Pot-Boilers Part 5

"When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite great quant.i.ties of nonsense, which even my own judgment condemns--when too late for being mended."

That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions to his future wife:

"I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own conceptions. We ama.s.s ideas, it is true; but at the same time we proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of culture," etc.

Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages.

Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one pa.s.sage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss Welsh just what he thought of it:

"[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the _maniere d'etre_ of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately t.i.tillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places where they sleep and dress; they live in _cafes_ and promenades and theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."

Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme.

de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second cla.s.s, the cla.s.s of Gray and Julie de Lespina.s.se, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is ent.i.tled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural.

Yet, under all her pert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please two people--her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore, to canva.s.s general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming.

Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises, and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small things great by insinuation. Her friend is a.s.sumed to be interested in all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals--the head and the heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G---- is, in its way, a little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter specimen of her style:

"Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amus.e.m.e.nt within doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without.

'Coelebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I strongly suspect) on Coeleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle--just for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair; and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people retain their faculties in rainy weather!"

We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs.

Carlyle will no doubt discover what it is that they both possess and Carlyle lacks. We would say, if permitted once again to trot out the weary and well-fired hack, that you may think of Carlyle writing his "Frederick" in a tail-coat, or whatever costume you prefer, and feel sure, if your mind be not too literal, that his letters were written in the same full dress. Far pleasanter to imagine Jane Welsh, coming home from a rout, slipping a gay dressing-gown over a satin petticoat, and gossiping till the fire burnt low. What is more, before she had the privilege of "doing for" a great man with a Scotch sense of economy and a peasant's notion of wifely duties, she may often have so gossiped. The fact is, Carlyle, in his most playful moments, kept one eye on "the eternities," and Jane, in her most solemn, never lost sight of the comic spirit.

The volumes before us are well printed on good paper, and without are embellished by a device--two hearts, stamped in gold, linked with a golden ring, and supported by a plump little cupid; the same device is repeated on the t.i.tle-page in mauve. Trifles may be significant; whether this symbol was suggested by the editor, or whether the editor was influenced by it, are questions deserving thought. Turning to matters less subtle, we wish that Mr. Alexander Carlyle had not found it necessary to rake up the ashes which reticence had allowed to grow cold.

Also, we wish that he had adopted some other policy towards Jane Welsh; the pin, even between deft fingers, is an ign.o.ble and unattractive weapon. In his notes he contrives a small and unpleasant sensation (vol.

i, p. 319) which would be more effective were it supported by anything better than a piece of gossip, for which no authority is given, and the doubtful interpretation of one pa.s.sage in a letter. We are grateful to him, however, for translating all the Latin, French, German, Italian, and Scotch words, and for several touches of unconscious humour, of which the following is a pleasant example:

"Pen (from Penfillan, home of Miss Welsh's paternal grandfather) was her pet name used to distinguish her from the Welshes of her maternal grandfather's household, especially from her mother's younger sister, whose name was also Jeannie Welsh. Conscious of procrastinating too long in writing, Miss Welsh here sportively enlarges Pen not into Penfillan, but into Penelope, the name of Ulysses' faithful wife, who put off so long the hateful task of choosing a husband from the wasteful and riotous horde of suitors a.s.sembled in her house during Ulysses' protracted absence. See Homer's 'Odyssey.'"

FOOTNOTE:

[8] "The Love-Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh." Edited by Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. Ill.u.s.trated. (John Lane.)

"Carlyle's First Love, Margaret Gordon, Lady Bannerman." By Raymond Clare Archibald. (John Lane.)

THE LYSISTRATA[9]

[Greek: Ahi Charites temenos ti labein hoper ouchi peseitai zetousai psuchen euron Aristophanous.]

PLATO.

