In Tchernicheva I saw an actual Princess of the Sea, gorgeously dressed, and enchanting. Yet, all of the spectacle was not beautiful; it was singularly inhuman and, at times, unnatural. Nothing but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Still, in the two extremes, pantomime and the poetic drama, the appeal is to the primary emotions, and with an economy and luxuriance of means, each of which is in its own way inimitable. Pantomime addresses itself, by the artful limitations of its craft, to universal human experiences, knowing that the moment it departs from those broad lines it will become unintelligible.
Pantomime, in its limited way, is no mere imitation of nature: it is a transposition. It can appeal to the intellect for its comprehension, and, like ballet, to the intellect through the eyes. To watch it is like dreaming. And as I watched this ballet I felt myself drawn deep into an opium-dream, as when I wrote of:
This crust, of which the rats have eaten part,
This pipe of opium; rage, remorse, despair;
This soul at pawn and this delirious heart.
Then, as the spell tightened closer and closer around me, I seemed to have taken hashish, of which I wrote:—
Behold the image of my fear;
O rise not, move not, come not near!
That moment, when you turned your face,
A demon seemed to leap through space;
His gesture strangled me with fear.
Who said the world is but a mood
In the eternal thought of God?
I know it, real though it seem,
The phantom of a hashish dream
In that insomnia which is God.
Does not every one know that terrifying impossibility of speaking which fastens one to the ground for the eternity of a second? Exactly that sensation came over me, the same kind of suspense, seeming to hang over the silent actors in the pantomime, giving them a nervous exaltation which has its subtle, immediate effect upon us, in comic or tragic situations.
III
The English theater with its unreal realism and its unimaginative pretenses toward poetry left me untouched and unconvinced. I found the beauty, the poetry, that I wanted only in two theaters, the Alhambra and the Empire. The ballet seemed to me the subtlest of the visible arts, and dancing a more significant speech than words. I could have said as Verlaine said to me, in jest, coming away from the Alhambra: "J'aime Shakespeare, mais—j'aimes mieux le ballet!" A ballet is simply a picture in movement. It is a picture where the imitation of nature is given by nature itself; where the figures of the composition are real, and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have a delightful, deliberate air of unreality. It is a picture where the colors change, re-combine, before one's eyes; where the outlines melt into one another, emerge, and are again lost in the mazes of the dancing.
The most magical glimpse I ever caught of a ballet was from the road in front, from the other side of the road, one night when two doors were suddenly thrown open as I was passing. In the moment's interval before the doors closed again I saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the heads of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the whole stage, its brilliant crowd drawn up in the last pose, just as the curtain was beginning to go down.
I liked to see a ballet from the wings, a spectator, but in the midst of the magic. To see a ballet from the wings is to lose all sense of proportion, all knowledge of the piece as a whole, but, in return, it is fruitful in happy accidents, in momentary points of view, in chance felicities of light and movement and shade. It is almost to be in the performance one's self, and yet passive, with the leisure to look about one.
The front row of the stalls, on a first night, has a character of its own. It is entirely filled by men, and the men who fill it have not come simply from an abstract esthetic interest in the ballet. They have friends on the other side of the footlights, and their friends on the other side of the footlights will look down, the moment they come on, to see who are in the front row, and who are standing by the bar on either side. The standing room by the bar is the reserve of the first-nighters with friends who could not get a seat in the front row. On such a night the air is electrical. A running fire of glances crosses and re-crosses, above the indifferent, accustomed heads of the gentlemen in the orchestra; whom it amuses, none the less, to intercept an occasional smile, to trace it home. On the faces of the men in the front row, what difference in expression. Here is the eager, undisguised enthusiasm of the novice, all eyes on one; here is the wary practised attention of the man who has seen many first nights, and whose scarcely perceptible smile reveals nothing, compromises nobody, rests on all.
And there is a charm, not wholly imaginary, in that form of illusion known as make-up. To a face really charming it gives a new kind of exciting savor; and it has, to the remnant of Puritan conscience that is the heritage of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness, the delight of forbidden fruit. The very phrase, painted women, has come to have an association of sin, and to have put paint on her cheeks, though for the innocent necessities of her profession, gives to a woman a kind of symbolic corruption. At once she seems to typify the sorceries and entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex, with all that is most subtle, least like nature, in her power of charm. Maquillage, to be attractive, must, of course, be unnecessary.
The art of the ballet counts for much in the evolution of many favorite effects of contemporary drawing, and not merely because Degas—who meant to me everything when I was writing on the ballets, standing in the wings, writing verses in which I was conscious of transgressing no law or art in taking that scarcely touched material for new uses—has drawn dancers, with his reserved, essentially classical mastery of form. By its rapidity of flight within bounds, by its bird-like and flowerlike caprices of color and motion, by that appeal to the imagination which comes from its silence (to which music is but like an accompanying shadow, so closely, so discreetly does it follow the feet of the dancers), by its appeal to the eyes and to the senses, its adorable artificiality, the ballet has tempted almost every draughtsman, as the interiors of music-halls have also been singularly tempting, with their extraordinary tricks of light, their suddenness of gesture, their fantastic humanity. And pantomime, too, in the French and correct, rather than in the English and incorrect sense of that word, has had its significant influence. And the point of view is the point of view of Pierrot—
"Le subtil génie
De sa malice infinie
De poète-grimacier"—
Verlaine's Pierrot Gamin.
Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, is the only painter of la galanterie who has given seriousness to the elegance of that passing moment, who has fixed that moment in an attitude which becomes eternal. In a similar gravity in the treatment of "light" subjects, and for a similar skill in giving them beauty and distinction, we must come down to Degas. In Degas the ballet and the café replace the Italian comedy of masks and the afternoon conversation in a park. But in Degas there is the same instantaneous notation of movement and the same choice and strange richness of color; with a quite comparable fondness for seizing what is true in artificial life, and for what is sad and serious in humanity at play. But Watteau, unlike Degas, is never cruel.
Never, as Watteau, "a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure or not at all," Degas, implacably farouche, the inexorable observer of women's flesh, in the wings of music-halls, in café-concerts, loves and hates and adores this strange mystery of women's flesh which he evokes, often curiously poisonous, but always with a caressing touch, a magic atmosphere that gives heat and life and light to all his pictures. Where Renoir is pagan and sensual, Degas is sensuous and a moralist. In the purity of his science, the perhaps impurity of his passion, he is inimitable. Is not his style—for painters have their own styles—the style of sensation—a style which is almost entirely made of sensations? He flashes on our vision vrai vérité of things, the very essence of them—not so much the essence of truth as of what appears in the visible world to the eyes that see it.
No one ever painted maquillage as he does, nor the strokes of light that shine in a dancer's eyes, nor the silk of her rose-colored tights that outline her nervous legs; nor the effects—sudden and certain—of what I have seen for years from the stage: silhouettes and faces and bodies and patches of light, a cigarette in a man's mouth; and, in the wings, miracles of change, of caprice, of fantasy, and of what seems and is not an endless motion of the dancers. I have always felt that the rhythm of dancing is a kind of arrested music, which Degas has certainly given us, as in the feet that poise, the silent waves of wandering sound of the dancer's moving melody, and her magic. A man of singular, but not universal, genius, Degas, his work being done, leaves behind him a sense of intense regret; for he created a new art in painting, that is to say, in painting the sex he adored, without pity and without malice.
ON HAMLET AND HAMLETS
I have seen many Hamlets. I have seen romantic, tragic, passionate, morbid, enigmatical, over-subtle and over-exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." And as almost every actor has acted this part, every one of them gives a different interpretation: that is to say, from the time of Shakespeare to our own age. One knows that Shakespeare, besides other of the dramatists, acted at least one part, which seems to have surprised his audience: the Ghost in Hamlet. And as Shakespeare put more of his inner self into Hamlet's mouth than into the mouth of any of his other characters, it is not to be forgotten that perhaps the most wonderful prose in our language is spoken by Hamlet in that famous scene with the Players. Take, for instance, this speech:
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, that most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave over-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable: in action how like an angel! in appearance how like a god! The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
If any prose is immortal, this is; and creative also, and imaginative, and lyrical: it has vision, and it has the sense of the immense contrast between "this majestical roof" and "this quintessence of dust" to which we are all reduced at the end.
I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should give one the impression of assisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven, and Romeo and Juliet is a suite, Hamlet a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice his drama to his poetry, and even Hamlet has been quoted against him. But let Hamlet be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere meditation will be realized as a part of that thought which makes or waits on action. The outlines of the tragedy are crude, irresistible melodrama, still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it comes to us by means of its poetry, comes to us legitimately as a growth out of melodrama.
I have often asked myself this question, when I have sat in the stalls watching a play, and having to write about it: is the success of this piece due to the playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? Nor is any question more difficult to answer than this; which Lamb certainly does his best to answer in one of his underlined sentences, in regard to the actor. "He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it." And again when he says: "In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical representations are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and to give a more favorable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it." Was anything more fundamentally true ever said on what the actor ought to do? Lamb answered it again, in his instinctive fashion of aiming his arrow straight at the mark, when he said of a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that "it seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape," but that "when the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood."
Every artist who has the sense of the sublime knows that the pure genius is essentially silent, and that his revelation has in it more of vision than of reality. For when he deigns to appear, he is constrained, under penalty of extinction, to lessen himself so as to pass into the Inaccessible. He creates; if he fails in creation, he is of necessity condemned to the utter darkness. He is the ordinator of chaos: he calls and disposes of the blind elements; and when we are uplifted in our admiration before some sublime work, it is not that he creates an idea in us: it is that, under the divine influence of the man of genius, this idea, which was in us, obscure to itself, is reawakened.
I am confronted now with Villiers de l'Isle Adam in his conjectures in regard to certain questions—never yet settled—in Hamlet. A modern man of taste might ask what Shakespeare would have answered if the actor who played Hamlet's part were to interrogate the Specter "escaped from hideous Night" as to whether he had seen God's face, whether he wanted to be concerned with, not the eternal mysteries, but with what he had seen in hell and what he hated seeing on earth; and, if he had come only to utter absurdities, really, why need he have died at all?
The Ghost, by the mere fact of being there, seems, at first sight, an absurdity; but if he has really seen God and the Absolute and if he has entered into them—which is impossible—the sublimity of his words might seem to be superfluous; and yet the incoherencies that he utters are all the more terrifying because of their incomprehensibility. "The secret of the Absolute cannot be expressed with syntax, and therefore one cannot ask the ghost to produce more than an impression." The Specter, for Shakespeare, is not a human being: he is obsession. Had he wanted Hamlet really to perceive the ghost and had he thought this dramatic effect ought to seize on the imagination of the audience, it was because he was certain that every one of them, in the ghost perceived by Hamlet, would see the familiar ghost that actually haunts himself.
Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a magnificent disavowal—on the part of Shakespeare. And if one excuses the contradiction by supposing that Hamlet tried to deliver himself from the obsession, to doubt, one can only reply that he never doubts the Ghost itself, but the nature of this ghost; for he says at the end of the second act:
The spirit I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
(As he is very potent with such spirits),
Abuses me to damn me.
Therefore if we compare the motive and the spirit of those sickly phrases with those of the soliloquy, we shall realize that this has no relation whatsoever with the superstitious character of Hamlet; even more so, because every single word of them is in flagrant contradiction with the entire drama.
