Chapter VII: Part 7

But, it will be objected, are we not, or most of us, still Christians? Are we not still capable of understanding prayers, miracles, saintliness, raising from the dead, “conversion,” and all the other subject-matter of _Callimachus_? To be sure we are; hence my “reverent” smile. If Christianity were dead (or, as in Swift’s ironical pamphlet, abolished by Act of Parliament) _Callimachus_ would be simply meaningless for us, a nothing, mere mummery. It is not the matter of the play that provokes our smile; but its form. The “fun,” says Miss St. John, is “not justified by the text.” She is thinking of the matter, abounding in piety and tending to edification; but in point of fact the language, the “text”—at any rate in theatrical representation (far be it from me to prejudice her forthcoming book)—has its comic side. Callimachus’s abrupt declaration of his passion to Drusiana and the terms of her rejection of him are both, to a modern audience, irresistibly comic. They are not meaningless, but they are delightfully impossible: they are love-making as imagined by a nun, the very person who _ex hypothesi_ knows nothing about it. You have, in fact, precisely the same delicious absurdity, proceeding from an imagination necessarily uninstructed by experience, as you get in Miss Daisy Ashford’s book. (Several critics have made this comparison. I am really chagrined not to have thought of it myself. But it should show Miss St. John that I am, at any rate, not the only one who found _Callimachus_ comic.)

Further, and quite apart from the exquisite naïveties of its text, the form of the play is so childlike and bland as to be really funny. The players, when not engaged in the action, stand motionless in a semi-circle. Changes of scene are indicated by two performers crossing the stage in opposite directions—a genuine cricket “over.” Characters are understood to be stricken with death when they composedly lie down on their backs. Others trot in pairs round Drusiana’s prostrate form and you understand they are journeying to her tomb. All this, of course, is merely primitive “convention.” Could we put ourselves back into Hroswitha’s time, it would pass unnoticed. In our own time, with a different set of “conventions,” that make some attempt at imitation of reality, we naturally laugh at these old conventions. We laugh, but we are interested; our curiosity is being catered for, we like to see what the old conventions were. The curio, in short, is amusing in the fullest sense of the term.

And it leaves us with a desire to know more about Hroswitha, the “white rose” of the tenth century (if that be really the meaning of her name). Perhaps the Cardinal’s preface will tell us more. One remark occurs. It seems a little significant that a nun should have written all her plays on the one theme of chastity. It must have been an obsession with her, this virtue to which, as Renan said, nature attaches so little importance. And, in hunting her theme, this nun does not scruple to pursue it to the strangest places. She even puts courtesans upon the stage and houses of ill-fame. How on earth did the good lady imagine these unconventual topics? The question suggests some puzzles about the psychology of nuns. But one only has to see _Callimachus_ to know that Hroswitha must have been as pure as snow, or as a white rose, as innocently ignorant, in fact, of what she was writing about as Miss Daisy Ashford when she described an elopement.

PAGELLO

Long before _Madame Sand_ was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre more had been written all the world over about the trip of George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Venice in 1833-4 than about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or the campaigns of the Great War. A heavy fine should be imposed on any one who needlessly adds a drop of ink to the vast mass of controversy that has raged round that subject, and I promise to leave the main story, which must be known to every adult man and woman in the two hemispheres, severely alone. But there is a subordinate actor in the story, to whom injustice, I think, has been done on all hands, and whose case it would be an act of the merest decency to reconsider. I mean Pietro Pagello.

His case was prejudiced from the first by the dissemination of an atrocious libel. When a patient alleges scandalous behaviour between doctor and nurse, it is well to be sure of the witness’s mental condition. Now Musset was suffering, not, as Pagello politely put it, from typhoid fever, but from _delirium tremens_. This would at once disqualify him as an eye-witness. But the fact is Musset himself never made the allegation; the story was spread about by brother Paul, a terrible liar. Pagello had been called in first to attend not Alfred, but George herself, for severe headache. Half a century later he remembered that her lips were thick and ugly, and her teeth discoloured by the cigarettes she was perpetually smoking; but she charmed him by her wonderful eyes: _per gli occhi stupendi_. After they had both nursed Alfred to convalescence the _occhi stupendi_ made short work with the young doctor. In the common phrase, George threw herself at him. People who don’t study the facts talk of the new arrangement as though it were a betrayal; but observe that it was of the highest convenience not only to George, but to Alfred. It enabled the poet to get away alone to Paris with an easier conscience; it provided George, compelled to stay on in Venice to complete her tale of “copy,” with a protector. But we are in 1834, with romanticism at its most ecstatic and “sublime.” So the convenience of the situation is draped in phrases and bedewed with tears. Alfred shed them with enthusiasm, while Pagello swore to him to look after the happiness of George. “Il nostro amore per Alfredo” was Pagello’s delightful way of putting it. A singular trio! Evidently poor Pagello was George’s slave. What was a poor young Venetian medical gentleman to do? A foreign lady with _occhi stupendi_ (and a habit of writing eight or nine hours a day on end) handed over to him, with tears of enthusiasm, by a grateful patient! Anyhow, Pagello showed his sense by removing the lady to cheaper lodgings. When Venice grew a little too hot he escorted her on a trip to Tirol, taking her on the way (such were the pleasing manners of the time) to see his father! He was a little short with me, says the son, but he received her with _cortesi ospitalita_, and the pair discussed French literature. Mr. Max Beerbohm should draw the picture.

