Prose (The Works of Francis Thompson, vol. III)

THREE Canticles are assigned to St Francis In his collected writings. It is dubious whether they are actually his; it is not dubious that they are early Franciscan work. Of these, the Caiiticle of the Sim is well known, and generally admired. The other two, which are never likely to win general admiration, may or may not be the work of the Saint, but certainly they are the work of a saint, and a saint admitted to the highest privileges of Divine Love. The manifest personal experience which notes them, the intimate secrets of that experience, are sufficient proofs of this. Because of that intimate secrecy of personal experience it is that I have said they are never likely to be generally admired. ' The fool,' says Lord Verulam, ' the fool receives not the words of the wise, unless thou speakest the things that are in his heart.' And not only the fool. By the law of Nature, no man can admire, for no man can understand, that of which he has no echo in himself. Such an echo implies an experience kindred, if not equal, to that of the utterer. Now, to the majority of men, Saintship is an uncomprehended word,

A doubtful tale from fairyland, Hard for the non-eledt to understand.

Tell them its meaning, and your words will be to them a sound, signifying nothing. Saintship

Is the touch of God. To most, even good people, God is a beHef. To the saints He is an embrace. They have felt the v/ind of His locks. His Heart has beaten against their side. They do not believe in Him, for they know Him. '•

Therefore to the many these Canticles must seem strained and fantastic things, touching in them no corresponding realities of their own experience. If it is hard for such men to seize the aloofness of the purely lyrical poet, how much harder for them to seize the aloofness of the lyrical saint! Take the first of the two Canticles to which I have referred. Saint Francis recounts the purifying struggles of Divine Love under the image of a warfare with Christ. Christ strikes him with dart and lance, overwhelms him with stones, until he falls with pierced heart, dying on the ground.

But lo! I did not die;

For my beloved Lord,

To crown His victory,

My life anew restored,

So keen and fresh that I

That moment could have soared

To join the saints on high.

How many will see in this finely daring allegory anything but the bizarre and tortured fancy of an ' ascetic ' — word of reprobation! Yet mark. A young poet has recently revived in happy verse a mediaeval fable — ' Le Chevalier Malheur.' He is encountered by an armed knight, who overthrows him, and then, as his ' poor heart hes dead,' pierces his bosom and thrusts in a gauntleted hand. Whereupon

A new, a noble lieart Within me woke.

The coincidence is striking; but it is the result of both poems being based upon a faft of human nature. The purifying power of suffering was known even to the heathen. In the Egyptian obsequies, the removal of the most perishable parts of the body, the preservation of the rest by steeping and burning nitre, signified the cleansing of the human being by pain; and the symbolism was emphasized by the v^ords spoken over the embalmed corpse: ' Thou art pure, Osiris, thou art pure.'

Now grace does not supersede, but afts along the lines of, Nature. This mysterious strife of the soul with Christ is manifestly prefigured in the Old Testament by the struggle of Jacob with the angel. Yet St Francis has a higher mystery to symbolize. Revivified and strengthened, he hastens again to the heavenly contest, and in that final strife, he has passed beyond the ken of profane eyes; to saints and a few readers of the mystics only is the meaning of that final triumphant image known. ' My dwelling,' says Wisdom, ' is in a pillar of a cloud.'

The second Canticle, less profoundly mystical, is perhaps to many even more profoundly unreal. It emphasizes the fire and torments of that Love which the Saint has rashly tempted — to find, alas! that the gates of the beatific Love arc guarded by the purgatorial Love.

Though held, I run; I rise, yet fall; I speak, though mute I am become; Pursue, and am pursued withal. O Love eternal, why Am I a fool for Thee? Wherefore hast Thou cast me In such a fire to die i

Christ answers in rebuke: Francis suffers because his love has broken rule, within which Charity, like all other virtues, should contain itself. Then, with a daring born of the love which casteth out fear, the Saint turns on his Lord, and tells Him that his own follies are Christ's, since Christ is transformed to him: nay, no folly to which love can lead him may equal the folly to which it led Christ:

Was that Love wise, O Saviour mine, Which drew Thee down to earth below?

This Love which makes me foolish, lo! It took away Thy Wisdom quite; This love which makes me languish so. It robbed Thee of Thy very might.

And the poem ends in transports which are veritable foolishness to men.

WAS there ever so strange a book as this Don Quixote! To what class shall we assign it? Solitary, singular, it will not be pigeon-holed; your literary entomologists shall ticket it, genus and sub-genus it, at their peril. It is complex beyond measure. It is a piece of literary duplicity without precedent or succession; nay, duplicity within duplicity, a sword turning all ways, like that which guarded ' unpermitted Eden,' to quote a cancelled verse of Rossetti's Lovers Nocturii.