I have no intention of discussing either Mr. Martin Hervey's representation of Hamlet or the somber and sinister Hamlet acted by Josef Keinz in Berlin; or the performance of Tree, or of Forbes-Robertson; or of any one's, with the exception of that given by Edward Sothern. He is by no means the only Hamlet, for there are always—to quote Browning—"points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans yet." Sothern had depth in his acting; and there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no figment of a German brain, no metaphysical Faust, loomed before us, but a man more to be pitied and not less to be honored than any man in Elsinore. Yet when one considers what Hamlet actually was—and there is no getting at the depths of his mystery—one finds, for one thing, a man too intensely restless to make up his mind on any question of thought, of conduct, and that he does for the most part the opposite of what he says. The pretense of madness is an almost transparent pretense, and used often for a mere effect of malicious wit, in the confusion of fools, or at the prompting of mere nerves. To me Hamlet seems to be cursed with the veritable genius of inaction. Always he is alone, even when he is in a crowd; he is the most sensitive of all Shakespeare's creations; his nerves are jarred, when knaves would play on him as one plays on an instrument; his blood is feverish, infected with the dark melancholy that haunts him. Does he love Ophelia? I see in him no passion for loving: to him passion is an abstract thing. In any case, irresolution is baneful to him; irresolution that loses so many chances, for which no one forgives himself. This Swinburne denies, supposing that the signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature "is by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux of contending forces;" adding, what is certainly true, that the compulsory expedition of Hamlet to England and his hot-headed daring prove to us his almost unscrupulous resolution in time of practical need. Only, when all Hamlet's plans of revenge have been executed, with the one exception of his unnecessary death, before he utters his last immortal words "The rest is silence," the thought of death to him is as if a veil had been withdrawn for an instant, the veil which renders life possible, and, for that instant, he has seen.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
I
What counts, certainly, for much of what is so extraordinary in the genius of Leonardo da Vinci—who died exactly five hundred years ago—is the fact that the noble blood he inherited (the so-called dishonor that hangs over his birth being in his case a singular honor) is curiously like the stain of some strange color in one of his paintings; he being the least of all men to whom there could be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of evil that germinated in Milan; where, as in Venice and in Rome, moved a changeful people who, in the very midst of their exquisite and cruel amusements, committed the most impossibly delicious sins, and without the slightest stings of conscience. Savonarola, from whom, in the last years of his life, Botticelli caught the contagion of the monk's fanaticism, was then endeavoring to strip off one lovely veil after another from the beauty of mortal things, rending them angrily; for which, finally, he received the baptism of fire. Rodrigo Borgia—a Spaniard born in Xàtiva—then Pope Alexander VI, was fortunate enough to possess in his son, Cesare, a man of sinister genius—cruel, passionate, ardent—who had the wonderful luck of persuading Leonardo to wander with him in their wild journey over Central Italy in 1502, as his chief engineer, and as inspector of strongholds. Not even the living pages of Machiavelli can give us more than a glimpse of what those conversations between two such flame-like creatures must have been; yet, we are aware of Cesare being condemned by an evil fate, as evil as Nero's, to be slain at the age of thirty-one, and of Leonardo, guided by his good genius, living to the age of sixty-seven.
The science of the Renaissance was divided, as it were, by a thousand refractions of things seen and unseen; so that when Leonardo, poring over his crucibles, desires no alchemist's achievement, but the achievement of the impossible, his vision is concentrated into infinite experiences, known solely to himself; exactly as when, in his retirement in the villa of the Melzi, his imagination is stirred feverishly as he writes detached notes, as he dashes off rapid drawings; and always not for other men's pleasure, but simply for his own; careless, as I think few men of genius have ever been, of anything but the moment's work, the instant's inspiration. And, what is also certain is that Da Vinci like Shakespeare created, ambiguously for all the rest of the world, flesh that is flesh and not flesh, bodies that are bodies and not bodies, by something inexplicable in their genius; something nervous, magnetic, overwhelming; and, to such an extent, that if one chooses to call to mind the greatest men of genius who have existed, this painter and this dramatist must take their places beside Aeschylus and beside Balzac.
Of Leonardo da Vinci, Pater has said: "Curiosity and the desire of beauty—these are the two elementary forces in his genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace." Certainly the desire of perfection is, in Da Vinci, organic; so much so that there remains in him always the desire, as well as the aim, of attaining nothing less than finality, which he achieves more finally than any of the other Italian painters; and, mixed with all these, is that mystery which is only one part of his magic.
Is all this mystery and beauty, then, only style, and acquired style? Fortunate time, when style had become of such subtlety that it affects us, to-day, as if it were actually a part of the soul! But was there not, in Leonardo, a special quality, which goes some way to account for this? Does it not happen to us, as we look at one of his mysterious faces, to seem to distinguish, in the eyes reluctant to let out their secret, some glimpse, not of the soul of Monna Lisa, nor of the Virgin of the Rocks, but of our own retreating, elusive, not yet recognized soul? Just so, I fancy, Leonardo may have revealed their own souls to Luini and to Solario, and in such a way that for those men it was no longer possible to see themselves without something of a new atmosphere about them, the atmosphere of those which Leonardo had drawn to him out of the wisdom of secret and eternal things. With men like Leonardo style is, really, the soul, and their influence on others the influence of those who have discovered a little more of the unknown, adding, as it were, new faculties to the human soul.
Raphael, I have said elsewhere, could "correct" Michelangelo, could make Michelangelo jealous; Raphael, who said of him that he "treats the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him," that he goes along the streets of Rome "like an executioner;" Raphael who for the remaining years of his life paces the same streets with that grim artist; of Raphael, may it not be asked: who in the Vatican has not turned away from the stanza a little weary, as one turns aside out of streets or rooms thronged with men and women, happy, vigorous, and strangers: and has not gone back to the Sistine Chapel, and looked at the ceiling on which Michelangelo has painted a world that is not this world, men and women as magnificent as our dreams, and has not replunged into that abyss with a great sense of relief, with a supreme satisfaction?
Is this feeling of a kind of revulsion, before so many of his pictures, really justifiable? Is it, I ask myself, reasonable to complain, as I was obliged to complain in Rome, that his women have no strangeness in their beauty: that they do not brood over mysteries, like Monna Lisa? Might it not be equally reasonable to complain of the calm, unthinking faces of Greek statues, in which the very disturbance of thought—not of emotion—is blotted out, as it might be among beings too divine for any meaner energy than that of mere existence, "ideal spectators" of all that moves and is restless?
II
Two men of genius, in our own generation, have revealed for all time the always inexplicable magic of Leonardo da Vinci: Walter Pater in his prose and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his sonnet. It is impossible not to quote this lyrical prose.
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Here is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. All the thoughts and experience of the world have been etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of peace, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
Rossetti, whose criticisms on poets are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse, was always his own best critic. He who said finally: "The life-blood of rhymed translation is this—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one," was as finally right on himself, as he was on others, in his unsurpassable revision of one of the most imaginative sonnets ever written: "A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione." Certainly no poem of his shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman's lavish yet studious hand. And, in this sonnet as in the one on Leonardo, there is the absolute transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable from one master's hand to another's. Only in the Leonardo, which I shall quote, there is none of the sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and the nakedness of burning life that I find in the Fête Champêtre. For in this divine picture the romantic spirit is born, and with it modern art. Here we see Whistler and the Japanese: a picture content to be no more than a picture: "an instant made eternity," a moment of color, of atmosphere, of the noon's intense heat, of faultless circumstance. It is a pause in music, and life itself waits, while men and women are for a moment happy and content and without desire; these, content to be beautiful and to be no more than a strain of music; to those others, who are content to know only that the hour is music.
