War Letters of a Public-School Boy Part 7

The magic of Keats and his adoration of beauty struck a responsive chord in Paul's nature. Tennyson did not stir him to the depths of his being like Wordsworth. "Ulysses," "The Revenge," and "Crossing the Bar" were the only Tennyson poems that he cared for. In an essay written when he was eighteen he defined poetry as "the soul of man put into untrammelled speech, the voice of angels, the music of the spheres." He read with critical discernment, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, with the author. It was his habit when reading a book to mark pa.s.sages that impressed him and make comments in the margin. Some of his _obiter dicta_ shall be given. In judging them it should be remembered that they were all p.r.o.nounced before he was nineteen.

How aptly said that Dante seems to have tried to write a poem with a sculptor's chisel or a painter's brush.

Froissart observes clearly, but his observation is limited to the world of n.o.bles and chivalry; he ignores the life, the sufferings and the joys of the people.

Ben Jonson, master of dignified declamatory drama, was the greatest of the post-Shakespeare school. We may justly say post-Shakespeare, though Jonson was nearly contemporaneous with the Bard of Avon, because the influence of such a man clearly belongs to an age in which the freedom and romantic magnificence of Shakespeare have been forgotten.

Gibbon is the first of historians. The "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" runs its course like some majestic river.

Burns is a microcosm of Scotland.

Burke--a stainless and beautiful character. A theorist in practice; a practical man in theory.

Burke's view of Rousseau was biased and unjust.

Though contemptuous of Wordsworth, Byron himself is a romantic of the romanticists. He was the guiding star of rebels the world over.

In the calm purity of his verse, Sh.e.l.ley is more cla.s.sic than romantic. What ecstatic melody in his lyrics!

d.i.c.kens is often mawkish and often portrays oddities; but these oddities do exist, especially in London (_e.g._, Sam Weller, Mrs.

Todgers, Jo, etc.), and d.i.c.kens unearthed them for the first time. How his heart warms for the poor and the wretched! He is the great poet of London life.

Macaulay is not a philosophic writer; but then the English genius is certainly non-philosophic.

Froude in his essay on Homer says: "The authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind."

Paul's marginal note: "Add to them Milton, Goethe, the author of the Nibelungen-lied, Browning."

Froude, I think, has misunderstood the Nibelungen-lied entirely.

There is really much savagery and much glory in both the German and the Greek epic.

How strange that men like Rabelais and Swift, Goldsmith and d.i.c.kens, who have done so much to make the world laugh, experienced in their own lives great unhappiness.

Browning is always an optimist. His manliness and vigour are unfailing:

I find earth not grey but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue.

Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.

Do I stand and stare? All's blue.

Paul considered that Macaulay lacked ideas and vision. He liked the lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science and refinement, he wrote: "This argument disproved by the examples of men like Shakespeare and Goethe, like Browning and Kipling. And did not Leonardo da Vinci become a student of anatomy in order to learn how to depict the human body properly on his canvas?"

Macaulay in his Essay on Mackintosh's "History of The Revolution"

describes the condition of England in 1678, after eighteen years of Charles the Second's reign, in graphic words, beginning "Such was the nation which, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a State of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of pandars and buffoons."

Paul's comment reads: "This superb pa.s.sage is one of the most inspired of Macaulay's utterances. Contrast with it in the same Essay the vivid sentence beginning 'In the course of seven centuries,' in which he p.r.o.nounces a magnificent panegyric on the greatness of Britain."

He thought the music of Macaulay's prose had often a metallic sound, and that it suffered from excess of epithet and addiction to ant.i.thetical phrases. In pithiness of style, sureness of touch and dispa.s.sionate judgment, he contrasted Acton as an historical writer with Macaulay, to the latter's disadvantage. He found every page of Acton packed with thought, every essay richly freighted with ideas.

Moreover, Acton was sternly impartial and impersonal in his judgment of persons and in his estimate of influences. Paul wrote:

There has never been in historical writing such inexorable logic, such compact phraseology, so much pith and point, as are to be found in Acton's Essays.

His view of Carlyle was thus expressed: "Take away his style and half his greatness vanishes. Carlyle's works are not English in spirit, nor have they any point of resemblance to those of any other English writer." As for his views: "he has, alas! no love for democracy."

Carlyle's habit of apotheosising heroes and his wors.h.i.+p of the Strong Man made Paul pose the familiar problem: "Is the great man the fas.h.i.+oner of his age, or its product?" He thought something was to be said on both sides, and that it was impossible to lay down a positive proposition on what he called "this terribly difficult question." But he agreed with Guizot that "great events and great men are fixed points and summits of historical survey." He emphasises the fact that in his "French Revolution" Carlyle, in spite of his hero-wors.h.i.+p, accepts the evolutionary view of history.

Among essayists he had a special liking for Froude, Matthew Arnold and Edmund Gosse. He often turned for refreshment to Froude's "Short Studies," and felt the fascination of his "Erasmus." In his essay on the Book of Job, Froude writes: "Happiness is not what we are to look for; our place is to be true to the best which we know; to seek that and do that." On this my son comments: "I don't hold with this idea; for, while happiness is not the end, yet it always in its purest and brightest form comes to the really good or great man in the consciousness of the work he has done." Froude in his essay on "Representative Men" enlarges on the importance of educating boys by holding up before them the pattern of n.o.ble lives. By picturing the career of a n.o.ble man rising above temptation and "following life victoriously and beautifully forward," Froude thinks you will kindle a boy's heart as no threat of punishment here or hereafter will kindle it. On this Paul writes: "A n.o.ble plea for an education of youth far more effective than the cursed nonsense of forbidding this or that on penalty of h.e.l.l-fire."

Matthew Arnold, whom in some moods he admired, occasionally got on his nerves. I find this footnote on a page of "Culture and Anarchy": "This is self-satisfied sw.a.n.k." On another page: "Matthew Arnold himself often wanting in sweetness and light." On another: "Admirably put; here I do agree with M. A." He liked Arnold's essay on "The Function of Criticism," although he differed from some of the author's judgments. "The French Revolution took a political, practical character," wrote Arnold; on which my son's comment is: "Surely the French Revolution was only one aspect of a great world-movement of liberation! One side of it is Romanticism; another the Revolution itself; yet another, the Industrial Revolution. No movement has ever a character _sui generis_." On Joubert's remark: "Force and Right are the governors of this world, Force till Right is ready," his comment is: "A regular German theory." Paul's final note on "The Function of Criticism" reads:

I consider that Matthew Arnold insists too much on the non-practical element of criticism. After all, it is the lesson of life that the practical man wins in the end. When we are brought face to face with the realities of things--as in a war like the present one--all thought of art and letters simply vanishes. How is it that the ma.s.s of the world is always inartistic? How is it that the one people in the world--the Greeks--who built up their State on what Arnold regards as ideal conditions, collapsed in headlong ruin before the inartistic but practical Romans?

This comment ill.u.s.trates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist.

For Mr. W. H. Hudson's "Introduction to the Study of Literature" he had high esteem. This book he has carefully annotated. Of Mr. Hudson's remarks on the contrast between the style of Milton and that of Dryden, between Hooker and Defoe, he writes: "A comparison of remarkable discernment. The difference between the Miltonic and Drydenic styles, _i.e._, pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing with Hudson that there is much poetry which is prosaic and much prose which is poetical, he cites as examples: "Prose in Poetry: Pope, Dryden, Walt Whitman. Poetry in Prose: Carlyle, Macaulay, Goethe." He did not concur with Hudson's remark that the "full significance of poetry can be appreciated only when it addresses us through the ear,"

and that "the silent perusal of the printed page will leave one of its princ.i.p.al secrets unsurprised." Paul's comment on this:

Too sweeping a statement. Take, for example, poets like Milton and Browning, where every line is fraught with some deep philosophic meaning and must be pondered over for some time before the whole of the greatness of the poetry is realised. In these cases reading aloud is not nearly so good as private, silent study.

He demurred to the proposition that while the function of Ethics is to instruct, that of Art is to delight. "I hold," he writes, "that Art's duty is to instruct as much as, if not more than, that of Ethics. Art to be great must elevate and edify." Hudson wrote: "The common view that the primitive ages of the world were ages of colossal individualism is grotesquely unhistorical; they were, on the contrary, ages in which group-life and group-consciousness were in the ascendant." "Quite true," notes Paul. "See Maine's 'Ancient Law,'

where he points out that ancient history has nothing to do with the individual but only with groups." Another annotated book is Maeterlinck's "Wisdom and Destiny." To Maeterlinck's remark, "It is often of better avail from the start to seek that which is highest,"

he adds: "Always, not often." He heartily subscribed to Maeterlinck's doctrine that our att.i.tude to life ought to be one of "gladsome, enlightened acceptance, not a hostile, gloomy submission."

His philosophy of life was expressed in that beautiful pa.s.sage in Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics":

Here on earth we are as soldiers fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign and have no need to understand it; seeing well what is at our hand to be done, let us do it like soldiers, with submission, with courage, with a heroic joy. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might." Behind us, behind each one of us, lie 6,000 years of human effort, human conquest. Before us is the boundless Time, with its as yet uncreated and unconquered continents and Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create; and from the bosom of Eternity there s.h.i.+ne for us celestial guiding stars.

My inheritance, how wide and fair!

Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.

The ethical side of Paul's character is reflected in the appended quotations from some of his essays:

Sacrifice is always the lot of the divine man.

What is "to do good"? It is to think of other people.

Joy only comes to Faust when at last he is labouring for others.

As Wolsey puts it in _Henry VIII_: "Love thyself last," and "bear peace in thy right hand."

The Epicurean idea is vile and detestable. If everyone thinks only of his own indulgence, how can the wherewithal for that indulgence be forthcoming? What is the use of man having all his glorious gifts of character and intellect if he does not use them? Why is man made so different from the animals if he is to be the mere slave of his pa.s.sions?

Stoicism finally degenerates into mere pessimism.

The great defect of Puritanism was its hostility to Art; for Art glorifies and enn.o.bles Life.

"What is the final cause of the Universe?" This is the old problem of the philosophers. Goethe's lines leap to the mind:

"How, when and where?

The G.o.ds make no reply; To causes give thy care, And cease to question why."

Carlyle in "Heroes and Hero Wors.h.i.+p" shows the folly of condemning a man for the faults noted down by the world about him--by those blind to the true inner secret of his life. "Who art thou that judgest thy fellow?"