Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the ‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone lies.’ For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too sacred for that – drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.

But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon; just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new movement; let us call it ‘Bible Rhythm.’ And the movement was devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to Difficulty – thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls ‘Hebrew phrase and English phrase,’ the translators fashioned, or rather, Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor wholly the other – a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world – a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself – but a form in which ‘artifice’ is really ‘abandoned’ at last. This rhythm it is to which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps being in the Psalms – this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses have – improved! It would not be well to be too technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.

Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet’s rhymes, we take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized ourselves with the poet’s rhythm, having found that iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun to grow monotonous, variations occur – trochaic, anapæstic, dactylic – according to the law which governs the ear of this individual poet; – we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations with regard to cæsuric effects are realized in the same proportions. Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say, to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence, – we expect that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard to the initial foot of any sequence, – there must be, not far ahead, that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when this expectation of cæsuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result. In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated is the law, – nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian, – the more pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will read Shakespeare’s plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ to the ‘Tempest,’ will have no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, as in social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized music apart from a recognized law – ‘artifice’ so completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of art – pauses so divinely set that they seem to be ‘wood-notes wild,’ though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the ‘moving music which is life’; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words. And if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where ‘the flaming steeds of song,’ though really kept strongly in hand, seem to run reinless as ‘the wild horses of the wind’?”

Chapter XVI

A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR

The reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of what I may call ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ essays gave me so much trouble that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism dealing with what he calls ‘the laws of cause and effect in literary art’ it naturally occurred to me to write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two. In response to my letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection for a friend took entire precedence of his own work: —

“My dear Mr. Douglas, – The selections from my critiques must really be left entirely to yourself. They are to illustrate your own critical judgment upon my work, and not mine. Overwhelmed as I am with avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge into the countless columns of the ‘Athenæum,’ in quest of articles of mine which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden at the present moment. I can think of only one article which I should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in part – not on account of any merit in it which I can recall, but because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one of the most delightful men and one of the most splendidly equipped writers of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond measure. A few days after the article appeared, the then editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ Mr. MacColl, the dear friend with whom I was associated for more than twenty years, showed me a letter that he had received from Traill. It was an extremely kind letter. Among the many generous things that Traill said was this – that it was just the kind of review article which makes the author regret that he had not seen it before his book appeared. I wrote to Traill in acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good while after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors’ Society dinner. At the table where I was sitting, and immediately opposite me, sat a gentleman whose countenance, especially when it was illuminated by conversation with his friends, perfectly charmed me. Although there was not the smallest regularity in his features, the expression was so genial and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading myself that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was really quite irresistible. The contrast between his black eyebrows and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a peculiarly picturesque appearance. Another thing I noticed was a boyish kind of lisp, which somehow, I could not say why, gave to the man an added charm. I did not know it was Traill, but after the dinner was over, when I was saying to myself, ‘That is a man I should like to know,’ a friend who sat next him – I forget who it was – brought him round to me and introduced him as ‘Mr. Traill.’ ‘You and I ought to know each other,’ he said, ‘for, besides having many tastes in common, we live near each other.’ And then I found that he lived near the ‘Northumberland Arms,’ between Putney and Barnes. I think that he must have seen how greatly I was drawn to him, for he called at The Pines in a few days – I think, indeed, it was the very next day – and then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall his comparatively early and sudden death. I used to go to his gatherings, and it was there that I first met several interesting men that I had not known before. One of them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney Low, then the editor of the ‘St. James’s Gazette.’ And I also used to meet there interesting men whom I had known before, such as the late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose ‘Light of Asia,’ and other such works, I had reviewed in the ‘Athenæum.’ I do not hesitate for a moment to say that Traill was a man of genius. Had he lived fifty years earlier, such a writer as he who wrote ‘The New Lucian,’ ‘Recaptured Rhymes,’ ‘Saturday Songs,’ ‘The Canaanitish Press’ and ‘Israelitish Questions,’ ‘the Life of Sterne,’ and the brilliant articles in the ‘Saturday Review’ and the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ would have made an unforgettable mark in literature. But there is no room for anybody now – no room for anybody but the very, very few. When he was about starting ‘Literature,’ he wrote to me, and a gratifying letter it was. He said that, although he had no desire to wean me from the ‘Athenæum,’ he should be delighted to receive anything from me when I chanced to be able to spare him something. It was always an aspiration of mine to send something to a paper edited by so important a literary figure – a paper, let me say, that had a finer, sweeter tone than any other paper of my time – I mean, that tone of fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that tone without which, ‘there can be no true criticism.’ A certain statesman of our own period, who had pursued literature with success, used to say (alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead), that the besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all the other educated classes. This might have been so then, but, through the influence mainly of ‘Literature’ and H. D. Traill, it is not so now. Many people have speculated as to why a literary journal, edited by such a man, and borne into the literary arena on the doughty back of the ‘Times,’ did not succeed. I have a theory of my own upon that subject. Although Traill’s hands were so full of all kinds of journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is a mistake to suppose that his own journal was badly edited. It was well edited, and it had a splendid staff, but several things were against it. It confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as I remember, give its attention to much else. Its price was sixpence; but its chief cause of failure was what I may call its ‘personal appearance.’ If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor at the beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the first quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper or a magazine. When the ‘Saturday Review’ was started, its personal appearance – something quite new then – did almost as much for it as the brilliant writing. It was the same with the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ when it started. Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a great deal in clothes. Now, as I told Traill when we were talking about this, ‘Literature’ in appearance seemed an uninviting cross between the ‘Law Times’ and ‘The Lancet’ – it seemed difficult to connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a business-like looking sheet as that. Traill laughed, but ended by saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of mine. Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten. I should be sorry indeed to think that. All that I can say is that for a book such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as any that Traill’s own delightful whimsical imagination could have pictured.”

Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wishes, and I do this with the more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on Sterne and the imaginative work – the theory of absolute humour exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article. It was a review of Traill’s ‘Sterne,’ in the ‘English Men of Letters,’ and it appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of November 18, 1882. I will quote the greater part of it: —

“Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while Addison as a humorist is not even talked about. In gauging the quality of poetry – in finding for any poet his proper place in the poetic heavens – there is always uncertainty and difficulty. With humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous relations, and that the quality of every man’s humour depends upon the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable. If, for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent. Again, if a man’s sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt – according, at least, to the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the Philistine only. If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree) Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer’s sense of the incongruous is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill calls ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ he is indeed a humourist, and in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest and deepest incongruities possible. And it will be found that these harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very ‘order of the universe’ itself and the mind of man. In certain temperaments the eternal incongruities between man’s mind and the scheme of the universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Novalis; but to other temperaments – to a Rabelais or Sterne, for instance – the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder, turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some ‘paradis artificiel.’ Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is that of ‘human intercourse,’ if he has no sense of this much deeper irony – the irony of man’s intercourse with the universal harmony itself – he cannot be ranked with the very greatest. Of this irony in the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive, while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment. Of Swift and Carlyle it might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible apprehension of it. And if we should find that this quality exists in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ how high, then, must we not place Sterne! And if we should find that Cervantes deals with the ‘irony of human intercourse’ merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity, terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne? Why is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is based so melancholy? Because it only sees the farce from the human point of view. The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a soul deeply conscious of man’s ludicrous futility in his relations to his fellow-man. But while the futilities of ‘Don Quixote’ are tragic because terrene, the futilities of ‘Tristram Shandy’ are comic because they are derived from the order of things. It is the great humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram’s nose. And if Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end a benevolent king; and hence all is well.

While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne under a classification. In Sterne’s writings every kind of humour is to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as Addison’s, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare’s. In loving sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by Sterne in his ‘fat, foolish scullion.’ Lower than the Dogberry type there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. While the news of Bobby’s death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen, suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must follow such a sad calamity to the ‘fat, foolish scullion,’ scrubbing her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of her own life, and consequently to the wail that ‘Bobby is certainly dead’ her soul merely answers as she scrubs, ‘So am not I.’ In four words that scullion lives for ever.

Sterne’s humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian, Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for such a Proteus? So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can work. Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne’s natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation. But the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which he pretended to be. And after all this is the important question as regards Sterne. Lamb’s critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own ‘self-pleasing quaintness.’ When any form of art departs in any way from symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic? That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust. In the humourous portions of Sterne’s work there is, probably, not a page, however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an offence..

‘Yorickism’ is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in the temperament – the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to say which fate is more terrible, Swift’s or Carlyle’s – that of the man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious, conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot. It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick. It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in a roar, or of him who, in the words of the ‘cadet of the house of Keppoch,’ was ‘sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen.’ Sterne, like Jaques and Hamlet, deals with ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ but what he specially recognizes is a deeper irony still – the irony of man’s intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical being – the irony, in short, of man’s position amid these natural conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this anomaly – a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature – that Sterne’s strength lies.

Man, the ‘fool of nature,’ prouder than Lucifer himself, yet ‘bounded in a nutshell,’ brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little ‘beastie’ whose house is ruined by the ploughshare – here is, indeed, a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! There is nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed, so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist. That Sterne’s donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in it no material for humoristic treatment. To render him absurd you must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human cook. Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is tried by human standards. But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and cooked the macaroons. All other humour is thin compared with this. Besides, it never grows old. It is difficult, no doubt, to think that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre. Certainly up to the present moment the anomaly of man’s position upon the planet is not lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and development. On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in speaking of Thoreau. If man was a strange and anomalous ‘piece of work’ as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a ‘piece of work’ does he appear now! He has the knack of advancing and leaving the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it? By the fact of his being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions. A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once supposed) from any ‘inner yearning’ for progress, but because it was pushed on by overmastering circumstances. An ungulate becomes the giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve. But man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips them so completely that he forgets he is one of them. If Uncle Toby’s progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.