Old and New Masters Part 11

Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in the essentials of beauty than Browning's--it is not, indeed, nearly so rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a G.o.d in a firmament of G.o.ds, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true G.o.d.

To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead world. _Jenny_ may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But _Jenny_ was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best, perhaps, in _The Blessed Damozel_, written when he was little more than a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this pa.s.sion must either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Auca.s.sin, whose swooning pa.s.sion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. In _Hand and Soul_, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul--and he constantly troubles about it--he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through the coloured gla.s.s of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with beautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in _The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town._ It is not that Rossetti could command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase; but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How beautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could leave a verse like:--

Venus looked on Helen's gift; _(O Troy Town!)_ Looked and smiled with subtle drift, Saw the work of her heart's desire:-- "There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"

_(O Troy's down, Tall Troy's on fire!)_

Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothing to correspond to _The Skylark_ or the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ or _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ in his work. The truth is, he was not a great poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorations in verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued, are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they are never, as it were, light and alight with it, as are _Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?_ and _Where lies the land to which yon ship must go?_ They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often weary before the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lines like:--

O love, my love! if I no more should see Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,-- How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing?

And, beautiful as this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines a little more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of the great singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds in themselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti.

He loved them as pictorial properties--as a designer rather than a poet loves them.

In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicated chiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters have expressed their vision of religion. His _Ave_ is a praise of the beauty of art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are told how, on the eve of the Annunciation,

Far off the trees were as pale wands, Against the fervid sky: the sea Sighed further off eternally As human sorrow sighs in sleep.

The poem is not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is a sincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it from being artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague.

His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of words and colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means of ritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I can make nothing of Christianity," he said, "but I only want a confessor to give me absolution for my sins." That was typical of his att.i.tude to life. He loved its ceremonies more--at least, more vividly--than he loved its soul. One is never done hearing about his demand for "fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a "life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief, of regret--the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged sandals like Sh.e.l.ley's, which set the spirit free.

Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far more than Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which has been a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is the Pagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of Francis Thompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influence on either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared the world for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott and the decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible for the change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was more distinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man of letters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century.

People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet, and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said to Burne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he should paint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it," he gave convincing proof that painting, and not poetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawing and twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that show him as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how well he can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny's wanderings in the Haymarket:--

Jenny, you know the city now.

A child can tell the tale there, how Some things which are not yet enrol'd In market-lists are bought and sold, Even till the early Sunday light, When Sat.u.r.day night is market-night Everywhere, be it dry or wet, And market-night in the Haymarket.

Our learned London children know, Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe; Have seen your lifted silken skirt Advertise dainties through the dirt; Have seen your coach wheels splash rebuke On virtue; and have learned your look When wealth and health slipped past, you stare Along the streets alone, and there, Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavement's edge Wind on together and apart, A fiery serpent for your heart.

In most of his poems, unfortunately, the design, as a whole, rambles.

His imagination worked best when limited by the four sides of a canvas.

XVI

MR. BERNARD SHAW

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people, it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw's gift of infuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men who can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture--and he does express an opinion on everything--without making a mult.i.tude of people shake their fists in impotent anger. His life--at least, his public life--has been a jibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket of illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has gone, an innumerable growl has followed him.

Not that he has not had his disciples--men and women who believe that what Mr. Shaw says on any conceivable subject is far more important than what _The Times_ or the _Manchester Guardian_ says. He has never founded a church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at his disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularity as other men have courted popularity. He has refused to a.s.sume the vacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the result those of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins are filled at times with a wild l.u.s.t to denounce and belittle him. He has been called more names than any other man of letters alive. When all the other names have been exhausted and we are about to become inarticulate, we even denounce him as a bore. But this is only the Billingsgate of our exasperation. Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever else he may be. He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting us beyond any other writer of his time.

He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as a public figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him. Whether he could have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted that elongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say. Probably he was doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was. If he had not told us legends about himself, other people would have told them, and they could scarcely have told them so well: that would have been the chief difference. Even if Mr. Shaw's plays should ever become as dead as the essays in _The Rambler_, his lineaments and his laughter will survive in a hundred stories which will bring the feet of pilgrims to Adelphi Terrace in search of a ghost with its beard on fire.

His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shaw myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. And Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an advertiser in an age of advertis.e.m.e.nt. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:--

Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertis.e.m.e.nts. If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true?

One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw's advertis.e.m.e.nt. Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if he were the inmate of a workhouse. He is something of a natural peac.o.c.k.

He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone through! life with so fine a swagger of words. This only means that in his life he is an artist.

He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is a moralist in his art. The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in thinking that his story ends here. The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite so simple as that. The truth about Mt. Shaw cannot be told until we realize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life, but in the observation of the lives of other people. His Broadbent is as wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw. Not that his portraiture is always faithful. He sees men and women too frequently in the refracting shallows of theories. He is a doctrinaire, and his characters are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections of men and women. "When I present true human nature," he observes in one of the many pa.s.sages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinks it is being made fun of. In reality I am simply a very careful writer of natural history." One is bound to contradict him. Mr. Shaw often thinks he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his opinions about human nature--the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women. Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of human nature and his opinions about it.

This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy. Certainly, from the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history. But it is not always a virtue. Thus in _The Doctors Dilemma_, when Dubedat is dying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirably true both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw's view of the human nature of artists. But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artistic creed: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen, Amen," these sentences are no more natural or naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R. Sims's ballads. Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not have said these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure, without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw's opinion of the nature of the creed of artists. There is a similar falsification in the same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at Dubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the widow. "Do you think," he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'How it Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good t.i.tle for an article, isn't it?"

These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr.

Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists. Mr.

Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of atmosphere in this manner. Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter. But, compared with the degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality is not overwhelming. It has been enormously exaggerated.

After all, if the character of the newspaper man in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius.

Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors. It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Moliere has never drawn a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, _The Philanderer._ The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the characterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Moliere:--

In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or pa.s.sions than those of Moliere, and more representative of cla.s.s, profession, or sect. Moliere depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor.

A few only of these latter types are given us by Moliere.

M. Hamon's comparison, made in the course of a long book, between the genius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Moliere is extraordinarily detailed. Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a pa.s.sage as that which informs us regarding the work of both authors that "suicide is never one of the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be made fun of." The comparison, however, between the sins that have been alleged against both Moliere and Mr. Shaw--sins of style, of form, of morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and so forth--is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure that the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book is intended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as a comparison between his work and Moliere's. It contains, it must be confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so do all books about Mr. Shaw. And it has also this fault that, though it is about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of a smile. Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself: M. Hamon's volume is an offering at a shrine.

The true things it contains, however, make it worth reading. M. Hamon sees, for instance, what many critics have failed to see, that in his dramatic work Mr. Shaw is less a wit than a humorist:--

In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the situations. He does not labour to be witty, nor does he play upon words.... Shaw's brilliancy does not consist in wit, but in humour.

Mr. Shaw was at one time commonly regarded as a wit of the school of Oscar Wilde. That view, I imagine, is seldom found nowadays, but even now many people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the ruling characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with witty conversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision of human society.

His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia or d.i.c.kens; but then neither was Moliere's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Moliere antic.i.p.ated Mr. Shaw in outraging the sentiment, for instance, which has gathered round the family. "Moliere and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is worth."

The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real or imaginary resemblance of his plays to Moliere's. His joy and his misery before the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and his expression of them is his own. He has studied with his own eyes the swollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and lovers and politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been derided on the English stage before. He has derided them with both an artistic and a moral energy. He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth, where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling frankness. He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth, sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist. Even his bitterness is never venomous, however. He is genial beyond the majority of inveterate controversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound and he does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice. The geniality of his comedy, on the other hand, is often more offensive than malice, because it is from an orthodox point of view geniality in the wrong place. It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service.

It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on the war. He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy that led up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision. I do not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote about the war. But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in the higher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist. He sees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, to the lyric poet. He was so occupied with his satiric vision of the pretences of the diplomatic world that, though his att.i.tude to the war was as anti-Prussian as M. Vandervelde's, a great number of people thought he must be a pro-German.

The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread the vision of the satirist and the sceptic. It is a vision of only one-half of the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to be more or less irrelevant. And, even at this, it is not infallible. This is not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion of politics. That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane, and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and the sentimentalist. It may be said of Mr. Shaw that in his politics, as in his plays, he has sought Utopia along the path of disillusion as other men have sought it along the path of idealism and romance.

XVII

MR. MASEFIELD'S SECRET

Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also the secret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite the admirably just verdict which Jeffrey delivered on Wordsworth's _Excursion_: "This will never do." We miss in his lines the onward march of poetry. His individual phrases carry no cargoes of wonder. His art is not of the triumphant order that lifts us off our feet. As we read the first half of his narrative sea-poem, _Dauber_, we are again and again moved to impatience by the sheer literary left-handedness of the author.

There are so many unnecessary words, so many unnecessary sentences. Of the latter we have an example in the poet's reflection as he describes the "fiery fishes" that raced Dauber's ship by night in the southern seas:--

What unknown joy was in those fish unknown!

It is one of those superfluous thoughts which appear to be suggested less by the thing described than by the need of filling up the last line of the verse. Similarly, when Dauber, as the ship's lampman and painter is nicknamed, regards the miracle of a ship at sea in moonlight, and exclaims:--

My Lord, my G.o.d, how beautiful it is!