/ . ] ; A -Couch By Sir Arthur Quitter-Couch On the Art of Writing On the Art of Reading Studies in Literature (first series) Studies in Literature (second series) Studies in Literature By Sir Arthur Quiller-Gouch, M.A. Fellow of Jesus College King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in the University of Cambridge First Series New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons Cambridge, England: University Press First Printing, December 1918 Second Printing, December 1922 Made in the United States of America PREFACE '"PHE first of these ' studies, ' The Commerce of Thought, ^ was originally read before an audience at the Royal Institution of London. Coleridge and Matthew Arnold have appeared as Introductions in 'The World's Classics' series, and I thank the Oxford University Press for allowing me to reprint them. Swinburne was written for 'The Edinburgh Review,' and Charles Reade for 'The Times Literary Supplement' on the centenary of Reade's birth. I cannot quarrel with any critic who may find the word 'studies' too important for a volume which con- sists, in the main, of familiar discourses: and will only plead that it was chosen to cover not this book alone but a successor of which some part of the contents may better justify the general title. For example, in the lec- ture here printed On the Terms 'Classical' and 'Ro- mantic' I purposely contented myself with discussing some elementary and (as I believe) mistaken notions, reserving some interesting modern theories for later treatment. I must here, however, avow my belief that before starting to lay down principles of literature or aesthetic a man should offer some evidence of his capacity to enjoy the better and eschew the worse. The claim, for the moment fashionable, that a general philoso- phy of aesthetic can be constructed by a thinker who, iii 2037805 iv Preface in practice, cannot distinguish Virgil from Bavius, or Rodin from William Dent Pitman, seems to me to pre- sume a credulity almost beyond the dreams of illicit therapeutics. By 'poetry, ' in these pages, I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and some others. ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH May 10, 1918. CONTENTS PAGE THE COMMERCE OF THOUGHT i BALLADS .23 THE HORATIAN MODEL IN ENGLISH VERSE . . 51 ON THE TERMS "CLASSICAL" AND "ROMANTIC" . 76 SOME SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POETS I. JOHN DONNE 96 II. HERBERT AND VAUGHAN . . . .118 III. TRAHERNE, CRASHAW AND OTHERS . . 146 THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH . . .168 THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY . . . .189 COLERIDGE 212 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . . . 231 SWINBURNE ........ 246 CHARLES READE 274 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, I . . . 289 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, II . . 306 INDEX 321 THE COMMERCE OF THOUGHT A MONG the fascinating books that have never been ** written (and they are still the most fascinating of all) I think my favourite is Professor So-and-So's History of Trade-Routes from the Earliest Times, a magnificent treatise, incomplete in three volumes. The title may not allure you ; possibly you suspect it of promising as much dullness as the title of this lecture, and it is even conceivable that you secretly extend your mistrust to professors as a class. Well, concerning us, as men, you may be right: the accusation has been levelled: but I shall try to persuade you that you are mistaken about this book. For a few examples Who, hearing that British oysters, from Richborough, were served at Roman dinner-parties under the Empire, does not want to know how that long journey was contrived for them and how they were kept alive on the road? Or take the secret of the famous purple that was used to dye the Emper- or's robe. As Browning asked, "Who fished the murex up?" How did it reach the dyeing-vat? What was the process? Was the trade a monopoly? Again, you remember that navy of Tarshish, which came once in three years bringing Solomon gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks. Who would not wish to read one 2 Studies in Literature of its bills of lading, to construct a picture of the quays as the vessels freighted or discharged their cargo? As who would not eagerly read a description of that lumberer's camp on Lebanon to which Solomon sent ten thousand men a month by courses: "a month they were in Lebanon and two months at home, and Adoni- ram was over the levy"? The conditions, you see, must have been hard, as the corvee was enormous. What truth, if any, underlies the legend that when Solomon died they embalmed and robed him and stood the corpse high on the unfinished wall that, under their great task- master's eye, the workmen should work and not ' ' slack " (as we say) ? What a clerk-of-the-works ! Yet again Where lay the famous tin-islands, the Cassiterides? How were the great ingots of Cornish tin delivered down to the coast and shipped on to Mar- seilles, Carthage, Tyre? We know that they were shaped pannier-wise, and carried by ponies. But where was the island of Ictis, where the ships received them? Our latest theorists will not allow it to have been St. Michael's Mount