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]

To Plato it seemed that the Graces, seeking an imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age _Punch_ and the _Times_ flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is, of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The taste of Athens in her prime, or of Rome in hers, of Italy in the days of Dante or of Raphael, of the court of Elizabeth, or of eighteenth-century France was not the taste of Victorian England. And the strange thing is that, though not only in the arts, but in all the delicacies of life--in personal relations, in sentiment and wit--the great poets, artists and critics are admitted to have been more subtle and fastidious than most curates or tradesmen, in the matter of morals the curates and tradesmen are allowed to know better. In this one respect their sensibilities are to be preferred; in all others they modestly confess themselves inferior to the greatest minds of the ages.

Things that seemed beautiful or interesting or amusing to Shakespeare or Plato, to Chaucer or Aristophanes, they know, for certain, to be evil.

And since they are evil they are not to be mentioned; discussion of them even--since they are quite sure that they are evil--is a crime. Now the prevention of crime is a duty of the state; so very few of the world's great masterpieces could have been published for the first time in modern England; and it has been impossible for Mr. Bickley Rogers to give us even a translation of the _Lysistrata_.

Were Aristophanes alive and publis.h.i.+ng now, not only would his plays be vetoed by the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by the libraries, he would be in personal danger on another account; for a judge of the High Court could surely be found to sentence the author of _The Birds_ to six months' hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of Podsnap--in 1878, to be exact--is not much to be blamed for having allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable, his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense of the possibilities of life. His share in that task has been to express and restate, in a form appreciable by the modern mind, some of the adventures and discoveries of the h.e.l.lenic genius. He is one of those scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have joined hands with the boldest spirits of the age, and, by showing what the Greeks thought and felt, have revealed to us new worlds of thought and feeling. Now, to write like the sociologists, the subject of the _Lysistrata_ is the fundamental nature and necessity of the interdependence of the s.e.xes.

But what Aristophanes thought and felt about the matter is just what we shall not find in this translation. For instance, the scene between Cinesias and Myrrhina is essential to a perfect understanding of the play, but the latter part of it (ll. 905-60) is not so much as paraphrased here. And so the spirit languishes; it could flourish only in the body created for it by the poet, and that body has been mutilated.

This version, then, fails to bring out the profound, comic conception that gives unity and significance to the original; nevertheless, it has something more than such literary interest as may be supposed to belong to any work by Mr. Rogers. The comic poet offers matter worthy the consideration of politicians and political controversialists, and this the translator has rendered fearlessly and well. For the _Lysistrata_ is a political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as anything else.

Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be worth pausing a moment to consider the circ.u.mstances in which it was produced.

Some eighteen months earlier--towards the end of 413 B.C.--had come news of the most stunning disaster that was to befall Athens till the final catastrophe at Aegospotami. The greatest armament ever a.s.sembled by a Greek state had been annihilated, literally, before Syracuse: the city, itself, was in danger. For that not the less was Aristophanes permitted to produce in the state theatre at the public cost his fiercely anti-militarist and anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or one of the two or three best, comedies of the year? That was what the Athenians wanted to know. If it was, of course it ought to be presented.

During this long and horrible war (it lasted twenty-eight years), power, as was to be expected, slipped into the hands of vile and violent demagogues, of men who by rhetoric and intrigue induced the people more than once to reject on fair occasions reasonable terms, who in 420, guided by Alcibiades, contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset the Peace of Nicias, and by a combination of evil motives--private interest, public vanity, vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality--prolonged the war until it ended in the ruin of the city and the irreparable debas.e.m.e.nt of ancient civilization. These men, as may be supposed, were the b.u.t.ts of our poet's bitterest satire and most furious invective. Yet even they, though incessantly attacked and exposed, never succeeded in prohibiting, and perhaps never wished to prohibit, the performance of his plays.

