CHESTERTON-TWELVE TYPES - THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that
it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The
classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes,
one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier
really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense,
to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have
imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham
rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be
unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is
the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:
he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits
out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may
be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical
couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great
liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of
small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but
at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's
'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'
the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:
'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'
Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The
one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing
'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'
the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:--
'A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
Darkly wise as a formless fate
And if he be great
If he be great, then rudely great,
Rudely great as a plough that plies,
And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'
Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of
the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have
occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever
been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element
of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the
realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we
cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of
divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was
truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in
the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we
cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or
magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to
meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural
irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses
were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in
terms.
Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of
civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come
Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.
But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques
and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea
Islander--the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art
which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one
especially he was supreme--the great and civilised art of satire. And
in this we have fallen away utterly.
We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and
hostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of
furious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them.
It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy,
though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And
yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and
social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be
worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.
It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous
enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very
accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a
man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is
necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the
merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only
another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army
we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.
England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same
simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of
battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an
idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a
people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance
of trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the
enemy; whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to
praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a
full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without
having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as
utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever
was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often
have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it
may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is
one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it
hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The
one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man
whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He
knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is
not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous
and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can
count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours
of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind
all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly
visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but
firm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the
'daring pilot in extremity,'
who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and
'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.'
The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause
of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that
is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent
has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to be
told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If
we take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as Sir
William Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which all
party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William
Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is
inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and
disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we all
know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not
inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone
knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the
old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.
Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable
honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is
therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we
were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of
stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; for
a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because
it is true.
Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: if
they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need
only turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The
Henleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt
for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the
man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstone
by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr
Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have
said, go quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they would see how a great
satirist approaches a great enemy:
'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
Should such a man--'
And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not
such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that
Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in
Pope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so
pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He
said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and
everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary
temperament:
'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.
* * * * *
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause.
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'
This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it
aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is
addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the
applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.
In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption
that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can
benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his
merits, we cannot even hurt him.
Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to
misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of
the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the
one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined
to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts
that truth is alone satisfying: there is aesthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which
asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean
asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the
speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and
essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'love
is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves,
walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any
other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:
'A book of verse beneath the bough
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou
Sitting beside me in the wilderness
O wilderness were Paradise enow.'
It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that
'From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends--
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.'
Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state
that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and
Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They
were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or
tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain
brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at
unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many
men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there.
All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an
asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained
themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is
one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not
feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one
case and only the purchase in the other.
The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The
mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in
which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and
dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it
as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur
to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe
is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit
to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with
joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.
The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood
up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea
gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these
disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one
dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly
tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that
the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and
ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition
of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times
more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.
Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this
out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather
the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,
but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason
that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,
because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to
their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,
because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of
benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,
in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost
indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily
as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,
perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of
the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast
practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this
amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple--minded infant was one
of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this
bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is
their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe
in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his
success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of
this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their
common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the
Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the
larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It
was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,'
as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had
'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret
nobility.
Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan
Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the
history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in
the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichaean
ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of
self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But
he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the
absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason
that not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all.
To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the
position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than
any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.
He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take
pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell
from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet
this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we
think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most,
property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and
poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in
these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were
blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and
not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully
here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;
we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find
that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.
So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are
only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which
sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens
itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and
lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black
curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are
young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we
who are its misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear and
tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the
water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,
his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided
the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,
bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a
cleaner and more transparent life.
The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was
small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason
that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to
be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the
madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it
the features of a new friend.
When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-aesthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to
the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of
Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for
remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for
'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school
which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view
which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.
The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, 'par excellence,' a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter
nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,
the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken
seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with
more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such
comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour which
steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not
superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.
Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were
the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of
comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, 'A
Sentimental Comedy.' The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.
'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at
his highest moment of happiness. 'Il me faut des geants.' An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing 'bouts rimes.' In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of
youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an
unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the
moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we
have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or
artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering
attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like
Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised
or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer
each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other.
Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in love
they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the
speech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur
Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called 'Cyrano
de Bergerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends
with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual
breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual
sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts
themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy,
and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same
apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of
'L'Aiglon,' now being performed with so much success. Although the hero
is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a
personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have
been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable paean of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so
high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the
characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern
life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of
the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Ou, ou sont les
aigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When
an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor, he replies, 'La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the
Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, 'Et nous?' pours out
a terrible description of the life lived by the common soldier. To-day
when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion as
jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in
few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might surely come a cry from the
vast mass of common humanity from the beginning 'et nous?' It is this
potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the
function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Ado
about Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole
pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is
common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. 'Love's Labour Lost' is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our
subject since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically
as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is
to the Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious human
passion, the love of death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall ever have
in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present
to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that
comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,
that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.
Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not
shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when
the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final
word, they all cry together 'Vive l'Empereur!' Monsieur Rostand,
perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field
of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing
but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them
should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as they
are in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not
the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their
conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice
and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, 'Vive l'Empereur.'
CHESTERTON-TWELVE TYPES - THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON