Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson has been very much what might, under the circumstances, have been expected. Their efforts to overwhelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed paltry to the critics, unless they could succeed, at the same time, in laying waste all the smaller gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded in human nature, and that the glory of a dead rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect unless some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. But when we come to think calmly on this matter, it will be seen that this offering up of the live poets as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of their dead master is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted all these years that we possessed the greatest of the world's poets since Victor Hugo. We did well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great age, and we complain at once, with bitter cries--because we have no poet left so venerable or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of craftsmanship--that poetry is dead amongst us, and that all the other excellent artists in verse are worthless scribblers. This is natural, perhaps, but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous. It is, moreover, exactly what the critics said in 1850, when Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson had already published a great deal of their most admirable work.

The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviving poets of England pays but a poor compliment to the memory of that great man whose fame it professes to honour. I suppose that there has scarcely been a writer of interesting verse who has come into anything like prominence within the lifetime of Tennyson who has not received from him some letter of praise--some message of benevolent indulgence. More than fifty years ago he wrote, in glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on his _Festus_; it is only yesterday that we were hearing of his letters to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. William Watson. Tennyson did not affect to be a critic--no man, indeed, can ever have lived who less _affected_ to be anything--but he loved good verses, and he knew them when he saw them, and welcomed them indulgently. No one can find it more distasteful to him to have it asserted that Tennyson was, and will be, "the last of the English poets" than would Tennyson himself.

It was not my good fortune to see him many times, and only twice, at an interval of about twelve years, did I have the privilege of hearing him talk at length and ease. On each of those occasions, however, it was noticeable with what warmth and confidence he spoke of the future of English poetry, with what interest he evidently followed its progress, and how cordially he appreciated what various younger men were doing. In particular, I hope it is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in which he spoke to me on each of these occasions of Mr. Swinburne, whose critical conscience had, it must not be forgotten, led him to refer with no slight severity to several of the elder poet's writings. In 1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, and might not unreasonably have been painfully recollected. Yet Tennyson spoke of him almost as Dryden did two hundred years ago to Congreve:

_And this I prophesy--thou shalt be seen_
_(Though with some short parenthesis between)_
_High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,_
_Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear._

It would never have occurred to this great and wise man that his own death could be supposed to mark the final burning up and turning to ashes of the prophetic bays.

These are considerations, however--to return to my original parable--for the few within the Abbey. They are of no force in guiding opinion among the non-poetical masses outside. These, dangerously moved for the nonce to observe the existence of poetry, may make a great many painful and undesirable reflections before the subject quits their memory. There is always a peril in a popular movement that is not founded on genuine feeling, and the excitement about Tennyson's death has been far too universal to be sincere. It is even now not too early for us to perceive, if we will face it calmly, that elements of a much commoner and emptier nature than reverence for a man of genius have entered into the stir about the Laureate's burial. The multitude so stirred into an excited curiosity about a great poet will presently crave, of course, a little more excitement still over another poet, and this stimulant will not be forthcoming. We have not, and shall not have for a generation at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the monster. It will be in the retreat of the wave, in the sense of popular disappointment at the non-recurrence of such intellectual shocks as the deaths of Browning and Tennyson have supplied, that the right of poetry to take precedence among the arts of writing will for the first time come to be seriously questioned. Our critics will then, too late, begin to regret their suttee of the Muses; but if they try to redeem their position by praising this living poet or that, the public will only too glibly remind them of their own dictum that "poetry died with Tennyson."

In old days the reading public swept the literature of its fathers into the dust-bin, and read Horace while its immediate contemporaries were preparing works in prose and verse to suit the taste of the moment. But nowadays each great writer who passes out of physical life preserves his intellectual existence intact and becomes a lasting rival to his surviving successor. The young novelist has no living competitor so dangerous to him as Dickens and Thackeray are, who are nevertheless divided from him by time almost as far as Milton was from Pope. It is nearly seventy years since the earliest of Macaulay's _Essays_ appeared, and the least reference to one of them would now be recognised by "every schoolboy." Less than seventy years after the death of Bacon his _Essays_ were so completely forgotten that when extracts from them were discovered in the common-place book of a deceased lady of quality, they were supposed to be her own, were published and praised by people as clever as Congreve, went through several editions, and were not detected until within the present century. When an age made a palimpsest of its memory in this way it was far easier to content it with contemporary literary excellence than it is now, when every aspirant is confronted with the quintessence of the centuries.

It is not, however, from the captious taste of the public that most is to be feared, but from its indifference. Let it not be believed that, because a mob of the votaries of Mr. Jerome and Mr. Sims have been drawn to the precincts of the Abbey to gaze upon a pompous ceremonial, these admirable citizens have suddenly taken to reading _Lucretius_ or _The Two Voices_. What their praise is worth no one among us would venture to say in words so unmeasured as those of the dead Master himself, who, with a prescience of their mortuary attentions, spoke of these irreverent admirers as those

_Who make it seem more sweet to be_
_The little life of bank and brier,_
_The bird who pipes his lone desire_
_And dies unheard within his tree,_

_Than he that warbles long and loud,_
_And drops at Glory's temple-gates,_
_For whom the carrion-vulture waits_
_To tear his heart before the crowd._

If this is more harsh reproof than a mere idle desire to be excited by a spectacle or by an event demands, it may nevertheless serve us as an antidote to the vain illusion that these multitudes are suddenly converted to a love of fine literature. They are not so converted, and fine literature--however scandalous it may sound in the ears of this generation to say it--is for the few.

How long, then, will the many permit themselves to be brow-beaten by the few? At the present time the oligarchy of taste governs our vast republic of readers. We tell them to praise the Bishop of Oxford for his history, and Mr. Walter Pater for his essays, and Mr. Herbert Spencer for his philosophy, and Mr. George Meredith for his novels. They obey us, and these are great and illustrious personages about whom newspaper gossip is continually occupied, whom crowds, when they have the chance, hurry to gaze at, but whose books (or I am cruelly misinformed) brave a relatively small circulation. These reputations are like beautiful churches, into which people turn to cross themselves with holy water, bow to the altar, and then hurry out again to spend the rest of the morning in some snug tavern.

Among these churches of living fame, the noblest, the most exquisite was that sublime cathedral of song which we called Tennyson; and there, it is true, drawn by fashion and by a choral service of extreme beauty, the public had formed the habit of congregating. But at length, after a final ceremony of incomparable dignity, this minster has been closed. Where will the people who attended there go now? The other churches stand around, honoured and empty. Will they now be better filled? Or will some secularist mayor, of strong purpose and an enemy to sentiment, order them to be deserted altogether? We may, at any rate, be quite sure that this remarkable phenomenon of the popularity of Tennyson, however we regard it, is but transitory and accidental, or at most personal to himself. That it shows any change in the public attitude of reserved or grumbling respect to the best literature, and radical dislike to style, will not be seriously advanced.

What I dread, what I long have dreaded, is the eruption of a sort of Commune in literature. At no period could the danger of such an outbreak of rebellion against tradition be so great as during the reaction which must follow the death of our most illustrious writer. Then, if ever, I should expect to see a determined resistance made to the pretensions of whatever is rare, or delicate, or abstruse. At no time, I think, ought those who guide taste amongst us to be more on their guard to preserve a lofty and yet generous standard, to insist on the merits of what is beautiful and yet unpopular, and to be unaffected by commercial tests of distinction. We have lived for ten years in a fool's paradise. Without suspecting the truth, we have been passing through a period of poetic glory hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in our history. One by one great luminaries were removed--Rossetti, Newman, Arnold, Browning sank, each star burning larger as it neared the horizon. Still we felt no apprehension, saying, as we turned towards Farringford:

"_Mais le père est là-bas, dans l'île._"

Now he is gone also, and the shock of his extinction strikes us for the moment with a sense of positive and universal darkness.

But this very natural impression is a mistaken one. As our eyes grow accustomed to the absence of this bright particular planet, we shall be more and more conscious of the illuminating power of the heavenly bodies that are left. We shall, at least, if criticism directs us carefully and wholesomely. With all the losses that our literature has sustained, we are, still, more richly provided with living poets of distinction than all but the blossoming periods of our history have been. In this respect we are easily deceived by a glance at some chart of the course of English literature, where the lines of life of aged writers overlap those of writers still in their early youth. The worst pessimist amongst us will not declare that our poetry seems to be in the utterly and deplorably indigent condition in which the death of Burns appeared to leave it in 1796. Then the beholder, glancing round, would see nothing but Crabbe, grown silent for eleven years, Cowper insane, Blake undeveloped and unrecognised; the pompous, florid Erasmus Darwin left solitary master of the field. But we, who look at the chart, see Wordsworth and Coleridge on the point of evolution, Campbell and Moore at school, Byron and Shelley in the nursery, and Keats an infant. Who can tell what inheritors of unfulfilled renown may not now be staining their divine lips with the latest of this season's blackberries?

But we are not left to these conjectural consolations. I believe that I take very safe ground when I say that our living poets present a variety and amplitude of talent, a fulness of tone, an accomplishment in art, such as few other generations in England, and still fewer elsewhere, have been in a position to exult in. It would be invidious, and it might indeed be very difficult and tedious, to go through the list of those who do signal honour to our living literature in this respect. Without repeating the list so patiently drawn up and so humorously commented upon by Mr. Traill, it would be easy to select from it fifteen names, not one of which would be below the fair meridian of original merit, and many of which would rise far above it. Could so much have been said in 1592, or in 1692, or in 1792? Surely, no. I must not be led to multiply names, the mere mention of which in so casual a manner can hardly fail to seem impertinent; yet I venture to assert that a generation which can boast of Mr. Swinburne and Miss Christina Rossetti, of Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore, of Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Robert Bridges, has no reason to complain of lack of fire or elevation, grace or versatility.