Here, then, is Rossetti's version of the beauty of mysterious peace which broods over the Virgin of the Rocks.
Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while he
Blesses the dead with his hand silently
To his long day which hours no more offend?
Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.
So Leonardo, who said "that figure is not good which does not express through its gestures the passions of its soul," becomes, more than any painter, the painter of the soul. He has created, not only in the Gioconda, a clairvoyant smile, which is the smile of mysterious wisdom hidden in things; he has created the motion of great waters; he has created types of beauty so exotic that they are fascinating only to those who are drawn into the unmirrored depths of this dreamless mirror. He invents a new form of landscape, subtle and sorcerous, and a whole new movement for an equestrian statue; besides inventing—what did not this miraculous man invent!—the first quite simple and natural treatment of the Virgin and Child. So, as he was content to do nothing as it had been done before, he creates in the Gioconda a new art of portrait painting; and, in her, so disquieting, that her eyes, as they follow you persistently, seem to ask one knows not what impenetrable and seductive question, on which all one's happiness might depend. Mysterious and enigmatical as she is, there is in her face none of the melancholy—which is part of the melancholy of Venice—that allures one's senses in a famous picture in the Accademia; where, the feast being over, and the wine drunk, something seems to possess the woman, setting those pensive lines about her lips, which will smile again when she has lifted her eyelids.
III
The sinister side of Leonardo da Vinci's genius leads him to the execution of the most prodigious caricatures ever invented; that is to say, before the malevolent and diabolical and macabre and malignant creations in this genre of Goya. In his Caprichos one sees the man's immense arrogance, his destructive and constructive genius, his rebellion—perhaps even more so than Leonardo's—against old tradition; which he hated and violated. Dramatic, revolutionary, visionary in his somber Spanish fashion, it seems to me that this—one of the supreme forms of his art—is, in the same sense as Villon's Grand Testament, his Last Testament: for in both poet and painter the nervous magnificence seen equally in the verse and in the painting is created, almost literally, out of their life-blood.
Only, in Leonardo, visions shape themselves into strange perversities—not the pensive perversities of Perugino—and assume aspects of evasive horrors, of the utmost ugliness, and are transformed into aspects of beauty and of cruelty, as the artist wanders in the hot streets of Florence to catch glimpses of strange hair and strange faces, as he and they follow the sun's shadow. He seizes on them, furiously, curiously, then he refines upon them, molding them to the fashion of his own moods; but always with that unerring sense of beauty which he possesses supremely—beauty, often enough, in its remoteness from actual reality. With passion he tortures them into passionate shapes; with cruelty he makes them grimace; abnormally sensitive (as Rodin often enough was) he is pitiless on the people he comes in contact with, setting ironical flames that circle round them as in Dante's Inferno, where the two most famous lovers of all time, Francesca and Paolo, endure the painted images of the fires of hell, eternally unconsumed. When he seeks absolute beauty there are times when it is beyond the world that he finds it; when he seeks ignominy, it is a breath blowing from an invisible darkness which brings it to his nerves. In evoking singular landscapes, he invents the bizarre. When he is concerned with the tragic passions of difficult souls, he drags them suddenly out of some obscure covering, and seems, in some of his extravagances, to set them naked before us.
As it is Pater who says that inextricably mingled with those qualities there is an element of mockery, "so that, whether in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even," I am reminded of certain of Botticelli's designs for Dante's inferno, in which I find the element of caricature; as, for instance, when the second head grows on Dante's shoulders, looking backward; as, in the face of Beatrice, which is changed into a tragic mask, because in the poem she refrains from smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh heaven, drawn into her eyes, shall shrivel Dante into ashes.
Nearest to Leonardo in the sinister quality of his genius is El Greco. I have never forgotten his Dream of Philip II, in the Escurial, where there is a painted hell that suggests the fierce material hells of Hieronymus von Bosch: a huge fanged mouth wide open, the damned seen writhing in that red cavern, a lake of flame awaiting those beyond, where the king, dressed in black, kneels at the side. It is almost a vision of madness, and as if this tormented brain of the fanatic, who built these prison walls about himself, and shut himself living into a tomb-like cell, and dead into a more tomb-like crypt, had wrought itself into the painter's brain; who would have found something not uncongenial to himself in this mountainous place of dust and gray granite, in which every line is rigid, every color ashen, in a kind of stony immobility more terrible than any other of the images of death.
I am tempted to bring in here, by way of comparison with these two artists, Jacques Callot, a painter of extraordinary genius, born at Nancy, in Lorraine, in 1592; who, in many of his works, created over again ancient dragons and devils: created them with the fury of an invention that never rested. In his engraving of the hanged men there is that strangeness in beauty which takes away much of the horror of the actual thing; and in his monstrous and malignant Fantasie, where two inhuman creatures—in all the splendor of caricature—grind I know not what poison, in a wide-mouthed jar, plumed and demoniacal.
La Tentation de Saint Antoine, done in 1635, is stupendous. High in the sky is the enormous figure of a reptile-faced Satan, who vomits out of his mouth legions of evil spirits; he is winged with ferocious wings that extend on both sides hugely; one of his clawed hands is chained, the right hurls out lightning. There is Chaos in this composition; it is imaginative in the highest degree of that satanical quality that produces monstrosities. There are clawed creatures that swim in the air, unicorns with stealthy glances. And, with his wonderful sense of design, the saint is seen outside his cave, assailed by legions of naked women, winged and wanton, shameless and shameful. And what is the aim, what is the desire of these evil creatures? To seduce Saint Antony of the Temptations.
Another picture painted on the same subject is that of Gruneweld in the Cologne Museum, which represents a tortured creature who has floated sheer off the earth in his agony, his face drawn inward, as it were, with hideous pains; near him a crew of red and green devils, crab-like, dragon-like, who squirm and gnaw and bark and claw at him, in an obscene whirl and fierce orgy of onslaught. Below, a strange bar of sunset and at the side a row of dripping trees; behind, a black sky almost crackling with color. In some of the other monstrous pictures I saw suggestions of Beardsley; as in the child who kisses the Virgin with thrust-out lips; in those of Meister van S. Severin, in which I found a conception of nature as unnatural and as rigid as that of the Japanese, but turned hideous with hard German reality, as in the terrifying dolls who are meant to be gracious in the Italian manner. And in this room I was obliged to sit in the midst of a great heat, where blood drips from all the walls, where tormented figures writhe among bright-colored tormentors; where there is a riot of rich cloths, gold and jewels, of unnatural beasts, of castles and meadows, in which there is nothing exquisite; only an unending cruelty in things. The very colors cry out at one; they grimace at you; a crucified thief bends back over the top of the cross in his struggles; all around monsters spawn out of every rock and cavern and there is hell fire.
To turn from these to the Cranachs in Vienna is to be in another world of art: an art more purposely perverse, more curiously unnatural; but, where his genius is shown at its greatest, is in an exquisite Judith holding the head of Holofernes, which lies, open-eyed, all its red arteries visible, painted delicately. She wears orange and red clothes, with collars and laces, and slashed sleeves through which many rings are seen on her fingers; she has a large red hat placed jauntily on her head. She is all peach-blossom and soft, half-cruel sweetness with all the wicked indifference of her long narrow eyes, the pink mouth and dimpled chin. She is a somnambulist, and the sword she holds is scarcely stained. There are two drops of blood on the table on which she rests the great curled head with its open eyes; her fingers rest on the forehead almost caressingly. She is Monna Lisa, become German and bourgeoise, having certainly forgotten the mysterious secret of which she still keeps the sign on her face.
Writing in Florence on Leonardo da Vinci I used by way of comparison two Greek marbles I had seen in London; one, the head of an old man, which is all energy and truth—comparable only in Greek work, with the drunken woman in Munich, and, in modern art, with La Vieille Heaulmière of Rodin; the other, a woman's head, which ravishes the mind. The lips and eyes have no expression by which one can remember them; but some infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow through them as through the eyes and lips of a woman's head by Leonardo. And all this reminds me of certain unforgettable impressions; and, most of all, when in Bologna I saw, in the Museo Civico, the spoils of Etruscan sepulchres, that weighed on me heavily; and, at the same time, I felt an odor of death, such as I had not even felt in Pompeii; where in so frightful a step backward of twenty centuries, the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat pacifying thought, for at least its momentary relief. Here were the bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life as the damp corpses in the morgue. In Bologna, as I was pursued by the sight of the hairpins of dead women, there flashed on me this wonderful sentence of Leonardo: "Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away."
But, as I walked back at night in those desolate streets—so essentially desolate after the warmth of Naples—on my way back to the hotel where Byron lived, before his evil genius hurried him to an early death, I remembered these two sentences in his letters; one, when in Florence, he returns from a picture-gallery "drunk with beauty"; one, where, as he sees the painted face of a learned lady, he cries: "This is the kind of face to go mad for, because it can not walk out of its frame." There, it seems to me, that Byron, whose instinct was uncertain, has, by instinct, in this sentence, anticipated a great saying of Whistler's. It was one of his aims in portrait painting to establish a reasonable balance between the man as he sits in the chair and the image of the man reflected back to you from the canvas. "The one aim," he wrote, "of the unsuspecting painter is to make his man 'stand out' from the frame—never doubting that, on the contrary, he should, and in truth absolutely does, stand within the frame—and at a distance behind it equal to the distance at which the painter has seen it. The frame is, indeed, the window through which the painter looks at his model, and nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to thrust the model on the hither-side of this window!" He never proposed, in a picture, to give you something which you could mistake for reality: but frankly, a picture, a thing which was emphatically not nature, because it was art; whereas, in Degas, the beauty is a part of truth, a beauty which our eyes are too jaded to distinguish in the things about us.
In the Ambrosiane in Milan, beside two wonderful portraits, once attributed to Leonardo, and coming near to being worthy of him, are his grotesque drawings that are astonishing in their science, truth and naked beauty. Each is a quite possible, but horrible and abnormal, exaggeration of one or another part of the face, which becomes bestial and indeed almost incredible, without ceasing to be human. It is this terrible seriousness that renders them so dreadful: old age, vice and disease made visible.
In another room there are many of his miraculously beautiful drawings—the loveliest drawings in the world. Note, for instance, the delicious full face drawing of a child with an enchanting pout. The women's faces are miracles. After these all drawings, and their method, seem obvious. The perfect love and understanding with which he follows the outline of a lovely cheek, or of a bestial snout; there is equal beauty, because there is equal reverence, in each. After this the Raphael cartoon (for the Vatican School of Athens) seems merely skilful, a piece of consummate draughtsmanship; supremely adequate but entirely without miracle.
In one of Leonardo's drawings in Florence there is a small Madonna and Child that peeps sidewise in half reassured terror, as a huge griffin with bat-like wings—stupendous in invention—descends suddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. This might perhaps have been one of his many designs for the famous Medusa—Aspecta Medusa—in the Uffizi; for to quote Pater's interpretation of this corpse-like creation, "the fascination of corruption penetrates in every line its exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flies unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally to strangle each other in terrified struggle to escape the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death brings with it is in the features." It is enough to compare any grotesque or evil head in the finest of Beardsley's drawings with Leonardo's head of Judas in the Windsor Library, or with one of those malevolent and malignant heads full of the energy of the beasts he represents and of insane fury which he scatters over the pages of his sketchbook, to realize that, in Beardsley, the thing drawn must remain ugly through all the beauty of the drawing and must hurt.
It hurts because he desires to hurt every one except himself, knowing, all the time, that he was more hated than loved. Sin is to him a diabolical beauty, not always divided against itself. Always in his work is sin—Sin conscious of sin, of an inability to escape from itself; transfigured often into ugliness and then transfigured from ugliness back to beauty. Having no convictions, he can when he chooses make patterns that assume the form of moral judgments.
IV
Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished Saint Jerome, in the Vatican at Rome, is exactly like intarsia work; the ground almost black, the men and the lion a light brown. This particular way of painting reminds me of the intarsia work in the halls in Santo Spirito in Bergamo by Fra Damiano in 1520; done just one year after Leonardo died. Here, in this supple and vigorous work in wood, I saw what could be done by a fine artist in the handling of somewhat intractable material. The work was broad or minute at will, with splendid masses and divisions of color in some designs which seemed to represent the Deluge, sharp, clear, firmly outlined in the patterns of streets and houses; full of rich color in the setting of wood against wood, and at times almost as delicate as a Japanese design. There was the head of John the Baptist laid on a stone slab, which was like a drawing of Daumier. And, in the whole composition of the design, with its two ovals set on each side like mirrors for the central horror, there was perfect balance. San Acre, this superb intarsia work of Fra Damiano, seemed a criticism on Lotto, the criticism of a thing, comparatively humble in itself, but in itself wholly satisfying, upon the failure of a more conspicuous endeavor, which has made its own place in art, to satisfy certain primary demands which one may logically make upon it.
In the Jerome, as in his finished work, one sees Leonardo's undeviating devotion to the perfect achievement of everything to which he set his hand; and how, after a long lapse of time, in the heat of the day, he crosses Florence to mount the scaffold, adds two or three touches to a single figure, and returns forthwith. Never did Michelangelo paint in such various ways as Leonardo; for, in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, art ceases to approach one directly, through this sense or that, through color, or some fancied outlook of the soul; only, one seems to be of the same vivid and eternal world as these meditative and joyous beings, joyous even in hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture of God in creation, of the women in disobedience.
Certainly, however, in the Jerome there is a glimpse of background in which I find already the suggestion of the magical rocks of the Virgin and of Monna Lisa; only it is sketched in green, and in it there are gaunt brown rocks, which seem to open on another glimpse in yellow. All of the outline is gaunt, both the saint and his rocky cave; only not the lion, who is the most ample and living beast I have ever seen attendant on any Jerome. All the lines are outlined; the painful but not grotesque anatomy of the saint and of the sharp angles of the rocks, are painted in dim, almost uniform, tones. Is the picture rhetorical, like the other Saint Jeromes, or does it in some subtle fashion escape? It seems to me to escape, retaining only the inevitable violence of gesture and the agony of emotion in body and face; together with an immense dignity, loneliness and obscure suffering.
Leonardo, who was in Venice in 1500, certainly must have seen Titian's early Annunciation in the Scuola di San Rocco; which is a rebuke to Tintoretto's explosive Crucifixion. Before this picture it struck me that Tintoretto is the Zola of painting. Here, in this immense drama of paint, is a drama in which the central emotion is lacking; Christ is no more than the robber who is being nailed to the cross or the robber whose cross is being hoisted. Every part of the huge and bustling scene has equal interest, equal intensity; and it is all an interest and intensity of execution—which in its way is stupendous. But there is no awe, no religious sense. The beauty of detail is enormous, the energy overwhelming; but there is no nobility, no subtlety; it is a tumultuous scene painted to cover a wall.
In the Old Pinakothek in Munich the finest piece of paint in the Gallery is the Scourging of Christ by Titian. The modern point of view, indeed most modern art, has come out of it—equally in Watts and in Monticelli and in the Impressionists. We see Titian breaking the achieved rules, at the age of ninety, inventing an art absolutely new, a new way, a more immediate way of rendering what he sees, with all that moving beauty of life in action: lights, colors, and not forms merely, all in movement. The depth and splendor of a moment are caught, with all the beauty of every accident in which color comes or changes, and in the space of a moment. Color is no longer set against color, each for itself, with its own calm beauty; but each tone rushes with exquisite violence into the embrace of another tone; there are fierce adulteries of color unheard of till now. And a new, adorable, complete thing is born, which is to give life to all the painting that is to come after it It seems as if paint at last had thoroughly mastered its own language.
I have always believed that Giorgione, born in 1478, one year before the birth of Titian, played in the development of Venetian Art a part exactly the same as that played by Marlowe, born in the same year as Shakespeare, in the history of tragic Drama. Shakespeare never forgot Marlowe, Titian never forgot Giorgione; only the influence of his predecessor on Shakespeare was a passing one; that of Giorgione on Titian was, until he finally escaped from his influence, immense. It is from Andrea del Verrocchio that Leonardo begins to learn the art of painting; soon surpasses him; but, as Pater supposes, catches from him his love of beautiful toys. Giorgione possesses perfection without excess; Leonardo's absolute perfection often leads him into passionate excesses. He adored hair; and certainly hair, mostly women's hair, is the most mysterious of human things. No one ever experimented in more amazing ways than he did; but his experiment in attempting to invent a medium of using oils in the painting of frescoes failed him in what might have been his masterpiece, The Last Supper, painted on the damp wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, of the Chaedo Vinciano in Milan. One looks at it as through a veil, which Time seems to have drawn over it, even when it is most cracked and chipped. Or it is as if it had soaked inward, the plaster sullenly absorbing all the color and all but the life. It is one of the few absolute things in the world, still; here, for once, a painter who is the subtlest of painters has done a great, objective thing, a thing in the grand style, supreme, and yet with no loss of subtlety. It is in a sense the measure of his greatness. It proves that the painter of Monna Lisa means the power to do anything.
IMPRESSIONISTIC WRITING
Impressionistic writing requires the union of several qualities; and to possess all these qualities except one, no matter which, is to fail in impressionistic writing. The first thing is to see, and with an eye which sees all, and as if one's only business were to see; and then to write, from a selecting memory, and as if one's only business were to write. It is the interesting heresy of a particular kind of art to seek truth before beauty; but in an impressionistic art concerned, as the art of painting is, with the revelation, the re-creation, of a colored and harmonious world, which (they tell us) owes its very existence to the eyes which see it, truth is a quality which can be attained only by him who seeks beauty before truth. The truth impressionist may be imagined as saying: "Suppose I wish to give you an impression of the Luxembourg Gardens, as I see them when I look out of my window, will it help to call up in your mind the impression of those glimmering alleys and the naked darkness of the trees, if I begin by telling you that I can count seven cabs, half another at one end, and a horse's head at the other, in the space between the corner of the Odéon and the houses on the opposite side of the street; that there are four trees and three lamp-posts on the pavement; and that I can read the words 'Chocolat Menier,' in white letters, on a blue ground, upon the circular black kiosk by the side of the second lamppost? I see those things, no doubt, unconsciously, before my eye travels as far as the railings of the garden; but are they any essential part of my memory of the scene afterward?"
I have turned over page after page of clever, ingenious summarizing of separate detail in a certain book, but I have found nowhere a page of pure beauty; all is broken, jagged, troubled, in this restless search after the broken and jagged outlines of things. It is all little bits of the world seen without atmosphere, and, in spite of many passages which endeavor to draw a moral from clouds, gas, flowers and darkness, seen without sentiment. When the writer describes to us "the old gold and scarlet of hanging meat; the metallic green of mature cabbages; the wavering russet of piled potatoes; the sharp white of fly-bills, pasted all awry;" we can not doubt that he has seen exactly what he describes, exactly as he describes it, and, to a certain extent, we too see what he describes to us. But he does not, as Huysmans does in the Croquis Parisiens, absolutely force the sight of it upon us, so that we see it, perhaps with horror, but in spite of ourselves we see it. Nor does he, when some vague encounter on the road has called up in him a "sense of the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in a vague survival beyond," convey to us the impression which he has felt in such a way that we, too, feel it, and feel it to be the revelation of the inner meaning of just that landscape, just that significant moment. He has but painted a landscape, set an inexpressive figure in the background, and ticketed the frame with a motto which has nothing to do with the composition.
In this book the writer has not, it seems to me, succeeded in his intention; but I have a further fault to find with the intention itself. It is one of the discreditable signs of the haste and heedlessness of our time that artists are coming to content themselves, more and more, with but sketching out their pictures, instead of devoting themselves to the patient labor of painting them; and that they are anxious to invent an excuse for their idleness by proclaiming the superiority of the unfinished, instinctive first draught over the elaborated, scarcely spontaneous work of finished art. A fine composition may, in the most subtle and delicate sense, be slight: a picture of Whistler, for example, a poem of Verlaine. To be slight, as Whistler, as Verlaine, is slight, is to have refined away, by a process of ardent, often of arduous, craftsmanship, all but what is most essential in outward form, in intellectual substance. It is because a painter, a poet of this kind, is able to fill every line, every word, with so intense a life, that he can afford to dispense with that amplification, that reiterance, which an artist of less passionate vitality must needs expend upon the substance of his art. But it is so easy to be brief without being concise; to leave one's work unfinished, simply because one has not the energy to finish it! This book, like most experiments in writing prose as if one were writing sonnets, is but a collection of notes, whose only value is that they may some day be worked into the substance of a story or an essay. It has not yet been proved—in spite of the many interesting attempts which have been made, chiefly in France, in spite of Gaspard de la Nuit, Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose, and Mallarmé's jeweled fragments—that prose can, quite legitimately, be written in this detached, poetic way, as if one were writing sonnets. It seems to me that prose, just because it is prose, and not poetry—an art of vaguer, more indeterminate form, of more wandering cadences—can never restrict itself within those limits which give the precision of its charm to verse, without losing charm, precision, and all the finer qualities of its own freedom.
In France, as in England, there are two kinds of poetical reputation, and in France these two kinds may be defined as the reputation of the Latin Quarter and the reputation of the boulevards. In England a writer like Francis Thompson was, after all, known to only a very narrow circle, even though many, in that circle, looked on him as the most really poetical poet of his generation. In France, Vielé-Griffin is greatly admired by the younger men, quite as much, perhaps, as De Régnier, but he is not read by the larger outside public which has, at all events, heard of De Régnier. These fine shades of reputation are not easily recognized by the foreigner; they have, indeed, nothing to do with the question of actual merit; but they have, all the same, their interest, if only as an indication of the condition and tendency of public opinion.
If we go further, and try to compare the actual merit of the younger French and English poets, we shall find some difficulty in coming to any very definite conclusion. To certain enthusiasts for exotic things, it has seemed as if the mere fact of a poem being written in French gives it an interest which it could not have had if it had been written in English. When the poem was written by Verlaine or by Mallarmé, yes; but now that Verlaine and Mallarmé are gone? Well, there is still something which gives, or seems to give, French verse an advantage over English. The movement which began with Baudelaire, and culminated in Verlaine, has provided, for every young man who is now writing French verse, a very helpful kind of tradition, which leaves him singularly free within certain definite artistic limits. It shows him, not a fixed model, but the suggestion of innumerable ways in which to be himself. All modern French verse is an attempt to speak straight, and at the same time to speak beautifully. "L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même," said Verlaine, and all these poets who are writing vers libre, and even those who are not writing vers libre, are content to be absolutely themselves, and to leave externalities perhaps even too much alone. What we see in England is exactly the contrary. We have had our traditions, and we have worn them out, without discovering a new form for ourselves. When we try to be personal in verse, the personal emotion has to mold anew every means of expression, every time; and it is rarely that we succeed in so difficult a task. For the most part we write poems for the sake of writing poems, choosing something outside ourselves to write about, and bringing it into permanent relation with ourselves. Our English verse-writers offer us a ballad, a sonnet, an eclogue; and it is a flower without a root, springing from no deep soil in the soul. The verse is sometimes excellent verse, but it is not a personal utterance; it is not a mood of a temperament, but something outside a temperament. In France, it is true, we often get the temperament and nothing else. And, in France, all these temperaments seem stationary; they neither change nor develop; they remain self-centered, and in time we become weary of seeing their pale reflections of themselves. Here, we become weary of poets who see everything in the world but themselves, and who have no personal hold upon the universe without. Between the too narrowly personal and a too generalized impersonality, there remains, in France and in England, a little exquisite work, which is poetry. Is it important, or even possible, to decide whether there is a little more of it to be found in the books of English or of French poets?
PARADOXES ON POETS
The great period of English poetry begins half-way through the sixteenth century, and lasts half-way into the seventeenth. In the poetry strictly of the sixteenth century, before the drama had absorbed poetry into the substance of its many energies, verse is used as speech, and becomes song by way of speech. It was the age of youth, and rejoiced, as youth does, in scarcely tried strength and in the choice of adventure. And it was an adventure to write. Soldiers and voyagers, Sidney, Raleigh, led the way as on horses and in ships. It is Raleigh, in the preface to a deeply meditated "History of the World," who speaks gallantly of "leisure to have made myself a fool in print." New worlds had been found beyond the sea, and were to be had for the finding in all the regions of the mind. There were buried worlds of the mind which had lately been dug up, lands had been newly colonized, in Italy and in France; à kind of second nature, it seemed to men in those days, which might be used not less freely than nature itself. And, just as the Renaissance in Italy was a new discovery of the mind, through a return to what had been found out in antiquity and buried during the Middle Ages, so, in England, poetry came to a consciousness of itself by way of what had already been discovered by poets like Petrarch and Ronsard, and even their later apes and mimics, Serafino or Desportes, among those spoils. Poetry had to be reawakened, and these were the messengers of dawn. Once awakened, the English tongue could but sing, for a while, to borrowed tunes; yet it sang with its own voice, and the personal accent brought a new quality into the song. Song-writers and sonnet-writers, when they happened to be poets, found out themselves by the way, and not least when they thought they were doing honor to a foreign ideal.
And it was an age of music. Music, too, had come from Italy, and had found for once a home there. Music, singing and dancing made then, and then only, the "merry England" of the phrase. And the words, growing out of the same soil as the tunes, took equal root. Campion sums up for us a whole period, and the song-books have preserved for us names, but for them unknown, of perfect craftsmen in the two arts. Every man, by the mere feeling and fashion of the time, took care
to write
Worthy the reading and the world's delight.
It was an age of personal utterance; and men spoke frankly, without restraint, too nice choosing, or any of the timidities or exaggerations of self-consciousness. The personal utterance might take any form; whether Fulke Greville wrote "treatises" on the mind of man, or Drayton pried into the family affairs of the fairies, or Samuel Daniel thought out sonnets to Delia, or Lodge wantoned in cadences and caprices of the senses. It might seem but to pass on an alien message, in as literal a translation as it could compass of a French or Italian poem. In the hand of a poet two things came into the version: magic, and the personal utterance, if in no other way, through the medium of style.
Style, to the poets of the sixteenth century, was much of what went to the making of that broad simplicity, that magnificently obvious eloquence, which seems to us now to have the universal quality of the greatest poetry. The poets of the nineteenth century are no nearer to nature, though they seem more individual because they have made an art of extracting rare emotions, and because they take themselves to pieces more cunningly. Drayton's great sonnet is the epilogue, and Spenser's great poem the epithalamium, for all lovers; but it needs another Shelley to find out love in the labyrinth of "Epipsychidion." All that is greatest in the poetry of the sixteenth century is open to all the world, like a wood, or Arcadia, in which no road is fenced with prohibitions, and the flowers are all for the picking.
And when, in the nineteenth century, poetry began again, it was to the poets of the sixteenth century that the new poets looked back, finding the pattern there for what they were making over again for themselves. A few snatches from Elizabethan song-books were enough to direct the first awakenings of song in Blake; Wordsworth found his gnomic and rational style, as of a lofty prose, in Samuel Daniel; Keats rifled the best sweets of Lodge's orchard; and Shelley found in the elegies of Michael Drayton the model of his incomparable style of familiar speech in verse, the style of the Letter to Maris Gisborne. Every reader of modern verse will find something contemporary in even the oldest of these poems; partly because modern verse is directly founded on this verse of the sixteenth century, and partly because the greatest poetry is contemporary with all ages.
Byron is to be judged by the whole mountainous mass of his world and not by any fragment of colored or glittering spar which one's pick may have extricated from the precipitous hillside. His world is a kind of natural formation, high enough to climb, and wide enough to walk On. There is hard climbing and heavy walking, but, once there, the air braces and the view is wide.
In making a selection from this large and uneven mass of poetry, it is difficult to do justice to a writer who was almost never a really good writer of verse, except in a form of what he rightly defined as "nondescript and ever-varying rhyme." The seriocomic ottava rima of Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment is the only meter which Byron ever completely mastered; and it is only in those unique poems, in which Goethe detected, for the first time in modern poetry, a "classically elegant comic style," that Byron is wholly able to express the new quality which he brought into English literature in a wholly personal, or at all satisfying, way. From the first he was a new force, but a force unconscious of direction, with all the uncouthness of nature in convulsions. He had a strong, direct, and passionate personality, but we find him, even in the better parts of Childe Harold, putting rhetoric in the place of that simplicity which he was afterward to discover by accident, as in jest; we find him, throughout almost the whole of the poetical romances, a mere masquerader in Eastern frippery, which is scarcely the better because it happened to have been bought on the spot; we find him, in his serious reflections, either quite sensible and quite obvious, or, as in addresses to the ocean, and the like, straining on tiptoe toward heights that can only be reached by wings. His lyric verse was always without magic, and only now and then, and chiefly in the lines beginning "When we two parted," was he able to turn speech into a kind of emphatic and intense chant, into which poetry comes as a kind of momentary suspension of the emphasis. His rendering of actual sensation, as in parts of Mazeppa, is the nearest approach to poetry which he made in those poems which were supposed to be the very voice of passion. Everything that he wrote in blank verse, and consequently the whole of the plays, is vitiated by his incapacity to handle that meter, or indeed to distinguish it, in any vital or audible way, from prose. Now and again personal feeling flung off the ill-fitting and constraining clothes of rhetoric, and stood up naked; sentiments of resentment, against his wife, or against the world, or against himself, made poetry sometimes. Then, as it was to be under other conditions in the later work, his flame is the burning of much dross: excellent food for flames.
And yet, out of all this writing which is hardly literature, this poetry which is hardly verse, there comes, even to the reader of to-day, for whom "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme" is as dead and buried as Napoleon, some inexplicable thrill, appeal, potency; Byron still lives, and we shall never cease to read almost his worst work, because some warmth of his life comes through it. Almost everything that he wrote was written for relief, and its effect on us is due to something never actually said in it; it is a kind of wild dramatic speech of some person in a play, whose words become weighty, tragic and pathetic because of the fierce light thrown upon them by a significant character and by transfiguring circumstances.
When Byron wrote to Murray, "You might as well want a midnight all stats as rhyme all perfect," he was theorizing over his own failure to achieve sustained excellence on any one level Luckily he carried the theory, in his own downright way, into practise, and, in the "versified Aurora Borealis" of the great comic poems, the defect turns into a quality, and creates what is really a new poetical form. Byron is a heroical Buffoon, the great jester of English poetry; and he is this because he is the only English poet who is wholly buoyant, arrogant and irresponsible. "I never know the word which will come next," he boasts, in Don Juan, and for once, improvisation becomes a means to an end, almost an end in itself. It is in the comic verse, strangely enough, that the first real mastery over form shows itself: a genius for rhyme which becomes a new music and decoration, as of cap and bells on the head of sober marching verse, and a genius for plain statement which leaves prose behind in mere fighting force, and glorifies fighting force with a divine natural illumination.