Et là-bas, sous le pont, adossé contre une arche, Le piétinement sourd des légions en marche. Upon Anthony and Cleopatra is laid the spell of Egypt, the land of mystery, haunted by its strange and immemorial past. The Queen is in the arms of her lover. The most passionate and irresistible woman of the South is clinging to him and crazing his wits with her beauty. His ambition is to conquer the world and share its glories with her. But she is his ally as well as his mistress. In a little while their fleets will be ranged to give battle to the future master of the Roman Empire. How little does Anthony suspect the impending treachery, that cruel desertion at the moment of his greatest need by the siren who leans upon him! He feels the rise and fall of her bosom through his heavy mail, and listens to her sighing breath as, full of deep contentment, she turns her pale face to him. He bends over to press his lips upon hers. What is Egypt's history, or Rome's, or any other, or worldly riches, or fame, or honour, to the ecstasy of that moment? She opens her glorious eyes, when, gazing down into their depths, he sees reflected, as in a pool, the betrayal that is at hand. Amid the stars of golden light that dance within them, a fleet of galleys, bearing the Queen's colours, are flying, flying, flying. Like leaves before the winter's gale, they speed and speed away! It is but a vile trick of the imagination, and, gathering her ever closer, their lips meet and cleave together in the profound stillness of the Egyptian summer night. This is the setting of Heredia's sonnet, with the sluggish Nile winding beneath the lovers, past ancient tomb and temple to the eternal sea. There is magic in the last three lines. The enchanterpoet has waved his wand and made a new birth out of the unreal. So great is the power of fancy wedded to the gift of harmony and words! Its influence is deeper than fact, more lasting than truth, more subtle than reason. Its sway is equal over young and old, and the hand that bears its sceptre commands more kingdoms and more peoples than have ever been inscribed upon the roll of time: Tous deux ils regardaient, de la haute terrasse, Et le Romain sentait sous la lourde cuirasse, Et, sur elle courbé, l'ardent Imperator Vit dans ses larges yeux étoilés de points d'or Higher and The last, and perhaps the finest, of the four sonnets is The Eagle's Death. A royal eagle is pictured by the poet soaring on mighty pinions into the waste of air. Higher and higher he mounts above the snow summits in order to reach the blue ether where the great globe of the sun will blaze upon his sight. higher yet does he climb in his strength and pride. A storm is raging above him, and up into it he goes, facing its terrors with unblinking eyelids, unheeding and fearless, making for the empyrean on the other side. But he has ventured too much. The remorseless lightning smites him and shivers both his wings. Down, with a dreadful cry, headlong he plunges, turning over and over through the sulphurous chaos of the elements into the abyss. The sublime adventurer is no more. This is the illustration which the poet makes use of, telling us in the last few lines, in majestic and unforgettable language, that such a death is the best that can be wished for anyone who, inspired by dreams of glory or liberty, is willing to die for the sake of either : Quand l'aigle a dépassé les neiges éternelles, A sa vaste envergure il veut chercher plus d'air Il s'enlève. Il aspire un torrent d'étincelles. Avec un cri sinistre, il tournoie, emporté Heureux qui pour la Gloire ou pour la Liberté, Meurt ainsi, d'une mort éblouissante et brève ! The foregoing sonnets reveal Heredia as a poet of the first rank. In dramatic power, in form, in finish, in quality of compression and breadth of treatment, no other poems of this or any other age are superior. They are pictures that abide in the memory, with their light and shade, their high relief and sharp outline, their impetuous movement and brilliant setting. With unerring skill the scene is laid and painted before you. You are witness of the fine moulding, of the building of the storied lines. But the result is a creation rather than an art. With infallible instinct the words emerge and drop into their places. It is no longer a mosaic, or even a composition, but a gem of fire, flashing with diverse colour as you revolve it here and there. The style is so perfect, the mastery of language so easy, that you read with a feeling of wonder and despair. Here is a man, with a faculty of expression denied to all but the very few, who, with so small a tale of words, can clothe the dust and legend of the past until they live and breathe before you, who, in so insignificant a scrap of room, can round and complete an epic, a drama, a pastoral, a song. Heredia is one of the world's classics. Without the humanity or sublime tragedy, without the passion or heart-searching music, of the foremost poets of all, he is, perhaps, the greatest dramatic craftsman of short metrical pieces that the world has seen. He was welcomed into the company of French immortals a few months after the appearance of his slender volume. Since that date his renown has spread over many lands and many nations. It will grow with the years and widen with the centuries, and as long as the precious gift of speech is held in honour its lustre will brighten the Temple of Fame. GODFREY LOCKER LAMPSON. 1923 THE MUSE OF HISTORY HISTORIANS, Who, more than all artists, should be men of the world, have in fact displayed a bland and irritating naïveté. Like the children who support with passion the House of Lancaster because they prefer red roses to white, or the House of Stuart because Cavaliers seem such jolly, laughing fellows in their pictures, celebrated historians have been infected with the most irrational enthusiasms. Freeman, after a lifetime devoted to the AngloSaxon period, grew to believe that the Teutonic settlers were responsible for all the good in it, and distorted his gigantic work in a quixotic effort to convince his readers. Green, infected with a rather similar virus, held that no spot upon the earth is more sacred than those Kentish mud-flats where first the keels of the settlers grounded on English soil. Subsequent research has, I believe, shown that he selected the wrong spot, but this does not alter the spirit of his enthusiasm. Froude, when he was not abroad, religiously jotting down as veracious whatever stories the amused and imaginative colonials thought safe to invent for him about their homes, had a deep admiration for Henry VIII. He did not admire that great Tudor, as one might have expected, for being a very perfect specimen of the Renaissance despot. He wasted his ingenuity in painting Henry as a Victorian paterfamilias in excelsis, set down among a gang of sixteenth century blackguards. Almost all the great modern historians have had some such blind spot. Freeman's Saxons, Froude's strong man, Green's mud-flats, are matched by Stubbs' charters, Mommsen's Cæsar-worship, Buckle's geographical causes, Taine's race theories, Grote's liberalism and Aulard's virtuous democrats. Really it is difficult to keep one's temper with them. They are so full of knowledge, so laboriously painstaking, so well intentioned, and— for one must be blunt-so silly. It is, of course, impossible for a historian to be great if he lacks enthusiasms. Nothing is more dead than mere mechanic industry; histories produced by that alone lack reality. They come to one like voices faintly heard from the next room. Even if one overcomes one's very natural repugnance and makes an effort to overhear, scarcely anything intelligible can be distinguished. Nevertheless, although enthu siasm is essential to history as an art, one does demand a certain sanity, a certain man-of-the-world air, in it. Compare Freeman and the rest to the few historians who do possess that sanityThucydides and Maitland, for example—and one sees instantly the difference. These latter were tempted to the study of the past by an imaginative, well-balanced curiosity; without being bloodlessly ashamed of their own prejudices, they were too sensitive, too humanist, for any prejudice to eat up their sanity. The tale of how the great bulk of modern historians came to incur the hatred of Clio and be struck by her with madness is a long one, but amusing and worth telling. In the seventeen-sixties Rousseau put this footnote in his Contrat Social : Les savantes recherches sur le droit public ne soient souvent que l'histoire des anciens abus; et l'on s'est entêté mal à propos quand on s'est donné la peine de les trop étudier ! Voilà précisément ce qu'a fait Grotius. On Christmas Day, 1873, Bishop Stubbs, writing the Preface to his three-volume Constitutional History, remarked: The history of institutions . . . holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of truth. . . . I would fain hope that the labour spent on it in this book may at least not repel the student. In the different tempers of these two passages lies the explanation of the madness of modern historians. Rousseau was writing when the world was very young indeed for those complacent thinkers who saw man, the rational being, as the master of things. It was the new age, the age of Reason. Previous generations not having worshipped Reason, had deservedly perished in barbarism. A catalogue of their crimes and follies could serve no useful purpose. Ecrasez l'infame; let us turn over a new leaf. If a man propose writing about the past, he must prove first that it was worth writing about. What moral, illustrative of the supremacy of Reason, did he draw from it? At the least, what diverting story had he to tell? If he answered lamely that he told nothing but the truth, he would have been driven out with the laughter of Rousseau ringing in his ears. What did he hope to gain by describing ruined civilisations or vanished, forgotten senates, and showing how inefficiently they performed the functions for which their creators had designed them? We can quite believe all you say,' Rousseau would have argued, but why say it? We never supposed anything else. These civilisations had not learned to follow Reason; any and every disaster may, therefore, have overtaken them.' By Stubbs' day the laughter of Rousseau had been silenced. The apostles of truth for truth's sake had established a tyrannous supremacy. More and more antique records were discovered, |