inimitably well as Praed does his trick of ant.i.thesis, I still feel that it _is_ a trick, and that most rhymers could follow him in a mere mechanic art. But here the judgment of Mr.

Locker would be opposed to this modest opinion, and there would be opposition again where Mr. Locker calls Dr. O. W. Holmes "perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse." But here we are straying among the moderns before exhausting the ancients, of whom I fancy that Martial, at his best, approaches most near the ideal.

Of course it is true that many of Martial's lyrics would be thought disgusting in any well-regulated convict establishment. His gallantry is rarely "honourable." Scaliger used to burn a copy of Martial, once a year, on the altar of Catullus, who himself was far from prudish. But Martial, somehow, kept his heart undepraved, and his taste in books was excellent. How often he writes verses for the bibliophile, delighting in the details of purple and gold, the ill.u.s.trations and ornaments for his new volume! These pieces are for the few--for amateurs, but we may all be touched by his grief for the little la.s.s, Erotion. He commends her in Hades to his own father and mother gone before him, that the child may not be frightened in the dark, friendless among the shades

"_Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras_ _Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis_."

There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, and the pity of a man for a child; pity that shows itself in a smile. I try to render that other inscription for the tomb of little Erotion:

Here lies the body of the little maid Erotion; From her sixth winter's snows her eager shade Hath fleeted on!

Whoe'er thou be that after me shalt sway My scanty farm, To her slight shade the yearly offering pay, So--safe from harm-- Shall thou and thine revere the kindly _Lar_, And _this_ alone Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far, A mournful stone!

Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial, who claimed for the study of his book no serious hours, but moments of mirth, when men are glad with wine, "in the reign of the Rose:" {9}

"_Haec hora est tua, c.u.m furit Lyaeus_, _c.u.m regnat rosa, c.u.m madent capilli_; _Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones_."

But enough of the poets of old; another day we may turn to Carew and Suckling, Praed and Locker, poets of our own speech, lighter lyrists of our own time. {10}

ON VERS DE SOCIETE

_To Mr. Gifted Hopkins_.