Old and New Masters Part 7

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and pa.s.sion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river.

His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half of his poems. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ is a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing--a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's genius, one has only to read _Childe Roland_ again to restore one's faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of apprehension and the Tower itself appears:--

The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:--

Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day Came back again for that! before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay-- "Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears, Of all the lost adventurers my peers-- How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.

And blew. "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_."

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine att.i.tude like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said, on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No," when in his later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians.

Like the Pope in _The Ring and the Book_, he loathed the a.s.sociation of Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in _Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers in _The Statue and the Bust._ There was at least a hint of heroism in the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age.

Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those two great energies of the spirit--love and heroism. For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did.

The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as those through which it has but recently pa.s.sed.

VIII

THE FAME OF J.M. SYNGE

The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries--or the choruses--as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare.

So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle--a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of pa.s.sion to prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a G.o.d, not a man--a creator of absolute beauty--and he asks us to accept the common view that _The Playboy of the Western World_ is his masterpiece. There can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not the peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Sh.e.l.ley: he is the peer, say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That is why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people than among simple people.

Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the artistic formula of Tolstoi. This was _Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea_, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants to-day.

Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is a corpse on the stage in _Riders to the Sea_, and a man laid out as a corpse in _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and there is a funeral party in _The Playboy of the Western World._ Synge's imagination dwelt much among the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities of a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either as a tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soul of a lyric poet.

If he is at his greatest in _Riders to the Sea_, he is at his most personal in _The Well of the Saints_, and this is essentially a tragic satire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blind beggars. Mr. Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists in _The Well of the Saints_," but that is because he is anxious to prove that Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In _Riders to the Sea_ he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life more and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the n.o.ble style of _Riders to the Sea_ for the gauded and overwrought style of _The Playboy._

"With _The Playboy of the Western World_," says Mr. Howe, "Synge placed himself among the masters." But then Mr. Howe thinks that "Pegeen Mike is one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama," and that she "is the normal," and that

Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's, insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's blood.

The conception of ordinary life--or is it only ordinary Irish life?--in the last half-sentence leaves one meditating.

But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with Mr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of the Irish countryside is a minor one. On the other hand, it is worth noting that he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discovery of the wonders of Irish peasant speech. His first plays express, as it were, the delight of first love. He was always a shaping artist, of course, in search of figures and patterns; but he kept his pa.s.sion for these things subordinate to reality in the early plays. In _The Playboy_ he seemed to be determined to write riotously, like a man straining after vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild phrases--the collections of years--into the conversations of a few minutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing of tricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms--I am sure there are a hundred blank-verse lines in the play--and otiose adjectives crept in and spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful English Synge wrote in the noon of his genius.

I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for _The Playboy_ except among those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier and better work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand of genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation to those who do not know _Riders to the Sea_ or _The Well of the Saints._ Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated form, and with sentimentality subst.i.tuted for the tolerant but Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and originality are obvious enough. _The Playboy_ is a marvellous confection, but it is to _Riders to the Sea_ one turns in search of Synge the immortal poet.

IX

VILLON: THE GENIUS OF THE TAVERN

It is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had ever written his essay on Villon. He explains that this was due to the fact that he "regarded Villon as a bad fellow," but one likes to think that his conscience was also a little troubled because through lack of sympathy he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius.

Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience. He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out. He was, no doubt, a thief; he had killed a man; and it may even be (if we are to read autobiography into one of the most shocking portions of the _Grand Testament_) that he lived for a time on the earnings of "la grosse Margot." But, for all this, he was not the utterly vile person that Stevenson believed. His poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally changes its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the "crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of h.e.l.l. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls.

Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as:

Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,

and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice,"

That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers, Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.

No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of d.a.m.ned souls--d.a.m.ned in their merry sins--at which the writer of _Ecclesiastes_ merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to sing _Carpe diem_ when at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head--not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang translation--that the _Ballade de bonne Doctrine a ceux de mauvaise Vie_ falls, with its refrain of destiny:

Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

And the _Ballade de la Belle Heaulmiere aux Filles de Joie_, in which Age counsels Youth to take its pleasure and its fee before the evil days come, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallest _memento mori._

One must admit, of course, that the obsession of vice is strong in Villon's work. In this he is prophetic of much of the greatest French literature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminals beyond most poets. It is not only that he indulged in the sins of the flesh. It is difficult to imagine that there exists any sin of which he and his companions were not capable. He was apparently a member of the famous band of thieves called the Coquillards, the sign of which was a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l in the cap, "which was the sign of the Pilgrim." "It was a large business," Mr. Stacpoole says of this organization in his popular life of Villon, "with as many departments as a New York store, and, to extend the simile, its chief aim and object was to make money. Coining, burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery, card-sharping, and dice-playing with loaded dice, were chief among its industries." Mr. Stacpoole goes on to tone down this catalogue of iniquity with the explanation that the Coquillards were, after all, not nearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweaters of women. He is inclined to think they may have been good fellows, like Robin Hood and his men or the gentlemen of the road in a later century.

This may well be, but a gang of Robin Hoods, infesting a hundred taverns in the town and quarrelling in the streets over loose women, is dangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never been taught the Shorter Catechism. Paris, even in the twentieth century, is alleged to be a city of temptation. Paris, in the fifteenth century, must have been as tumultuous with the seven deadly sins as the world before the Flood. Joan of Arc had been burned in the year in which Villon was born, but her death had not made saints of the students of Paris. Living more or less beyond the reach of the civil law, they made a duty of riot, and counted insolence and wine to themselves for righteousness. Villon, we are reminded, had good influences in his life, which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness and folly. He had his dear, illiterate mother, for whom, and at whose request, he wrote that unexpected ballade of prayer to the Mother of G.o.d. He had, too, that good man who adopted him, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoist--

mon plus que pere Maistre Guillaume de Villon, Qui m'a este plus doux que mere;

and who gave him the name that he has made immortal. That he was not altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his references to them in his _Grand Testament_, though Stevenson was inclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind of mockery and derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it will be remembered, was the _Rommant du Pet au Diable_, which Stevenson refers to again and again as an "improper romance." Mr. Stacpoole has done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that the _Rommant_ was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic--possibly witty enough--on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians of Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendency to justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's only known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he must have been acting on the defensive, because, "since the earliest times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack--chiefly the attack of wolves and dogs"--one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile.

I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse Villon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence that acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well as a dagger. Nor does it seem to, me quite fair to blame, as Mr.

Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de Vaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles--what a poem her very name is!-may, for all one knows, have had the best of reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet "like dirty linen on the washing-board." We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:--

Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December.

All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her absence Villon and a member of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark of one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the College de Navarre.

This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his _Pet.i.t Testament_, and skipped from Paris.

We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we know whether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in reputable idleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to Charles of Orleans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this period. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans, for some cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he "could not even see the lightning of a thunderstorm," and kept him there for three months with "neither stool to sit nor bed to lie on, and nothing to eat but bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers." Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes his _Grand Testament_ a "De Profundis"

without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr.

Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and old.

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint against the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. But to recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. He knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomes the servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of "la belle Heaulmiere" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to hideousness--her once fair limbs become "speckled like sausages"?

"La Grosse Margot" alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her name with Villon's:--

Ordure amons, ordure nous affuyt; Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt, En ce bordeau, ou tenons nostre estat.