The Art Of Letters Part 10

There are few greater ironies in history than that the modern Conservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves. One finds even the _Morning Post_--which someone has aptly enough named the _Morning Prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _A Voyage to Houyhnhnms_ in the list of sound Tories. It is undeniable that Swift wrote pamphlets for the Tory Party of his day. A Whig, he turned from the Whigs of Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of his life. If we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do we find were the chief political ideals for which Swift stood? His politics, as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of a pacifist and a Home Ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodox Tories of our own time. Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of those rare periods at which it was a peace party. _The Conduct of the Allies_ was simply a demand for a premature peace. Worse than this, it was a pamphlet against England's taking part in a land-war on the Continent instead of confining herself to naval operations. "It was the kingdom's misfortune," wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough's element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country." Whether Swift and the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is a question into which I do not propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasize the fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory point of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, doc.u.ment. Were anything like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence of the Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes of war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is trying to convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master:

Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living.

There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for "places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a twentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word.

As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from London. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the causes of a nation's thriving--

... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments.

He said of the Irish:

We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by doctors at a distance, strangers to their const.i.tution and the nature of their disease.

In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland. He declared that all reason was on the side of Ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for Ireland's servitude. "The arguments on both sides," he said in a pa.s.sage which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between England and Ireland, were "invincible":

For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.

It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's pa.s.sionate championship of the "one single man in his shirt." One wishes very earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern Conservative party. Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may infer from Mr. Gerard's recent revelations, there might have been no European war.

Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as a man of letters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party politician. The present book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen lecture which he delivered at Cambridge a few months ago. It was bound, therefore, to be predominantly literary in interest. At the same time, Mr. Whibley's political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent about. His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence with which we find ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is too single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean without clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. He seems to think that the only alternative to the att.i.tude of Dean Swift towards humanity is the att.i.tude of persons who, "feigning a bland and general love of abtract humanity ... wreak a wild revenge upon individuals." He apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish well to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to John, Peter and Thomas in particular. Here are some of Mr. Whibley's rather wild comments on this topic. He writes:

We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best he is content with a moral maxim, and b.u.t.tons up his pocket in the presence of poverty. "I _give_ thee sixpence! I will see thee d.a.m.ned first!" It is not for nothing that Canning's immortal words were put in the mouth of the Friend of Humanity, who, finding that he cannot turn the Needy Knife Grinder to political account, give him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of Republican enthusiasm." Such is the Friend of Man at his best.

"At his best" is good. It makes one realize that Mr. Whibley is merely playing a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard. His indictment of humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as would an indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn. One has only to mention Sh.e.l.ley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr.

Whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling.

With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view of politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his pa.s.sion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors.

His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment.

We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the prattle of the _Journal to Stella_. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour is essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It is the essential n.o.bleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the Houyhnhnms a n.o.ble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are people who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive persons to live!

(2) SHAKESPEARE

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards their att.i.tude to his electioneering activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be misunderstood. To be great is a.s.suredly to be misunderstood by Mr.

Whibley.

I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in his volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever ill.u.s.trator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr. Whibley, plunging blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place. "Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?" Had Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it, Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are any moderns who come under the n.o.ble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr.

Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinate career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote:

They tax our policy, and call it cowardice; Count wisdom as no member of the war; Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand; the still and mental parts-- That do contrive how many hands shall strike, When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-- Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.

They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: So that the ram, that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, They place before his hand that made the engine, Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution.

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of the author of the _Letters of an Englishman_.

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal a.s.siduity in regard to _Coriola.n.u.s_. He treats this play, not as a play about Coriola.n.u.s, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriola.n.u.s. He has not been initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses Coriola.n.u.s's patrician pride than he endorses Oth.e.l.lo's jealousy or Macbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting n.o.ble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize with Coriola.n.u.s in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as from most men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriola.n.u.s to become a traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr.

Whibley) for enthusiasm. "Shakespeare," cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes some of Coriola.n.u.s's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off.

He pursues it with an irony of scorn." "There in a few lines," he writes of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the courage of its own opinions." It would be interesting to know whether in Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriola.n.u.s's hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of such a gospel in _Coriola.n.u.s_. Certainly, the mother of Coriola.n.u.s, who was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very opposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriola.n.u.s that his triumph over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence:

The man was n.o.ble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroyed his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr'd.

Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the ma.s.s of human beings so excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of Coriola.n.u.s's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriola.n.u.s too scrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.

But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not move in that large Shakespearean world in which ill.u.s.trious men salute their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of

He was the n.o.blest Roman of them all.

The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox does not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of human nature to write well on Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says:

He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe to England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France, each in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news." After Valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy. "No public event," he wrote, "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. I could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment."

It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America, Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own time have been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys of Germany. So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see no reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. He believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley has certainly the mind of a German professor. His vehemence against the Germans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German professor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him. "Why then," he asks,

should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage.

Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of hunger.... No doubt, if they came to these sh.o.r.es, they would feed their fury by scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over Shakespeare's works.

Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs.

He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the knee to an insolent alien.

This is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a Tory Thersites. This pa.s.sage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr.

Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatrical Jolly-Rogerism.

XV.--THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world as beautiful as an illuminated ma.n.u.script. He loved the bright colours, the gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed itself. His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. His pa.s.sion for trappings--and what fine trappings!--is admirably suggested by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr. Compton-Rickett's _William Morris: a Study in Personality_. Morris he declares, was in his opinion "no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich colours of stained gla.s.s falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not scamped." To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the very handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age." Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy of Utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is capable.

It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men should have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. Mackail's biography and Mr. Compton-Rickett's study. Obviously, he was a man with whom generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he sold the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. On the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti's famous a.s.sertion: "Top"--the general nickname for Morris--"never gives money to a beggar."

Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti's statement as expressive of Morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. Mr.

Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "The number of 'beggars,'" he affirms, "who called at his house and went away rewarded were legion."

Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: "They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready."

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that--to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett--"human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth--when he gushed into "dearests" in his letters--we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds of Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were Pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as "the rare distance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life long." One thinks of him in his work as a child with a box of paints--an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. He could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "Much of his literary work was done on buses and in trains." His poetry is often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "His best work," as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, "reads like happy improvisations." He had a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into his studio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a panel." "It's all right," he a.s.sured the scared model, who was preparing to fly; "it's all right--_something_ had to give way." The same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains--his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like a table on four legs: a d.a.m.ned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," flung at him. He enjoyed the expression of knock-out opinions such as: "I always bless G.o.d for making anything so strong as an onion!" He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness. He took a young boy's pleasure in showing off the strength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get hold of it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience."

He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance of his emotions." Possibly there was something high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, "he would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop." It seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett's book, that "William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong, unvarnished oak--nothing of the elm about him." But we can forgive Mr. Burns's imperfect judgment in grat.i.tude for the sentences that follow:

There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good.

I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town Planning Act for which I am responsible.

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns's reference to him as a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a master artisan, if I may claim that dignity"?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher--whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching--who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success and failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things--has a unique attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett's book I was full of hope that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris's evangelistic personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail's distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham's introduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr.

Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says of Morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all the Waverley novels, and many of Marryat's," Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely writes: "He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost before he could lisp their names." That is typical of Mr.

Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at--and certainly achieves--a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common bond unites all these men--d.i.c.kens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high up in the air." The landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And the criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For instance:

A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty Morris has no superior.