It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, that roses ever grew without thorns. We cannot have the rose of such an exceptional life as Tennyson's without suffering for it. We suffer by the void its cessation produces, the disturbance in our literary hierarchy that it brings, the sense of uncertainty and insufficiency that follows upon it. The death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking and swaying of the ship of literature in France, and to this day it cannot be said that the balance there is completely restored. I cannot think that we gain much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevitable, and still less by folding our hands and calling out that it means that the vessel is sinking. It means nothing of the kind. What it does mean is that when a man of the very highest rank in the profession lives to an exceptionally great age, and retains his intellectual gifts to the end, combining with these unusual advantages the still more fortuitous ones of being singular and picturesque in his personality and the object of much ungratified curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the eyes of his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He is seen up in the sky where no man could be. I trust I shall not be accused of anything like disrespect to the genius of Tennyson--which I loved and admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as possible--when I say that his reputation at this moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the very highest order; but in the popular esteem, at this moment, he holds a position which is, to carry on the image, topographically impossible. No poet, no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows.

The result of seeing one mountain in vertical mirage, and various surrounding acclivities (if that were possible) at their proper heights, would be to falsify the whole system of optical proportion. Yet this is what is now happening, and for some little time will continue to happen _in crescendo_, with regard to Tennyson and his surviving contemporaries. There is no need, however, to cherish "those gloomy thoughts led on by spleen" which the melancholy events of the past month have awakened. The recuperative force of the arts has never yet failed the human race, and will not fail us now. All the _Tit-Bits_ and _Pearson's Weeklies_ in the world will not be able to destroy a fragment of pure and original literature, although the tastes they foster may delay its recognition and curtail its rewards.

The duty of all who have any influence on the public is now clear. So far from resigning the responsibility of praise and blame, so far from opening the flood-gates to what is bad--on the ground that the best is gone, and that it does not matter--it behoves those who are our recognised judges of literary merit to resist more strenuously than ever the inroads of mere commercial success into the Temple of Fame. The Scotch ministry preserve that interesting practice of "fencing the tables" of the Lord by a solemn searching of would-be communicants. Let the tables of Apollo be fenced, not to the exclusion or the discomfort of those who have a right to his sacraments, but to the chastening of those who have no other mark of his service but their passbook. And poetry, which survived the death of Chaucer, will recover even from the death of Tennyson.

_1892._

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in the _Times_ for October 17th, 1892.

SHELLEY in 1892

Shelley in 1892

_Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August 11, 1892_

We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly one hundred years ago, there was born, in an old house in this parish, one of the greatest of the English poets, one of the most individual and remarkable of the poets of the world. This beautiful county of Sussex, with its blowing woodlands and its shining downs, was even then not unaccustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and thirty years before, it had given birth to Otway; seventy years before, to Collins. But charming as these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and not Otway can compare for a moment with that writer who is the main intellectual glory of Sussex, the ever-beloved and ethereally illustrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you might, as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex town, like to be reminded, before we go any further, of the exact connection of our poet with the county--of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in it. You will see that, although his native province lost him early, she had a strong claim upon his interests and associations.

When Shelley was born, on the 4th of August, 1792, his grandfather, afterwards a baronet, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was ensconced at Goring Castle, while his father, the heir to the title, Mr. Timothy Shelley, inhabited that famous house, Field Place, which lies here at your doors. Mr. Timothy Shelley had married a lady from your nearest eastern neighbour, the town of Cuckfield; he was M.P. for another Sussex borough, Shoreham; in the next Parliament he was to represent, if I am not mistaken, Horsham itself. The names which meet us in the earliest pages of the poet's biographies are all Sussex names. It was at Warnham that he was taught his earliest lessons, and it was in Warnham Pond that the great tortoise lurked which was the earliest of his visions. St. Irvine's, in whose woods he loved to wander by moonlight, has disappeared, but Strode is close to you still, and if St. Leonard's Forest has shrunken somewhat to the eastward since Shelley walked and raved in its allies, you still possess it in your neighbourhood.

Until Shelley was expelled from Oxford, Field Place was his constant residence out of school and college hours. Nor, although his father at first forbade him to return, was his connection with Sussex broken even then. The house of his uncle, Captain Pilfold, was always open to him at Cuckfield, and when the Duke of Norfolk made his kind suggestion that the young man should enter Parliament, as a species of moral sedative, it was to a Sussex borough that he proposed to nominate him. Shelley's first abortive volume of poems was set up by a Horsham printer, and it was from Hurstpierpoint that Miss Hitchener, afterwards known as the "Brown Demon," started on her disastrous expedition into the lives of the Shelleys. It was not until 1814, on the eve of his departure for the Continent, that Shelley came to Sussex for the last time, paying that furtive visit to his mother and sisters, on which, in order to conceal himself from his father, he buttoned the scarlet jacket of a guardsman round his attenuated form.

If I have endeavoured, by thus grouping together all the Sussex names which are connected with Shelley, to attract your personal and local sympathy around the career of the poet, it is with no intention to claim for him a provincial significance. Shelley does not belong to any one county, however rich and illustrious that county may be; he belongs to Europe--to the world. The tendency of his poetry and its peculiar accent were not so much English as European. He might have been a Frenchman, or an Italian, a Pole, or a Greek, in a way in which Wordsworth, for instance, or even Byron, could never have been anything but an Englishman. He passes, as we watch the brief and sparkling record of his life, from Sussex to the world. One day he is a child, sailing paper boats among the reeds in Warnham Pond; next day we look, and see, scarcely the son of worthy Mr. Timothy Shelley of Field Place, but a spirit without a country, "a planet-crested shape sweeping by on lightning-braided pinions" to scatter the liquid joy of life over humanity.

Into the particulars of this strange life I need not pass. You know them well. No life so brief as Shelley's has occupied so much curiosity, and for my part I think that even too minute inquiry has been made concerning some of its details. The "Harriet problem" leaves its trail across one petal of this rose; minuter insects, not quite so slimy, lurk where there should be nothing but colour and odour. We may well, I think, be content to-day to take the large romance of Shelley's life, and leave any sordid details to oblivion. He died before he was quite thirty years of age, and the busy piety of biographers has peeped into the record of almost every day of the last ten of those years. What seems to me most wonderful is that a creature so nervous, so passionate, so ill-disciplined as Shelley was, should be able to come out of such an unprecedented ordeal with his shining garments so little specked with mire. Let us, at all events, to-day, think of the man only as "the peregrine falcon" that his best and oldest friends describe him.

We may, at all events, while a grateful England is cherishing Shelley's memory, and congratulating herself on his majestic legacy of song to her, reflect almost with amusement on the very different attitude of public opinion seventy and even fifty years ago. That he should have been pursued by calumny and prejudice through his brief, misrepresented life, and even beyond the tomb, can surprise no thinking spirit. It was not the poet who was attacked; it was the revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant and paradoxical humanitarian. It is not needful, in order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveigh against those who, taught in the prim school of eighteenth-century poetics, and repelled by political and social peculiarities which they but dimly understood, poured out their reprobation of his verses. Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them "beaten hounds" and "carrion kites"; some, perhaps, were very respectable and rather narrow-minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry of Shenstone. The newer a thing is, in the true sense, the slower people are to accept it, and the abuse of the _Quarterly Review_, rightly taken, was but a token of Shelley's opulent originality.

To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded in the course of years an equally blind, although more amiable, admiration. Among a certain class of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, and once more the centre of attention was not the poet and his poetry, but the faddist and his fads. Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and canonised. Expressions were used about his conduct and his opinions which would have been extravagant if employed to describe those of a virgin-martyr or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians clustered around the eater of buns and raisins, revolutionists around the enemy of kings, social anarchists around the husband of Godwin's daughter. Worse than all, those to whom the restraints of religion were hateful, marshalled themselves under the banner of the youth who had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful of the fact that all his best writings attest that, whatever name he might give himself, he, more than any other poet of the age, saw God in everything. This also was a phase, and passed away. The career of Shelley is no longer a battlefield for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they still skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the main tract of it is not darkened with the smoke from their artillery. It lies, a fair open country of pure poetry, a province which comes as near to being fairyland as any that literature provides for us.

We cannot, however, think of this poet as of a writer of verses in the void. He is anything but the "idle singer of an empty day." Shelley was born amid extraordinary circumstances into an extraordinary age. On the very day, one hundred years ago, when the champagne was being drunk in the hall of Field Place in honour of the birth of a son and heir to Mr. Timothy Shelley, the thunder-cloud of revolution was breaking over Europe. Never before had there been felt within so short a space of time so general a crash of the political order of things. Here, in England, we were spectators of the wild and sundering stress, in which the other kingdoms of Europe were distracted actors. The faces of Burke and of his friends wore "the expression of men who are going to defend themselves from murderers," and those murderers are called, during the infancy of Shelley, by many names, Mamelukes and Suliots, Poles and Swedes, besides the all-dreaded one of _sansculottes_. In the midst of this turmoil Shelley was born, and the air of revolution filled his veins with life.

In Shelley we see a certain type of revolutionist, born out of due time, and directed to the bloodless field of literature. The same week that saw the downfall of La Fayette saw the birth of Shelley, and we might believe the one to be an incarnation of the hopes of the other. Each was an aristocrat, born with a passionate ambition to play a great part in the service of humanity; in neither was there found that admixture of the earthly which is needful for sustained success in practical life. Had Shelley taken part in active affairs, his will and his enthusiasm must have broken, like waves, against the coarser type of revolutionist, against the Dantons and the Robespierres. Like La Fayette, Shelley was intoxicated with virtue and glory; he was chivalrous, inflammable, and sentimental. Happily for us, and for the world, he was not thrown into a position where these beautiful qualities could be displayed only to be shattered like a dome of many-coloured glass. He was the not unfamiliar figure of revolutionary times, the _grand seigneur_ enamoured of democracy. But he was much more than this; as Mr. Swinburne said long ago, Shelley "was born a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work." Let us attempt to discover what sort of prophecy it was that he blew through his golden trumpet.

It is in the period of youth that Shelley appeals to us most directly, and exercises his most unquestioned authority over the imagination. In early life, at the moment more especially when the individuality begins to assert itself, a young man or a young woman of feeling discovers in this poet certain qualities which appear to be not merely good, but the best, not only genuine, but exclusively interesting. At that age we ask for light, and do not care how it is distributed; for melody, and do not ask the purpose of the song; for colour, and find no hues too brilliant to delight the unwearied eye. Shelley satisfies these cravings of youth. His whole conception of life is bounded only by its illusions. The brilliancy of the morning dream, the extremities of radiance and gloom, the most pellucid truth, the most triumphant virtue, the most sinister guilt and melodramatic infamy, alone contrive to rivet the attention. All half-lights, all arrangements in grey or russet, are cast aside with impatience, as unworthy of the emancipated spirit. Winged youth, in the bright act of sowing its intellectual wild oats, demands a poet, and Horsham, just one hundred years ago, produced Shelley to satisfy that natural craving.

It is not for grey philosophers, or hermits wearing out the evening of life, to pass a definitive verdict on the poetry of Shelley. It is easy for critics of this temper to point out weak places in the radiant panoply, to say that this is incoherent, and that hysterical, and the other an ethereal fallacy. Sympathy is needful, a recognition of the point of view, before we can begin to judge Shelley aright. We must throw ourselves back to what we were at twenty, and recollect how dazzling, how fresh, how full of colour, and melody, and odour, this poetry seemed to us--how like a May-day morning in a rich Italian garden, with a fountain, and with nightingales in the blossoming boughs of the orange-trees, with the vision of a frosty Apennine beyond the belt of laurels, and clear auroral sky everywhere above our heads. We took him for what he seemed, "a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," and we thought to criticise him as little as we thought to judge the murmur of the forest or the reflections of the moonlight on the lake. He was exquisite, emancipated, young like ourselves, and yet as wise as a divinity. We followed him unquestioning, walking in step with his panthers, as the Bacchantes followed Dionysus out of India, intoxicated with enthusiasm.

If our sentiment is no longer so rhapsodical, shall we blame the poet? Hardly, I think. He has not grown older, it is we who are passing further and further from that happy eastern morning where the light is fresh, and the shadows plain and clearly defined. Over all our lives, over the lives of those of us who may be seeking to be least trammelled by the commonplace, there creeps ever onward the stealthy tinge of conventionality, the admixture of the earthly. We cannot honestly wish it to be otherwise. It is the natural development, which turns kittens into cats, and blithe-hearted lads into earnest members of Parliament. If we try to resist this inevitable tendency, we merely become eccentric, a mockery to others, and a trouble to ourselves. Let us accept our respectability with becoming airs of gravity; it is another thing to deny that youth was sweet. When I see an elderly professor proving that the genius of Shelley has been overrated, I cannot restrain a melancholy smile. What would he, what would I, give for that exquisite ardour, by the light of which all other poetry than Shelley's seemed dim? You recollect our poet's curious phrase, that to go to him for common sense was like going to a gin-palace for mutton chops. The speech was a rash one, and has done him harm. But it is true enough that those who are conscious of the grossness of life, and are over-materialised, must go to him for the elixir and ether which emancipate the senses.

If I am right in thinking that you will all be with me in considering this beautiful passion of youth, this recapturing of the illusions, as the most notable of the gifts of Shelley's poetry to us, you will also, I think, agree with me in placing only second to it the witchery which enables this writer, more than any other, to seize the most tumultuous and agitating of the emotions, and present them to us coloured by the analogy of natural beauty. Whether it be the petulance of a solitary human being, to whom the little downy owl is a friend, or the sorrows and desires of Prometheus, on whom the primal elements attend as slaves, Shelley is able to mould his verse to the expression of feeling, and to harmonise natural phenomena to the magnitude or the delicacy of his theme. No other poet has so wide a grasp as he in this respect, no one sweeps so broadly the full diapason of man in nature. Laying hold of the general life of the universe with a boldness that is unparalleled, he is equal to the most sensitive of the naturalists in his exact observation of tender and humble forms.

And to the ardour of fiery youth and the imaginative sympathy of pantheism, he adds what we might hardly expect from so rapt and tempestuous a singer, the artist's self-restraint. Shelley is none of those of whom we are sometimes told in these days, whose mission is too serious to be transmitted with the arts of language, who are too much occupied with the substance to care about the form. All that is best in his exquisite collection of verse cries out against this wretched heresy. With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct, his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the highest and most classic technical perfection. No one, among the moderns, has gone further than he in the just attention to poetic form, and there is so severe a precision in his most vibrating choruses that we are taken by them into the company, not of the Ossians and the Walt Whitmans, not of those who feel, yet cannot control their feelings, but of those impeccable masters of style,

_who dwelt by the azure sea_
_Of serene and golden Italy,_
_Or Greece the mother of the free._

And now, most inadequately and tamely, yet, I trust, with some sense of the greatness of my theme, I have endeavoured to recall to your minds certain of the cardinal qualities which animated the divine poet whom we celebrate to-day. I have no taste for those arrangements of our great writers which assign to them rank like schoolboys in a class, and I cannot venture to suggest that Shelley stands above or below this or that brother immortal. But of this I am quite sure, that when the slender roll is called of those singers, who make the poetry of England second only to that of Greece (if even of Greece), however few are named, Shelley must be among them. To-day, under the auspices of the greatest poet our language has produced since Shelley died, encouraged by universal public opinion and by dignitaries of all the professions, yes, even by prelates of our national church, we are gathered here as a sign that the period of prejudice is over, that England is in sympathy at last with her beautiful wayward child, understands his great language, and is reconciled to his harmonious ministry. A century has gone by, and once more we acknowledge the truth of his own words:

_The splendours of the firmament of time_
_May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;_
_Like stars to their appointed height they climb._

SYMBOLISM AND M. STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

Symbolism and M. Stéphane Mallarmé

The name which stands at the head of this essay is that of a writer who is at the present time more talked about, more ferociously attacked, more passionately beloved and defended, and at the same time less understood, than perhaps any other man of his intellectual rank in Europe. Even in the ferocious world of Parisian letters his purity of motive and dignity of attitude are respected. Benevolent to those younger than himself, exquisitely courteous and considerate in controversy, a master of that suavity and reserve the value of which literary persons so rarely appreciate, M. Mallarmé, to one who from a distance gazes with curiosity into the Parisian hurly-burly, appeals first by the beautiful amenity of his manners--a dreamy Sir Launcelot riding through a forest of dragons to help the dolorous lady of Poesy from pain. In the incessant pamphlet-wars of his party, others seem to strike for themselves, M. Mallarmé always for the cause; and when the battle is over, and the rest meet to carouse round a camp-fire, he is always found stealing back to the ivory tower of contemplation. Before we know the rights of the case, or have read a line of his verses, we are predisposed towards a figure so pure and so distinguished.

But though the personality of M. Mallarmé is so attractive, and though he marches at the head of a very noisy rabble, exceedingly little seems to be clearly known about him in this country. Until now, he has published in such a rare and cryptic manner, that not half a dozen of any one of his books can have reached England. Two or three abstruse essays in prose, published in the _National Observer_, have lately amazed the Philistines. Not thus did Mr. Lillyvick understand that the French language was to be imparted to Morleena Kenwigs. Charming stories float about concerning Scotch mammas who subscribed to the _National Observer_ for the use of their girls, and discovered that the articles were written in Moldo-Wallachian. M. Mallarmé's theories have been ridiculed and travestied, his style parodied, his practice gravely rebuked; but what that practice and style and theories are, has scarcely been understood. M. Mallarmé has been wrapped up in the general fog which enfolds our British notions of symbolists and impressionists. If the school has had a single friend in England, it has been Mr. Arthur Symons, one of the most brilliant of our younger poets; and even he has been interested, I think, more in M. Verlaine than in the Symbolists and Décadents proper.

It was in 1886 that the Décadents first began to be talked about. Then it was that Arthur Rimbaud's famous sonnet about the colours of the vowels flashed into celebrity, and everybody was telling everybody else that

_A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;_
_But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow._

Those were the days, already ancient now! of Noël Loumo and Marius Tapera, when the inexpressible Adoré Floupette published _Les Déliquescences_. Where are the deliquescents of yesteryear? Where is the once celebrated scene in the "boudoir oblong aux cycloïdes bigarrures" which enlivened _Le Thé chez Miranda_ of M. Jean Moréas? These added to the gaiety of nations, and have been forgotten; brief life was here their portion. Fresh oddities come forward, poets in shoals and schools, Evolutivo-instrumentists, Cataclysmists, Trombonists--even while we speak, have they not faded away? But amidst all this world of phantasmagoria, among these fugitive apparitions and futile individualities, dancing once across the stereopticon and seen no more--one figure of a genuine man of letters remains, that of M. Stéphane Mallarmé, the solitary name among those of the so-called Décadents which has hitherto proved its right to serious consideration.

If the dictionaries are to be trusted, M. Mallarmé was born in 1842. His career seems to have been the most uneventful on record. He has always been, and I think still is, professor of English at the Lycée Fontanes in Paris. About twenty years ago he paid a short visit to London, carrying with him, as I well remember, the vast portfolio of his translation of Poe's _Raven_, with Manet's singular illustrations. His life has been spent in a Buddhistic calm, in meditation. He has scarcely published anything, disliking, so it is said, the "exhibitionnisme" involved in bringing out a book, the banality of types and proofs and revises.

