Recent Developments in European Thought Part 7

'He stood alone in some queer sunless place Where Armageddon ends,'--

the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,--

'He stared at them, half wondering, and then They told him how I'd killed them for his sake, Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men: At last he turned and smiled; smiled--all was well Because his face would lead them out of h.e.l.l.'

Finally, the poet himself glories in his act; he knows that he can beat into music even the cras.h.i.+ng discords that fill his ears; he knows too that he has a music of his own which they cannot subdue or debase:

'I keep such music in my brain No din this side of death can quell, Glory exulting over pain, And beauty garlanded in h.e.l.l.'

To have found and kept and interwoven these two musics--a language of unflinching veracity and one of equally unflinching hope and faith--is the achievement of our war-poetry. May we not say that the possession together of these two musics, of these two moods, springing as they do from the blended grip and idealism of the English character, warrants hope for the future of English poetry? For it is rooted in the greatest, and the most English, of the ways of poetic experience which have gone to the making of our poetic literature--the way, ultimately, of Shakespeare, and of Wordsworth. But that temper of catholic fraternity which finds the stuff of poetry everywhere does not easily attain the consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find consummate expression for what is apprehended. The flawless perfection of the Parna.s.sians--of Heredia's sonnets--is nowhere approached in the less aristocratically exclusive poetry of to-day. But the future, in poetry also, is with the spirit which found the aristocracy of n.o.ble art not upon exclusions, negations, and routine, but upon imagination, penetration, discovery, and catholic openness of mind.

SOME BOOKS FOR CONSULTATION

Pellissier, _Le Mouvement Litteraire au XIXme Siecle_.

Brunetiere, _La Poesie Lyrique au XIXme Siecle_.

Eccles, F.Y., _A Century of French Poets_.

Vigie-Lecocq, _La Poesie Contemporaine_.

Phelps, _Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century_.

Muret, _La Litterature Italienne d'aujourd'hui_.

Ladenarde, _G. Carducci_.

Symons, _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_.

Jackson, _The Eighteen Nineties_.

McDowall, _Realism_.

Aliotta, _The Idealist Reaction against Science_.

Soergel, _Die deutsche Litteratur unserer Zeit_.

Bith.e.l.l, _Contemporary German Poetry_ (Translated).

Halevy, _Charles Peguy_.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: The temper of the two realists was no doubt widely different. 'C'est en haine du realisme', wrote Flaubert, 'que j'ai entrepris ce roman. Mais je n'en deteste pas moins la fausse idealite, dont nous sommes berces par le temps qui court' (_Corresp._ 3, 67).]

[Footnote 4: _Causeries du Lundi_, 1850 f.]

[Footnote 5: _Histoire de la litterature anglaise_, 1863.]

[Footnote 6: But a Wilde who wrote no _De Profundis_ and no _Ballad of Reading Gaol_.]

[Footnote 7: _La Forge_: dedicated to Gaston Paris, the greatest _forgeron_ of his generation in the love of Old French.]

[Footnote 8: _Rime Nuove_: Cla.s.sicismo e Romantismo.]

[Footnote 9: _Midi_.]

[Footnote 10: _La Paix des Dieux_.]

[Footnote 11: For this and the other verse-translations the writer is responsible.]

[Footnote 12: Even the 'music' was far removed from the simplicity of pure song. The song of these poets was an incantation. Nay, painting itself witnessed a corresponding revolt against the 'eloquence' of the pseudo-realists--the 'far away dirty reasonableness', as Manet dubbed it, which missed the essential vision by using the worn-down accepted phrases of the public.]

[Footnote 13: _Au jardin de l'Infante: Veillee_.]

[Footnote 14: To some types of Irish imagination French Naturalism, it is true, was no less congenial; hence the rift between the realist and the spiritual Irishmen delightfully played on in Max Beerbaum's cartoon of Yeats presenting the _Faery Queene_ to George Moore.]

[Footnote 15: Aliotta, _The Idealistic Revolt_, p. 116. Cf. the account of the a.n.a.logous views of Boutroux and Renouvier in the same chapter.]

[Footnote 16: Keats, no doubt, also aspired to the life of action. But in him the two moods were disparate, even in conflict; in Brooke they were seemingly fused.]

[Footnote 17: Eighteenth-century observation, in the person of Goldsmith, had found no worthier epithet for the great Flemish river than 'lazy', and the modern tourist is likely to find this by far the more 'characteristic'. But which had the best chance of seeing truly, the life-long companion and lover, or the stranger, sad, lonely, and longing for home?]

[Footnote 18: _Les Saintes du Paradis_.]

[Footnote 19: Cf. for instance the situation of Signe, in the grip of the brutal _prefet_, with that of Beatrice, in _The Changeling_, in the hands of De Flores.]

V

HISTORICAL RESEARCH

G.P. GOOCH

The scientific study of history began a hundred years ago in the University of Berlin. Preparatory work of the highest importance had been accomplished by laborious collectors like Baronius and Muratori, keen-sighted critics such as Mabillon and Wolf, and brilliant narrators like Gibbon and Voltaire. But it was not till Niebuhr, Bockh, and above all Ranke preached and practised the critical use of authorities and doc.u.mentary material that historical scholars.h.i.+p entered on the path which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for the last three generations. It is my task to-day to direct your attention to some of its main achievements during the last half-century.

The outstanding feature of our time has been the immense increase in the material available for the knowledge and interpretation of every stage and chapter in the life of humanity. Primitive civilization has been definitely brought within the circle of historical study. The discoveries of Boucher des Perthes, Pitt-Rivers, and their successors have thrown back the opening of the human drama tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, and we recreate prehistoric man from skull and weapon, language and legend. Anthropology has become a science, and the habits and beliefs of our savage ancestors have been rendered intelligible by the piercing insight of Tylor and Sir James Frazer. In its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of suggestion, the _Golden Bough_ stands forth as perhaps the most notable contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human race.

Among the most sensational events of the nineteenth century was the resurrection of the Ancient East. We now know that Greece and Rome, far from standing near the beginning of recorded history, were the heirs of a long series of civilizations. Our whole perspective has been changed or should be changed by the discovery. The ancient world thus revealed by the partners.h.i.+p of philology and archaeology ceases to be merely the vestibule to Christian Europe, and becomes in point of duration the larger part of human history.

The story opens with Champollion's decipherment of the bilingual tablet discovered more than a century ago at the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. The key once fitted to the lock, the whole civilization of ancient Egypt lay open to the explorer. A secure chronological basis was supplied by Lepsius, and systematic excavation was commenced by Mariette, who was named by the Khedive Director of Antiquities and established the Cairo Museum. The work of the three great founders of Egyptology has been carried forward during the last half-century by an international army of scholars. The interpretation of the ancient scripts has reached a technical mastery unknown to the pioneers, and the genius of Brugsch unlocked the door to demotic, which Champollion had never thoroughly mastered. But the triumphs of philology have been surpa.s.sed by the conquests of the spade. The closest friend of Mariette's later years was Maspero, who succeeded him as Director of Antiquities, and whose most sensational find was the tombs of the Kings near Thebes. Equally eminent as excavator, philologist, and historian, Maspero was the first to popularize Egyptology in France, as Flinders Petrie, the greatest excavator since Mariette, has popularized it in England. Until twenty years ago the curtain rose on the pyramid-builders of the Fourth dynasty. We have now not only recovered the earlier dynasties, but neolithic and palaeolithic Egypt emerges from the primitive cemeteries.

The immense accession of new material has enabled Eduard Meyer to construct something like a definite chronology; but though marvellous progress has been made in our knowledge of the Early, Middle, and New Empires, a great gap remains between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties, and the period of the Hyksos is still tantalizingly obscure.

Egyptian history in the light of the latest discoveries may be best studied in the judicial pages of Breasted, the foremost of American Egyptologists.