Letters on Literature Part 2

Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist. He preaches as continually as Thackeray. And his moral is this: "Let a man be kind, generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest--and we may pardon him vices of young blood, and the stains of adventurous living." Fielding has no mercy on a seducer. Lovelace would have fared worse with him than with Richardson, who, I verily believe, admired that infernal (excuse me) coward and villain. The case of young Nightingale, in "Tom Jones," will show you what Fielding thought of such gallants. Why, Tom himself preaches to Nightingale. "Miss Nancy's Interest alone, and not yours, ought to be your sole Consideration," cried Thomas, . . . "and the very best and truest Honour, which is Goodness, requires it of you," that is, requires that Nightingale shall marry Miss Nancy.

How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly honest, with his own astonis.h.i.+ng lack of _retenue_, and with Lady Bellaston, is just the puzzle. We cannot very well argue about it. I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partly excuse Jones in a number of very delicate situations. If you ask me whether Sophia had not, after her marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I must admit that probably it was so. But Dr. Johnson himself thought little of that.

I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding's morality is to take the best of it and leave the remainder alone. Here I find that I have unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr. James Boswell, the younger, of Auchinleck:

"The moral tendency of Fielding's writings . . . is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections.

He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructions to a higher state of ethical perfection."

Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones's faults, and what a world of men and women it will become! Fielding did not paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well. He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties of charity in every sense of the word. He found that the only man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral character. In short, he knew that respectability often practised none but the strictly self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always extinguish a native goodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery made him leniently disposed to "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that I," say the author of "Pamela," "could not be interested for any one of them."

How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those deplorably tedious lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,'" as Horace Walpole calls them!

Fielding asks his Muse to give him "humour and good humour." What novelist was ever so rich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind with so much affection for mankind in his heart? This love s.h.i.+nes in every book of his. The poor have all his good-will, and in him an untired advocate and friend. What a life the poor led in the England of 1742! There never before was such tyranny without a servile insurrection. I remember a dreadful pa.s.sage in "Joseph Andrews," where Lady b.o.o.by is trying to have f.a.n.n.y, Joseph's sweetheart, locked up in prison:--

"It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his Wors.h.i.+p, our Justice, commit a Fellow to _Bridewell_; he takes so much pleasure in it. And when once we ha' 'um there, we seldom hear any more o' 'um. He's either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month's Time."

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to- day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but "Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry Fielding's must even go to the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that pa.s.ses can shove him aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes "with a purpose" like d.i.c.kens--obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, if _l'Art pour l'Art_ is all the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His n.o.ble English, his sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle--not hackneyed--to show you that if he is writing about "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty," he is yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth's conversations with the author who remarked that "Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius." What knew Samuel of Eustathius? I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him but in his faults. They make him more human; one loves him for them as he loves Squire Western, with all his failings. Delightful, immortal Squire!

It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out "Hurray for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Suss.e.x." But it _was_ Western that talked of "One Acton, that the Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own Dogs kill'd 'un, and eat 'un." And have you forgotten the popular discussion (during the Forty-five) of the affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire Western said, "all of us understand"? Said the Puppet-Man, "I don't care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not uppermost, for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows." But the Puppet-Man had no vote in 1745. Now, to our comfort, he can and does exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise.

There is no room in this epistle for Fielding's glorious gallery of characters--for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her debaucheries, and is therefore so unlike our modern representative of her cla.s.s, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton's "Doctor Cupid;" for Square, and Thwack.u.m, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady b.o.o.by, and Honour, that undying lady's maid, and Partridge, and Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!

It is like the whole world of that old England--the maids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starveling authors--all alive; all (save the authors) full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the l.u.s.ty old militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer to Fielding--a number of meritorious moderns? Who knows? But do not let _us_ prefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don Quixote on the paths of Spain.

But I cannot convert you. You will turn to some story about store-clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues with the fair.

LONGFELLOW

_To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_.

My dear Mainwaring,--You are very good to ask me to come up and listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the minor characters in "Sordello;" but I think it would suit me better, if you didn't mind, to come up when the May races are on. I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in "Sordello," and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pa.s.s through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello's story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.

What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember, and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books have made on him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for example. I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, and what a flood of memories his music brings with it! To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing over the empty fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a belated bird, and here and there a red leaf from the tree. There is that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of one's boyhood; it breathes of a world very vaguely realized--a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with early manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy's favourites, such as "Of Nelson and the North," or "Ye Mariners of England."

His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither when one was fifteen. To read the "Voices of the Night," in particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardens and fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,

"The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair, The best-beloved Night!"

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human matter than for an indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the "Psalm of Life" that has made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people, that it is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our difficult life. They say so, and they think so: but the poem is not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent. But it really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the "Psalms of Life" a masterpiece. You--my learned prosodist and student of Browning and Sh.e.l.ley--will agree with me that it is _not_ a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders can.

How many other poems of Longfellow's there are that remind us of youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when we read "The Reaper and the Flowers"! I read again, and, as the poet says,

"Then the forms of the departed Enter at the open door, The beloved, the true-hearted Come to visit me once more."

Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with Theo's own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," and confess the truth, which poet brings the break into the reader's voice? It is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it is the simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a ballad moves you. I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one's old self of the old years. I don't know a poem "of the affections," as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that I like better than Thackeray's "Cane-bottomed Chair." Well, "The Fire of Driftwood" and this other of Longfellow's with its absolute lack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is not less tender and true.

"And she sits and gazes at me With those deep and tender eyes, Like the stars, so still and saintlike, Looking downward from the skies."

It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read the "Voices of the Night" from the same book with us, how long ago! So long ago that one was half-frightened by the legend of the "Beleaguered City."

I know the ballad brought the scene to me so vividly that I expected, any frosty night, to see how

"The white pavilions rose and fell On the alarmed air;"

and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark "Three Brethren's Cairn," that I half-hoped to watch when "the troubled army fled"--fled with battered banners of mist drifting through the pines, down to the Tweed and the sea. The "Skeleton in Armour" comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the "Wreck of the Hesperus" touches one in the old, simple way after so many, many days of verse-reading and even verse-writing.

In brief, Longfellow's qualities are so mixed with what the reader brings, with so many kindliest a.s.sociations of memory, that one cannot easily criticize him in cold blood. Even in spite of this friendliness and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of course, that he does moralize too much. The first part of his lyrics is always the best; the part where he is dealing directly with his subject. Then comes the "practical application" as preachers say, and I feel now that it is sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured.

Look at his "Endymion." It is the earlier verses that win you:

"And silver white the river gleams As if Diana in her dreams Had dropt her silver bow Upon the meadows low."

That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But the moral and consolatory _application_ is too long--too much dwelt on:

"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought, Love gives itself, but is not bought."

Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and not only does the poet "moralize his song," but the moral is feeble, and fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that

"Some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own."

If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.

A poem like "My Lost Youth" is needed to remind one of what the author really was, "simple, sensuous, pa.s.sionate." What a lovely verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow's favourite Finnish "Kalevala," "a verse of a Lapland song," like a wind over pines and salt coasts:

"I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tide, tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and the mystery of the s.h.i.+ps, And the magic of the sea."

Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language--not a Keats by any means--has often, by sheer force of plain sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten:

"Ye open the eastern windows, That look towards the sun, Where thoughts are singing swallows, And the brooks of morning run."

There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli's, the Virgin seated with the Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise.

This poem of Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour," seems, like Botticelli's painting, to open a door into the paradise of children, where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden from men--what no man hath seen at any time.

Longfellow is exactly the ant.i.thesis of Poe, who, with all his science of verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of it into his lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the other is the poet of Death, and of _bizarre_ shapes of death, from which Heaven deliver us!