It has been the fashion to dismiss Pagello as a mere nincompoop. But if he had been that, a George Sand would not have cared a rap for him, and he would have been terrified by George. As it was, when she asked him to take her back to Paris he “chucked” his practice and cheerfully parted with his pictures and plate to provide funds for the journey. He was, at any rate, a disinterested lover; but the truth seems to be he was not passionate enough for George. “Pagello is an angel of virtue,” she writes to Musset, “he is so full of sensibility and so good ... he surrounds me with care and attention.... For the first time in my life I love without passion.... Well, for my part, I feel the need to suffer for some one. Oh! why couldn’t I live between the two of you and make you happy without belonging to either?” But by the time she had reached Paris she was already thinking of belonging to Alfred again, and “door-stepped” Pagello. Her Parisian set, of course, made fun of him. The poor gentleman’s situation was, indeed, sufficiently awkward. But it is not true, as it is the fashion to say, that he was “sent straight back.” George, who had retreated to Nohant, invited him there, but he had the good sense to decline. She was afraid he might be in want of money, and wrote to a friend, “he will never take it from a woman, even as a loan.” She, at any rate, knew he was a gentleman. But the Italians, with all their romantic traditions, are a practical people. Finding himself adrift in Paris, Pagello remembered his profession, and stayed on as long as he could to study surgery, with such substantial result that he subsequently became one of the chief surgeons in Italy, and gained a special reputation, it is said, in lithotomy. Thus may a fantastic love adventure be turned to good account.

I take my facts about Pagello from Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s “George Sand” (1899-1912), the one authentic and exhaustive work on the subject. He died, over 90 years of age, after the first two of her three volumes were published, and what one likes most of all about him is that, till very near the end of his life, he kept his mouth tight shut about the great adventure of his youth. A mere nincompoop could not have done that. In 1881 the Italian Press happened to be reviving the story of the Venetian amour, and they succeeded in getting from Pagello a few of George’s letters and some modest, manly reminiscences. He had no piquant scandals to disclose, and merely showed, quite unconsciously, that he was far the most decent of the strange three involved in the Venetian adventure.

As for the Pagello of the new play, the American dramatist has made him just a tame, hopelessly bewildered donkey. He is provided with a fierce Italian sweetheart, to bring him back safe, if scolded, from Paris to Italy. He lives freely on other people’s money, George’s—when it isn’t Alfred’s. After all, it doesn’t matter, for all the people of the play are mere travesties of the originals, turned (in the published book of the play, though not at the Duke of York’s) into modern American citizens. Buloz talks of “boosting” his subscriptions. Alfred says George is “like a noisy old clock that won’t stop ticking.” Oh dear!

STENDHAL

In reviewing the performance by the New Shakespeare Company of _King Henry V._ I was reminded by one of Henry’s lines at Agincourt,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,

to speak, it may have seemed a trifle incongruously, of Stendhal. But it was Stendhal who said, “je n’écris que pour les _happy few_.” No quotation could have been more appropriate. Stendhal’s readers have always been few, but they have been enthusiastic. In his lifetime he was hardly read at all, though Balzac gave him a magnificent “puff”—so magnificent that even Stendhal himself was taken aback by it and infused a little irony into his thanks. He supposed himself to be ahead of his time, and in 1840 said he would be understood somewhere about 1880. It was rather a good shot, for somewhere about that date there came into being the fierce tribe of Stendhalians, who founded the “Stendhal Club” and included in their number no less a man than M. Paul Bourget. But the vicissitudes of literary reputations are as uncertain as anything in this world, and M. Bourget wondered what would be thought of Stendhal in another forty years—namely, in 1920. Well, 1920 has arrived, as the years have the habit of doing with abominable rapidity, and any one who likes can seek for an answer to M. Bourget’s question. I will hazard a guess. I doubt if in the interval there has been very much change in Stendhal’s position. Now, as in 1880, Stendhal is read, and immoderately loved, by the “happy few,” and ignored or detested by the rest. But, in enjoying him, the happy few contrive to take him a little less seriously than did the Stendhal Club. That process goes on with even greater reputations. Croce, we are told, takes Dante more lightly than has been the habit of Italian critics in the last half-century. We English are gradually learning to discuss Shakespeare as a human being. And here, pat to the occasion, is a paper on Stendhal in the _Revue de Paris_ by M. Anatole France, which handles its subject with the easy Anatolian grace we all know and does, perhaps, at the same time indicate what the readers of 1920 think of Stendhal, though none of them would express their thought of him with the same charm.

