Part 6 (1/2)
In such scenes as these contests with bears, wolves, lions, crocodiles, the Baron is the chief actor, plays the part of comedian, but he is big enough to shed round himself a zone of comic light. The giant makes comedy as he walks; notably in St Petersburg, he runs from a mad dog, discarding his fur coat in his hurry, and that, so far as he is concerned, is the end of the adventure. But a comic fate pursues Munchausen, for his fur coat, bitten by the mad dog, develops hydrophobia, leaps at and destroys companion clothing, until its master arrives in time to see it 'falling upon a fine full-dress suit which _he_ shook and tossed in an unmerciful manner.' That is an example of the comic zone in which Munchausen revolves; round him the inanimate breathes, is animated by his own life-l.u.s.t until the 'it' of things vanishes into the magic 'he.'
It is a pity, from the purely comic point of view, that the Baron should so uniformly dominate circ.u.mstances. A victorious hero is seldom so mirth-making as is the ridiculous and ridiculed Tartarin; we find relief when Munchausen fails to throw a piece of ordnance across the Dardanelles, and when he shatters his chariot against the rock he thus decapitates and makes into Table Mountain. His failure, injurious to his gigantic quality, is essential to his comic quality, for the reader often cries out, in presence of his flaming victories: Accursed sun!
Will you never set? But the sun of Munchausen will never set. For a moment it may be obscured by a pa.s.sing cloud, while its powerful rays rebelliously glow through the clot of mist and maintain the outline of the Baron's wicked little eye, but set it cannot: is it not in its master's power to juggle with moons and arrest the steeds of Apollo?
DemiG.o.dly, the giant must see but not judge, for one cannot judge when one is so far away. Thus Munchausen has but few sneers for little mankind; he observes that the people of an island choose as governors a man and his wife who were 'plucking cuc.u.mbers on a tree' because they fell from the tree on the tyrant of the isle and destroyed him, but he does not seem to see anything singular in this method of government. Nor has he an express scoff for the College of Physicians because no deaths happened on earth while it was suspended in the air. The scoff is there, but it is not expressed by Munchausen; he takes the earth in his hand, remarks 'Odd machine, this,' and lays it down again. And it may be too much to say 'odd'; though Munchausen expresses astonishment from time to time it is not vacuous astonishment; it is reasonable, measured astonishment, that of a modern tourist in Baedekerland. Thus, in his view, politicians, rulers, pedagogues, apothecaries, explorers are not subjects for his sling: they are curiosities.
He stares at these curiosities with simple wonder. He does not see the world as a joke, but as an earnest and extraordinary thing. He is always ready to be mildly surprised and he is never sceptical; that is, he never doubts the possibility of the impossible when it happens to him: he gravely doubts it when it happens to anybody else. Thus it is clear that he does not think much of Mr Lemuel Gulliver, that his chief enemy is his old rival Baron de Tott. If he were not so polite Munchausen would call de Tott a plain liar; he refrains and merely outstrips the upstart, as a gentleman should do. Munchausen sees the world in terms of himself; he would have no faith in the marvellous escapes of von Trenck, Jack Sheppard, and Monte Cristo. 'I,' says Munchausen, and the rivals may withdraw. He does not even fear imitation, and if he were confronted with d.i.c.kens's story of the lunars in _Household Words_, or with his French imitator, M. de Crac, he would chivalrously say: 'Most creditable, but I....' Nothing in Munchausen is so colossal as his 'I.'
Like the Gauls he fears naught, save that the sky will fall upon his head, and I am not sure that he fears even that: the accident might enable him to make interesting notes on heaven.
There is, perhaps, unjustified levity in this surmise of mine, for Munchausen is a pious man. When, in Russia, he covers an old man with his cloak, a voice from heaven calls to him: 'You will be rewarded, my son, for this in time.' It must have been the voice of St Hubert, the patron to whom Munchausen readily paid his homage, for Munchausen simply believed in him, liked to think that 'some pa.s.sionate holy sportsman, or sporting abbot or bishop, may have shot, planted, and fixed the cross between the antlers of St Hubert's stag.' But his piety is personal; he believes that the voice is for him alone, that St Hubert is his own saint. Gigantic Munchausen shuts out his own view of the world. His shadow falls upon and obscures it. That is why he so continuously brags.
The most resolute horseman shrinks from a wild young horse, but Munchausen tames him in half an hour and makes him dance on the tea-table without breaking a single cup; the Grand Seignior discards his own envoy and employs him on State business at Cairo; he makes a cannon off a cannon-ball, 'having long studied the art of gunnery'; he does away (in his third edition) with the French persecutors of Marie Antoinette. He, always he, is the actor; he is not the chief actor, he is the sole actor, and the rest of the world is the audience.
So simply and singly does he believe in himself that his gigantic quality is a.s.sured. He disdains to imitate; when confined in the belly of the great fish he does not wait like Sindbad, or wait and pray like Jonah: Baron Munchausen dances a hornpipe. He is quite sure that he will escape from the fish: the fish is large, but not large enough to contain the spirit of a Munchausen; and he is sure that the story is true. There is nothing in any adventure to show that the Baron doubted its accuracy, and we must not conclude from his threat in Chapter VIII.: 'If any gentleman will say he doubts the truth of this story, I will fine him a gallon of brandy and make him drink it at one draught,' that he knew himself for a liar. As a man of the world he recognised that his were wonderful stories, and he expected to encounter unbelief, but he did not encounter it within himself. No, Munchausen accepted his own enormity, gravely believed that he 'made it a rule always to speak within compa.s.s.' If he winked at the world as he told his tales it was not because he did not believe in them; he winked because he was gay and, mischievously enough, liked to keep the world on the tenterhooks of scepticism and gullibility. He did not even truckle to his audience, try to be in any way consistent; thus, when entangled with the eagle he rides in the branches of a tree, he dares not jump for fear of being killed ... while he has previously fallen with impunity some five miles, on his descent from the moon, with such violence as to dig a hole nine fathoms deep.
No, this precursor of Bill Adams, who saved Gibraltar for General Elliott, simply believed. Like Falstaff, like Tartarin, he suffered from mirage; though some of his adventures are dreams, monstrous pictures of facts so small that we cannot imagine them, others are but the distortions of absolutely historic affairs. No doubt Munchausen saw a lion fight a crocodile: it needed no gigantic flight for him to believe that he cut off the lion's head while it was still alive, if he actually cut it off 'to make sure' when it was dead; and though he did not tie his horse to a snow-surrounded steeple, he may have tied him to a post and found, in the morning, that the snow had so thawed as to leave the horse on a taut bridle; a.s.suredly he did not kill seventy-three brace of wildfowl with one shot, but the killing of two brace was a feat n.o.ble enough to be magnified into the slaughter of a flight.
Munchausen lied, but he lied honestly, that is to himself before all men. For he was a gentleman, a gentleman of high lineage the like of whom rode and drove in numbers along the eighteenth century roads. His own career, or rather that of his historian, Raspe,[8] harmonises with his personal characteristics, reveals his Teutonic origin, and it matters little whether he was the German 'Munchausen' or the Dutch Westphalian 'Munnikhouson.' The first sentence of his first chapter tells of his beard; his family pride stares us everywhere in the face; Munchausen claims descent from the wife of Uriah (and he might have been innocent enough to accept Ananias as a forbear), and knows that _n.o.blesse oblige_, for, says he to the Lady Fragantia when receiving from her a plume: 'I swear ... that no savage, tyrant, or enemy upon the face of the earth shall despoil me of this favour, while one drop of the blood of the Munchausens doth circulate in my veins!' Quixotic Munchausen, it is well that you should, in later adventures, meet and somewhat humiliate the Spanish Don. For you are a gentleman of no English and cold-blooded pattern, even though you buy your field-gla.s.ses at Dollonds's and doubtless your clothes at the top of St James's Street. Too free, too unrestrained to be English you maintain an air of fas.h.i.+on, you wors.h.i.+p at the shrine of any Dulcinea.
[Footnote 8: See Mr Thomas Seccombe's brilliant introduction to the Lawrence and Bullen edition, 1895.]
Munchausen has no use for women, save as objects for wors.h.i.+p; they must not serve, or co-operate; for him they are inspiration, beautiful things before whom he bows, whom he compliments in fulsome wise; he is preoccupied by woman whenever he is not in the field; he has chivalrous oaths for others than the Lady Fragantia; he makes the horse mount the tea-table for the ladies' pleasure; he receives gracefully the proposals of Catherine of Russia; he is the favourite of the Grand Seignior's favourite; he is haunted by the Lady Fragantia, who was 'like a summer's morning, all blus.h.i.+ng and full of dew.'
Polite and gallant as any cavalier, Munchausen carries in him the soul of a professor; he is minute, he kills no two score beasts, but exactly forty-one; every little thing counts for him, as if he were a student: Montgolfier and his balloon, architecture, and the amazing etymology for which 'Vide Otrckocsus de Orig-Hung.' A swordsman and a scholar he recalls those reiters who fled from kings into monasteries, there to labour as Benedictines. And he has Teutonic appet.i.tes. Indeed nothing is so Germanic as the Baron's perpetual concern with food: he remembers how good was the cherry-sauce made from the cherries that grew out of the stag's forehead; he gloats over a continent of cheese and a sea of wine; even on eagleback he finds bladders of gin and good roast-beef-fruit; bread-fruit, plum-pudding-fruit (hot), Cape wine, Candian sugar, frica.s.see of pistols, pistol-bullets, gunpowder sauce, all these figure in his memoirs. And if, sometimes, he is a little gross, as when he stops a leak in a s.h.i.+p by sitting upon it, which he can do because he is of Dutch extraction, he confirms completely the impression we have of him: a gallant gentleman, brave in the field, l.u.s.ty at the trencher, gay in the boudoir.
Good Munchausen, you strut large about the Kingdom of Loggerheads, debonair, tolerant, confident; you believe in yourself, because so large that you cannot overlook yourself; you believe in yourself because you tower and thus amaze humanity; and you believe in yourself because you are as enormously credulous as you would have us be. Thus, because you believe in yourself, you are: you need no Berkeley to demonstrate you.
The Esperanto of Art
It is established and accepted to-day that a painter may not like music, that a writer may yawn in a picture-gallery: though we proclaim that art is universal, it certainly is not universal for the universe. This should not surprise us who know that van Gogh wrote: 'To paint and to love women is incompatible'; van Gogh was right for himself, which does not mean that he was right for everybody, and I will not draw from his dictum the probably incorrect conclusion that 'To paint and to love literature is incompatible.' But van Gogh, who had not read Bergson, was indicating clearly enough that he knew he must ca.n.a.lise his powers, therefore exclude from his emotional purview all things which did not appertain directly to his own form of art.
Form of art! Those three words hold the difficulty of mutual understanding among artists. While sympathising with van Gogh in his xenophobia, I cannot accept that because certain artists did not appreciate certain forms of art, no artist can understand another whose form is alien to him. There is, there must be a link between the painter, the sculptor, the writer, the musician, the actor, between the poet in words and the one, to-day most common, who wishes to express himself in the deeds of his own life. For art is, we are a.s.sured thereof, all of one stuff. A symphony and a poem may be allotropic forms of the same matter: to use a common simile, there is red phosphorus and there is yellow, but both are phosphorus. Likewise there are different forms of art, but there is only one art.
It is important that artists should understand one another so that conflict may arise from their impressions, so that they may form a critical brotherhood. Some, to-day, are able to grasp one another's meaning and yet find it difficult, because every form of art has its own jargon, to express what they mean; they can grasp that the painter equally with the writer is striving to express himself, but they fail to phrase their appreciation and their criticism because writers cannot talk of ma.s.ses or painters of style. There stands between them a hedge of technique; so thick is it that often they cannot see the spirit of the works; their difficulty is one of terms. Now I do not suggest that the musician should study Praxiteles and himself carve marble; he is better employed expressing his own pa.s.sion in the Key of C. But I do feel that if technical terms are the preserve of each form of art, general terms are not; that _continuity_, _rhythm_, _harmony_, to quote but a few, have a precise meaning, that they are inherent in no form of art because they are inherent in art itself.
The following, then, is a forlorn attempt to find the common language, the esperanto of art. It is made up of general terms (in italics); it represents no more than a personal point of view, and is for this reason laid down in a tentative spirit: it is not a solution but a finger-post.
Order being a necessary antidote for the abstruse, I have divided the terms into groups, according to their nature, to the dimension they affect or the matter to which they refer. Following this line of thought we find that works of art affect us in virtue of four properties: their power, their logic, their movement, and their att.i.tude; this leads us to four groups of properties:--
Group A. (Volumetric): _Concentration_, _Relief_, _Density_, _Depth_.
Group B. (Linear): _Linking Continuity_.
Group C. (Kinetic): _Rhythm_, _Intensity_, _Reaction_, _Key_, _Culmination_.
Group D. (Static): _Grace_, _Balance_, _Harmony_.
This is a rough cla.s.sification, for an opera does not necessarily compare with a square rood of paint or a novel of Tolstoyan length; indeed, on the volumetric basis, an opera may have less bulk than a sonnet.
Group A. (Volumetric). By _concentration_ we mean the quality of conveying a great deal within a small s.p.a.ce. It follows that _concentration_ is in inverse ratio to area, though it does not follow that area is in inverse ratio to _concentration_. While _Anna Karenin_ is an enormous novel it is as concentrated as the sonnet of d'Arvers; on the other hand, Francis Thompson's _Arab Love Song_ is more concentrated than the complete works of Mrs Barclay; while any Rubens is more concentrated than a modern miniature, an intaglio may be more concentrated than twenty square yards of Delacroix. We nullify areas, therefore, and must lay down that the test of concentration is the effect: if the painter realises that the author has felt all he wrote, if the writer sees that every line was necessary, then both can be sure that they are respectively in presence of concentrated works.
Likewise with _relief_. A bas-relief may have none. A fresco may.