His revolutionary ideas with regard to style were formulated about 1875, when the _Parnasse Contemporain_, edited by the friends and co-evals of M. Mallarmé, rejected his first important poem, _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_, which appeared at length in 1876, as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by Manet. In the same year he gave his earliest example of the new prose in the shape of an essay prefixed to a beautiful reprint of Beckford's _Vathek_, a volume bound in vellum, tied with black and crimson silk, and produced in a very small edition. Ridicule was the only welcome vouchsafed to these two couriers of the Décadance. Perhaps M. Mallarmé was somewhat discouraged, although absolutely unsubdued.

He remained long submerged, but with the growth of his school he was persuaded to reappear. In 1887 one fascicule only of his complete poems was brought out in an extraordinary form, photolithographed from the original manuscript. In 1888 followed a translation of the poems of Edgar Poe. But until 1893 the general reader has had no opportunity, even in France, of forming an opinion on the prose or verse of M. Mallarmé. Meanwhile, his name has become one of the most notorious in contemporary literature. A thousand eccentricities, a thousand acts of revolt against tradition, have been perpetrated under the banner of his tacit encouragement. It is high time to try and understand what M. Mallarmé's teaching really is, and what his practice.

To ridicule the Décadents, or to insist upon their extravagance, is so easy as to be unworthy of a serious critic. It would be quite simple for some crusty Christopher to show that the poems of master and scholars alike are monstrous, unintelligible, ludicrously inept, and preposterous. M. Mallarmé has had hard words, not merely from the old classical critics such as M. Brunetière, but from men from whom the extremity of sympathy might have been looked. Life-long friends like M. Leconte de Lisle confess that they understood him once, but, alas! understand him no longer; or, like M. François Coppée, avoid all discussion of his verses, and obstinately confine themselves to "son esprit élevé, sa vie si pure, si belle." When such men as these profess themselves unable to comprehend a writer of their own age and language, it seems presumptuous for a foreigner to attempt to do so, nor do I pretend that in the formal and minute sense I am able to comprehend the poems of M. Mallarmé. He remains, under the most loving scrutiny, a most difficult writer. But, at all events, I think that sympathy and study may avail to enable the critic to detect the spirit which inspires this strange and cryptic figure. Study and sympathy I have given, and I offer some results of them, not without diffidence.

Translated into common language, then, the main design of M. Mallarmé and his friends seems to be to refresh the languid current of French style. They hold--and in this view no English critic can dare to join issue with them--that art is not a stable nor a definite thing, and that success for the future must lie along paths not exactly traversed in the immediate past. They are tired of the official versification of France, and they dream of new effects which all the handbooks tell them are impossible to French prosody. They make infinite experiments, they feel their way; and I have nothing to reproach them with except their undue haste (but M. Mallarmé has not been hasty) in publishing their "tentatives." Their aims are those of our own Areopagites of 1580, met "for the general surceasing and silence of bold Rymers, and also of the very best of them too"--"our new famous enterprise for the exchange of barbarous rymes for artificial verses." We must wish for the odd productions of these modern Parisian euphuists a better fate than befell the trimeter iambics of Master Drant and Master Preston. But the cause of their existence is plain enough. It is the exhaustion, the enervation of the language, following upon the activities of Victor Hugo and his contemporaries. It is, morever, a reaction towards freedom, directly consequent upon the strict and impersonal versification of the Parnassians. When the official verse has been burnished and chased to the metallic perfection of M. de Hérédia's sonnets, nothing but to withdraw to the wilderness in sheepskins is left to would-be poets of the next generation.

To pass from Symbolism generally to M. Mallarmé and his particular series of theories, he presents himself to us above all as an individualist. The poets of the last generation were a flock of singing-birds, trained in a general aviary. They met, as on the marble pavement of some new Serapeum, to contend in public for the rewards of polished verse. In contrast with these rivalries and congregations M. Mallarmé has always shown himself solitary and disengaged. As he has said: "The poet is a man who isolates himself that he may carve the sculptures of his own tomb." He refuses to obey that hierarchical tradition of which Victor Hugo was the most formidable pontiff. He finds the alexandrine, as employed in the intractable prosody of modern France, a rigid and puerile instrument, from which melodies can nowadays no more be extracted. So far as I comprehend the position, M. Mallarmé does not propose, as do some of his disciples, to reject this noble verse-form altogether, and to slide into a sort of rhymed Walt Whitmanism. I cannot trace in his published poems a single instance of such a determination. But it is plain that he takes the twelve syllables of the line as forming, not six notes, but twelve, and he demands permission to form with these twelve as many combinations as he pleases. Melody, to be gained at any sacrifice of the old Jesuit laws, is what he desiderates: harmony of versification, obtained in new ways, by extracting the latent capabilities of the organ until now too conventionally employed.

So much, very briefly, for the prosodical innovation. For the language he demands an equal refreshment, by the rejection of the old worn phrases in favour of odd, exotic, and archaic terms. He takes up and adopts literally the idea of Théophile Gautier that words are precious stones, and should be so set as to flash and radiate from the page. More individually characteristic of M. Mallarmé I find a certain preference for enigma. Language, to him, is given to conceal definite thought, to draw the eye away from the object. The Parnassians defined, described, analysed the object until it stood before us as in a coloured photograph. M. Mallarmé avoids this as much as possible. He aims at allusion only; he wraps a mystery around his simplest utterance; the abstruse and the symbolic are his peculiar territory. His aim, or I greatly misunderstand him, is to use words in such harmonious combinations as will suggest to the reader a mood or a condition which is not mentioned in the text, but is nevertheless paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of composition. To the conscious aiming at this particular effect are, it appears to me, due the more curious characteristics of his style, and much of the utter bewilderment which it produces on the brain of an indolent reader debauched by the facilities of realism.

The longest and the most celebrated of the poems of M. Mallarmé is _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_. It appears in the "florilège" which he has just published, and I have now read it again, as I have often read it before. To say that I understand it bit by bit, phrase by phrase, would be excessive. But if I am asked whether this famous miracle of unintelligibility gives me pleasure, I answer, cordially, Yes. I even fancy that I obtain from it as definite and as solid an impression as M. Mallarmé desires to produce. This is what I read in it: A faun--a simple, sensuous, passionate being--wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recall his experience of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate recipient of an actual visit from nymphs, white and golden goddesses, divinely tender and indulgent? Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but the shadow of a vision, no more substantial than the "arid rain" of notes from his own flute? He cannot tell. Yet surely there was, surely there is, an animal whiteness among the brown reeds of the lake that shines out yonder? Were they, are they, swans? No! But Naiads plunging? Perhaps!

Vaguer and vaguer grows the impression of this delicious experience. He would resign his woodland godship to retain it. A garden of lilies, golden-headed, white-stalked, behind the trellis of red roses? Ah! the effort is too great for his poor brain. Perhaps if he selects one lily from the garth of lilies, one benign and beneficent yielder of her cup to thirsty lips, the memory, the ever-receding memory, may be forced back. So, when he has glutted upon a bunch of grapes, he is wont to toss the empty skins into the air and blow them out in a visionary greediness. But no, the delicious hour grows vaguer; experience or dream, he will now never know which it was. The sun is warm, the grasses yielding; and he curls himself up again, after worshipping the efficacious star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious ecstasy into the more hopeful boskages of sleep.

This, then, is what I read in the so excessively obscure and unintelligible _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_; and, accompanied as it is with a perfect suavity of language and melody of rhythm, I know not what more a poem of eight pages could be expected to give. It supplies a simple and direct impression of physical beauty, of harmony, of colour; it is exceedingly mellifluous, when once the ear understands that the poet, instead of being the slave of the alexandrine, weaves his variations round it like a musical composer. Unfortunately, _L'Après-Midi_ was written fifteen years ago, and his theories have grown upon M. Mallarmé as his have on Mr. George Meredith. In the new collection of _Vers et Prose_ I miss some pieces which I used to admire--in particular, surely, _Placet_, and the delightful poem called _Le Guignon_. Perhaps these were too lucid for the worshippers. In return, we have certain allegories which are terribly abstruse, and some subfusc sonnets. I have read the following, called _Le Tombeau d'Edgard Poe_, over and over and over. I am very stupid, but I cannot tell what it _says_. In a certain vague and vitreous way I think I perceive what it _means_; and we are aided now by its being punctuated, which was not the case in the original form in which I met with it. But, "O my Brothers, ye the Workers," is it not still a little difficult?

_Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,_
_Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu_
_Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu_
_Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!_
_Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange_
_Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu_
_Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu_
_Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange._
_Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!_
_Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief_
_Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne_
_Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur_
_Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne_
_Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur._

Of the prose of M. Mallarmé, I can here speak but briefly. He has not published very much of it; and it is all polished and cadenced like his verse, with strange transposed adjectives and exotic nouns fantastically employed. It is even more distinctly to be seen in his prose than in his verse that he descends directly from Baudelaire, and in the former that streak of Lamartine that marks his poems is lacking.

The book called _Pages_ can naturally be compared with the _Poèmes en Prose_ of Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are now reprinted in _Vers et Prose_, and they strike me as the most distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M. Mallarmé. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets. _La Pipe_, in which the sight of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary lodgings there; _Le Nénuphar Blanc_, recording the vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat; _Frisson d'Hiver_, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china; each of these, and several more of these exquisite _Pages_, give just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems that style should give. They are exquisite--so far as they go--pure, distinguished, ingenious; and the fantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect accord with their general character.

Here is a fragment of _La Pénultième_, on which the reader may try his skill in comprehending the New French: