Visions and Revisions Part 6

It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not _interesting_ enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it is _that_ which is lacking.

Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but one thing he did not avoid--the innocence of unmitigated foolishness!

He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life that Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the world with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its by-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its Circuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey"

among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish, wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just those side-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figures traced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law and the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.

d.i.c.kENS

It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief"

for d.i.c.kens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give one's personal appreciation that kind of form.

d.i.c.kens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of s.e.x, for instance, or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with s.e.x, in our desire to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously handicapped.

Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy,"

d.i.c.kens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so dominate, for instance, his mere "ill.u.s.trators," as to mesmerize them completely into his manner. And certainly his ill.u.s.trators are _drugged_ with the d.i.c.kens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their author?

Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and d.i.c.k Swiveller and Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment, horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed "unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial h.e.l.l. Much wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in d.i.c.kens--in his style, his method, his vision, his art--actually appeals to one particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination.

Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But d.i.c.kens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde--that Uranian Baby--or as Paul Verlaine--that little "pet lamb" of G.o.d--felt themselves to be childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing more than middle-aged people's d.a.m.ned affectations. The children's cult at the present day plays strange tricks.

But d.i.c.kens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authentic reaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by "New Educational Methods," glutted with toys, depraved by "understanding sympathy," and worn out by performances of "Peter Pan," believe--really and truly--in fairies any more? But, in spite of sentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "It doesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" and cultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlings cold to t.i.tania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies, with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabit and the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decorated beyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. They will dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They will talk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And all will go well with "the Child in the House," even if he has not so much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!

If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read d.i.c.kens, they would know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and "aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people never dream of. d.i.c.kens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Pa.s.sage. And G.o.d knows whither it comes or where it goes!

To endow the little every-day objects that surround us--a certain picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow, a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it--with the fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and that is what d.i.c.kens does. It is, of course, something not confined to people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag, Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!

And that is why, to me, d.i.c.kens is so great a writer. Since men have come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms and pa.s.sages and windows and bas.e.m.e.nts have come to mean more to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and murmur in its shadows!

How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some tall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surely there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and shutter-c.h.i.n.ks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond interpretation!

It is not only children--and yet it is children most of all--who get the sense, in a weird, sudden flash, of the demonic life of inanimate things. Why are our houses so full of things that one had better not look at, things that, like the face of Salome, had better be seen in mirrors, and things that must be forbidden to look at us? The houses of mortal men are strange places. They are sepulchres and cemeteries. Dungeons are they, and prison cells. Not one of them but have murderous feet going up and down. Not one of them but have lavisher's hands, fumbling, back and forth, along the walls. For the secret wishes, and starved desires, and mad cravings, and furious revolts, of the hearts of men and women, living together decently in their "homes," grow by degrees palpable and real and gather to themselves strange shapes.

No writer who has ever lived can touch d.i.c.kens in indicating this sort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror. For it is children, more than any, who are conscious how "haunted" all manner of places and things are. And people themselves! The searching psychologists are led singularly astray. They peer and pry and repine, and all the while the real essence of the figure lies in its momentary expression--in its most superficial gesture.

d.i.c.kens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds nothing but monstrous exaggeration here--and fantastic mummery.

If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there was--"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are right. d.i.c.kens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits the mark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There is something more whimsical, more capricious, more _unreal,_ than philosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People are actually--as every child knows--much worse and much better than they "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune their souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People _think_ with their bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.

The world of d.i.c.kens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." He seems to go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing k.n.o.bs, jags, wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snouts into terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what we actually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, are we to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautiful people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic people. d.i.c.kens is never more childlike than when he draws us, wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin, or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from the rattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone.

Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as wear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It is wonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest is left in life, when you have eliminated "s.e.x," suppressed "psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of G.o.d! How unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!

Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--the adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion, full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to respond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!

Long reading of d.i.c.kens' books, like long living with children, gives one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is to be taken for what it is--an extraordinary Pantomime. The people who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists--but, G.o.d help them! they are not in the game.

The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particular city leads us further. d.i.c.kens has managed to get the inner ident.i.ty of London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else; as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly.

One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it is something else also. More than any place on earth it seems to have that weight, that ma.s.s, that depth, that foursquare solidity, which rea.s.sures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. It descends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives one the impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity, upon which, for all its acc.u.mulated litter and debris, man will be able to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata.

And d.i.c.kens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of this t.i.tanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, its alleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, its circuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as the human atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinning crowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole," we cannot but feel that somehow we _must_ gather strength and friendliness enough to applaud such a tremendous Performance.

d.i.c.kens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the town alone. There are _suggestions_ of his, relating to country roads and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except, perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism"

into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that d.i.c.kens alone among writers seems to understand.

A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there; with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide marsh-land--like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"--with I know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that to some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind when all else of their country journey is forgotten.

There is no one but d.i.c.kens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into wistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--as in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in d.i.c.kens will say something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in street and tavern, that art itself "gives up," and applauds, speechless.

After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author, undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remain a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!

Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death.

One never forgets death in reading d.i.c.kens. He has a thought, a pity, for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still, while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of our mortality's last jest.

And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Every poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of them by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed.

There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while d.i.c.kens is their "Manager," Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or long without their applause!

He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--and what would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a sprinkling of that ingredient!

He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.

He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a melodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama.

And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little Showman do the same?

GOETHE

As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after these years--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciate ogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart he bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved, yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research; but the other, raised aloft, n.o.ble and welcoming, carries the laurel crown of the triumph of Imagination!

So, between Truth and Poetry--"im ganzen guten, schonen,"--stands our Lord of Life!

Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, in its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.

Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first one impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then another--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One hears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often in these days. But "cosmic," with its Whitmanesque, modern connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When he did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of his Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--it was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at Stra.s.sburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!

I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away,"

or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean att.i.tude, cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing vague about Goethe's _intimacy,_ if I may put it so, with the Earth.

He and It seemed destined to understand one another most _serenely,_ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!

The Goethean att.i.tude to the Universe is too self-poised and self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment. It is too--what shall I say?--too sly and _demonic_--too much _inside_ the little secrets of the great Mother--to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of t.i.tanic whirlwind of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too far, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic, evaporates, like a thin stream of Parna.s.sian smoke.

How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is the _German_ in him.

For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman, Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who keep bowing to the ground and muttering "Olympian"!

Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too far when I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, something humorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough, with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakes him, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, in little pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity--a simplicity grave-eyed, portentious and solemn--almost like that of some great Infant-Faun, trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our human "Categorical Imperative"! World-child, as he was, the magic of the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange, dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we find him so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being he worshipped; and so transparently certain of his personal survival after Death!

There is no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history of our Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed of some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. There is much rea.s.surance in this. More than has been, perhaps, realized.

For it is probable that "in his caves of ice," Leonardo also felt himself indestructible by the Arch-Enemy. One thinks of those Cabalistic words of old Glanville, "Man does not yield himself to Death--save by the weakness of his mortal Will."

Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata; Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis of Plants; Goethe climbing Stra.s.sburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table; Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of n.o.ble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of Living!

How vividly returns to me--your pardon, reader!--the first time I read "The Sorrows of Werter" in that little "Three-penny" edition published by Messrs. Ca.s.sell! It was in a Barge, towed by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them--this is twenty-five years ago, reader!--a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand--and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered--as the friendly mists rose--under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern.