Adventures among Books

A >> Andrew Lang >> Adventures among Books


"Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I have been
saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The
number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
world of outward events."

Now for the anecdote--one of Mark Twain's.

Some years ago, Mark Twain published in _Harper's Magazine_ an article on
"Mental Telegraphy." He illustrated his meaning by a story of how he
once wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had popped into
his head between asleep and awake, to a friend on the other side of
America. He did not send the letter, but, by return of post, received
one from his friend. "Now, I'll tell you what he is going to say," said
Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his
friend's despatch, proved that they were essentially identical. This is
what he calls "Mental Telegraphy"; others call it "Telepathy," and the
term is merely descriptive.

Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should have
explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, and I
rather incline to think that he would have been right. But Mark Twain,
in his article on "Mental Telegraphy," cites Dr. Holmes for a story of
how he once, after dinner, as his letters came in, felt constrained to
tell, _a propos des bottes_, the story of the last challenge to judicial
combat in England (1817). He then opened a newspaper directed to him
from England, the _Sporting Times_, and therein his eyes lighted on an
account of this very affair--Abraham Thornton's challenge to battle when
he was accused of murder, in 1817. According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes
was disposed to accept "Mental Telegraphy" rather than mere chance as the
cause of this coincidence. Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to
have been a favourite of his. It occurs in, "The Professor," in the
fifth section. Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is
why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered
by the coincidence. There was enough of Cotton Mather in the man of
science to give him pause.

The form of Dr. Holmes's best known books, the set concerned with the
breakfast-table and "Over the Teacups," is not very fortunate. Much
conversation at breakfast is a weariness of the flesh. We want to eat
what is necessary, and then to go about our work or play. If American
citizens in a boarding-house could endure these long palavers, they must
have been very unlike the hasty feeders caricatured in "Martin
Chuzzlewit." Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast
parties in the Albany; but breakfast parties are obsolete--an
unregrettable parcel of things lost. The monologues, or dialogues, were
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but they have had a
vitality and a vogue far beyond those of the magazine _causerie_. Some
of their popularity they may owe to the description of the other
boarders, and to the kind of novel which connects the fortunes of these
personages. But it is impossible for an Englishman to know whether these
American types are exactly drawn or not. Their fortunes do not strongly
interest one, though the "Sculpin"--the patriotic, deformed Bostonian,
with his great-great-grandmother's ring (she was hanged for a witch)--is
a very original and singular creation. The real interest lies in the
wit, wisdom, and learning. The wit, now and then, seems to-day rather in
the nature of a "goak." One might give examples, but to do so seems ill-
natured and ungrateful.

There are some very perishable puns. The learning is not so _recherche_
as it appeared when we knew nothing of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef,
the author of a book against the persecution of witches. Calef, of
course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive him for refusing to see a
lady, known to Mr. Mather, who floated about in the air. That she did so
was no good reason for hanging or burning a number of parishioners; but,
did she float, and, if so, how? Mr. Calef said it would be a miracle, so
he declined to view the performance. His logic was thin, though of a
familiar description. Of all old things, at all events, Dr. Holmes was
fond. He found America scarcely aired, new and raw, devoid of history
and of associations. "The Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to
the piers of the Pons AElius, even more full of meaning than my
well-beloved Charles, eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge." No
doubt this is a common sentiment among Americans.

Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an historical atmosphere, and
then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think
Schenectady, New York, "a better place." It is not easy to understand
what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was extremely caustic in his
writings about that continent, and discontented. Our matrons were so
stout and placid that they irritated him. Indeed, they are a little
heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable slimness, even in
this poor old country. Fond as he was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes
remained loyal to the historical present. He was not one of those
Americans who are always censuring England, and always hankering after
her. He had none of that irritable feeling, which made a great
contemporary of his angrily declare that _he_ could endure to hear "Ye
Mariners of England" sung, because of his own country's successes, some
time ago. They were gallant and conspicuous victories of the American
frigates; we do not grudge them. A fair fight should leave no rancour,
above all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes's withers would have been
unwrung by Campbell's ditty.

He visited England in youth, and fifty years later. On the anniversary
of the American defeat at Bunker's Hill (June 17), Dr. Holmes got his
degree in the _old_ Cambridge. He received degrees at Edinburgh and at
Oxford, in his "Hundred Days in Europe" he says very little about these
historic cities. The men at Oxford asked, "Did he come in the 'One Hoss
Shay'?" the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein. The
whole visit to England pleased and wearied him. He likened it to the
_shass caffy_ of Mr. Henry Foker--the fillip at the end of the long
banquet of life. He went to see the Derby, for he was fond of horses, of
racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing. He had the great
boldness once, _audax juventa_, to write a song in praise of that
comfortable creature--wine. The prudery of many Americans about the
juice of the grape is a thing very astonishing to a temperate Briton. An
admirable author, who wrote an account of the old convivial days of an
American city, found that reputable magazines could not accept such a
degrading historical record. There was no nonsense about Dr. Holmes. His
poems were mainly "occasional" verses for friendly meetings; or humorous,
like the celebrated "One Horse Shay." Of his serious verses, the
"Nautilus" is probably too familiar to need quotation; a noble fancy is
nobly and tunefully "moralised." Pleasing, cultivated, and so forth, are
adjectives not dear to poets. To say "sublime," or "magical," or
"strenuous," of Dr. Holmes's muse, would be to exaggerate. How far he
maintained his scholarship, I am not certain; but it is odd that, in his
preface to "The Guardian Angel," he should quote from "Jonathan Edwards
the younger," a story for which he might have cited Aristotle.

Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes's creations as my
favourite, it would be "a frequent correspondent of his," and of mine--the
immortal Gifted Hopkins. Never was minor poet more kindly and genially
portrayed. And if one had to pick out three of his books, as the best
worth reading, they would be "The Professor," "Elsie Venner," and "The
Guardian Angel." They have not the impeccable art and distinction of
"The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter," but they
combine fantasy with living human interest, and with humour. With Sir
Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and--may we not add Dr. Weir
Mitchell?--Dr. Holmes excellently represents the physician in humane
letters. He has left a blameless and most amiable memory, unspotted by
the world. His works are full of the savour of his native soil,
naturally, without straining after "Americanism;" and they are national,
not local or provincial. He crossed the great gulf of years, between the
central age of American literary production--the time of Hawthorne and
Poe--to our own time, and, like Nestor, he reigned among the third
generation. As far as the world knows, the shadow of a literary quarrel
never fell on him; he was without envy or jealousy, incurious of his own
place, never vain, petulant, or severe. He was even too good-humoured,
and the worst thing I have heard of him is that he could never say "no"
to an autograph hunter.




CHAPTER V: MR. MORRIS'S POEMS


"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you have convinced me that
no man can be a poet." The study of Mr. William Morris's poems, in the
new collected edition, {5} has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no
middle-aged man, can be a critic. I read Mr. Morris's poems (thanks to
the knightly honours conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no
ambiguity as to 'Mr. Morris'), but it is not the book only that I read.
The scroll of my youth is unfolded. I see the dear place where first I
perused "The Blue Closet"; the old faces of old friends flock around me;
old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and revive. St. Andrews,
Oxford, come before the mind's eye, with

"Many a place
That's in sad case
Where joy was wont afore, oh!"

as Minstrel Burne sings. These voices, faces, landscapes mingle with the
music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us certain
hours passed in the paradise of youth. A reviewer who finds himself in
this case may as well frankly confess that he can no more criticise Mr.
Morris dispassionately than he could criticise his old self and the
friends whom he shall never see again, till he meets them

"Beyond the sphere of time,
And sin, and grief's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul."

To write of one's own "adventures among books" may be to provide
anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, but, at least, it
is to write historically. We know how books have affected, and do affect
ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions and
revived sensations. To judge books dispassionately and impersonally, is
much more difficult--indeed, it is practically impossible, for our own
tastes and experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts, do what
we will. However, the effort must be made, for to say that, at a certain
age, in certain circumstances, an individual took much pleasure in "The
Life and Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is certainly
not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."