It would probably occur to none of them, for instance, as it does to Anatole France, to begin an appreciation of Stendhal with the statement that he “had a leg.” Modern costume has abolished this advantage, but Stendhal lived, at any rate for the greater part of his life, in the knee-breeches period, when calves were on exhibition. Unluckily, Stendhal’s calves do not appear in the portrait prefixed to the Correspondence, but only the head, which is rather quaintly ugly. Quaint ugliness in men is not displeasing to women (or where would most of us be?), but what ne’er won fair lady is faint heart, and Stendhal was timid. Thus, as a young man Stendhal is said to have loved Mlle. Victorine Monnier for five years before he spoke to her. He was not sure that even then she knew who he was. And this was the man who wrote a treatise “De l’Amour” (a delightful book to skim through, nevertheless), and preaches that every woman can be captured by direct assault! I remember once talking to the wife of a popular novelist, a great enthusiast for love, about her husband’s variety and virtuosity on this subject. She replied without enthusiasm: “Yes, in his books.” On the same point, M. France reports a capital _sub rosâ_ saying of Renan’s:—“Les Européens font preuve d’une déplorable indécision en tout ce qui concerne la conjonction des sexes.”

As might have been expected from a writer for the “happy few,” Stendhal did not suffer fools gladly. A man must have the social, the gregarious spirit for that, and Stendhal lived much to himself. That being so, he could not hope to escape boredom. An incurable _ennui_ lurks behind many of his pages; his enemies would say _in_ them. He even got bored with Italy, as so many others of a century ago, who began as enthusiastic lovers, got bored. Byron went to Greece—and Shelley took to yachting with the fatal result we know—because each was bored with Italy. But Stendhal in his later years had to put up with it at Civita Vecchia—which, for a “littery gent” must have been a deadly dull place in 1840, and would not, I imagine, be very lively even now. Indeed, his existence (after his early experiences with the Grand Army) seems to have been quiet, solitary, and slow. Perhaps that is why his books, his MSS., his letters, are so full of mysterious disguises, initials, pseudonyms, codes, erasures, as though he were being watched by censors and hunted by spies. It was a way of creating for himself an imaginary atmosphere of adventure.

M. France has some good things to say about Stendhal’s style. M. Bourget calls his prose algebraic, which is rather hard. But there are many ways of writing, says M. France, and one can succeed at it perfectly without any art, just as one can be a great writer without correctness, as Henri IV. was in his letters and Saint-Simon in his memoirs. No one would read “Le Rouge et le Noir” or “La Chartreuse de Parme,” as the Duchess in a Pinero play said she read her French novel, for the style. Anatole France commits himself to a very definite statement. No Frenchman, he says, in Stendhal’s time wrote well, the French language was altogether lost, and every author at the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote ill, with the sole exception of Paul Louis Courier. “The disaster to the language, begun in the youth of Mirabeau, increased under the Revolution, despite those giants of the tribune, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, compared with whom our orators of to-day seem noisy children, despite Camille Desmoulins, author of the last well-written pamphlet France was to read; the evil was aggravated under the Empire and the Restoration; it became a frightful thing in the works of Thiers and of Guizot.” This, from the greatest living master of French, is not without its interest. No one could say the same thing of our English prose in the same period—a period that gave us, to take a few instances at random, Cowper’s letters and Byron’s, and the Essays of Elia.

Stendhal, then, was not remarkable for style. But one gathers that, in the rare occurrence of congenial society, he was a good talker. One would give something to have been a third in the box at La Scala when Stendhal, a young officer of Napoleon, met an old, lanky, melancholy general of artillery—no other than Choderlos de Laclos, author, before the Revolution, of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Stendhal, as a child, had known the original of Laclos’s infamous Mme. de Merteuil, an original who appears to have been even worse than the copy. Some years later George Sand, on her way to Italy with Musset, met Stendhal on a Rhone steamer, and he told her a story which, she said, shocked her. She does not repeat it. One would really rather like to hear a story which could shock George Sand.

JULES LEMAÎTRE

It was in the first week of August, 1914. The crowd on the seafront was outwardly as gay as ever, only buying up the evening papers with a little more eagerness than usual to read the exciting news from Belgium. We had not had time to realize what war meant. Some one held out a paper to me and said, quite casually, “I see Lemaître’s dead.” This event seemed to me for the moment bigger than the war itself. At any rate it came more intimately home to me. The world in an uproar, nations toppling to ruin, millions of men in arms—these are only vague mental pictures. They disquiet the imagination, but are not to be realized by it. The death of your favourite author, the spiritual companion and solace of half a lifetime, is of an infinitely sharper reality, and you feel it as though it were a physical pang.

Lemaître died where, whenever he could, he had lived, at Tavers in the Loiret, the heart of France. He was always writing about Tavers, though he never named it by its name. In describing the far-off cruises of Loti and the indefatigable touristry of Bourget he says:—“There is somewhere a big orchard that goes down to a brook edged with willows and poplars. It is for me the most beautiful landscape in the world, for I love it, and it knows me.” To understand Lemaître you must keep that little _vignette_ affectionately in your mind, as he did. M. Henry Bordeaux, in his charming little monograph “Jules Lemaître,” rightly insists upon Lemaître’s passionate love for his native countryside. But you never can tell; his insistence seems only to have bored a recent reviewer of the book. “The insistence on Lemaître’s patriotism and on his being ‘l’homme de sa terre’ is a little wearying; of course he was ‘l’homme de sa terre,’ but he was many other things, or we should never have heard of him.” As who should say, of course Cyrano had a nose, but he had many other things, or we should never have heard of him. But Cyrano’s nose was a conspicuous feature, and, if we are not told of it, we shall not fully understand Cyrano. So with Lemaître’s love of his countryside by the Loire.

It made him, to begin with, an incorrigible stay-at-home. In this, as in so many other things, he was a typical Frenchman. We English, born roamers as we are, take for granted the educative influence of travel. Places and people, we know by elementary experience, are only to be realized by being seen on the spot. Lemaître thought otherwise. Why, he asked, need I go to England? I can get all England out of Dickens and George Eliot and my friend Bourget’s “Impressions de Voyage.” And then he drew a picture of England, as he confidently believed it to be, that is about as “like it” as, say, the average untravelled Englishman’s notion of Tavers. He was never tired of quoting a passage of the “Imitation” about the variety of changing sky and scene. But a cloistered monk is not exactly an authority on this subject.

Again, the fact that Lemaître was “l’homme de sa terre” is of vital literary importance; it affected not only the spirit, but the actual direction of his criticism. It inclined him to ignore or to misapprehend those features in a foreign author that precisely marked how he also, in his turn, was the man of his countryside, and that very different from the banks of the Loire. Some of his comments on Shakespeare, for instance, are of a Gallicism almost Voltairean. And it fostered illusions like that which possessed him about the “Northern literatures”—Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and so forth—that they were mere belated imitators of the French romantics. The fact that Lemaître was essentially a man of his province involved the fact that his criticism now and then was also provincial.

Indeed, his very provincialism heightened his enjoyment of Paris and sharpened his sense of Parisianism. Things which the born Parisian takes for granted were delightful novelties for him, challenging observation and analysis. “Il est,” said Degas, “toujours bien content d’être à Paris.” He was “bien content” because he was “the young man from the country,” the man from Tavers. The phenomenon is familiar all the world over.

Further, the fact that Lemaître remained “l’homme de sa terre,” still getting his clothes from the village tailor, never so much at home as among the farmers, country schoolmasters, and peasants he had known from his infancy, gives a quite peculiar savour to his remarks on “le monde”—the great fashionable scene, which he describes and analyses, to be sure, as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who is, consciously and indeed defiantly, an “outsider.”

These are all integral parts of Lemaître’s critical individuality. Without them he would have been another man altogether—a point so obvious to all lovers of Lemaître that it would never have occurred to me to mention it, had it not been for our reviewer’s weariness of being reminded that he was “l’homme de sa terre.” Evidently the reviewer cannot forgive Lemaître for his treatment of the “décadents” and the “symbolistes,” and other cranks. “Think of the people Lemaître missed.” The people include, it seems, Moréas, Laforgue, Samain, and Rimbaud. Well, after thinking of these people, many of us will be resigned to “missing” them with Lemaître.

It is odd that the reviewer, while hunting for objections to Lemaître’s criticism, as criticism, should have “missed” the really valid one—that it is often not so much critical as “high fantastical.” Lemaître was apt to be carried away by his imagination, and to run through a varied assortment of comparisons, associations, and parallels that coloured rather than cleared the issue. The rigorist Croce has, in passing, laid his finger upon this. He quotes Lemaître on Corneille. Polyeucte, says the critic, recalls at once “St. Paul, Huss, Calvin, and Prince Kropotkine,” and awakes “the same curiosity as a Russian Nihilist, of the kind to be seen in Paris in bygone years, in some _brasserie_ ... of whom the whisper went round that at St. Petersburg he had killed a general or a prefect of police.” Croce dismisses this sort of thing as _ricami di fantasia_, and certainly, from the point of view of strict criticism, it is a weakness of Lemaître’s.

After all, however (as the counsel in “Pickwick” pleaded about something else), it is an amiable weakness; it makes him such incomparably good reading! Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting _ricami di fantasia_ for strict analysis—he may be all the more stimulating to the reader. He may be giving the reader not scrupulous criticism, but something better. It all depends, of course, on the temperament and the talent. Lemaître’s _ricami di fantasia_ are part, if not the best part, of his charm.

JANE AUSTEN

The amusing parlour-game of Jane Austen topography is always being played somewhere. A few years ago there was a correspondence in the _Literary Supplement_ about the precise position of Emma’s Highbury on the map. Some Austenites voted for Esher, others for Cobham, others again for Bookham. There has been another correspondence about Mansfield Park. Lady Vaux of Harrowden “identifies” it with Easton Neston, near Towcester. Sir Francis Darwin and the Master of Downing are for Easton in Huntingdonshire. People have consulted Paterson’s Roads about it. Mr. Mackinnon, K.C., points out that it must have been about four miles north of Northampton. But I like him best when he says, “I do not suppose any actual park was in Jane Austen’s mind.” _Brigadier, vous avez raison!_ I do not suppose any actual place was in Jane Austen’s mind when she assigned her personages a home or a lodging. You might as well try to fix the number of the house in Gracechurch Street where Elizabeth’s uncle lived. Are we not shown the “real” Old Curiosity Shop? And the “real” Bleak House? And Juliet’s tomb at Verona? And the exact point of the Cobb where Louisa Musgrove fell?