the nearest of all, and the most obviously correspondent with the historian's description. They tell us hardily it was the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Thanet. Ah, if these professors did not suffer from sea-sickness, how much simpler their hypotheses would be! Image the old Cornish merchant taking whole trains of ponies, laden with valuable ore, along the entire south of England, through dense forests and marauding tribes, to ship his ware at Thanet, when he had half a dozen better ports at his door! Imagine a skipper from Marseilles But the absurdities are endless, and I will not here pursue them. For what other hidden port of trade was that Phoe- nician skipper bound who, held in chase off the Land's The Commerce of Thought 3 End by a Roman galley and desperate of cheating her, deliberately (tradition tells) drove his ship ashore to save his merchant's secret? Through what phases, be- fore this, had run and shifted the commercial struggle between young Greece and ancient Phoenicia imaged for us in Matthew Arnold's famous simile: As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the ^Egean isles: And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine; And knew the intruders on his ancient home, The young light-hearted masters of the waves; And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail, And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales. What commerce followed the cutting of Rome's great military roads? that tremendous one, for instance, hewn along the cliffs close over the rapids that swirl through the Iron Gates of Danube. By what caravan tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constanti- nople ? WTiat sort of men worked goods down the Rhone 4 Studies in Literature valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? To come a little later, how did the Crusaders handle trans- port and commissariat? Through and along what line of entrepots did Venice, Genoa, Seville ply their immense ventures? Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux, Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks? Who, and what sort of man, opened an aloe market in Socotra? Why, and on what instance, and how, did England and Flanders come to supply Europe, the one with wool, the other with fine linen and naperies? Now of these and like questions for of course I might multiply them by the hundred I wish, first of all, to impress on you that they are of first importance if you would understand history; by which I mean, if you would take hold, in imagination, of the human motives which make history. Roughly (but, of course, very roughly) you may say of man that his wars and main migrations on this planet are ruled by the two great appetites which rule the strifes and migrations of the lower animals love, and hunger. If under love we include the parental instinct in man to do his best for his mate and children (which includes feeding them, and later includes patrimonies and marriage portions) you get love and hunger combined, and doubled in driving power. Man, unlike the brutes, will also war for religion (I do not forget the Moslem invasion or the Crusades) and emigrate for religion (I do not forget the Pilgrim Fathers) : but, here again, when a man expatri- ates himself for religion the old motives at least "come in. " The immediate cause of his sailing for America is that authority, finding him obnoxious at home, makes the satisfaction of hunger, love and the parental instincts impossible for him save on con- The Commerce of Thought 5 dition of renouncing his faith, which he will not do. Neither do I forget indeed it will be my business, before I have done, to remind you that hundreds of thousands of men have left home and country for the sake of learning. There lies the origin of the great universities. But here again you will find it hard to separate at all events from the thirteenth century onward the pure ardour of scholarship from the worldly advancement to which it led. Further, while men may migrate for the sake of learning I do not remember to have heard of their making war for it. On this point they content themselves with calling one another names. To cut this part of the argument short Of all the men you have known who went out to the Colonies, did not nine out of ten go to make money? Of all the women, did not nine out of ten go to marry, or to "better themselves" by some less ambiguous process? We are used to think of Marathon as a great victory won by a small enlightened Greek race over dense hordes of the obscurantist East; of Thermopylae as a pass held by the free mind of man against its would-be enslavers. But Herodotus does not see it so. Herodo- tus handles the whole quarrel as started and balanced on a trade dispute. Which was it first East or West that, coming in the way of trade, broke the rules of the game by stealing away a woman ? Was lo that woman ? Or was Europa? Jason sails to Colchis and carries off Medea, with the gold : Paris sails to Sparta and abducts Helen both ladies consenting. Always at the root of the story, as Herodotus tells it, we find commerce, coast-wise trading, the game of marriage by capture: no silly notions about liberty, nationality, religion or 6 Studies in Literature the human intellect. It is open to us, of course, to believe that Troy was besieged for ten years for the sake of a woman, as it is pleasant to read in Homer of Helen watching the battlefield from the tower above the Skaian gates, while the old men of the city marvel at her beauty, saying one to another, "Small blame is it that for such a woman the Trojans and Achaeans should long suffer hardships." But if you ask me, do I believe that the Trojan War happened so, I am constrained to answer that I do not : I suspect there was money in it somewhere. There is a legend I think in Suetonius, who to be sure had a nasty mind that Caesar first invaded Britain for the sake of its pearls; a disease of which our oysters have creditably rid themselves. And even nowadays, when we happen to be fighting far abroad and our statesmen assure us that "we seek no goldfields, " one murmurs the advice of Tennyson's Northern Farmer Doant them marry for mutiny, but goa wheer munny is. Money? Yes: but let your imagination play on these old trade-routes, and you will not only enhance your hold on the true springs of history; you will wonderfully seize the romance of it. You will see, as this little planet revolves back out of the shadow of night to meet the day, little threads pushing out over its black spaces dotted ships on wide seas, crawling trains of emigrant waggons, pioneers, tribes on the trek, men extinguishing their camp-fires and shoulder- ing their baggage for another day's march or piling it into canoes by untracked river sides, families loading their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, villagers treading wine-vats, fishermen hauling nets, olive- The Commerce of Thought 7 gatherers, packers, waggoners, long trains of African porters, desert caravans with armed outriders, daha- beeyahs pushing up the Nile, busy rice-fields, puffs of smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada, or northward from Capetown, Greenland whalers, Newfoundland codfishers, trappers around Hudson's Bay. . . . The main puzzle with these trade-routes is that while seas and rivers and river valleys last for ever, and roads for long, and even a railroad long enough to be called a "permanent way," the traffic along them is often curiously evanescent. Let me give you a couple of instances, one in quite recent times, the other of today, passing under our eyes. A man invents a steam-engine. It promptly makes obsolete the stage-coaches, whose pace was the glory of England. Famous hostelries along the Great North Road put up their shutters; weeds begin to choke the canals; a whole nexus of national traffic is torn in shreds, dissipated. A few years pass, and somebody invents the motor-car locomotion by petrol. Forthwith pro- sperity flows back along the old highways. County Councils start re-metalling, tar-spraying; inns revive under new custom: and your rich man is swept past a queer wayside building, without ever a thought that here stood a turnpike gate which Dick Turpin had to leap. For a second change, which I have watched for a year or two as it has passed under my own eyes at the foot of my garden at home. As you know, the trade of Europe from the West Coast of America around the Horn is carried by large sailing-vessels (the passage being too long for steamships without coaling stations). One day America starts in earnest to cut the Panama 8 Studies in Literature canal. Forthwith the provident British shipowner begins to get quit of these sailing-vessels: noble three- and four-masters, almost all Clyde-built. He sells them to Italian firms. Why to Italian firms ? Because these ships have considerable draught and are built of iron. Their draught unfits them for general coasting trade; they could not begin to navigate the Baltic, for instance. Now Italy has deep-water harbours. But the Genoese firms (I am told) buy these ships for the second reason, that they are of iron : because while the Italian Government lays a crippling duty on ordinary iron, broken-up ship-iron may enter free. So, after a coastwise voyage or two, it pays to rip their plates out, pass them under the rollers and re-issue them for new iron; and thus for a few months these beautiful things that used to wing it home, five months without sighting land, and anchor under my garden, eke out a new brief traffic until the last of them shall be towed to the breakers' yard. Even in such unnoted ways grew, thrived, passed, died, the commercial glories of Venice, Spain, Holland. II Now I will ask you to consider something more transient, more secret in operation, than ways of trade and barter the ways in which plants disseminate them- selves or are spread and acclimatised. For my pupils in Cambridge, the other day, I drew, as well as I could, in the New Lecture Theatre, the picture of an old Roman colonist in his villa in Britain, let us say in the fourth century and you must remember that these Roman colonists inhabited Britain for a good four hundred years. Let me quote one short passage from that description: The Commerce of Thought 9 The owner of the villa (you may conceive) is the grand- son or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first built it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The family