Part 17 (1/2)
The habit of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120] I shall pa.s.s to diseases which are more particularly modern, and with which directness is equally at war.
[120] _The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us_, pp. 74 ff.
The richness of the English language is in itself a danger. English, like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacity discovered by the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have exploited the musical quality of English. This is clear from such a collection as the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_, which faithfully represents the output of the age, and contains some fine poetry, but also a very large percentage of what Horace called, _Versus inopes rerum nugaeque canorae_. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little bread among the imitators of Tennyson. To such rhetorical or musical trifles no better antidote can be found than Greek literature, for there is no rhetoric in it, and what melodious nothings it contained, were parodied in its own age and have scantily survived to ours. In general it avoided both by its directness. The rhetoric of Lucan or Byron, the predominance of sound over sense in some of Sh.e.l.ley and much of Swinburne arise because those poets shut their eyes to the real world and become lost in the music of words. The Greek, starting with facts, not with sounds or with feelings about facts, could not easily become the victim of words. The temptation did not arise for him, or if it did, his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pa.s.s into an unearthly paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her communication with it open.
Directness is also a protection against that literature of egotism which is the excess into which subjective poetry easily falls. Legitimate when kept within bounds, the habit of putting oneself into what one writes can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at times a total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of Carlyle's pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as much as of morals, and has its peculiar effect and its appropriate penalty. Its effect is to distract a man's attention from major to minor issues, from the large world to the small self; its penalty is that it wearies its audience, and the next generation, if not its own, dislikes the continual obtrusion of an element in which it has no interest. Hence oblivion, often unjust, is the punishment which the egotist suffers.
Even our age, interested as it is in personalities, has little time to spare for those of Byron or Carlyle; it is too busy with the characters of its own contemporaries to trouble about those of its predecessors.
But no Greek writer is forgotten for this cause. Whatever their other offences, the Greeks are free from literary egotism. Directness turned their eyes to the external world, and taught them to see even themselves from without.
Egotism is a minor defect in English literature. To some it may even seem to be a virtue. A more serious weakness, which our literature shares with other modern literatures, is one-sidedness or incompleteness of view, which reveals itself by a series of reactions, and in England has taken the form of an oscillation between sentimentalism and a rather cruel realism, the latter being dominant at the present time. These two schools represent excesses of temperament, the one of generosity and kindliness, the other of truth; and among our writers of genius d.i.c.kens and Hardy typify them well. The one school desire in fiction to reward their good characters and punish the bad, just as they would wish that life should do; and truth is not allowed to thwart their benevolence or their indignation. In defiance of all probability Micawber and Mr. Mell make a success of life in Australia, though truth cries out that they were born to be failures; while the foot of punishment moves more swiftly and visibly in the pages of d.i.c.kens than it does in fact. Then comes the veracious person, who, growing indignant at a travesty of life that misleads the reader and insults truth, gives us the opposite extreme in an imagined world where the shadows are deepened and the high lights carefully blocked out. Scott and d.i.c.kens picture a world in which at the end vice finds itself in the gutter while virtue marries the heroine. Later, Thomas Hardy has given us _Jude the Obscure_ and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.[121] Here is a protest, a redressing of the balance, by an advocate who rises to supply a side of the case which has been ignored. Yet once again Truth is violated, and by her sworn servant; for the world that Hardy portrays is not the world as it is.
When d.i.c.kens makes Mr. Micawber the District Magistrate of Port Middlebay, he is not representing life, but saying what he and his audience would like to believe in order to feel comfortable when they close the book. As a protest therefore against him in the next generation comes Thomas Hardy, who after recording the miserable end of Tess, writes 'The President of the immortals had ended his sport with Tess'. In so writing he is no true recorder any more than was d.i.c.kens, but the self-appointed Judge of a universe which he conceives to be cruel.
[121] In these novels and in _The Dynasts_ Mr. Hardy allows his personal views to depress one side of the scales: in his lesser novels he has often shown that he can hold the balance even. This distinction should be borne in mind in all the criticisms of his work, which I have ventured to make.
Neither d.i.c.kens nor Hardy can be called unveracious writers; both give a picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs less by distortion than by omission; he sees one side of life, but at the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and largely true of all, that they see life steadily and see it whole. Still less can this be said of their followers, who, after the fas.h.i.+on of disciples, imitate and develop their defects, and oscillate between sentimental falsity, and the starkness and brutality which have been familiar in English literature during the last twenty years and in French literature for a much longer period. None of these writers, not even the best, is direct. Like d.i.c.kens, they consult their generous hearts, or, worse, ask: 'Can truth be told without making the public angry?' Or, like Hardy, they veil a didactic purpose under the name of realism, and register a bitter personal protest against the cruelty of life. In either case they narrow their view, and see the world through a mist of temperament.
This point may be ill.u.s.trated by examining a famous pa.s.sage from Homer, and then asking how a sentimental and a realistic writer might have treated it. Imagine the death of Hector in the hands of d.i.c.kens or Hardy. The first most probably would not have permitted it to occur, or, if he had, would have made Achilles the villain of the piece and emphasized and developed the tragedy in the manner of his death scenes, till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would have made the tragedy more tragic, and the brutality more brutal. It is thus that he has treated the death of Jude. By so doing, both d.i.c.kens and Hardy in their different ways, would have been allowing their own personalities rather than the facts to speak, and, seeing only one side of the story, would have made it less complicated than life and less complete. But in the _Iliad_ we see nothing of Homer's personality and hear no voice but that of the facts. The story tells itself without the heightening of artifice. The two men are brought before our eyes--Hector, the last hope of Troy, with his wife and child waiting for him at home--Achilles, mad with the memory of his dead friend. There is no judgement and no comment, but only the thing as it was.