It is easy to see why Jane Austen lends herself more readily than most writers to this topographical game. She was very fond of topographical _colour_, giving not only real place-names to the neighbourhood of the fictitious homes, but exact distances in miles. It was so many miles from Highbury to Kingston market-place, and so many to Box Hill. Yet she was always vague about the exact spot from which these distances were calculated. For there her imagination had its home, it was her private Paradise of Dainty Devices; she wanted a free hand there, unhampered by maps, road books, and other intrusions from the actual world. In fact, she did with real places just what Scott, say, did with historical people, kept them to surround the imaginary centre of the tale. You can “identify” Charles Edward, but not Waverley. You can “identify” Nottingham, but not Mansfield Park.

It is a mercy that Jane Austen never describes houses—never describes them, I mean, with the minute (and tedious) particularity of a Balzac—or the topographical game would have been supplemented by an architectural one, and we should have had the “real” Mansfield Park pointed out to us from its description, like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Indeed, she never, in the modern sense, describes anything, never indulges in description for its own sake. She never even expatiated on the beauties of nature, taking them for granted and, indeed, on at least one famous occasion—when strawberries were being picked while the apple trees were still in bloom at Donwell Abbey—rather mixing them up. Her descriptions always had a practical purpose. If it rained in Bath, it was in order that Anne might, or might not, meet Captain Wentworth. We know that Sir Thomas’s “own dear room” at Mansfield Park was next to the billiard-room, because the novelist wanted us to know how he came plump upon the ranting Mr. Yates. But that detail, thank goodness, won’t enable us to “identify” Mansfield Park.

Doesn’t it argue a rather matter-of-fact frame of mind—I say it with all respect to the correspondents of the _Literary Supplement_—this persistent tendency to “identify” the imaginary with the actual, the geographical, the historical? There is a notable instance of it in the Letters of Henry James. The novelist had described in “The Bostonians” a certain veteran philanthropist, “Miss Birdseye.” Forthwith all Boston identified the imaginary Miss Birdseye with a real Miss Peabody. “I am quite appalled,” writes Henry James to his brother William, “by your note in which you assault me on the subject of my having painted a ‘portrait from life’ of Miss Peabody! I was in some measure prepared for it by Lowell’s (as I found the other day) taking it for granted that she had been my model, and an allusion to the same effect in a note from aunt Kate. Still, I didn’t expect the charge to come from you. I hold that I have done nothing to deserve it.... Miss Birdseye was conceived entirely from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn.” It is odd that a man like William James, a professed student of the human mind and its workings, should have made such a mistake. I remember a saying attributed, years ago, to Jowett about the two brothers: one, he remarked, was a writer of fiction and the other a psychologist, and the fiction was all psychology and the psychology all fiction. Anyhow, I think if any one had written to Jane Austen to tax her with Highbury being Esher or Mansfield Park Easton Neston, she would have been able to reply that they were conceived entirely from her moral consciousness. And I fancy she would have smiled at her little trick of giving the exact mileage from her imaginary centre to real places having “sold” so many worthy people. Very likely she would have brought the topographical game into the Hartfield family circle, as a suitable alternative for Mr. Elton’s enigmas, charades, conundrums, and polite puzzles, or for Mr. Woodhouse’s “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which made him think of poor Isabella—who was very near being christened Catherine, after her grandmamma.

The truth, surely, is that this place-hunting, this seeking to “identify” the imaginary with the actual map-marked spot, is only a part of the larger misconception of imaginative work—the misconception which leads to a perpetual search for the “originals” of an author’s personages, especially when these personages have a full, vivid life of their own. Jane Austen has often been compared to Shakespeare, ever since Macaulay set the fashion. Well, it is naturally upon Shakespeare that this misconception has wreaked its worst. Commentators have gravely presented us with the “original” of Falstaff, of Sir Toby Belch, of Dogberry—nay, of Iago. Surely, the only “originals” of these people were Shakespeare himself? What were they but certain Shakespearean moods, humours, intimate experiences, temptations felt, but resisted, impulses controlled in actual life but allowed free play in imaginative reverie? No one that I know of has been foolish enough to charge Jane Austen with “copying” any of her characters from actual individuals, but, if you are in quest of “identifications,” is it not possible to “identify” many of them, the women at any rate—for, of course, her women bear the stamp of authentic reality much more plainly than her men—is it not possible to identify them with sides, tendencies, moods of Jane Austen herself? Here, I know, I am at variance with a distinguished authority, from whom it is always rash to differ. Professor Raleigh says:—“Sympathy with her characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in Anne Elliot of ‘Persuasion,’ is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof.” Pass, for Emma and Elizabeth! But the “even” in the case of Anne gives me courage. We are not, of course, talking of identity in regard to external circumstances. Jane Austen was not the daughter of a Somersetshire baronet and did not marry a captain in the navy. But that Jane only “sympathized” with the heart and mind of Anne Elliot is to my thinking absurdly short of the truth. That the adventures of Anne’s soul, her heart-beatings, misgivings and intimate reassurances about Wentworth’s feeling for her had been Jane Austen’s own is to me as certain as though we had the confession under her own hand and seal. The woman who drew Anne’s timid, doubting, wondering love must have been in love herself and in that way. One short sentence settles that for me. The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling? And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir for evidence that she had a love affair? No, it is because there is most of Jane Austen’s spiritual “identity” in Anne that “Persuasion” is the sweetest, tenderest, and truest of her books. I apologize for having wandered from Mansfield Park and Easton Neston and the other engaging futilities of the parlour game.

T. W. ROBERTSON

Fifty years ago to-morrow (February 3rd, 1871) died Thomas William Robertson, a great reformer of the English drama in his day, but now, like so many other reformers, little more than a name. His plays have ceased to hold the stage. Very few of them still allow themselves to be read. To-day their matter seems, for the most part, poor, thin, trivial, and their form somewhat naïve. “Robertsonian” has become for the present generation a meaningless epithet, and “teacup and saucer school” an empty gibe. Even within a few years of Robertson’s death George Meredith could only say of him: “In a review of our modern comedies, those of the late Mr. Robertson would deserve honourable mention.” As the old tag says, times change and we in them. Robertson is now a “back number.” His comedies are not classics, for classics are live things; they are merely historical documents. Yet you have only to turn to such a record as “The Bancrofts’ Recollections” to see how live these comedies once were, how stimulating to their time, how enthusiastically they were hailed as a new birth, a new portent, a new art. Indeed, for my part, when I read the glowing eulogies of John Oxenford and Tom Taylor and the other critics of that time I am filled with something like dismay. All that warm (and rather wordy—it was the way of the ’sixties) appreciation gone dead and cold! I wonder how many of our own judgments will stand the test of fifty years. Br—r—r!

Well, to understand Robertson’s success, we have to think ourselves back into his time. We have to ignore what followed him and to see what he displaced. Up to his date the theatre, under the great French influence of the ’thirties, still remained romantic. But that influence was wearing out. A new influence was making itself felt in France, through the dialectics of Dumas _fils_ and Augier’s commonsense, though the new influence still bore trace of the old romanticism, as we can see at least to-day. _La Dame aux Camélias_, so romantic to-day, was greeted in 1855 as a masterpiece of realism! And it _was_ comparatively realistic, realistic for its time. But the English theatre, a second-hand theatre, still stuck to the old French romantic tradition. It lived largely on adaptations from Scribe. Robertson himself adapted a Scribe play (and not a bad one), _Bataille de Dames_. He had, however, come under the newer, the realistic, or romantico-realistic influence. He adapted Augier’s _L’Aventurière_. Tom Stylus’s pipe in the ballroom (in _Society_) had previously been dropped by Giboyer in _Les Effrontés_. I cannot help thinking that the new French reaction had a good deal to do with the Robertsonian reaction, certainly as much as the influence of Thackeray to which Sir Arthur Pinero traces it.

But I must let Sir Arthur speak for himself. In a letter in which he has been so good as to remind me of to-morrow’s date he says:—

“I look upon Robertson as a genius. Not that he wrote anything very profound, or anything very witty, but because, at a time when the English stage had sunk to even a lower ebb than it is usually credited with reaching; when the theatres stank of stale gas and orange-peel and the higher drama was represented mainly by adaptations from Scribe by Leicester Buckingham; he had the vision to see that a new public could be created, and an old and jaded one refreshed, by invoking for dramatic purposes the spirit, and using some part of the method, of Thackeray.”

This is admirable, and I only wish our dramatists would more often be tempted into the region of dramatic criticism. All the same I confess that (after going through all Robertson’s plays) it seems to me to overrate the Thackerayan influence. There is a little sentimental cynicism in Robertson and there is much in Thackeray. There is a tipsy old reprobate in _Pendennis_ and there is another in _Caste_. Tom Stylus helped to found a newspaper and so did George Warrington. Esther D’Alroy tried vainly to buckle on her husband’s sword-belt when he was ordered on service, and Amelia Osborne hovered helplessly about her husband with his red sash on the eve of Waterloo. But such matters as these are common property, _communia_, and the artist’s business, which Horace said was so difficult, is _proprie communia dicere_, to give them an individual turn. Drunkenness apart I don’t think Eccles is a bit like Costigan. As to the Thackerayan spirit, would that Robertson had “invoked” it! His plays might then be classics still, as Thackeray is, instead of merely documents.

If we are to connect Robertson with some typical Victorian novelist, I would myself, with all deference to Sir Arthur, suggest Trollope. His young women, his Naomi Tighes and Bellas, his Polly and Esther Eccles, strike me as eminently Trollopean. There are traces of Mrs. Proudie in both Mrs. Sutcliffe and Lady Ptarmigant. But, probably, these also are only instances of _communia_. Probably the young ladies (and, for all I know, the old ones, too) were real types of the ’sixties, as we see them in Leech’s drawings. Bless their sweet baby-faces and their simple hearts and their pork-pie hats!

The Robertsonian way is often spoken of as a “return to nature.” It is, in fact, a common eulogy of most reactions in art. “Don Quixote” was a return to nature, compared with the romances of chivalry, and “Tom Jones” was a return to nature, compared with “Don Quixote.” The world gradually changes its point of view and sees the facts of life in a new light. Artists change with the rest of the world, and give expression to the new vision. They are hailed as reformers until the next reformation; they seem to have returned to nature, until the world’s view of “nature” again changes. I think, as I have said, that Robertson’s work is to be related to the general anti-romantic reaction that started in France in mid-nineteenth century. But all reactions keep something of what they react against, and Robertson’s reaction retains a good deal of romance. _School_ is as romantic as the German Cinderella-story, on which it was founded. The central situation of _Caste_—the return home of the husband given up for dead—is essentially romantic, not a jot less romantic than in _La joie fait peur_. The scenes at the “Owl’s Roost” in _Society_, applauded for their daring realism, are realistic presentations of the last stronghold of the romantic Murger tradition, literary “Bohemia.” Robertson’s dialogue was often the high-flown lingo of the old romance. (In dialogue we have “returned to nature” several times over since his day.) But more often it was not. He astonished and delighted his contemporaries by making many of his people speak in the theatre as they spoke out of it. He invented sentimental situations that were charming then and would be charming now—love-passages in London squares and over milk-jugs in the moonlight. He had been an actor and a stage manager and knew how to make the very most of stage resources. Take the scene of George’s return in _Caste_. There is a cry of “milkaow” and a knock at the door. “Come in,” cries Polly to the milkman—and in walks with the milk-can one risen from the dead! This thrilling _coup de théâtre_ is followed, however, by something much better, the pathetic scenes of Polly’s hysterical joy and her tender artifice in breaking the news to Esther. I confess that I cannot read these scenes without tears. There was a quality of freshness and delicate simplicity in Robertson’s work at its best that was a true “return to nature.” No need, is there? to speak of the luck his work had in finding such interpreters as the Bancrofts and their company or of the luck the actors had in finding the work to interpret—the Bancrofts themselves have already told that tale. But it all happened half a century ago and I suppose we are not to expect a future Robertson revival. The past is past. Life is perpetual change. The more reason for not neglecting occasions of pious commemoration. Let us, then, give a friendly thought to “Tom” Robertson to-morrow.

VERSATILITY

Now that the _Literary Supplement_ costs 6_d._, one feels entitled to examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I well know what mine is, before examination. Even when it cost 3_d._, my relation to it was always one of weekly disconcertment. It revealed to me so many things I didn’t know and never should know, yet known presumably to some other reader. Now omniscience is derided as a “foible,” but why should one be ashamed to confess it as an ideal? Frankly, I envy the man who was so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s epitome. He must have got more fun out of life than your profound specialist. It is to give this various reader this variety of fun that (I surmise, but the editor will know for certain) the _Supplement_ exists. But for me, imperfectly various, it means something bordering on despair. I suppose other readers are more sensible, and just take what suits them, leaving the rest. But I simply hate leaving anything. Take the ten columns modestly headed “New Books and Reprints.” What a world of unknown topics and alien ideas and unfathomable theories about everything this simple title covers! Is there any reader whose intellectual equipment includes at once the biography of Absalom Watkin, of Manchester, the Indian Trade Inquiry Reports on Hides and Skins, an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and the particular philosophy of mysticism entertained by Mr. Watkin (not Absalom, but another)? Mine doesn’t—and there’s the pang, for each and all these subjects, simply because they are there, staring me in the face, the face of an absolutely blank mind about them, excite my intellectual curiosity. I should like to know all about ergatocracy—merely on the strength of its alluring name—and the true story, from the Franciscan point of view, of the Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England, and Lord Grey’s reminiscences of intercourse with Mr. Roosevelt, and the history of the Assyrian “millet” in the great war, and what is meant by the “Free Catholic” tendency in the Nonconformist Churches. Yet it is fairly certain that I shall have to do without any knowledge of most, if not all, of these matters which presumably engage the enlightened interest of some other readers.

That is why I say the _Supplement_ disconcerts me every week. It makes me feel ignorant and, what is worse, lonely, cut off from so many human sympathies, cold to enthusiasms that are agitating other breasts, isolated in a crowd who, for all I know, may be banding themselves against me with the secret password “ergatocracy,” an uninitiated stranger among the friends of Mr. Absalom Watkin of Manchester. Indeed, unlike “the master of this college,” I am so far from feeling that “what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” as to find it the one sort of knowledge I itch to possess and suppose myself to have lost a golden opportunity in missing. There are strong men about, I am aware, who say they don’t care. They profess themselves content with knowing a few things thoroughly, with their own little set of enthusiasms, and repeat proverbs about jacks of all trades. I respect these sturdy men, but all the time my heart goes out to the other kind, the men of versatility, the men whose aim is to understand everything, to sympathize with every human emotion, to leave no corner of experience unexplored. And some such aim as this is indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand. To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards.

That resumption of self is easy enough. The true difficulty is in surrendering it, even for a while. One finds the task particularly hard, I think, in lending oneself to tastes one has outgrown. Remember your schoolboy enthusiasm over Macaulay’s style. You have lost that long ago, and are now, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. Yet you must recapture it, if only for a moment; that is to say, you must try to reflect in yourself the joy that Macaulay felt in writing as he did, if you are sitting down to try to criticize him adequately. This is difficult, this momentary renunciation of your present taste in favour of the taste you have outgrown. Remember your schoolboy attitude to Scott; how you read feverishly for the story and nothing but the story, and simply skipped the long prefaces and introductions and copious historical notes? To-day your taste has matured, and you see the prefaces and notes as a welcome setting for the story, as completing for you the picture of the author’s mind in the act of composition. But you will have to go back to your discarded taste and think only of the story if you are recommending Scott to your youngsters.