has prospered, and our man is now a considerable landowner. He was born in Britain ; his children have been born here; and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out- of-door life, in its essentials I fancy not so very unlike the life of an English country squire today. Instead of chasing hares and foxes he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport is good, and he returns with an appetite. He has added a summer parlour to the house, with a northern aspect and no heating flues ; for the old parlour he has enlarged the praefurnium, and through the long winter evenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a modern country house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him from the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-beds which will breathe odorously in the spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave quarters and some of the outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows that there are no gaps or weak spots in his stockade fence wood is always cheap. In a word, he has improved his estate, is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like the old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something better than he found it. Such a family it was part of my picture would get many parcels from the land they still called "home," from the adored City urbe quam dicunt Romam The City; parcels fetched from the near military station on the great road where the imperial writ ran ; parcels for- warded by those trade-routes of which I have spoken; parcels of books scrolls, rather, or tablets; parcels of seeds useful vegetables or pot-herbs, garden flowers, fruit -plants for the orchard, for the colonnade even roses io Studies in Literature with real Italian earth damp about their roots. For the Romans here were great acclimatisers, and upon Italy they could draw as a nursery into which the best fruits, trees, flowers of the world had been gathered after con- quest and domesticated. For beasts, it seems probable that they introduced the ass with the mule as a consequence, the goat, certain new breeds of oxen; for birds, the peacock from India or Persia, the pheasant from Colchis, the Numidian guinea- fowl (as we call it), the duck, the goose (defender of the Capitol), possibly the dove and the falcon. But we talk of plants. Britain swarmed with oak and beech, as with most of the trees of Gaul ; but the Roman brought the small-leaved elm, ilex, cypress, laurel, myrtle, oriental plane, walnut ; of fruits (among others) peach, apricot, cherry, probably the filbert; of vegetables, green peas (bless him!), cucumbers, onions, leeks; of flowers, some species of the rose (the China-rose, as we call it, for one), lilies, hyacinths, sweet-williams, lilacs, tulips. But these were plants deliberately imported and tended. What of wild-flowers the common blue speedwell, for instance? I am not botanist enough to say if the speedwell was indigenous in Britain : but, as a gardener in a small way, I know how it can travel! If the speedwell will not do, take some other seed that has lodged on his long tramp northward in the boot- sole of a common soldier in Vespasian's legion. The boot reaches Dover, plods on, wears out, is cast by the way, rots in a ditch. From it, next spring, Britain has gained a new flower. Ill I come now to something more volatile, more fuga- cious yet more secret and subtle and mysterious in The Commerce of Thought n operation even than the vagaries of seeds; I come to the wanderings, alightings, fertilisings of man's thought. Will you forgive my starting off with a small personal experience which (since we have just been talking of a very common weed) may here come in not inappropri- ately? I received a message the other day from an acquaintance, a young engineer in Vancouver. He had been constructing a large dam on the edge of a forest, himself the only European, with a gang of Japanese labourers. But the rains proved so torrential, washing down the sides of the dam as fast as they were heaped, and half drowning the diggers, that at length the whole party sought shelter in the woods. There, as he searched about, my young engineer came upon a log-shanty, doorless, abandoned, empty, save for two pathetic objects left on the mud floor the one a burst kettle, the other a "soiled copy" (as the booksellers say) of one of my most unpopular novels. You see, there is no room for vanity in the narrative a burst kettle and this book the only two things not worth taking away ! Yet I who can neither make nor mend kettles own to a thrill of pride to belong to a call- ing that can fling the other thing so far; and nurse a hope that the book did, in its hour, cheer rather than dispirit that unknown dweller in the wilderness. But indeed to come to more serious and less dead, though more ancient, authors you never can tell how long this or that of theirs will lie dormant, then sud- denly spring to life. Someone copies down a little poem on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill : the paper goes to wrap a mummy ; long centuries pass ; a tomb is laid bare of the covering sand, and from its dead ribs they unwind a passionate lyric of Sappho: 12 Studies in Literature 01 ^xev (xxiQtov