Let not Swift say that he was born to introduce and refine irony. The irony of Cervantes is refined and dangerous beyond the irony of Swift; Swift's is obvious beside it. All irony is double-tongued; but whether it be the irony of Swift, or Swift's predecessors, or Swift's successors, it has this characteristic: that its dupHcity is (so to speak) a one-sided duphcity; if you do not take the inner meaning, you read bafHed, without pleasure, without admiration, without comprehension. But this strange irony, this grave irony, this broadly-laughing irony, of the strange, grave, humorous Spaniard, delights even those who have not a touch of the ironic in their composition. They laugh at the comic mask, who cannot sec the melancholy face behind it. It is the Knight of the Rueful Countenance in the vizard of Sancho Panza; and all laugh, while some few have tears ia their laughter. And they know not that their derision is derided; that they are trapped and cozened into jeers; that Cervantes, from behind his mask, beholds their grins with a sardonic smile. »„

A cope of scornful and melancholy protest, set about with a pulp of satire, and outside all a rind of thick burlesque — that is Don Quixote. It never ' laughed Spain's chivalry away.' Chivalry was no more, in a country where it could be written. Where it could be thought an impeachment of idealism, ideaHsm had ceased to be. Against this very state of things its secret but lofty contempt is aimed. Herein hes its curious complexity. Outwardly Cervantes falls in with the waxing materialism of the day, and professes to satirize everything that is chivalrous and ideal. Behind all that, is subtle, suppressed, mordant satire of the material spirit in all its forms: the clownish materialism of the boor; the comfortable materialism of the bourgeois; the pedantic materialism of the scholar and the mundane cleric; the idle, luxurious, arrogant materialism of the noble — all agreeing in derisive conceit of superiority to the poor madman who still believes in grave, exalted, heroic ideas of life and duty. Finally, at the deepmost core of the strange and wonderful satire, in which the hidden mockery is so opposite to the seeming mockery, lies a sympathy even to tears vnth all height and heroism insulated and out of date, mad to the eyes of a purblind world: nay, i bitter confession that such nobility is, indeed, mad and phantasmal, in so much as it imputes its own greatness to a petty and clay-content society. Even Sancho is held up to admiration mixed with smiles, because he has the dim yet tough insight to follow what he does not understand, yet obscurely feels to be worthy of love and following. The author of the heroic Numantia a contemner of the lofty and ideal! It could not be. -Surely Don Quixote has much of the writer's self; of his poetic discontent with the earthy and money-seeking society around him. There is no true laughter in literature with such a hidden sadness as that of Cervantes.

Yet it is laughter, and not all sad. The man is a humorist, and feels that if the world be full of mournful humour, yet life would go nigh to madness if there were not some honest laughter as well — laughter from the full lungs. Therefore he gives us Sancho — rich, un61:uous, Shakespearean humour to the marrow of him. The mockers of the Don, with their practical jests on him, furnish the understanding reader with but pitying and half-relu6lant laughter; but the faithful compost of fat and flesh who cleaves to the meagre visionary allows us mirth unstinted and unqualified. Many a touch in this creation of the great Spaniard reminds us of like touches in the greatest of Englishmen. Sancho's blunt rejcdlion of titles, for example: ' Don does not belong to me, nor ever did to any of my family: I am called plain Sancho Panza, my father was a Sancho, and my grandfather a Sancho, and they were all Panzas, without any addition of Dons or Donnas.' Who does not remember at once the drunten tinker's ' What! am I not Christopher Sly? ' etc. The two passages are delightfully kindred in style and humour. How like, too, are Sancho's meandering telling of his story at the Duke's table, and Dame Quickly's narrative style, when she recounts Falstaff's promise of marriage! Unadulterated peasant nature both — the same in Spain as in Eastcheap. What more gloriously characteristic than Sancho's rebutting of the charge that he may prove ungrateful in advancement to high station? ' Souls like mine are covered four inches thick with the grease of the old Christian.'

But enough. With all the inward gravity of his irony, Cervantes has abundantly provided that we need not take his seriousness too seriously: there is laughter even for those who enter deepest into that grave core.

OVID, with the poisiblc exception of Catullus, is the most modern-minded of Latin poets. It is therefore with delight that we first encounter his di6fum, so essentiallymodern, so opposed to the aesthetic feeling of the ancient world, deceniiorem esse jaciem in qua aliquis ncevus esset. It was a didlum borne out by his own practice, a pra6lice at heart essentially romantic rather than classic; and there can therefore be little wonder that the saying was scouted by his contemporaries as an eccentricity of genius. The dominant cult of classicism was the worship of perfection, and the Goth was its iconoclast. Then at length literature reposed in the beneficent and quickening shadow of imperfe6tion, which gave us for consummate produ6l Shakespeare, in whom greatness and imperfeftion reached their height. Since him, however, there has been a gradual decline from imperfedion. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality; and if Dryden partially escaped, it was because of the rich faultiness with which Nature had endowed him. The stand made by the poets of the early part of the nineteenth century was only temporarily successful; and now, we suppose, no thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the hold which the renascent principle has gained over the contemporary mind. Unless some voice be raised in timel)'- protest, we feel that English art (in its widest sense) must soon dwindle to the extinction of unendurable excellence.

Over the whole contemporary mind is the trail of this serpent perfe6lion. It even affe6ls the realm of colour, where it begets cloying, enervating harmonies, destitute of those stimulating contrasts by which the great colourists threw into relief the general agreement of their hues. It leads in poetry to the love of miniature finish, and that in turn (because minute finish is most completely attainable in short poems) leads to the tyranny of sonnet, ballade, rondeau, triolet, and their kind. The principle leads again to ecstheticism; which is simply the aspiration for a hot-house seclusion of beauty in a w^orld which Nature has tempered by bracing gusts of ugliness.

The most nobly conceived characfter in assuming vraisemblance takes up a certain quantity of imperfection; it is its water of crj'stalhzation: expel this, and far from securing, as the artist fondly deems, a more perfe6l crystal, the charafter falls to powder. We by no means desire those improbable incongruities which, frequent enough in actual life, should in art be confined to comedy. But even incongruities may find their place in serious art, if they be artistic incongruities, not too glaring or suggestive of unlikelihood; incongruities which are felt by the reader to have a whimsical hidden keeping with the congruities of the charadler, which enhance the consent of the general quahties by an anisiically modulated dissent; which just lend, and no more than lend, the ratifying seal of Nature to the dominating regularities of characterization.

From the negle6l of all this have come tlie hero and heroine; and among all prevalent types of heroine, the worst is one apparently founded on Pope's famous di6lum,

Moit women have no churad^ers at all —

a dicSium which we should denounce with scorn, if so acute an observer as De tjuincey did not stagger us by defending it. He defends it to attack Pope. Pope (says De Quincey) did not see that what he advances as a reproach against women constitutes the very beauty of them. It is the absence of any definite character which enables their chara6ler to be moulded by others: and it is this soft plasticity which renders them such charming companions as wives. We should be inclined to say that the feminine characteristic which De Quincey considered plasticity was rather elasticity. Now the most elastic substance in Nature is probably ivory. What are the odds, you subtle, paradoxical, delightful ghost of delicate thought, what are the odds on your moulding a bilhard ball?

Does anyone believe in Patient Grizzel? Still more, does anyone believe in the Nut-brown Maid? Yet their descendants infest literature, from Spenser to Dickens and Tennyson, from

Una to Enid; made tolerable in the poem only by their ideal surroundings. The dream of ' a perfed: woman nobly planned ' underlies the thing; albeit Wordsworth goes on to show that his ' perfect woman ' had her little failings. Shakespeare was not afraid to touch with such failings his finest heroines; he knew that these defe6fs serve only to enhance the large nobilities of chara(?ter, as the tender im perfections and wayward wilfulnesses of individual rose-petals enhance the prevalent symmetry of the rose. His most consummate woman, Imogen, possesses her little naturaUzing traits. Take the situation where she is confronted with her husband's order for her murder. What the Patient Grizzel heroine would have done we all know. She would have behaved with unimpeachable resignation, and prepared for death with a pathos ordered according to the best canons of art. What does this glorious Imogen do? Why (and we publicly thank Heaven for it), after the first paroxysm of weeping, which makes the blank verse sob, she bursts into a fit of thoroughly feminine and altogether charming jealousy. A perfe<5l woman indeed, for she is imperfedl! Imogen, however, it may be urged, is not a Patient Grizzel. Take, then, Desdemona, who is. That is to say, Desdemona represents the type in nature which Patient Grizzel misrepresents. Mark now the difference in treatment. Shakespeare knew that these gentle, affedionate, yielding, all-submissive and all-suffering dis- positions are founded on weakness, and accordinslv he cave De^demona the defe6ls of her quahties. He would have no perfeftion in his charaiflers. Rather than face the anger of the man whom she fo passionately loves, Desdcmona will he — a slight lie, but one to which the ideal distortion of her would never be allowed to vield. Yet the weakness but makes Shakespeare's lady more credible, more piteous, perhaps even more lovable.

' From the later developments of contemporary fiflion the faultless hero and heroine have, we admit, relievingly disappeared. So much good has been wrought by the craze for ' human documents.' But alas! the disease expelled, v.ho will expel the medicine? And the h}-dra perfedlion merely shoots up a nev/ head. It is now a desire for the perfe6l reproduftion of Nature, uninterfered v^ith by the writer's ideals or sympathies; so that we have novelists who stand coldly aloof from their chara6lers, and exhibit them with passionless countenance. We all admire the representations which result: ' How beautifully drawn! how cxa6lly like Nature! ' Yes, beautifully drawn; but they do not live. They resemble the mask in Phaedrus — a cunning semblance, at animam non habet. Thi' attitude of the novelist is fatal to artistic illusion: his personages do not move us because they do not move him. Partridge believed in the ghost because ' the little man on the stage was more frightened thTn T '; and in novel- reading we arc all Partridges, we only believe in the novelist's creations when he shows us that he believes in them himself. Finally, this pestilence attacks in literature the form no less than the essence, the integuments even more than the vitals. Hence arises the dominant belief that mannerism is vicious; and accordingly critics have erefted the ideal of a style stripped of everything special or peculiar, a style which should be to thought what light is to the sun. Now this pure white light of style is as impossible as undesirable; it must be splintered into colour by the refra6ling media of the individual mind, and humanity will always prefer the colour. Theoretically we ought to have no mannerisms; pra6lically we cannot help having them, and without them style would be flavourless — ' faultily faultless, icilv regular, splendidly null.' Men will not drink distilled water: it is entirely pure and entirely insipid. The obje6l of writing is to communicate individuality, the obje^l: of style adequately to embody that individuality; and since in every individuality worth anything there are chara6leristic peculiarities, these must needs be reproduced in the embodiment. So reproduced we call them mannerisms. They correspond to those little unconscious tricks of voice, manner, gesture, in a friend which are to us the friend himself, and which we would not forgo. It is affe6led to imitate another's tricks of demeanour: similarly, it is affedlcd to imitate another's mannerisms.

We should avoid as far as possible in conversation passing conventionalities of speech, because they are brainless; similarly, wc should avoid as far as possible in writing the mannerisms of our age, because they corrupt originality. But in essence, mannerisms — individual mannerisms, are a season of style, and happily unavoidable. It is, for instance, stated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that De Quincey is not a manneristic writer; and, so put, the assertion has much truth. Yet he is full of mannerisms, mannerisms which every student lovingly knows, and without which the essayist would not be our very own De Quincey.

We say, therefore: Guard against this seductive principle of perfe6fion. Order yourselves to a wise conformity with that Nature who cannot for the life of her create a brain without making one half of it weaker than the other half, or even a fool without a flaw in his folly; who cannot set a nose straight on a man's face, and whose geometrical drawing would be tittered at by half the pupils of South Kensington. Consider who is the standing modern oracle of perfection, and what resulted from his interpretation of it. ' Trifles make perfeftion, and perfe6fion is no trifle.' No; it is half a pound of muscle to the square inch — and that is no trifle. One satisfadory reflection we have in concluding. Wherever else the reader may be grieved by perfeClion, this article, at least, is sacred from the accursed thing.

Now, how much of all this do we mean? Hearken, O reader, to an apologue.

Once on a time there was a hypochondriac, who — though his digestion was excellent — believed that his delicate system required a most winnowed choice of viands. His physician, in order to humour him, prescribed a light and carefully varied diet. But the hypochondriac was not satisfied.

' I want to know, Dodor,' he said, * how much of this food really contributes to the building up of my system, and hoAV much is waste material! '

' That,' observed the sage physician, ' I cannot possibly tell you without recondite analysis and nice calculation.',

* Then,' said the hypochondriac, in a rage, * I will not eat your food. You are an impostor, Sir, and a charlatan, and I believe now your friends who told me that you were a homoeopath in disguise.',

' My dear Sir,' replied the unmoved physician, * if you will eat nothin;? but what is entire nutriment, you will soon need to consult, not a do61or, but a chameleon. To what purpose are your digestive organs, unless to secrete what is nutritious, and excrete what is innutritions! '

And the moral is — no, the reader shall have a pleasure denied to him in his outraged childhood. He that hath understanding, let him understand.