This difficulty is perpetually confronting one in the theatre. I confess, I find the theatre almost as disconcerting as the _Literary Supplement_ for an analogous, though not identical, reason. In that case you have the bewildering spectacle of things unknown; in this, of tastes outgrown. One afternoon I saw a little play translated from the French, limpid in expression, simplicity itself in form, spare almost to austerity in its use of theatrical means. Not a word, not a situation, was emphasized. This or that point was neatly, briefly indicated, offered just as a germ which might be safely left to your own intelligence to develop. The action was pure acted irony, but not an ironical word was uttered. This, of course, is the sort of play that refreshes the jaded critic, and he has to resist the temptation to over-praise it. The next evening I saw a play diligently crammed with everything that the other had carefully left out—emphasis, repetition, six words where one would have sufficed, “dramatic” situations and suspenses, the gentle humours of life concentrated into eccentricities of stage “character.” There is a numerous, and entirely respectable, public with a taste in this stage; it likes dots on its _i_’s, things thrust under its nose, so that it can see them, and repeated over and over again, so that it can understand them. That is a taste which the jaded critic cannot but have outgrown. Yet the play was good, sound work of its kind, and the critic’s first duty was to force himself back into his outgrown taste and see the play with the spirit with which the author wrote it and its proper public received it. I say his first duty; it was open to him afterwards to recover his own personality and make his distinctions. But this first duty was hard. It is an ever-recurring trial of critical conscience. “These are our troubles, Mr. Wesley,” as the peevish gentleman said when the footman put too much coal on the fire.

WOMEN’S JOURNALS

Who was the wit who, to the usual misquotation from Buffon, _le style c’est l’homme_, rejoined _mais ce n’est pas la femme_? The statement has perhaps as much truth as is required from a witticism; it is half true. Woman, unlike man, does not express all of herself. She has her reticences, her euphemisms, and her asterisks. She will on no account name all things by their names. It is one of the childish weaknesses of men, she holds, to practise veracity to excess. Like children, they cannot help blurting out the truth. But she, from diligent experiments on her own person, has learnt that truth looks all the better for having its nose powdered and its cheeks discreetly rouged. Readers of George Sand’s “Histoire de ma Vie” are often baffled in tracing the fine distinction between the woman and the make-up. Therein the work is typical, illustrating as it does the general desire of women in literature to look pretty—to look pretty in their mirror, for themselves, for their own pleasure. Not, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, to look pretty in the eyes of men or of a particular man. So one is amused but scarcely convinced by Heine’s well-known remark that every woman who writes has one eye on her paper and the other on some man—except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had only one eye. Evidently the generalization was invented just to spite the countess. Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter are far better than those to Bussy-Rabutin. George Eliot may have had one eye on Lewes when she did her best to spoil her novels by scientific pedantry—which was sheer waste (let alone the damage to the novels), as Lewes was, by all accounts, the ugliest man in London. But on what man had Jane Austen an eye? One might ask the question about our thousands of women novelists to-day, and at once see the refutation of Heine in simple arithmetic; there would not be enough men to go round. There is clearly no rule. Heine may have been thinking of George Sand, already mentioned, whose eye—her “glad eye,” I fear it must be called—revolved as she wrote upon a round dozen of men in turn.

But there is one department of women’s literature wherein the element of doubt altogether vanishes. I mean the journals they publish, or get published, for themselves. They cannot write here with their eye on some man. Indeed, men, nice men (“nice” in the strict sense, approved in a certain talk between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney), are rather chary of even approaching such journals. They exhibit advertisements of “undies,” corsets, and other things that used to be called feminine mysteries, but are now entitled perhaps to the rank of notorieties which make one instinctively stammer, “Oh, I beg your pardon,” and beat a hasty retreat. So, it will at once be said, do all newspapers nowadays, and that is true. Yet, somehow, one feels more indiscreet in lighting upon them in the women’s journals than in the others. For one thing, they seem to be more dainty and alluring by reason of more artistic execution and glazed paper, so that they may satisfy the critical eye of their proper wearers. And, for another, there is a difference between the high-road of the newspaper, whereon a man willy-nilly must travel, and the by-path of the women’s journal, where he is at best a privileged intruder. If you ask, “Goosey, goosey, gander, whither shall I wander?” there is a distinct difference between answering, “Upstairs and downstairs,” and “in my lady’s chamber.”

All this, of course, as the judicious will have perceived, really means that I am as interested as, I suppose, are most of my fellow-men in all these curiously dainty and elegant ingenuities of women’s apparel, and that I am only pretending to be shocked. (After all, in his pursuit of veracity, even a man may occasionally powder his nose.) The advertisers, bless them, know all about that. They know that the natural man shares the naïve admiration which Pepys once expressed on seeing Lady Castlemaine’s wonderful _lingerie_ and laces hanging out to dry on a clothes-line in Whitehall. But the natural man generally finds it convenient to be more reticent about it than Pepys.