There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the
nineteenth century. The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott,
and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats. By 1822 the blossoming time was
over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr.
Tennyson and Mr. Browning. It broke forth again, in 1842 and did not
practically cease till England's greatest laureate sang of the "Crossing
of the Bar." But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and
Mr. Browning rather later, in "Bells and Pomegranates" ("Men and Women"),
the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris's "Defence of Guenevere,"
and flowered till Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" appeared in 1865,
followed by his poems of 1866. Mr. Rossetti's book of 1870 belonged, in
date of composition, mainly to this period.

In 1858, when "The Defence of Guenevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have
been but a year or two from his undergraduateship. Every one has heard
enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon,
and the others of the old _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, where Mr.
Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should they not be
revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams? As literature, I
prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The
Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!" Mr. Morris and his friends were
active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic
revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part. This
revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more
"earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial,
restoration by Scott. The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of
Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no
less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems. The
fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period." In "The
Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose
narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and
Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." In the early book the rugged
style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. There are cockney rhymes, too,
such as "short" rhyming to "thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's
early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it. In the
first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:--

"Listen: suppose your time were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

"The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

"'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

"'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see

"A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

"Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

"And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
No man could tell the better of the two.

"After a shivering half-hour you said,
'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.'
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

"And cry to all good men that loved you well,
'Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.'"

There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the
_bizarrerie_ of a new thing in beauty. How far it is really beautiful
how can I tell? How can I discount the "personal bias"? Only I know
that it is unforgettable. Again (Galahad speaks):--

"I saw
One sitting on the altar as a throne,
Whose face no man could say he did not know,
And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow."

Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.

Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially
sympathetic period--the gloom and sad sunset glory of the late fourteenth
century, the age of Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars. To Froissart it
all seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly fortunes; he
only murmurs a "great pity" for the death of a knight or the massacre of
a town. It is rather the pity of it that Mr. Morris sees: the hearts
broken in a corner, as in "Sir Peter Harpedon's End," or beside "The
Haystack in the Floods." Here is a picture like life of what befell a
hundred times. Lady Alice de la Barde hears of the death of her knight:--

"ALICE

"Can you talk faster, sir?
Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes
On mine, I pray you, and whate'er you see
Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,
Or bid you stop.

"SQUIRE

"I pray your pardon then,
And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
I am unhappy that your knight is dead.
Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.
We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
Yet for three days about the barriers there
The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;
But still amid the crash of falling walls,
And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
St. George's banner, and the seven swords,
And still they cried, 'St. George Guienne,' until
Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."

The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in "Geffray Teste
Noire" is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal ball,
rather than like a picture suggested by printed words. "Shameful Death"
has the same enchanted kind of presentment. We look through a "magic
casement opening on the foam" of the old waves of war. Poems of a pure
fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind" and "The
Blue Closet." Each only lives in fantasy. Motives, and facts, and
"story" are unimportant and out of view. The pictures arise distinct,
unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on
our eyes between sleeping and waking. Fantastic, too, but with more of a
recognisable human setting, is "Golden Wings," which to a slight degree
reminds one of Theophile Gautier's _Chateau de Souvenir_.

"The apples now grow green and sour
Upon the mouldering castle wall,
Before they ripen there they fall:
There are no banners on the tower,

The draggled swans most eagerly eat
The green weeds trailing in the moat;
Inside the rotting leaky boat
You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."

These, with "The Sailing of the Sword," are my own old favourites. There
was nothing like them before, nor will be again, for Mr. Morris, after
several years of silence, abandoned his early manner. No doubt it was
not a manner to persevere in, but happily, in a mood and a moment never
to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris did fill a fresh page in English
poetry with these imperishable fantasies. They were absolutely neglected
by "the reading public," but they found a few staunch friends. Indeed, I
think of "Guenevere" as FitzGerald did of Tennyson's poems before 1842.
But this, of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious,
estimate. Criticism may aver that the influence of Mr. Rossetti was
strong on Mr. Morris before 1858. Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris
first (as the world read the "Lay" before "Christabel"), and my own
preference is for Mr. Morris.