It has been said that Athens attempted to impose her civilization on the h.e.l.lenic world and became barbarous in the attempt. There is, of course, much truth in this. To wage war successfully a state must make itself to some extent barbarous; and the Peloponnesian War ended the progressive phase of Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome was something unrecognizably inferior to the state that Pericles so recklessly jeopardized; and it is interesting to note that the conquest of Greece by Rome did far more for the spread of Greek civilization and culture than any of those projects of aggrandizement and expansion so artfully devised by Athenian imperialists. No reader of Thucydides can doubt that as the struggle intensified Athenian civility diminished: yet, when we remember that even in the throes of war the right of the individual to live and speak freely was not lost, that, on the contrary, during the war, came forth some of the finest and freest criticism with which the world has ever been blest, we shall incline to suspect that even in her decline Athens was decidedly more civilized than most states at their apogee.

[Greek: ho de anexetastos bios ou biotos], said Socrates--a life unsifted is a life unspent. Because the Athenians really believed this, because they saw dimly that good states of mind, not wealth nor comfort nor power nor prestige--which are but means--but states of mind, which alone are good in themselves, are the proper end of existence, they refused to sacrifice individual liberty to any G.o.d of efficiency. It was to the mind of the individual they looked for absolute good: the state was but a means. Therefore at Athens, after twenty years of stultifying war, the right of the individual to free expression and self-development was scrupulously respected. In this truly liberal atmosphere vivid and original characters grew and flourished, thought and felt, and of their thoughts and feelings have left such record as still charms and tantalizes less fortunate generations. This belief in personal liberty, this respect for the individual mind as the sole source of truth and beauty, made possible Athens, a small short-lived state in the distant past, an ideal towards which the best minds are ever looking back, the glory and grand achievement of the Western world.[11]

Our enthusiasm for that Athenian spirit, which respected art and gave free rein to criticism even at the most desperate moment of the city's history, has carried us a little, but only a little, away from the matter in hand--the political ideas of the _Lysistrata_. Political wisdom, like human folly, seems to obey a law known to men of science as "the Conservation of Energy"--quant.i.ty and quality are permanent, form alone changes. It is the Aristophanic method that differs so greatly from that of most modern satirists. For Aristophanes does not confine himself to driving the blade of his wit into the rotten parts of a bad case; he does not score intellectual points only. His method is more fundamental. A clever controversialist can always find joints in the harness of his foe. When Mr. Shaw meets Mr. Belloc in public controversy it is hard to say which makes the greater number of hits. Even harder is it to say that the cause of truth has been much advanced. One may hold, fairly enough, that both sides have been made ludicrous; but it is still fairer to admit that neither has been utterly discredited. If Aristophanes never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd, instead of merely thinking certain things in it silly.

The superior, sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the b.u.t.t of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius; nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that, if he ever had one, he has lost it. Some idea of the simplicity and subtlety of the Aristophanic method may be gathered from the following scene, but to ill.u.s.trate the extravagance and beauty of the form, or the profundity of the conception, no quotation can suffice. Lysistrata has unfolded her famous scheme for stopping the war: there is to be a sympathetic strike; the women of all the combatant states, princ.i.p.als and allies, are to withhold their services until the war has been stopped:

LYSISTRATA [_ending a speech_]. Then shall the people revere us and honour us, givers of Joy, and givers of Peace.

MAGISTRATE. Tell us the mode and the means of your doing it.

LYS. First we will stop the disorderly crew, Soldiers in arms promenading and marketing.

STRATYLLIS [_leader of the chorus of women_]. Yea, by divine Aphrodite, 'tis true.

LYS. Now in the market you see them like Corybants, jangling about with their armour of mail.

Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery, sternly parade by the cabbage and kail.

MAG. Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly!

LYS. Troth, 'tis a mighty ridiculous jest, Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place, grimly accoutred with s.h.i.+eld and with crest.

STRAT. Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular, shaking his dart and his target to boot; Off runs a shopgirl, appalled at the sight of him, down he sits soldierly, gobbles her fruit.

MAG. You, I presume, could adroitly and gingerly settle this intricate, tangled concern: You in a trice could relieve our perplexities.

LYS. Certainly.