X.
I don't know how those two little books got in there. They are
Henley's "Song of the Sword" and "Book of Verses." They ought to be
over yonder in the rather limited Poetry Section. Perhaps it is that
I like his work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put
them ready to my hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was very
much greater than his work, great as some of his work was. I have
seldom known a personality more magnetic and stimulating. You left
his presence, as a battery leaves a generating station, charged up
and full. He made you feel what a lot of work there was to be done,
and how glorious it was to be able to do it, and how needful to get
started upon it that very hour. With the frame and the vitality of
a giant he was cruelly bereft of all outlet for his strength, and
so distilled it off in hot words, in warm sympathy, in strong
prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating emotions. Much
of the time and energy which might have built an imperishable name
for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it was not waste,
for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed beneath it.
A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature to-day.
Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best
was the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive
lines more noble and more strong than those which begin with the
well-known quatrain--
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,
I thank whatever Gods there be
For my unconquerable soul."
It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from
a man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned
again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon's knife. When he
said--
"In the fell clutch of Circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody but unbowed."
It was not what Lady Byron called "the mimic woe" of the poet, but
it was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake,
whose proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.
There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the
very extreme from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running
to large sweeping images and thundering words. Such are the "Song of
the Sword" and much more that he has written, like the wild singing
of some Northern scald. The other, and to my mind both the more
characteristic and the finer side of his work, is delicate, precise,
finely etched, with extraordinarily vivid little pictures drawn
in carefully phrased and balanced English. Such are the "Hospital
Verses," while the "London Voluntaries" stand midway between the two
styles. What! you have not read the "Hospital Verses!" Then get the
"Book of Verses" and read them without delay. You will surely find
something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name--or
at least I can name--nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and
Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if
majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied,
so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly
journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a
man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five booklets
behind him!
However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no
business in this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles
of various sorts. Here are three in a line, which carry you over a
splendid stretch of French (which usually means European) history,
each, as luck would have it, beginning just about the time when the
other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de Monstrelet,
and the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the
best contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a
century--a fair slice out of the total written record of the human
race.
Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval
French, which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get
Lord Berners' almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English,
or you can turn to a modern translation, such as this one of Johnes.
A single page of Lord Berners is delightful; but it is a strain,
I think, to read bulky volumes in an archaic style. Personally, I
prefer the modern, and even with that you have shown some patience
before you have reached the end of that big second tome.
I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea
of what he was doing--whether it ever flashed across his mind that
the day might come when his book would be the one great authority,
not only about the times in which he lived, but about the whole
institution of chivalry? I fear that it is far more likely that his
whole object was to gain some mundane advantage from the various
barons and knights whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left it
on record, for example, that when he visited the Court of England he
took with him a handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless,
if one could follow the good Canon one would find his journeys
littered with similar copies which were probably expensive gifts to
the recipient, for what return would a knightly soul make for a book
which enshrined his own valour?
But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be
admitted that the work could not have been done more thoroughly.
There is something of Herodotus in the Canon's cheery, chatty,
garrulous, take-it-or-leave-it manner. But he has the advantage
of the old Greek in accuracy. Considering that he belonged to the
same age which gravely accepted the travellers' tales of Sir John
Maundeville, it is, I think, remarkable how careful and accurate
the chronicler is. Take, for example, his description of Scotland
and the Scotch. Some would give the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that
is another matter. Scotch descriptions are a subject over which a
fourteenth-century Hainaulter might fairly be allowed a little scope
for his imagination. Yet we can see that the account must on the
whole have been very correct. The Galloway nags, the girdle-cakes,
the bagpipes--every little detail rings true. Jean-le-Bel was
actually present in a Border campaign, and from him Froissart got
his material; but he has never attempted to embroider it, and its
accuracy, where we can to some extent test it, must predispose us
to accept his accounts where they are beyond our confirmation.
But the most interesting portion of old Froissart's work is that
which deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time,
their deeds, their habits, their methods of talking. It is true that
he lived himself just a little after the true heyday of chivalry;
but he was quite early enough to have met many of the men who had
been looked upon as the flower of knighthood of the time. His book
was read too, and commented on by these very men (as many of them as
could read), and so we may take it that it was no fancy portrait,
but a correct picture of these soldiers which is to be found in it.
The accounts are always consistent. If you collate the remarks and
speeches of the knights (as I have had occasion to do) you will find
a remarkable uniformity running through them. We may believe then
that this really does represent the kind of men who fought at Crecy
and at Poictiers, in the age when both the French and the Scottish
kings were prisoners in London, and England reached a pitch of
military glory which has perhaps never been equalled in her history.
In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had
presented to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme
romancer, you will find that Scott's mediaeval knights were
usually muscular athletes in the prime of life: Bois-Guilbert,
Front-de-Boeuf, Richard, Ivanhoe, Count Robert--they all were
such. But occasionally the most famous of Froissart's knights were
old, crippled and blinded. Chandos, the best lance of his day, must
have been over seventy when he lost his life through being charged
upon the side on which he had already lost an eye. He was well on to
that age when he rode out from the English army and slew the Spanish
champion, big Marten Ferrara, upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth
and strength were very useful, no doubt, especially where heavy
armour had to be carried, but once on the horse's back the gallant
steed supplied the muscles. In an English hunting-field many a
doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated in his familiar
saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game. So it was
among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could still
carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms, and,
above all, their cool and undaunted courage.
Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the
knight was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little
quarter in his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed. But with
all his savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable
boy playing a dreadful game. He was true also to his own curious
code, and, so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial
and sympathetic, even in warfare. There was no personal feeling or
bitterness as there might be now in a war between Frenchmen and
Germans. On the contrary, the opponents were very softspoken and
polite to each other. "Is there any small vow of which I may relieve
you?" "Would you desire to attempt some small deed of arms upon me?"
And in the midst of a fight they would stop for a breather, and
converse amicably the while, with many compliments upon each other's
prowess. When Seaton the Scotsman had exchanged as many blows as
he wished with a company of French knights, he said, "Thank you,
gentlemen, thank you!" and galloped away. An English knight made a
vow, "for his own advancement and the exaltation of his lady," that
he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and touch with his
lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most characteristic of
the times. As he galloped up, the French knights around the barrier,
seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon him, and called
out to him that he had carried himself well. As he returned,
however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe upon the
side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him. Here ends
the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher had
a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not
stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy,
meet so plebeian an end.
De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional
than Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones
out of that quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course
Quentin Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The
whole history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold,
the strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the
barber and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage
cruelty and of slavish superstition--it is all set forth here. One
would imagine that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of
strange qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and
yet like causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski's
"Life of Ivan the Terrible," and you will find that more than a
century later Russia produced a monarch even more diabolical,
but working exactly on the same lines as Louis, even down to
small details. The same cruelty, the same superstition, the same
astrologers, the same low-born associates, the same residence
outside the influence of the great cities--a parallel could hardly
be more complete. If you have not supped too full of horrors when
you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author's account of
Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of monarchs! Blood
and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons. And
there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which
gives it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the
Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent
rule in Russia.
Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder
has as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It
is Washington Irving's "Conquest of Granada." I do not know where
he got his material for this book--from Spanish Chronicles, I
presume--but the wars between the Moors and the Christian knights
must have been among the most chivalrous of exploits. I could not
name a book which gets the beauty and the glamour of it better than
this one, the lance-heads gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale
fires glowing on the crags, the stern devotion of the mail-clad
Christians, the debonnaire and courtly courage of the dashing
Moslem. Had Washington Irving written nothing else, that book alone
should have forced the door of every library. I love all his books,
for no man wrote fresher English with a purer style; but of them all
it is still "The Conquest of Granada" to which I turn most often.
To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are
two exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are
a brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has
only two books. This green-and-gold volume contains both the works
of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady
Wilde. The first is "Sidonia the Sorceress," the second, "The Amber
Witch." I don't know where one may turn for a stranger view of
the Middle Ages, the quaint details of simple life, with sudden
intervals of grotesque savagery. The most weird and barbarous things
are made human and comprehensible. There is one incident which
haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers
with the villagers as to what price they will give him for putting
some young witch to the torture, running them up from a barrel of
apples to a barrel and a half, on the grounds that he is now old and
rheumatic, and that the stooping and straining is bad for his back.
It should be done on a sloping hill, he explains, so that the "dear
little children" may see it easily. Both "Sidonia" and "The Amber
Witch" give such a picture of old Germany as I have never seen
elsewhere.
But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in
whom I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who
is, if I mistake not, young and with his career still before him.
"The Forerunner" and "The Death of the Gods" are the only two
books of his which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of
Renaissance Italy in the one, and of declining Rome in the other,
are in my opinion among the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that
as I read them I was pleased to find how open my mind was to new
impressions, for one of the greatest mental dangers which comes upon
a man as he grows older is that he should become so attached to old
favourites that he has no room for the new-comer, and persuades
himself that the days of great things are at an end because his own
poor brain is getting ossified. You have but to open any critical
paper to see how common is the disease, but a knowledge of literary
history assures us that it has always been the same, and that if the
young writer is discouraged by adverse comparisons it has been the
common lot from the beginning. He has but one resource, which is
to pay no heed to criticism, but to try to satisfy his own highest
standard and leave the rest to time and the public. Here is a little
bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see, beside my bookcase, which may
in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to some younger brother--
"Critics kind--never mind!
Critics flatter--no matter!
Critics blame--all the same!
Critics curse--none the worse!
Do your best-- ---- the rest!"
