Old and New Masters Part 6

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as well as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every face was a doc.u.mentary sc.r.a.p."

I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of the "plain boiled" much better than one could dispense with that.

Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of English life revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating. "As one sat there," he says of his reeking restaurant, "one _understood._" It is in the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a precious discovery that he recalls "the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter." What an epicure the man was! "The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast"

still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards. Not that these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merely gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past. The breakfasts a.s.sociated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Rogers. They had also a doc.u.mentary value as "the exciting note of a social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store...." It was one morning, "beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace," that his "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew Arnold's banter. Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to Henry James to _be_ somebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a play with cross-references.

The beauty was ... that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite groan under the acc.u.mulation and the weight of.

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National Gallery, that he writes about. Of t.i.tian and Rembrandt and Rubens he communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby filled to overflowing." He does, indeed, give a slender description of his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact even of this incident is that "I thrilled ... with the prodigy of this circ.u.mstance that I should be admiring t.i.tian in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne."

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography.

He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler."

After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my vibration." The occasion of the message to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving at George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G.H. Lewes's sons lying in horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically describes it:--

a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably compromised.

There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out of his visits to George Eliot. The visit he paid her at Witley under the "much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no law but that of innocent and exquisite aberration," had a superb conclusion, which "left our adventure an approved ruin." As James was about to leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville, G.H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to the doorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shaking high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after his dash in quest of them":--

"Ah, those books--take them away, please, away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance.

The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own new book--a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, in turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to be read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect their young visitor with the volumes. Hence a situation so comic that even its victim could not but enjoy it:--

Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.

Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host. Tennyson had read at least one of his stories and liked it. All the same, James was disappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed and stamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson not Tennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock to his guest:--

He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.

As Tennyson read _Locksley Hall_ to his guests, Henry James had to pinch himself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility." What a lovely touch of malice there is in his description of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs.

Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:--

He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius.

Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, even after his conversion. He was a wit as well as an enthusiast. _The Middle Years_, indeed, is precious in every page for its wit as well as for its confessional raptures. It may be objected that Henry James's wit is only a new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis. He might be described as the last of the periphrastic humorists. At the same time, if ever in any book there was to be found the free play of an original genius--a genius however limited and even little--it is surely in the autobiography of Henry James. Those who can read it at all will read it with shining eyes.

VII

BROWNING: THE POET OF LOVE

Browning's reputation has not yet risen again beyond a half-tide. The fact that two books about him were published during the war, however, suggests that there is a revival of interest in his work. It would have been surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets who inspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of h.e.l.l.

Browning was the great challenger of the mult.i.tude of devils. He did not achieve his optimism by ignoring Satan, but by defying him. His courage was not merely of the stomach, but of the daring imagination. There is no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow and indigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, enjoyed good health. As Professor Phelps, of Yale, says in a recent book, _Robert Browning: How to Know Him:--_

He had a truly wonderful digestion: it was his firm belief that one should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the infallible sign that the food was healthful. "My father was a man of _bonne fourchette_," said Barett Browning to me "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially with rich sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things.

He would make a whole meal off mayonnaise."

Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of a kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:--

It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.

The man who does not suffer from pie will hardly suffer from pessimism; but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors than pie for breakfast, and his philosophy did not flinch. There was no other English writer of the nineteenth century who to the same degree made all human experiences his own. His is poems are not poems about little children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero who is either worse than his virtue or better than his sins. Nowhere else in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer is there such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's often quoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect and essential criticism:--

Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walked along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse.

For Browning was a portrait-painter by genius and a philosopher only by accident. He was a historian even more than a moralist. He was born with a pa.s.sion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially and eagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to whether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make one believe. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder into forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in _How it Strikes a Contemporary_, to all such calumnies on poets.

Of all the fields of human experience, it was love into which the imagination of Browning most fully entered. It may seem an obvious thing to say about almost any poet, but Browning differed from other poets in being able to express, not only the love of his own heart, but the love of the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of love from the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there never was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love and so little of the obsession of s.e.x. Love was for him the crisis and test of a man's life. The disreputable lover has his say in Browning's monologues no less than Count Gismond. Porphyria's lover, mad and a murderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic lover of Cristina.

The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the varieties of pa.s.sionate experience was an art-form of immense possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that Browning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent to form has always seemed to me the extreme of stupidity. At the same time, its very newness puzzles many readers, even to-day. Some people cannot read Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throw themselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artistic sense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled by the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are reborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramatic studies. Professor Phelps's book should be of especial service to such readers, because it will train them in the right method of approach to Browning's best work.

It is a very admirable essay in popular literary interpretation. One is astonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent ba.n.a.lity.

There are sentences that will make the fastidious shrink, such as:--

The commercial worth of _Pauline_ was exactly zero.

And:--

Their (the Brownings') love-letters reveal a drama of n.o.ble pa.s.sion that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of Heloise and Abelard, Auca.s.sin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia.

And, again, in the story of the circ.u.mstances that led to Browning's death:--

In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him, he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice.

Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath away, as when, discussing _The Lost Mistress_, Professor Phelps observes that the lover:--

instead of thinking of his own misery ... endeavours to make the awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the sparrows and the leaf-buds.

When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in existence.

Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements.

One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short poems like _Meeting at Night_, but long poems, such as _Andrea del Sarto, Caliban on Setebos_, and _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came._ This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet is allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.

At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full _Transcendentalism_ and _How it Strikes a Contemporary_ as Browning's confession of his aims as an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic a.s.sertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things--with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the pa.s.sion for the detailed and the concrete. In _Transcendentalism_ he bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme with his subtle meanings:--

Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt, John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.

With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things" as compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":--

He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all-- Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.

One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and pedestrian details with beauty.

The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as when the mourners are made to say in _A Grammarian's Funeral_:--

Look out if yonder be not day again.

r.i.m.m.i.n.g the rock-row!