To those who would maintain that d.i.c.kens or Hardy give an accurate picture of the world, there are two answers. First, their world is not the world as Shakespeare or Meredith sees it; this for many persons will be a sufficient disproof of its reality. Second, the history of English and French literatures has been for the last 150 years a history of successive reactions. The cla.s.sical school was followed by the romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some excess to provoke them. The existence of a reaction is a symptom of disease, and not only would it never take place apart from disease, but there is always a chance that it may go too far; for as in the body, so in the world of letters, a balance once disturbed is difficult to restore. But Greek literature, unlike our own and unlike French, at no stage developed by reaction. Its epic poets are followed by the lyrists and these by the tragedians: tragedy pa.s.ses into the New Comedy, which is followed by the learned and artistic poetry of Alexandria. In prose the unperiodic style of Herodotus is succeeded by the style of Thucydides; while Plato and the various orators develop different types of writing. None of these styles, however, and none of these writers, are in reaction against one another. Some traces of reaction against the Homeric outlook of Sophocles may perhaps be found in Euripides. But this contrast lies between two individual writers and not between two literary schools, and has no a.n.a.logy with the relation of the romantic to the cla.s.sical or to the realist movements. It is far less marked, for instance, than the contrast between Voltaire and Victor Hugo or that between Victor Hugo and Flaubert. There is no reaction in the development of Greek literature, because at no stage is there any excess to react from; and there is no excess, because the Greek writers are direct and objective, because they are mirrors that reflect life, not imperfect lenses that distort it each according to its own imperfection.
The literature of the Elizabethans here resembles Greek. It is indeed more wayward, more fanciful, more personal, more luxuriant than the Greek; but it is on the whole more disinterested, freer from any didactic bent, more inclined to contemplate life for its own sake than the literature of any succeeding epoch in England. Since the Puritans a didactic strain has continually appeared in our writers. We have had revolts and protests, and then, by reaction, more protests and revolts.
However admirable in morals, this Protestantism is injurious in literature, for, like all rebellions, it ends in excess and destroys the even-balanced temper which is essential to the creation of the greatest literature. This didactic temper, often disguised as realism, has never been stronger than in our own age, when many who might have found their profession in the Churches are diverted to other paths and seek in literature an outlet that in the past would have been found in the pulpit. Messrs. Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy--to mention no others--are parsons _manques_, who were designed by nature to write not plays or novels but sermons. Or rather they are dual personalities: clergyman and creative writer have been combined in them and the clergyman has corrupted the poet. The unsatisfied appet.i.te for preaching which a hundred years ago would have been quieted by writing an evangelical tract, to-day issues in a novel or a play. The moral differs, the form changes, the intention and temper are the same.
It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of it: we, on the other hand, can learn something from their intellectual disinterestedness which in political and social controversies would make opposing views more intelligible and the path to truth easier and plainer, in literature would free us from excesses that are followed by reaction to a contrary excess, and in national life would guard us from the materialism which besets an industrial and commercial age. It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.
The last quality of Greek literature of which I wish to speak is not one which we should expect to find in combination with truthfulness; it is certainly very rare in modern realists. Yet the Greek instinct for beauty is beyond question. There is the evidence of Winckelmann, who, living in a world that had forgotten Greek, rediscovered it; or of Keats, who was not brought up to the familiarity with Greek that breeds obtuseness and indifference, but made acquaintance with it when he was of an age to judge. The impression made both on Keats and Winckelmann is that of a new and surpa.s.sing beauty. There is the evidence of 'the beautiful mythology of Greece',[122] the offspring of an untaught folk-imagination, and so far richer in the quality of beauty than the mythology of the North. Even in the sawdust of a mythological dictionary the stories of Atalanta, Narcissus, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, Phaethon, Medusa keep their magic.
[122] Keats, _Preface to Endymion_.
The following extract from the hymn of Demeter may ill.u.s.trate this beauty, though it is not one of the greatest pa.s.sages of Greek literature and its writer is unknown. It is the story of the Earth Mother and her daughter Persephone:
?? ??d??e??
??pa?e?, d??e? de a???t?p?? e????pa ?e??, pa????sa? ?????s? s?? O?ea??? a?????p???
a??ea t' a???e???, ??da ?a? ?????? ?d' ?a ?a?a ?e???' a a?a??? ?a? a?a???da? ?d' ?a??????
?a???ss?? ?', ?? f?se d???? ?a????p?d? ?????
Ga?a ???? ????s? ?a????e?? ????de?t?, ?a?ast?? ?a????ta? sea? t? ?e pas?? ?des?a?
a?a?at??? te ?e??? ?de ???t??? a????p????
t?? ?a? ap? ????? ??at?? ?a?a e?epef??e?, ???' ?d?st' ?d?, pa? d' ???a??? e???? ?pe??e ?a?a te pa?' e?e?a.s.se ?a? ?????? ??da ?a?a.s.s??.
? d' a?a ?a?sa?' ??e?at? ?e?s?? ?' af?
?a??? a???a ?ae??? ?a?e de ???? e???a???a ??s??? a ped???, t? ????se? a?a? ????de???
?pp??? a?a?at??s?[123]
{hen Aidoneus herpaxen, doken de baryktypos euryopa Zeus, paizousan kouresi syn okeanou bathykolpois anthea t' ainymenen, rhoda kai krokon ed' ia kala leimon' am malakon kai agallidas ed' hyakinthon narkisson th', hon physe dolon kalukopidi koure Gaia Dios boulesi charizomene Polydekte, thaumaston ganoonta; sebas to ge pasin idesthai athanatois te theois ede thnetois anthropois; tou kai apo rhizes hekaton kara exepephykei, koz' hedist' odme, pas d' ouranos eurys hyperthe gaia te pas' egela.s.se kai halmyron oidma thala.s.ses.