by F L Lucas
As this solitary and silent girl stood there in the moonlight, a straight slim figure, clothed in a plaitless gown, the contours of womanhood so undeveloped as to be scarcely perceptible, the marks of poverty and toil effaced by the misty hour, she touched sublimity at points, and looked almost like a being who had rejected with indifference the attribute of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism. She stooped down and cleared away the withered flowers that Grace and herself had laid there the previous week, and put her fresh ones in their place.
‘Now, my own, own love,’ she whispered, ‘you are mine, and on’y mine; for she has forgot ’ee at last, although for her you died! But I – whenever I get up I’ll think of ’ee, and whenever I lie down I’ll think of ’ee. Whenever I plant the young larches I’ll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I’ll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven! … But no, no, my love, I never can forget ’ee; for you was a good man, and did good things!’
The first of these, Donne’s requiem for James I, [179] makes a magnificent Funeral March. With its splendour of imagery, its sullen refrain of ‘Dead’ like the tolling of the bell of old Saint Paul’s, it reveals in every line the practised orator, the master-organist; and yet – as those gaunt lips roll out the cadences of this Dies Irae, does not the ear perhaps catch something that rings as hollow as the dead king’s vault? Donne should have known well enough that James Stuart’s three kingdoms had plenty of matter for ‘complaint’; [180] that there were plenty of eyes from which that blundering hand had never ‘wiped all tears’; that no honest man in that year 1625 could really feel in honour bound to weep for the dead king with the frantic desperation of a ‘murmurer against God’. Donne was a priest, and therefore vowed to truth; he stood in the presence of death, which should check vanities. No doubt, dead Caesars must be praised; but few men cannot be honestly praised for something; and ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ had his genuine parts. But not these. Did Donne know he was lying? Or was he swept away? One cannot tell. But because of that underlying falsity some of his readers are not. [181]
In the second passage, at the close of The Woodlanders, Hardy is writing of a girl who never lived, grieving for a man who never died. Yet here, for me, is precisely that reality – that truth – which the other lacks. George Moore thought Hardy could not write prose; Robert Bridges thought he could not write verse. So capricious is the Muse of Criticism. One may grant that Hardy seems sometimes less sure when he speaks in his own person (I am not wholly happy here about ‘touched sublimity at points’ or ‘abstract humanism’) than when he speaks through the mouths of his simpler characters. But the grief of Marty South moves me far more than the genius of John Donne. Through her voice one catches the tones of one of the most lovable writers in English Literature. If aesthetic wiseacres find this a sentimental folly, I would wish them – were it not too uncharitable – friends like themselves. And it would, I think, be a strange person who would sooner have the last words spoken over himself by Donne, with all his gifts, than by the bleak, yet compassionate honesty of Hardy. Goodness, indeed, is in literature no substitute for genius; but neither is genius for goodness.
The conclusion seems that, if you would write well, you will be wise to flee falsity like the plague; that, if you would move your readers (and for worthier motives also), it is better not to palter for one moment with sincerity. That may not save you from accusations of insincerity: but you can at least avoid deserving them. One cannot ask oneself too often, both in writing and in re-reading what one has written, ‘Do I really mean that? Have I said it for effect, though I know it is exaggerated? Or from cowardice, because otherwise I should be ill thought of?’
Clough is hardly an outstanding writer; but here he is better worth remembering than many, because he possessed this kind of intellectual conscience to a rare degree. Indeed he carried it to excess. For a conscience should be robust as well as sensitive. Still, his remains a rare kind of excess.
I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process.
After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it; I have had pain it is true: I have wept, and so have the actors.
But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man;
Let fact be fact, and life the thing it can.
The language is often wry, the rhythm clumsy; but I would have every writer know those last two lines by heart.
Some do not agree. I remember an argument with a clever admirer of Yeats, who admitted that Yeats was apt at times to pose; but pleaded that all the world’s a stage on which, if he wishes, a man must be allowed a mask. I do not feel this. Reticence, by all means – but not pretence. Veils – but not masks.
One should not, indeed, be pedantic about veracity. The world would be the poorer if Johnson, despite his great phrase about ‘enormous and disgusting hyperboles’, had not allowed himself a good many of them in his conversation – if he had talked as if on oath. But conversation is not writing; and even in books one can see that there are many hyperboles which do not deceive, and are not meant to deceive. But, for a writer, any serious deception remains, I think, dangerous; above all, self-deception. Indeed one can often feel more respect for a man who deceives others than for one who deceives himself. For these reasons I prefer Byron’s prose to most of his verse, in which he was prone to strike attitudes, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes cynical; and to most of Shelley’s verse (with certain fine exceptions), because Shelley seems to me, though in some ways the soul of sincerity, to have plunged, with the highest intentions, from one quagmire of self-deception into another.
We hear a great deal of the ‘artistic conscience’ which commands a writer to make his work perfect to the final hair; but I find myself perpetually driven to beg my own pupils to acquire from our scientists here some also of that scientific conscience which demands that evidence be weighed to the last scruple. I remember the late Sir John Clapham saying to me: ‘When we get your men coming over to History, the trouble is that they seem to think, if they have written a nice sentence, it must be true.’ I had no answer; I knew it only too well. I have spent years saying: ‘Your generalization is beautifully epigrammatic. I understand that you could not bear to leave it unwritten. But consider all these exceptions to it. You knew them. If you could not bear to kill your darling, why not introduce it with the words “It might be said that”, and then yourself point out the fatal objections? Then you could serve Beauty and Truth at once. At the least you could have inserted “possibly” or “sometimes” into this sweeping pronouncement.’ But this advice does not seem to produce much effect. The literary mind is too apt to spurn such petty prudences. Which is why so much of our criticism, from age to age, remains a shoddy, slovenly pseudo-science – the astrology of literary stars.
One great obstacle to steady vision is, of course, not weakness of sense, but strength of feeling. Artists, even more than most men, are confronted by the perpetual dilemma – without passion they are likely to do little that is worth doing; yet with it they are constantly duped into doing the wrong thing. The only answer is to combine strong passions with strong control; but that proves not easy. Among the most distorting of such passions is the often generous one of enthusiasm. Consider these two examples from Chesterton and Belloc – excellent and now, I think, unduly forgotten writers. Both passages seem to me quite needlessly ruined by a falsity of exaggeration, due to lack of control.
The Battle of the Marne
The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of Paris; and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed to stand open; and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and last time: for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was to come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested the last hope of the seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a r
ock, in every angle [182] of his sky-blue jacket and his bull-dog figure. He had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the invasion at Guise; he had silently digested the responsibility of dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to the last desperate leagues before the capital; and he stood and watched. And even as he watched [183] the whole huge invasion swerved.
Out through Paris and out and round beyond Paris, other men in dim blue coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a few secondary forces to delay the wing [184] that was swinging round on him, dashed across the Allies’ line at a desperate angle, to smash it at the centre as with a hammer. [185] It was less desperate than it seemed; for he counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called Creçy, [186] and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the highest moment of all the secular history of man.
But it was not now the Creçy in which English and French knights had met in a more coloured age, in a battle that was rather a tournament. It was a league of all knights for the remains of all knighthood, of all brotherhood in arms or in arts, against that which is and has been radically unknightly and radically unbrotherly from the beginning. Much was to happen after – murder and flaming folly and madness in earth and sea and sky; but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian thrust had failed, and Christendom was delivered once more. The empire of blood and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness of the northern forests; and the great nations of the West went forward; where side by side, as after a long lover’s quarrel, went the ensigns of St. Denys and St. George.
– G. K. Chesterton, The Crimes of England
Now all this is vigorous enough till we come to ‘the highest moment of all the secular history of man’. There my interest collapses. It is as if one had watched Mr. Chesterton with puffed cheeks blowing larger and larger this beautiful, iridescent bubble, mirroring the world; but there it bursts, leaving only dank nothingness behind. When I am told that the Marne was the highest moment in human history, even with the proviso ‘secular history’, I can only answer – ‘How do you know? How can anyone know? How can one measure such things?’ Even within twenty-six years, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain were to dwarf the Marne.
From that point onwards the passage seems to me to run romantic-mad. When I am asked to believe that England and France were the repositories of all chivalry and brotherhood in the world, or that the English and French have been through the centuries in love with one another, I can only plead that my imagination is not equal to it.
In the Belloc passage, on the other hand, the fatal hyperbole comes at the outset.
The Normans
They have been written of enough today, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?
The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that they first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all [187] other Christians were like wood or like lead.
We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.
(At this point a reader might excusably mutiny. Yet it is worth going on.)
The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St. Edmunds, ‘Unworthy,’ they said, ‘of a great saint,’ and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the castle at Oxford; in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St. Alban’s; in 1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled [188] Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham … And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood.
– Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea
Might it not have been wiser to let these great stones of the Normans cry aloud for themselves, in this splendid catalogue, rather than daub them with hyperbolical pictures of men ‘all lords’, gifted with ‘continual genius’? But this seems the constant weakness of Romantic minds – what Landor called ‘the hot and uncontrolled harlotry of a flaunting and dishevelled enthusiasm’. The eighteenth century had often tended at its beginning to excess of restraint. We may recall Swift’s warning to a young gentleman taking orders, to avoid a moving manner of preaching – ‘if you ever be so unfortunate as to think you have it’. ‘Else I may probably have occasion to say of you as a great person said of another upon this very subject. A lady asked him coming out of church whether it were not a very moving discourse. “Yes,” he said, “I was extremely sorry, for the man is my friend.” ’ This seems impossibly bleak; but better even that than the total abandonment of restraint which this same eighteenth century sometimes saw at its close; when, for example, Barras could screech in public at Carnot: ‘There is not a louse on your body but has the right to spit in your face.’
Even Burke did not wholly escape that contagion; [189] and yet, when he flung on the floor of the House a dagger like a carving-knife, you may remember how the spirit of classicism, speaking through the lips of Sheridan, is said to have reduced melodrama to farce by sardonically inquiring, ‘Where’s the fork?’ Almost as devastating, though less brief, was Arthur Balfour’s rejoinder, just over a century later, to a similar hysteria in that eminent Nonconformist, Dr. Clifford:
We may easily forgive loose logic and erratic history: strong language about political opponents is too common to excite anything but a passing regret. … But I have often wondered how a man of Dr. Clifford’s high character and position can sink to methods like these, and I am disposed to find the explanation in the fact that he is the unconscious victim of his own rhetoric. Whatever may have been the case originally, he is now the slave, not the master, of his style: and his style is unfortunately one which admits neither of measure nor of accuracy. Distortion and exaggeration are of its very essence. If he has to speak of our pending differences, acute, no doubt, but not unprecedented, he must needs compare them to the great Civil War. If he has to describe a deputation of Nonconformist ministers presenting their case to the leader of the House of Commons, nothing less will serve him as a parallel than Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms. If he has to indicate that, as sometimes happens in the case of a deputation, the gentlemen composing it firmly believed in the strength of their own case, this cannot be done at a smaller rhetorical cost than by describing them as ‘earnest men speaking in the austerest tones of invincible conviction. … ’ It would be unkind to require moderation or accuracy from anyone to whom such modes of expression have evidently become a second nature. Nor do I wish to judge Dr. Clifford harshly. He must surely occasionally find his method embarrassing, even to himself. [190]
It would not be easy to produce anything more restrained, yet more deadly, than this passage of unruffled composure, and aristocratic disdain – what Tennyson in a satiric moment called
That repose
Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.
Aristocracy is now out of fashion; in politics this may be an advance; but I could sometimes wish for a little more of it in that wilderness of contemporary literature w
hose sacred calf, not wholly golden, is ‘the common man’. And I have quoted this passage at length because the excesses of overstatement that it rebukes are, I find, one of the hardest faults to cure in the writing of those whom I have the pleasure to teach personally.
It is not in the least that one wishes, like Swift, to ban a style that is ‘moving’. Where a writer feels strongly I would have him by all means speak strongly. The emotional prudery which besets some twentieth-century intellectuals is as disgusting as the physical prudery of their Victorian grandparents. I despise those who always praise hedgingly, or blame timidly. For that is, after all, only another form of falsity. What I cannot forgive a style for lacking is sense and truth.
‘Speaking in a perpetual hyperbole,’ says Bacon, ‘is comely in nothing but love.’ Even in love it seems to me pretty tedious. I know that it is not uncommon for Romeo to assure Juliet that she is the most wonderful woman that ever has existed or will exist; and that, if she will accept him, he will make her the happiest. But if I were Juliet, I should prefer him to have wit enough to discover praises of me that, though more moderate, were also true. That excellent critic Mr E. E. Kellett records a scientific acquaintance of his who objected to poetry on account of its total lack of accuracy. For it was perpetually asserting absurdities – such as that love was woman’s ‘whole existence’; whereas Venus herself could not possibly have devoted to it more than ten per cent of her time. ‘Poets should study statistics.’ Rather a simple scientist perhaps. Yet I must own to great sympathy with him.