It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, in
1866 or 1867, "The Life and Death of Jason." Young men who had read
"Guenevere" hastened to purchase it, and, of course, found themselves in
contact with something very unlike their old favourite. Mr. Morris had
told a classical tale in decasyllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort,
and he regarded the heroic age from a mediaeval point of view; at all
events, not from an historical and archaeological point of view. It was
natural in Mr. Morris to "envisage" the Greek heroic age in this way, but
it would not be natural in most other writers. The poem is not much
shorter than the "Odyssey," and long narrative poems had been out of
fashion since "The Lord of the Isles" (1814).

All this was a little disconcerting. We read "Jason," and read it with
pleasure, but without much of the more essential pleasure which comes
from magic and distinction of style. The peculiar qualities of Keats,
and Tennyson, and Virgil are not among the gifts of Mr. Morris. As
people say of Scott in his long poems, so it may be said of Mr.
Morris--that he does not furnish many quotations, does not glitter in
"jewels five words long."

In "Jason" he entered on his long career as a narrator; a poet retelling
the immortal primeval stories of the human race. In one guise or another
the legend of Jason is the most widely distributed of romances; the North
American Indians have it, and the Samoans and the Samoyeds, as well as
all Indo-European peoples. This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at
greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, and in the "Orphica," Mr. Morris
took up and handled in a single and objective way. His art was always
pictorial, but, in "Jason" and later, he described more, and was less
apt, as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable
way.

In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the "Earthly
Paradise": that vast collection of the world's old tales retold. One
might almost conjecture that "Jason" had originally been intended for a
part of the "Earthly Paradise," and had outgrown its limits. The tone is
much the same, though the "criticism of life" is less formally and
explicitly stated.

For Mr. Morris came at last to a "criticism of life." It would not have
satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris! The
burden of these long narrative poems is _vanitas vanitatum_: the
fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream
"rounded by a sleep." The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as
beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art. The hideousness of
modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he
was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many
arts and crafts in which he was a master. His narrative poems are,
indeed, part of his industry in this field. He was not born to slay
monsters, he says, "the idle singer of an empty day." Later, he set
about slaying monsters, like Jason, or unlike Jason, scattering dragon's
teeth to raise forces which he could not lay, and could not direct.

I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say this much
only to prove that Mr. Morris's "criticism of life," and prolonged,
wistful dwelling on the thought of death, ceased to satisfy himself. His
own later part, as a poet and an ally of Socialism, proved this to be
true. It seems to follow that the peculiarly level, lifeless, decorative
effect of his narratives, which remind us rather of glorious tapestries
than of pictures, was no longer wholly satisfactory to himself. There is
plenty of charmed and delightful reading--"Jason" and the "Earthly
Paradise" are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we do miss a
strenuous rendering of action and passion. These Mr. Morris had rendered
in "The Defence of Guinevere": now he gave us something different,
something beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic vigour.
Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary writer of
epic, in an age of Criticism. He dealt with the tale of "Jason," and
conceivably he may have borrowed from older minstrels. But the Medea of
Apollonius Rhodius, in her love, her tenderness, her regret for home, in
all her maiden words and ways, is undeniably a character more living,
more human, more passionate, and more sympathetic, than the Medea of Mr.
Morris. I could almost wish that he had closely followed that classical
original, the first true love story in literature. In the same way I
prefer Apollonius's spell for soothing the dragon, as much terser and
more somniferous than the spell put by Mr. Morris into the lips of Medea.
Scholars will find it pleasant to compare these passages of the
Alexandrine and of the London poets. As a brick out of the vast palace
of "Jason" we may select the song of the Nereid to Hylas--Mr. Morris is
always happy with his Nymphs and Nereids:--

"I know a little garden-close
Set thick with lily and with rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
And though within it no birds sing,
And though no pillared house is there,
And though the apple boughs are bare
Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
Her feet upon the green grass trod,
And I beheld them as before.
There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the place two fair streams are,
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea;
The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
The shore no ship has ever seen,
Still beaten by the billows green,
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.
For which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight,
That maketh me both deaf and blind,
Careless to win, unskilled to find,
And quick to lose what all men seek.
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place,
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once rest from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea."