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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Rhythm of Life by Alice Meynell
+#4 in our series by Alice Meynell
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+The Rhythm of Life and other Essays
+
+by Alice Meynell
+
+April, 1998  [Etext #1276]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Rhythm of Life by Alice Meynell
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+
+
+The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+The Rhythm of Life
+Decivilised
+A Remembrance
+The Sun
+The Flower
+Unstable Equilibrium
+The Unit of the World
+By the Railway Side
+Pocket Vocabularies
+Pathos
+The Point of Honour
+Composure
+Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
+James Russell Lowell
+Domus Angusta
+Rejection
+The Lesson of Landscape
+Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes
+Innocence and Experience
+Penultimate Caricature
+
+
+
+
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+
+
+
+If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.
+Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to
+the path of the orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged,
+ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.
+Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last
+week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again
+next week or next year.  Happiness is not a matter of events; it
+depends upon the tides of the mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in
+at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at
+longer and longer intervals towards recovery.  Sorrow for one cause
+was intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today
+it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed.  Even the burden
+of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a
+temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain--it returns.
+Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise.  If we had made a course of
+notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have
+had an expectation instead of a discovery.  No one makes such
+observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world,
+there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such
+cycles.  But Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not
+measure them.  In his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst
+thou more than these? for out of these were all things made'--he
+learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness,
+and the remembrance that restrains the soul at the coming of the
+moment of delight, giving it a more conscious welcome, but presaging
+for it an inexorable flight.  And 'rarely, rarely comest thou,'
+sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight.
+Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our
+service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
+violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is
+thus compelled.  THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or
+parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what
+trysts with Time.
+
+It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the IMITATION should
+both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and
+to guess at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls were in close
+touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate
+human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal
+movement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences.  Eppur si
+muove.  They knew that presence does not exist without absence; they
+knew that what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its
+long path of return.  They knew that what is approaching to the very
+touch is hastening towards departure.  'O wind,' cried Shelley, in
+autumn,
+
+
+'O wind,
+If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'
+
+
+They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt
+with unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of
+onset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To live in
+constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be sought
+in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of
+the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity.  The
+souls of certain of the saints, being singularly simple and single,
+have been in the most complete subjection to the law of periodicity.
+Ecstasy and desolation visited them by seasons.  They endured,
+during spaces of vacant time, the interior loss of all for which
+they had sacrificed the world.  They rejoiced in the uncovenanted
+beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts.  Like them are the
+poets whom, three times or ten times in the course of a long life,
+the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.  And yet hardly like
+them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the
+departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour.  Few
+poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse.  For
+full recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
+
+It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America
+worship the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but
+no tribes are known to adore the sun, and not the moon.  For the
+periodicity of the sun is still in part a secret; but that of the
+moon is modestly apparent, perpetually influential.  On her depend
+the tides; and she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews
+that recurrently irrigate lands where rain is rare.  More than any
+other companion of earth is she the Measurer.  Early Indo-Germanic
+languages knew her by that name.  Her metrical phases are the symbol
+of the order of recurrence.  Constancy in approach and in departure
+is the reason of her inconstancies.  Juliet will not receive a vow
+spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did not live to know
+that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which are due to
+the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly
+and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.
+For man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of
+periodicity.  The individual man either never learns it fully, or
+learns it late.  And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of
+cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is lacking.  It
+is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt so
+definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance.  That
+young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young
+ignorance.  So is the early hope of great achievement.  Life seems
+so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all
+the intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations,
+between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep.  And
+life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the
+inevitable and unfailing refreshment.  It would be for their peace
+to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more
+subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--
+than the phrase was meant to contain.  Their joy is flying away from
+them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they
+would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that
+they are ruled by the law that commands all things--a sun's
+revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.
+
+
+
+DECIVILISED
+
+
+
+The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
+decivilised man lies in this:  when you accuse him of vulgarity--
+sparing him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge
+of barbarism.  Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he
+faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly
+persuaded of his own youthfulness of race.  He writes, and recites,
+poems about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the
+recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the
+lawless ways of a young society.  He is there to explain himself,
+voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang.  But his
+colonialism is only provincialism very articulate.  The new air does
+but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set
+into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse
+feeling of a race decivilising.  American fancy played long this
+pattering part of youth.  The New-Englander hastened to assure you
+with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and feathers,
+that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you had
+suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat.  And
+when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American
+was ill-content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for
+some delicate successes in continuing something of the literature of
+England, something of the art of France; he was more eager for the
+applause that stimulated him to write romances and to paint
+panoramic landscape, after brief training in academies of native
+inspiration.  Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are
+constantly calling upon America to begin--to begin, for the world is
+expectant.  Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a
+continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained
+refinement and can save from decivilisation.
+
+But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil.  The English town,
+too, knows him in all his dailiness.  In England, too, he has a
+literature, an art, a music, all his own--derived from many and
+various things of price.  Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity
+and cheapness, is impossible without a beautiful past.  Its chief
+characteristic--which is futility, not failure--could not be
+achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory reproduction, the
+quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the
+utterance by words.  Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality,
+purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the antecedents
+of trash.  It is after them; it is also, alas, because of them.  And
+nothing can be much sadder than such a proof of what may possibly be
+the failure of derivation.
+
+Evidently we cannot choose our posterity.  Reversing the steps of
+time, we may, indeed, choose backwards.  We may give our thoughts
+noble forefathers.  Well begotten, well born our fancies must be;
+they shall be also well derived.  We have a voice in decreeing our
+inheritance, and not our inheritance only, but our heredity.  Our
+minds may trace upwards and follow their ways to the best well-heads
+of the arts.  The very habit of our thoughts may be persuaded one
+way unawares by their antenatal history.  Their companions must be
+lovely, but need be no lovelier than their ancestors; and being so
+fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may be intrusted to keep the
+counsels of literature.
+
+Such is our confidence in a descent we know.  But, of a sequel which
+of us is sure?  Which of us is secured against the dangers of
+subsequent depreciation?  And, moreover, which of us shall trace the
+contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards
+dishonour?  Or who shall discover why derivation becomes
+degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls?  The
+decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities,
+every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities.  No
+ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh, but has the
+excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by some living
+sweetness once.  Nor are the decivilised to blame as having in their
+own persons possessed civilisation and marred it.  They did not
+possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
+inclination for things mentally inexpensive.  And the tendency can
+hardly do other than continue.  Nothing can look duller than the
+future of this second-hand and multiplying world.  Men need not be
+common merely because they are many; but the infection of commonness
+once begun in the many, what dulness in their future!  To the eye
+that has reluctantly discovered this truth--that the vulgarised are
+not UNcivilised, and that there is no growth for them--it does not
+look like a future at all.  More ballad-concerts, more quaint
+English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures,
+more anxious decoration, more colonial poetry, more young nations
+with withered traditions.  Yet it is before this prospect that the
+provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise
+common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in
+senility.  He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be
+new because his forest is untracked and his town just built.  But
+what the newness is to be he cannot tell.  Certain words were
+dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age.  Dreadful and
+pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them
+when they are the promise of an impotent people?  'I will do such
+things:  what they are yet I know not.'
+
+
+
+A REMEMBRANCE
+
+
+
+When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be
+rolled up and sealed with their records within them, there will be
+no remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems
+better worth interpreting than the speech of many another.  Of
+himself he has left no vestiges.  It was a common reproach against
+him that he never acknowledged the obligation to any kind of
+restlessness.  The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, but as he
+did none there was nothing for it but that the kingdom of heaven
+should yield to his leisure.  The delicate, the abstinent, the
+reticent graces were his in the heroic degree.  Where shall I find a
+pen fastidious enough to define and limit and enforce so many
+significant negatives?  Words seem to offend by too much assertion,
+and to check the suggestions of his reserve.  That reserve was life-
+long.  Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except to write a
+letter.  He was not inarticulate, he was only silent.  He had an
+exquisite style from which to refrain.  The things he abstained from
+were all exquisite.  They were brought from far to undergo his
+judgment, if haply he might have selected them.  Things ignoble
+never approached near enough for his refusal; they had not with him
+so much as that negative connexion.  If I had to equip an author I
+should ask no better than to arm him and invest him with precisely
+the riches that were renounced by the man whose intellect, by
+integrity, had become a presence-chamber.
+
+It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
+taught, rather than by precepts.  Few were these in his speech, but
+his personality made laws for me.  It was a subtle education, for it
+persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own.  How, if he would
+not define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy
+of his gentle and implacable judgment?  I must needs judge them for
+myself, yet he constrained me in the judging.  Within that
+constraint and under that stimulus, which seemed to touch the
+ultimate springs of thoughts before they sprang, I began to discern
+all things in literature and in life--in the chastity of letters and
+in the honour of life--that I was bound to love.  Not the things of
+one character only, but excellent things of every character.  There
+was no tyranny in such a method.  His idleness justified itself by
+the liberality it permitted to his taste.  Never having made his
+love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having bound the
+literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
+never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some
+of his delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond
+the sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own
+preferences, which lay somewhat on the hither side of full
+effectiveness of style.  These the range of his reading confessed by
+certain exclusions.  Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he
+was patient:  he did but respect the power of pause, and he disliked
+violence chiefly because violence is apt to confess its own limits.
+Perhaps, indeed, his own fine negatives made him only the more
+sensible of any lack of those literary qualities that are bound in
+their full complement to hold themselves at the disposal of the
+consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do no more.
+
+Men said that he led a DILETTANTE life.  They reproached him with
+the selflessness that made him somewhat languid.  Others, they
+seemed to aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur
+at living.  So it was, in the sense that he never grasped at
+happiness, and that many of the things he had held slipped from his
+disinterested hands.  So it was, too, in this unintended sense; he
+loved life.  How should he not have loved a life that his living
+made honourable?  How should he not have loved all arts, in which
+his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed, studious, docile,
+austere?  An amateur man he might have been called, too, because he
+was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by the
+discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
+Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness.  He
+had always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes.
+His sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised.  When
+he had joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon
+the general sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure.
+It was his finest distinction to desire no differences, no
+remembrance, but loss among the innumerable forgotten.  And when he
+suffered, it was with so quick a nerve and yet so wide an
+apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in him.  He pitied not
+himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for pain he was
+then feelingly persuaded.  His darkening eyes said in the extreme
+hour:  'I have compassion on the multitude.'
+
+
+
+THE SUN
+
+
+
+Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
+divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
+immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as
+in a plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky.  The curious
+have an insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it
+to see the sunrise.  The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a
+sun past the dew of his birth; he has walked some way towards the
+common fires of noon.  But on the flat country the uprising is early
+and fresh, the arc is wide, the career is long.  The most distant
+clouds, converging in the beautiful and little-studied order of
+cloud-perspective (for most painters treat clouds as though they
+formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery), are those that
+gather at the central point of sunrise.  On the plain, and there
+only, can the construction--but that is too little vital a word; I
+should rather say the organism--the unity, the design, of a sky be
+understood.  The light wind that has been moving all night is seen
+to have not worked at random.  It has shepherded some small flocks
+of cloud afield and folded others.  There's husbandry in Heaven.
+And the order has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst.  Not a
+line, not a curve, but confesses its membership in a design declared
+from horizon to horizon.
+
+To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to
+look for in all achieved works of Nature and art:  the organism that
+is unity and life.  It is the unity and life of painting.  The Early
+Victorian picture--(the school is still in full career, but
+essentially it belongs to that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum
+of things put together, in concourse, not in relation; but the true
+picture is ONE, however multitudinous it may be, for it is composed
+of relations gathered together in the unity of perception, of
+intention, and of light.  It is organic.  Moreover, how truly
+relation is the condition of life may be understood from the extinct
+state of the English stage, which resembles nothing so much as a
+Royal Academy picture.  Even though the actors may be added together
+with something like vivacity (though that is rare), they have no
+vitality in common.  They are not members one of another.  If the
+Church and Stage Guild be still in existence, it would do much for
+the art by teaching that Scriptural maxim.  I think, furthermore,
+that the life of our bodies has never been defined so suggestively
+as by one who named it a living relation of lifeless atoms.  Could
+the value of relation be more curiously set forth?  And one might
+penetrate some way towards a consideration of the vascular organism
+of a true literary style in which there is a vital relation of
+otherwise lifeless word with word.  And wherein lies the progress of
+architecture from the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight
+of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the flight of the ogival
+arch, but in a quasi-organic relation?  But the way of such thoughts
+might be intricate, and the sun rules me to simplicity.
+
+He reigns as centrally in the blue sky as in the clouds.  One
+October of late had days absolutely cloudless.  I should not have
+certainly known it had there been a hill in sight.  The gradations
+of the blue are incalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the
+central fire.  As to the earthly scenery, there are but two 'views'
+on the plain; for the aspect of the light is the whole landscape.
+To look with the sun or against the sun--this is the alternative
+splendour.  To look with the sun is to face a golden country,
+shadowless, serene, noble and strong in light, with a certain lack
+of relief that suggests--to those who dream of landscape--the
+country of a dream.  The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and
+the golden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might
+paint with a colour.  Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of
+sunlight than its luminosity.  For by a kind of paradox the luminous
+landscape is that which is full of shadows--the landscape before you
+when you turn and face the sun.  Not only every reed and rush of the
+salt marshes, every uncertain aspen-leaf of the few trees, but every
+particle of the October air shows a shadow and makes a mystery of
+the light.  There is nothing but shadow and sun; colour is absorbed
+and the landscape is reduced to a shining simplicity.  Thus is the
+dominant sun sufficient for his day.  His passage kindles to
+unconsuming fires and quenches into living ashes.  No incidents save
+of his causing, no delight save of his giving:  from the sunrise,
+when the larks, not for pairing, but for play, sing the only
+virginal song of the year--a heart younger than Spring's in the
+season of decline--even to the sunset, when the herons scream
+together in the shallows.  And the sun dominates by his absence,
+compelling the low country to sadness in the melancholy night.
+
+
+
+THE FLOWER
+
+
+
+There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed
+by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere
+witnesses, in its tyranny.  It is the obsession of man by the
+flower.  In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him-
+-his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale
+habitualness, his slatternly ostentation.  These return to him and
+wreak upon him their dull revenges.  What the tyranny really had
+grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where
+the most ordinary things of design and decoration have sifted down
+and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a cumulative
+force and achieves a conspicuous commonness.  Stem and petal and
+leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
+rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness
+and insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces.  The most ugly
+of all imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-
+house arrayed for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is
+beset with flowers.  It blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron
+garden.  The floor flourishes with blossoms adust, poorly
+conventionalised into a kind of order; the table-cover is ablaze
+with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper is set with
+bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and lilies
+in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
+is scattered.  In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the
+plaster picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in
+the pediment of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the
+barometer, in the finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-
+plates of the 'grained' door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait
+or to be traced the stale inspiration of the flower.  And what is
+this bossiness around the grate but some blunt, black-leaded
+garland?  The recital is wearisome, but the retribution of the
+flower is precisely weariness.  It is the persecution of man, the
+haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
+inconsiderable brain.
+
+The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to
+the smallest of the things he has abused.  The designer of cheap
+patterns is no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain
+and transitory author by the phrase.  But I had rather learn my
+decoration of the Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot
+plain from the wheel, holding one singular branch in blossom, in the
+attitude and accident of growth.  And I could wish abstention to
+exist, and even to be evident, in my words.  In literature as in all
+else man merits his subjection to trivialities by a kind of
+economical greed.  A condition for using justly and gaily any
+decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance.  Ornament--strange
+as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was in the beginning
+intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to be
+achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty.  Nor can the
+prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute.  For Nature
+has something even more severe than moderation:  she has an
+innumerable singleness.  Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal;
+they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is
+exactly the disgrace of decoration.  Who has ever multiplied or
+repeated his delights? or who has ever gained the granting of the
+most foolish of his wishes--the prayer for reiteration?  It is a
+curious slight to generous Fate that man should, like a child, ask
+for one thing many times.  Her answer every time is a resembling but
+new and single gift; until the day when she shall make the one
+tremendous difference among her gifts--and make it perhaps in
+secret--by naming one of them the ultimate.  What, for novelty,
+what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the last?
+Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
+mouth are all numbered.
+
+
+
+UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
+
+
+
+It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress
+of man is so much to be desired.  The leg, completing as it does the
+form of man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is
+at least as important as the scenery of geological structure, or the
+scenery of architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the
+lovers of mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have
+consented to ignore.  The leg is the best part of the figure,
+inasmuch as it has the finest lines and therewith those slender,
+diminishing forms which, coming at the base of the human structure,
+show it to be a thing of life by its unstable equilibrium.  A
+lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the body, springing,
+poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never stands without
+implying and expressing life.  It is the leg that first suggested
+the phantasy of flight.  We imagine wings to the figure that is
+erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,
+because of his station, looks new-lighted.  All this is true of the
+best leg, and the best leg is the man's.  That of the young child,
+in which the Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither
+movement nor supporting strength.  In the case of the woman's figure
+it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives
+the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so
+organic.  But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the
+strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all
+garments the most stupid.  Inexpressive of what they clothe as no
+kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they are neither
+implicitly nor explicitly good raiment.  It is hardly possible to
+err by violence in denouncing them.  Why, when a bad writer is
+praised for 'clothing his thought,' it is to modern raiment that
+one's nimble fancy flies--fain of completing the beautiful metaphor!
+
+The human scenery:  yes, costume could make a crowd something other
+than the mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the
+multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and
+demonstrate, and strike, and listen to the democrat.  For the
+undistinguished are very important by their numbers.  These are they
+who make the look of the artificial world.  They are man
+generalised; as units they inevitably lack something of interest;
+all the more have they cumulative effect.  It would be well if we
+could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in
+the clothing of his average body.  Unfortunately he will be slow to
+be changed.  And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are
+their national customs--and the wretchedest of them all the wearing
+of other men's old raiment--that they must wait for reform until the
+reformed dress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have
+turned second-hand.
+
+
+
+THE UNIT OF THE WORLD
+
+
+
+The quarrel of Art with Nature goes on apace.  The painters have
+long been talking of selecting, then of rejecting, or even, with Mr.
+Whistler, of supplanting.  And then Mr. Oscar Wilde, in the witty
+and delicate series of inversions which he headed 'The Decay of
+Lying,' declared war with all the irresponsibility naturally
+attending an act so serious.  He seems to affirm that Nature is less
+proportionate to man than is architecture; that the house is built
+and the sofa is made measurable by the unit measure of the body; but
+that the landscape is set to some other scale.  'I prefer houses to
+the open air.  In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.
+Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human
+dignity, is absolutely the result of indoor life.'  Nevertheless,
+before it is too late, let me assert that though nature is not
+always clearly and obviously made to man's measure, he is yet the
+unit by which she is measurable.  The proportion may be far to seek
+at times, but the proportion is there.  Man's farms about the lower
+Alps, his summer pastures aloft, have their relation to the whole
+construction of the range; and the range is great because it is
+great in regard to the village lodged in a steep valley in the foot
+hills.  The relation of flower and fruit to his hands and mouth, to
+his capacity and senses (I am dealing with size, and nothing else),
+is a very commonplace of our conditions in the world.  The arm of
+man is sufficient to dig just as deep as the harvest is to be sown.
+And if some of the cheerful little evidences of the more popular
+forms of teleology are apt to be baffled, or indefinitely postponed,
+by the retorts that suggest themselves to the modern child, there
+remains the subtle and indisputable witness borne by art itself:
+the body of man composes with the mass and the detail of the world.
+The picture is irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figure
+amongst its natural accessories in the landscape, and would not have
+them otherwise.
+
+But there is one conspicuous thing in the world to which man has not
+served as a unit of proportion, and that one thing is a popularly
+revered triumph of that very art of architecture in which Mr. Oscar
+Wilde has confidence for keeping things in scale.  Human ingenuity
+in designing St. Peter's on the Vatican, has achieved this one
+exception to the universal harmony--a harmony enriched by discords,
+but always on one certain scale of notes--which the body makes with
+the details of the earth.  It is not in the landscape, where Mr.
+Oscar Wilde has too rashly looked for contempt and contumely, but in
+the art he holds precious as the minister to man's egotism, that
+man's Ego is defied.  St. Peter's is not necessarily too large
+(though on other grounds its size might be liable to correction); it
+is simply out of relation to the most vital thing on the earth--the
+thing which has supplied some secret rod to measure the waves
+withal, and the whales, the sea-wall cliffs, the ears of wheat, the
+cedar-branches, pines and diamonds and apples.  Now, Emerson would
+certainly not have felt the soft shock and stimulus of delight to
+which he confesses himself to be liable at the first touch of
+certain phrases, had not the words in every case enclosed a promise
+of further truth and of a second pleasure.  One of these swift and
+fruitful experiences visited him with the saying--grown popular
+through him--that an architect should have a knowledge of anatomy.
+There is assuredly a germ and a promise in the phrase.  It delights
+us, first, because it seems to recognise the organic, as distinct
+from the merely constructive, character of finely civilised
+architecture; and next, it persuades us that Vitruvius had in truth
+discovered the key to size--the unit that is sometimes so obscurely,
+yet always so absolutely, the measure of what is great and small
+among things animate and inanimate.  And in spite of themselves the
+architects of St. Peter's were constrained to take something from
+man; they refused his height for their scale, but they tried to use
+his shape for their ornament.  And so in the blankest dearth of
+fancy that ever befel architect or builder they imagined human
+beings bigger than the human beings of experience; and by means of
+these, carved in stone and inlaid in mosaic, they set up a relation
+of their own.  The basilica was related to the colossal figure (as a
+church more wisely measured would have been to living man), and so
+ceased to be large; and nothing more important was finally achieved
+than transposal of the whole work into another scale of proportions-
+-a scale in which the body of man was not the unit.  The pile of
+stones that make St. Peter's is a very little thing in comparison
+with Soracte; but man, and man's wife, and the unequal statures of
+his children, are in touch with the structure of the mountain rather
+than with that of the church which has been conceived without
+reference to the vital and fundamental rule of his inches.
+
+Is there no egotism, ministering to his dignity, that man, having
+the law of the organism of the world written in his members, can
+take with him, out of the room that has been built to accord with
+him, into the landscape that stands only a little further away?  He
+has deliberately made the smoking chair and the table; there is
+nothing to surprise him in their ministrations.  But what profounder
+homage is rendered by the multitudinous Nature going about the
+interests and the business of which he knows so little, and yet
+throughout confessing him!  His eyes have seen her and his ears have
+heard, but it would never have entered into his heart to conceive
+her.  His is not the fancy that could have achieved these woods,
+this little flush of summer from the innumerable flowering of
+grasses, the cyclic recreation of seasons.  And yet he knows that he
+is imposed upon all he sees.  His stature gives laws.  His labour
+only is needful--not a greater strength.  And the sun and the
+showers are made sufficient for him.  His furniture must surely be
+adjudged to pay him but a coarse flattery in comparison with the
+subjection, yet the aloofness, of all this wild world.  This is no
+flattery.  The grass is lumpy, as Mr. Oscar Wilde remarks with
+truth:  Nature is not man's lacquey, and has no preoccupation about
+his more commonplace comforts.  These he gives himself indoors; and
+who prizes, with any self-respect, the things carefully provided by
+self-love?  But when that farouche Nature, who has never spoken to
+him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of hinting his
+wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of his form
+and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes lets
+him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him
+suspect further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand-
+-then man becomes conscious of having received a token from her
+lowliness, and a favour from her loveliness, compared with which the
+care wherewith his tailor himself has fitted him might leave his
+gratitude cool.
+
+
+
+BY THE RAILWAY SIDE
+
+
+
+My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two
+of the harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and
+there were a sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the
+sun as his fires brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby,
+seaside ilex-woods.  I had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to
+the Genovesato:  the steep country with its profiles, bay by bay, of
+successive mountains grey with olive-trees, between the flashes of
+the Mediterranean and the sky; the country through the which there
+sounds the twanging Genoese language, a thin Italian mingled with a
+little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much French.  I was regretful at
+leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous in its vowels set in
+emphatic L'S and M'S and the vigorous soft spring of the double
+consonants.  But as the train arrived its noises were drowned by a
+voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear again for months--
+good Italian.  The voice was so loud that one looked for the
+audience:  Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done
+to every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its
+insincerity?  The tones were insincere, but there was passion behind
+them; and most often passion acts its own true character poorly, and
+consciously enough to make good judges think it a mere counterfeit.
+Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness.  It is when I am angry
+that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious
+and intelligible form.  Thus even before the words were
+distinguishable it was manifest that they were spoken by a man in
+serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is convincing in
+elocution.
+
+When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting
+blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of
+the type that grows stout and wears whiskers.  The man was in
+BOURGEOIS dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small
+station building, shaking his thick fist at the sky.  No one was on
+the platform with him except the railway officials, who seemed in
+doubt as to their duties in the matter, and two women.  Of one of
+these there was nothing to remark except her distress.  She wept as
+she stood at the door of the waiting-room.  Like the second woman,
+she wore the dress of the shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with
+the local black lace veil in place of a bonnet over her hair.  It is
+of the second woman--O unfortunate creature!--that this record is
+made--a record without sequel, without consequence; but there is
+nothing to be done in her regard except so to remember her.  And
+thus much I think I owe after having looked, from the midst of the
+negative happiness that is given to so many for a space of years, at
+some minutes of her despair.  She was hanging on the man's arm in
+her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting.  She
+had wept so hard that her face was disfigured.  Across her nose was
+the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear.  Haydon saw it on
+the face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London
+street.  I remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via
+Reggio, in her intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs
+lifting it.  She was afraid that the man would throw himself under
+the train.  She was afraid that he would be damned for his
+blasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear.  It was
+horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.
+
+Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the
+clamour.  No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the
+woman's horror.  But has any one who saw it forgotten her face?  To
+me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely
+mental image.  Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a
+background, and against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with
+sobs, under the provincial black lace veil.  And at night what
+emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep!  Close to my hotel
+there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
+giving Offenbach.  The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and
+the little town was placarded with announcements of La Bella Elena.
+The peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half
+the hot night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its
+pauses.  But the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the
+persistent vision of those three figures at the Via Reggio station
+in the profound sunshine of the day.
+
+
+
+POCKET VOCABULARIES
+
+
+
+A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in
+such a collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a
+portable vocabulary.  It is suited to the manners of a day that has
+produced salad-dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the
+saving of processes.  Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic'
+things, of 'quaint' things and 'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy'
+Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-painting' (is not that the
+way of it?), and it will serve the turn.  Especially did the
+Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of language.  It
+seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature that if
+anything could convince him of his own success it must be the energy
+of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,
+fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century.  Literature
+doubtless is made of words.  What then is needful, he seems to ask,
+besides a knack of beautiful words?  Unluckily for him, he has
+achieved, not style, but slang.  Unluckily for him, words are not
+style, phrases are not style.  'The man is style.'  O good French
+language, cunning and good, that lets me read the sentence in
+obverse or converse as I will!  And I read it as declaring that the
+whole man, the very whole of him, is his style.  The literature of a
+man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his qualities, with
+little fibres running invisibly into the smallest qualities he has.
+He who is not a man of letters, simply is not one; it is not too
+audacious a paradox to affirm that doing will not avail him who
+fails in being.  'Lay your deadly doing down,' sang once some old
+hymn known to Calvinists.  Certain poets, a certain time ago,
+ransacked the language for words full of life and beauty, made a
+vocabulary of them, and out of wantonness wrote them to death.  To
+change somewhat the simile, they scented out a word--an earlyish
+word, by preference--ran it to earth, unearthed it, dug it out, and
+killed it.  And then their followers bagged it.  The very word that
+lives, 'new every morning,' miraculously new, in the literature of a
+man of letters, they killed and put into their bag.  And, in like
+manner, the emotion that should have caused the word is dead for
+those, and for those only, who abuse its expression.  For the maker
+of a portable vocabulary is not content to turn his words up there:
+he turns up his feelings also, alphabetically or otherwise.
+Wonderful how much sensibility is at hand in such round words as the
+New Literature loves.  Do you want a generous emotion?  Pull forth
+the little language.  Find out moonshine, find out moonshine!
+
+Take, as an instance, Mr. Swinburne's 'hell.'  There is, I fear, no
+doubt whatever that Mr. Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a
+vocabulary, with the inevitable consequences to the word.  And when
+the minor men of his school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may
+very well happen to any young man practising authorship), I must not
+be accused of phantasy if I say that they put their hands into Mr.
+Swinburne's vocabulary and pick it.  These vocabularies are made out
+of vigorous and blunt language.  'What hempen homespuns have we
+swaggering here?'  Alas, they are homespuns from the factory,
+machine-made in uncostly quantities.  Obviously, power needs to make
+use of no such storage.  The property of power is to use phrases,
+whether strange or familiar, as though it created them.  But even
+more than lack of power is lack of humour the cause of all the
+rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of commerce, of
+all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is moved to
+exclaim with Cassio:  'Hither comes the bauble!'  Lack of a sense of
+humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries
+to make amends for a currency debased.  No more than any other can a
+witty writer dispense with a sense of humour.  In his moments of
+sentiment the lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at
+least perceptible.  A sense of humour cannot be always present, it
+may be urged.  Why, no; it is the lack of it that is--importunate.
+Other absences, such as the absence of passion, the absence of
+delicacy, are, if grievous negatives, still mere negatives.  These
+qualities may or may not be there at call, ready for a summons; we
+are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily aware, unless they
+ought to be in action, whether their action is possible.  But want
+of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous:  these are lacks
+wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are all-
+influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
+themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying;
+what other paradoxes can I adventure?  Without power--no style.
+Without a possible humour,--no style.  The weakling has no
+confidence in himself to keep him from grasping at words that he
+fancies hold within them the true passions of the race, ready for
+the uses of his egoism.  And with a sense of humour a man will not
+steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the language and put it
+in his pocket.
+
+
+
+PATHOS
+
+
+
+A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
+magazine:  'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is
+the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of
+the pathos that is worked out more fully, though by different ways,
+in Bottom and Malvolio.'  Has it indeed come to this?  Have the
+Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz and the other things compared to which
+'le spleen' was gay, done so much for us?  Is there to be no
+laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham
+real-life?  So it would seem.  Even what the great master has not
+shown us in his work, that your critic convinced of pathos is
+resolved to see in it.  By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy
+he will come at it.  It is of little use now to explain Snug the
+joiner to the audience:  why, it is precisely Snug who stirs their
+emotions so painfully.  Not the lion; they can see through that:
+but the Snug within, the human Snug.  And Master Shallow has the
+Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and
+discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan
+in his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature
+shudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt.  Et
+patati, et patata.
+
+It may be only too true that the actual world is 'with pathos
+delicately edged.'  For Malvolio living we should have had living
+sympathies:  so much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of
+refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed
+for the laughter of a chambermaid.  By an actual Bottom the Weaver
+our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance,
+his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the
+niggard doom of circumstance.  But is not life one thing and is not
+art another?  Is it not the privilege of literature to make
+selection and to treat things singly, without the after-thoughts of
+life, without the troublous completeness of the many-sided world?
+Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge?  Fortunately unreal
+is his world when he will have it so; and there we may laugh with
+open heart at a grotesque man:  without misgiving, without remorse,
+without reluctance.  If great creating Nature has not assumed for
+herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the
+right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving
+out, of taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the
+day.  Art and Nature are separate, complementary; in relation, not
+in confusion, with one another.  And all this officious cleverness
+in seeing round the corner, as it were, of a thing presented by
+literary art in the flat--(the borrowing of similes from other arts
+is of evil tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)--is but
+another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation
+between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind.  In some of his
+persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive;
+but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he is
+impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is
+an artist.  And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us--or
+used to give us, for even the world is obsolete--the pleasure of
+OUBLIANCE.
+
+Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have
+caught him a clout as he went.  Yet he will do it again; and those
+like-minded will assuredly also continue to show how much more
+completely human, how much more sensitive, how much more
+responsible, is the art of the critic than the world has ever dreamt
+till now.  And, superior in so much, they will still count their
+superior weeping as the choicest of their gifts.  And Lepidus, who
+loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his admiration than
+the pathos of the time.  It is bred now of your mud by the operation
+of your sun.  'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it are wet.
+
+
+
+THE POINT OF HONOUR
+
+
+
+Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez.
+In Spain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the first
+Impressionist.  As an Impressionist he claimed, implicity if not
+explicity, a whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness;
+he made an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he relied on his
+own candour and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept
+the chastity of art when other masters were content with its
+honesty, and when others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded
+the point of honour.  Contemporary masters more or less proved their
+position, and convinced the world by something of demonstration; the
+first Impressionist simply asked that his word should be accepted.
+To those who would not take his word he offers no bond.  To those
+who will, he grants the distinction of a share in his
+responsibility.  Somewhat unrefined, in comparison to his lofty and
+simple claim to be believed on a suggestion, is the commoner
+painter's production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions
+of ordinary experience, his self-defence against the suspicion of
+making irresponsible mysteries in art.  'You can see for yourself,'
+the lesser man seems to say to the world, 'thus things are, and I
+render them in such manner that your intelligence may be satisfied.'
+This is an appeal to average experience--at the best the cumulative
+experience; and with the average, or with the sum, art cannot deal
+without derogation.  The Spaniard seems to say:  'Thus things are in
+my pictorial sight.  Trust me, I apprehend them so.'  We are not
+excluded from his counsels, but we are asked to attribute a certain
+authority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of that art
+of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and not far from the
+end--not far short of the whole--of the art of painting.  So little
+indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a great Impressionist's
+impression that Velasquez requires us to be in some degree his
+colleagues.  Thus may each of us to whom he appeals take praise from
+the praised:  He leaves my educated eyes to do a little of the work.
+He respects my responsibility no less--though he respects it less
+explicitly--than I do his.  What he allows me would not be granted
+by a meaner master.  If he does not hold himself bound to prove his
+own truth, he returns thanks for my trust.  It is as though he used
+his countrymen's courteous hyperbole and called his house my own.
+In a sense of the most noble hostship he does me the honours of his
+picture.
+
+Because Impressionism is so free, therefore is it doubly bound.
+Because there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times
+responsible.  To undertake this art for the sake of its privileges
+without confessing its obligations--or at least without confessing
+them up to the point of honour--is to take a vulgar freedom:  to see
+immunities precisely where there are duties, and an advantage where
+there is a bond.  A very mob of men have taken Impressionism upon
+themselves in this our later day.  It is against all probabilities
+that more than a few among these have within them the point of
+honour.  In their galleries we are beset with a dim distrust.  And
+to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted.  How many of
+these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the truth
+of their own impressions?  An ethical question as to loyalty is
+easily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the
+intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide.  But when
+the DUBIUM concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be
+sure that their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their
+delicate equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their
+apprehension, are enough?  Now Impressionists of late have told us
+things as to their impressions--as to the effect of things upon the
+temperament of this man and upon the mood of that--which should not
+be asserted except on the artistic point of honour.  The majority
+can tell ordinary truth, but they should not trust themselves for
+truth extraordinary.  They can face the general judgment, but they
+should hesitate to produce work that appeals to the last judgment,
+which is the judgment within.  There is too much reason to divine
+that a certain number of those who aspire to derive from the
+greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point
+of view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth
+waylaying.  And to be, de parti pris, an Impressionist without
+these!  O Velasquez!  Nor is literature quite free from a like
+reproach in her own things.  An author, here and there, will make as
+though he had a word worth hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word
+that seeks to withdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it
+seems to dissemble is all too probably a platitude.  But obviously,
+literature is not--as is the craft and mystery of painting--so at
+the mercy of a half-imposture, so guarded by unprovable honour.  For
+the art of painting is reserved that shadowy risk, that undefined
+salvation.  May the gods guard us from the further popularising of
+Impressionism; for the point of honour is the simple secret of the
+few.
+
+
+
+COMPOSURE
+
+
+
+Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude:  what remedy of composure
+do these words bring for their own great disquiet!  Without the
+remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and
+shake too cruelly.  In order to the sane endurance of the intimate
+trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful.  Johnson
+feared death.  Did his noble English control and postpone the
+terror?  Did it keep the fear at some courteous, deferent distance
+from the centre of that human heart, in the very act of the leap and
+lapse of mortality?  Doubtless there is in language such an
+educative power.  Speech is a school.  Every language is a
+persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note
+indeed but gives the tone.  Every language imposes a quality,
+teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition:  this is the
+tone--the voice--of the instrument.  Every language, by counter-
+change, replies to the writer's touch or breath his own intention,
+articulate:  this is his note.  Much has always been said, many
+things to the purpose have been thought, of the power and the
+responsibility of the note.  Of the legislation and influence of the
+tone I have been led to think by comparing the tranquillity of
+Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close
+emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers who have entered as
+disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.
+
+For if every language be a school, more significantly and more
+educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that
+part.  Few languages offer the choice.  The fact that a choice is
+made implies the results and fruits of a decision.  The French
+author is without these.  They are of all the heritages of the
+English writer the most important.  He receives a language of dual
+derivation.  He may submit himself to either University, whither he
+will take his impulse and his character, where he will leave their
+influence, and whence he will accept their education.  The Frenchman
+has certainly a style to develop within definite limits; but he does
+not subject himself to suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or
+thitherwards, to currents of various race within one literature.
+Such a choice of subjection is the singular opportunity of the
+Englishman.  I do not mean to ignore the necessary mingling.
+Happily that mingling has been done once for all for us all.  Nay,
+one of the most charming things that a master of English can achieve
+is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their results so
+exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools are
+made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove
+them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world
+knew they were.  Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as
+to which school of words shall have the place of honour in the great
+and sensitive moments of an author's style:  which school shall be
+used for conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service.  And
+the choice being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses
+of so many hearts quickened in thought and feeling in this day
+suggests to me a deliberate return to the recollectedness of the
+more tranquil language.  'Doubtless there is a place of peace.'
+
+A place of peace, not of indifference.  It is impossible not to
+charge some of the moralists of the last century with an
+indifference into which they educated their platitudes and into
+which their platitudes educated them.  Addison thus gave and took,
+until he was almost incapable of coming within arm's-length of a
+real or spiritual emotion.  There is no knowing to what distance the
+removal of the 'appropriate sentiment' from the central soul might
+have attained but for the change and renewal in language, which came
+when it was needed.  Addison had assuredly removed eternity far from
+the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the 'pleasing
+hope,' the 'fond desire;' and the touch of war was distant from him
+who conceived his 'repulsed battalions' and his 'doubtful battle.'
+What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored
+once more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times.  Men were too
+eager to go into the workshop of language.  There were unreasonable
+raptures over the mere making of common words.  'A hand-shoe! a
+finger-hat! a foreword!  Beautiful!' they cried; and for the love of
+German the youngest daughter of Chrysale herself might have
+consented to be kissed by a grammarian.  It seemed to be forgotten
+that a language with all its construction visible is a language
+little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its
+images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain
+spiritualising and subtilising effect of alien derivations is a
+privilege and an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half
+of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque
+allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead
+tongue, without the death.
+
+But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in
+origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase.  The most
+beautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in
+Shakespeare.  'Superfluous kings,' 'A lass unparalleled,'
+'Multitudinous seas:' we needed not to wait for the eighteenth
+century or for the nineteenth to learn the splendour of such
+encounters, of such differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and
+union.  But it is well that we should learn them afresh.  And it is
+well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmic reaction bearing
+us now somewhat to the side of the Latin.  Such a reaction is in
+some sort an ethical need for our day.  We want to quell the
+exaggerated decision of monosyllables.  We want the poise and the
+pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement
+expresses it.  And not the phrase only but the form of verse might
+render us timely service.  The controlling couplet might stay with a
+touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning
+for his son.  But it should not be attempted without a distinct
+intention of submission on the part of the writer.  The couplet
+transgressed against, trespassed upon, shaken off, is like a law
+outstripped, defied--to the dignity neither of the rebel nor of the
+rule.  To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction
+which the very closeness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes
+necessary.  Shall not the Thing more and more, as we compose
+ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the
+leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?
+
+
+
+DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+
+It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be
+permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries.  We never desired
+them as coevals.  We never wished to share an age with them; we
+share nothing else with them.  And we deliver ourselves from them by
+passing, in literature, into the company of an author who wrote
+before their time, and yet is familiarly modern.  To read Dr. Oliver
+Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time
+before he was, or his Humour.  Obviously we go in like manner behind
+many another, but the funny writer of the magazines is suggested
+because in reference to him our act has a special significance.  We
+connect him with Dr. Holmes by a reluctant ancestry, by an
+impertinent descent.  It may be objected that such a connection is
+but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous incident, to a
+man of letters.  So it is.  But the triviality has wide allusions.
+It is often a question which of several significant trivialities a
+critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who does not
+insist that all the grave things shall be told him.  And, by the
+way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the
+last few years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by
+the last few years?  A trivial connexion has remote and negative
+issues.  To go to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid
+of many things; to go to himself is especially to get rid of the New
+Humour, yet to stand at its unprophetic source.  And we love such
+authors as Dickens and this American for their own sake, refusing to
+be aware of their corrupt following.  We would make haste to ignore
+their posterity, and to assure them that we absolve them from any
+fault of theirs in the bastardy.
+
+Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must
+explain why the little humour in Elsie Venner and the Breakfast
+Table series is not only the first thing the critic touches but the
+thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the
+world.  The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social
+entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor
+Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty
+per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good enough to remain
+after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off.  But that half is
+excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance--
+the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour of it
+has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth.  Like
+Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro,
+but American; and it made New England aware of her comedy.  Until
+then she had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at.
+'Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver
+Wendell Holmes.  Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes
+the average spiritual woman:  as seriously as that woman takes
+herself when she makes a novel.  And in a like mood Nature made New
+England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities,
+with long views, with energetic provincialism.
+
+If we remember best The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, we do so in spite
+of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr.
+Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as
+conspicuous as his humour.  It is fancy rather than imagination; but
+it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of
+imagery, which is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and
+adult.  No grown man makes quite so definite mental images as does a
+child; when the mind ages it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer
+pictures.  The young mind of Dr. Holmes has less intellectual
+imagination than intelligent fancy.  For example:  'If you ever saw
+a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull
+speaker and a lively listener.  The bird in sable plumage flaps
+heavily along his straightforward course, while the other sails
+round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks
+out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of
+him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow
+does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length,
+with explanations.  Again:  'That blessed clairvoyance which sees
+into things without opening them:  that glorious licence which,
+having shut the door and driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls
+upon Truth, majestic Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop
+her academic POSES.'  And this, of the Landlady:  'She told me her
+story once; it was as if a grain that had been ground and bolted had
+tried to individualise itself by a special narrative.'  'The riotous
+tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
+features.'  'Think of the Old World--that part of it which is the
+seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help marching in
+step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.'  'Young folk
+look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given
+little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.'  And
+that exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement
+and the inward tranquillity of the woods.  Such things are the best
+this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be
+bare thoughts shapely with their own truth.
+
+Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase
+wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance.  He has
+unpreoccupied and alert eyes.  Strangely enough, by the way, this
+watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly
+observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's
+gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.'  Who shall
+trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have
+taught him?  Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at
+a gallop than at a walk.  But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to
+somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life.
+Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of
+Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the
+routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing
+household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour
+emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side
+and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by
+undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by
+demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion
+by candour.
+
+As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility
+which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in Elsie Venner, it is
+strange that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present
+it--not in its own insolubility but--in caricature.  As though the
+secrets of the inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a
+bit of burlesque physiology!  It is in spite of our protest against
+the invention of Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention
+which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially
+frivolous--that the serpent-maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good
+night,' and by the gentle phrase that tells us 'Elsie wept.'  But
+now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in proposing the question of
+separate responsibility so as to convince every civilised mind of
+his doubts, there will be curiously little change wrought thereby in
+the discipline of the world.  For Dr. Holmes incidentally lets us
+know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance and
+destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the
+false.  Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that
+negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and
+destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in
+the manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness,
+unscientific though it may be.  And to say this is to confess that
+Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to
+futile purpose.  His books are justified by something quite apart
+from his purpose.
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+
+
+The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names
+not the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or
+three names of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world
+more than one man of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested,
+patient, happy, temperate, delighted.  The colonial days, with the
+'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the
+experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that
+should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the
+civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious
+and inexpert heroism of the army;--none of these periods of the
+national life could fitly be represented by a man of letters.  And
+though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
+'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South
+seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be
+discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and
+the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was
+virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and
+education, an American of the seventies and onwards.  He represented
+the little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness,
+consists the excellence of Americans -an excellence they must be
+content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost
+them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have
+never succeeded in definitely describing in words.  Mr. Lowell was a
+refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American
+enough.  He ranked with the students and the critics among all
+nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,
+perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not
+seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem
+composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and
+there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as
+to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the
+reader.  The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest
+of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable
+weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again,
+'Well, what do you think of my country?'
+
+Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in
+the thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can
+hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase,
+in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor
+authentic--I recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of
+proportion and a delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical
+work of this critical century.  Those small volumes, Among My Books
+and My Study Windows, are all pure literature.  A fault in criticism
+is the rarest thing in them.  I call none to mind except the strange
+judgment on Dr. Johnson:  'Our present concern with the Saxons is
+chiefly a literary one. . . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance.  The
+Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art,'
+and so forth.  One wonders how Lowell read the passage on Iona, and
+the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the Preface to the Dictionary
+without conviction of the great English writer's supreme art--art
+that declares itself and would not be hidden.  But take the essay on
+Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a writer of
+American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they prove
+Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in
+sentencing.  His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is
+famous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A
+Good Word for Winter.'  His talk about the weather is so full of wit
+that one wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt
+one so rich.  The birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his
+pensioners only, but his parishioners, so charmingly local, so
+intent upon his chronicle does he become when he is minded to play
+White of Selborne with a smile.  And all the while it is the word
+that he is intent upon.  You may trace his reading by some fine word
+that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan
+has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace.  He is thus
+fastidious and alert in many languages.  You wonder at the delicacy
+of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman
+of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief verse of Peire de
+Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante has
+transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil
+somewhat noble in Homer.  In his own use, and within his own
+English, he has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that
+keep every word new for the day's work.  He gave to the language,
+and did not take from it; it gained by him, and lost not.  There are
+writers of English now at work who almost convince us of their
+greatness until we convict them on that charge:  they have succeeded
+at an unpardonable cost; they are glorified, but they have beggared
+the phrases they leave behind them.
+
+Nevertheless Lowell was no poet.  To accept his verse as a poet's
+would be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more
+grievous lack in a lover of poetry.  Reason, we grant, makes for the
+full acceptance of his poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his
+may be forgiven for having trusted to reason and to criticism.  His
+trust was justified--if such justification avails--by the admiration
+of fairly educated people who apparently hold him to have been a
+poet first, a humourist in the second place, and an essayist
+incidentally.  It is hard to believe that he failed in instinct
+about himself.  More probably he was content to forego it when he
+found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so willing.
+They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we reluctant
+to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the
+evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded?  Such
+reluctance justifies itself.  Nor would I attempt to back it by the
+cheap sanctions of prophecy.  Nay, it is quite possible that
+Lowell's poems may live; I have no commands for futurity.  Enough
+that he enriched the present with the example of a scholarly,
+linguistic, verbal love of literature, with a studiousness full of
+heart.
+
+
+
+DOMUS ANGUSTA
+
+
+
+The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
+destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for
+its slight capacities.  Men have commonly complained of fate; but
+their complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness,
+of the human lot.  A disproportion--all in favour of man--between
+man and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted in
+literature:  so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the
+habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well
+explained has it ever been.
+
+
+'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
+That I have to be hurt,'
+
+
+discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the
+brave Emilia.  But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow
+house.  Obviously it never had its poet.  Little elocution is there,
+little argument or definition, little explicitness.  And yet for
+every vain capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain
+destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates.  It is
+the trouble of the wide house we hear of, clamorous of its
+disappointments and desires.  The narrow house has no echoes; yet
+its pathetic shortcoming might well move pity.  On that strait stage
+is acted a generous tragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an
+enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that
+slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks that timorous heart.
+
+We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
+inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
+inadequacy and imprecision of speech.  For, doubtless, right
+language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.
+Who, for instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word
+of his confidence?  Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing
+the ultimate syllable of his tenderness?  There is a 'pledging of
+the word,' in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and
+promise.  The poet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and
+finds therein a peculiar sanction.  And I suppose that even physical
+pain takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers
+a phrase.  Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united
+as thought and the word.  Almost--not quite; in spite of its
+inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond,
+as it were, its poor power.
+
+But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we
+know it to be general.  Life is great that is trivially transmitted;
+love is great that is vulgarly experienced.  Death, too, is a heroic
+virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed:  death,
+submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the
+vulgar, secret in the familiar.  It is destructive because it not
+only closes but contradicts life.  Unlikely people die.  The one
+certain thing, it is also the one improbable.  A dreadful paradox is
+perhaps wrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and
+yet is constrained to die.  That is a true destruction, and the
+thought of it is obscure.
+
+Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal
+pause.  It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical
+conclusion.  Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.
+Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion
+for her would be manifestly inappropriate.  Shakespeare, indeed,
+having seen a life whole, sees it to an end:  sees it out, and
+Falstaff dies.  More than Promethean was the audacity that, having
+kindled, quenched that spark.  But otherwise the grotesque man in
+literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the
+immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is
+predurable because he is not completed.  His humours are strangely
+matched with perpetuity.  But, indeed, he is not worthy to die; for
+there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
+mortal.  I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world.  I
+thank my fellow-mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke
+that the French so pleasantly call une joyeusete; these are to smile
+at.  But the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the book.
+
+That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living
+windows.  Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by
+moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things.
+There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief
+glances.  Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of
+meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting.  To be clever
+and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid--wouldst thou
+do such a deed for all the world?  Not I, by this heavenly light.
+
+
+
+REJECTION
+
+
+
+Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world.  She has a
+penitential or a vidual singleness.  We can conceive an antique
+world in which life, art, and letters were simple because of the
+absence of many things; for us now they can be simple only because
+of our rejection of many things.  We are constrained to such a
+vigilance as will not let even a master's work pass unfanned and
+unpurged.  Even among his phrases one shall be taken and the other
+left.  For he may unawares have allowed the habitualness that besets
+this multitudinous life to take the pen from his hand and to write
+for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our refusals.  Or
+he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to force a
+sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully pausing,
+would well have become.  Exaggeration has played a part of its own
+in human history.  By depreciating our language it has stimulated
+change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise.  Our
+rejection must be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and
+arrest it.  It makes us shrewder than we wish to be.  And, indeed,
+the whole endless action of refusal shortens the life we could
+desire to live.  Much of our resolution is used up in the repeated
+mental gesture of adverse decision.  Our tacit and implicit distaste
+is made explicit, who shall say with what loss to our treasury of
+quietness?  We are defrauded of our interior ignorance, which should
+be a place of peace.  We are forced to confess more articulately
+than befits our convention with ourselves.  We are hurried out of
+our reluctances.  We are made too much aware.  Nay, more:  we are
+tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes
+almost inevitable.  As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of
+refusal!  O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of
+fear!  'We live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so
+much in the iteration of rejection and repulse.  And in the very
+touch of joy there hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on
+one side, on the other.  If joy is given to us without reserve, not
+so do we give ourselves to joy.  We withhold, we close.  Having
+denied many things that have approached us, we deny ourselves to
+many things.  Thus does il gran rifiuto divide and rule our world.
+
+Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice.
+Rejection has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured.
+When we garnish a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more
+various, than might haunt the dreams of decorators.  There is no
+limit to our rejections.  And the unconsciousness of the decorators
+is in itself a cause of pleasure to a mind generous, forbearing, and
+delicate.  When we dress, no fancy may count the things we will none
+of.  When we write, what hinders that we should refrain from Style
+past reckoning?  When we marry--.  Moreover, if simplicity is no
+longer set in a world having the great and beautiful quality of
+fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality of
+refinement.  And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection.
+One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative
+has offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness.
+Refinement is not negative, because it must be compassed by many
+negations.  It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands
+immolations, it exacts experience.  No slight or easy charge, then,
+is committed to such of us as, having apprehension of these things,
+fulfil the office of exclusion.  Never before was a time when
+derogation was always so near, a daily danger, or when the reward of
+resisting it was so great.  The simplicity of literature, more
+sensitive, more threatened, and more important than other
+simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax the
+good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.
+
+
+
+THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE
+
+
+
+The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itself
+formed under too luxurious ideals.  This is the evil work of that
+LITTLE MORE which makes its insensible but persistent additions to
+styles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when
+unluckily man becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and
+too deliberate in his arrangement of it.  The landscape has need of
+moderation, of that fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and,
+in short, of a return towards the ascetic temper.  The English way
+of landowning, above all, has made for luxury.  Naturally the
+country is fat.  The trees are thick and round--a world of leaves;
+the hills are round; the forms are all blunt; and the grass is so
+deep as to have almost the effect of snow in smoothing off all
+points and curving away all abruptness.  England is almost as blunt
+as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victorian cast-iron
+work.  And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by our
+invention of the country park.  There all is curves and masses.  A
+little more is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest
+glade, and for increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to
+idleness.  Not a tree that is not impenetrable, inarticulate.  Thick
+soil below and thick growth above cover up all the bones of the
+land, which in more delicate countries show brows and hollows
+resembling those of a fine face after mental experience.  By a very
+intelligible paradox, it is only in a landscape made up for beauty
+that beauty is so ill achieved.  Much beauty there must needs be
+where there are vegetation and the seasons.  But even the seasons,
+in park scenery, are marred by the LITTLE TOO MUCH,  too complete a
+winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, an autumn too
+demonstrative.
+
+'Seek to have less rather than more.'  It is a counsel of perfection
+in The Imitation of Christ.  And here, undoubtedly, is the secret of
+all that is virile and classic in the art of man, and of all in
+nature that is most harmonious with that art.  Moreover, this is the
+secret of Italy.  How little do the tourists and the poets grasp
+this latter truth, by the way--and the artists!  The legend of Italy
+is to be gorgeous, and they have her legend by rote.  But Italy is
+slim and all articulate; her most characteristic trees are those
+that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the
+etching-point rather than a brush loaded with paint.  Cypresses
+shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness of their
+tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and
+olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf--these make keen
+lines of slender vegetation.  And they own the seasons by a gentle
+confession.  Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous
+proclamation of summer in the English woods, we would follow June to
+this subtler South:  even to the Campagna, where the cycle of the
+seasons passes within such narrow limitations that insensitive eyes
+scarcely recognise it.  In early spring there is a fresher touch of
+green on all the spaces of grass, the distance grows less mellow and
+more radiant; by the coming of May the green has been imperceptibly
+dimmed again; it blushes with the mingled colours of minute and
+numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lines longer than those of
+ocean billows.  This is the desert blossoming like a rose:  not the
+obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various flower
+that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the
+wilderness.  When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of
+harmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest,
+which is gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter.  All
+this fine chromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that
+it is accused as a monotony.  But those who find its modesty
+delightful may have a still more delicate pleasure in the blooming
+and blossoming of the sea.  The passing from the winter blue to the
+summer blue, from the cold colour to the colour that has in it the
+fire of the sun, the kindling of the sapphire of the Mediterranean--
+the significance of these sea-seasons, so far from the pasture and
+the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary senses, as appears from
+the fact that so few stay to see it all fulfilled.  And if the
+tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that is lovely and
+moderate by the insistence of his descriptions.  He would find
+adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search
+for words for the white.  A white Mediterranean is not in the
+legend.  Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the
+white sea is the flower of the breathless midsummer.  And in its
+clear, silent waters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat,
+bring forth translucent living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish,
+coloured like mother-of-pearl.
+
+But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in
+agricultural Italy that the LITTLE LESS makes so undesignedly, and
+as it were so inevitably, for beauty.  The country that is formed
+for use and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest.  What a
+lesson in literature!  How feelingly it persuades us that all except
+a very little of the ornament of letters and of life makes the
+dulness of the world.  The tenderness of colour, the beauty of
+series and perspective, and the variety of surface, produced by the
+small culture of vegetables, are among the charms that come
+unsought, and that are not to be found by seeking--are never to be
+achieved if they are sought for their own sake.  And another of the
+delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality.  The soil may
+be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own.  He has
+embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat
+in the light shadows of olive leaves.  Thanks to the metayer land-
+tenure, man's heart, as well as his strength, is given to the
+ground, with his hope and his honour.  Louis Blanc's 'point of
+honour of industry' is a conscious impulse--it is not too much to
+say--with most of the Tuscan contadini; but as each effort they make
+for their master they make also for the bread of their children, it
+is no wonder that the land they cultivate has a look of life.  But
+in all colour, in all luxury, and in all that gives material for
+picturesque English, this lovely scenery for food and wine and
+raiment has that LITTLE LESS to which we desire to recall a
+rhetorical world.
+
+
+
+MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES
+
+
+
+To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than
+praise of their imagery.  Imagery is the natural language of their
+poetry.  Without a parable she hardly speaks.  But undoubtedly there
+is now and then a poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too
+vitally, too sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes
+for love of the beautiful image.  Those rare moments are simple, and
+their simplicity makes one of the reader's keenest experiences.
+Other simplicities may be achieved by lesser art, but this is
+transcendent simplicity.  There is nothing in the world more costly.
+It vouches for the beauty which it transcends; it answer for the
+riches it forbears; it implies the art which it fulfils.  All
+abundance ministers to it, though it is so single.  And here we get
+the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of art at this
+perfection.  All the faculties of the poet are used for preparing
+this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed.  The
+loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr.
+Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there,
+only to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be
+impossible were they less glorious--are testimonies to the
+difference between sacrifice and waste.
+
+But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's
+work with praise of an infrequent mood?  Infrequent such a mood must
+needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic.  To have
+attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a
+true history of literature would show to be above price, even gauged
+by the rude measure of rarity.  Transcendent simplicity could not
+possibly be habitual.  Man lives within garments and veils, and art
+is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the
+loveliness of his life; when they are rent asunder it is impossible
+not to be aware that an overwhelming human emotion has been in
+action.  Thus DEPARTURE, IF I WERE DEAD, A FAREWELL, EURYDICE, THE
+TOYS, ST. VALENTINE'S DAY --though here there is in the exquisite
+imaginative play a mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group
+themselves apart as the innermost of the poet's achievements.
+
+Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great
+images, and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at,
+betray--the beauties of poetic art.  Emotion is here, too, and in
+shocks and throes, never frantic when almost intolerable.  It is
+mortal pathos.  If any other poet has filled a cup with a draught so
+unalloyed, we do not know it.  Love and sorrow are pure in The
+Unknown Eros; and its author has not refused even the cup of terror.
+Against love often, against sorrow nearly always, against fear
+always, men of sensibility instantaneously guard the quick of their
+hearts.  It is only the approach of the pang that they will endure;
+from the pang itself, dividing soul and spirit, a man who is
+conscious of a profound capacity for passion defends himself in the
+twinkling of an eye.  But through nearly the whole of Coventry
+Patmore's poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch.  Nay,
+more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch.  That is, his
+capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is
+more than the capacity of other men.  He endures therefore what they
+could but will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they
+cannot apprehend.  Thus, to have studied The Unknown Eros is to have
+had a certain experience--at least the impassioned experience of a
+compassion; but it is also to have recognised a soul beyond our
+compassion.
+
+What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist
+upon our knowing.  He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned
+reader's error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in
+reading.  That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is
+inevitable.  It has the obscurity of profound clear waters.  What
+the poet chiefly secures to us is the understanding that love and
+its bonds, its bestowal and reception, does but rehearse the action
+of the union of God with humanity--that there is no essential man
+save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind.
+When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of
+human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the
+truths of the love of God.  The thought grows gay in the three
+Psyche odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being
+somewhat reluctant.  How is it?  Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more
+often than not wins you to but a slow participation.  Perhaps
+because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.
+
+But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine
+allusion, is a most familiar truth.  Love that is passionate has
+much of the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling,
+as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies.
+The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the
+upward love hesitates and is fugitive.  St. Francis Xavier asked
+that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of
+all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the child is 'fretted with sallies
+of his mothers kisses.'  It might be drawing an image too
+insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.
+
+The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion
+so authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be
+otherwise than consummate.  Often the word has a fulness of
+significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation.  This is
+always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of
+the author's work.  Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of
+course is impossible.  Nor is that beautiful precision less in
+passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and
+elsewhere.  The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure.
+And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of
+what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that
+proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary.  The
+poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects--
+we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the
+most modern of adjectives--and call them topical.  Here assuredly
+there is no composure.  Never before did superiority bear itself
+with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--
+reluctance.
+
+If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with
+minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten
+time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to
+liberal verse the laws of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-
+marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to
+music, and thus compelled into the musical time).  Liberal verse,
+dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time
+measures--if for no other reason, for this:  that to prescribe
+pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed.  Granting,
+however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the
+irregular metre of The Unknown Eros is happily used except for the
+large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called.
+Lycidas, the Mrs. Anne Killigrew, the Intimations, and Emerson's
+Threnody, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their
+laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without
+haste.  So with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr.
+Coventry Patmore's series.  A more lovely dignity of extension and
+restriction, a more touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme,
+a truer impetus of pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly
+yield than are to be found in his versification.  And what movement
+of words has ever expressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful
+approach, as they are expressed in a celestial line--the eighth in
+the ode To the Unknown Eros?  When we are sensible of a metrical
+cheek it is in this way:  To the English ear the heroic line is the
+unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedly add
+together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with
+something of a jerk.  And this adding--as, for instance, of a line
+of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now and
+then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as A Farewell.
+It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about
+of a boat.  In The Angel in the House, and other earlier poems, Mr.
+Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as
+he never left it either heavily or thinly packed.  Moreover those
+first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of
+the Odes.  And even in his slightest work he proves himself the
+master--that is, the owner--of words that, owned by him, are
+unprofaned, are as though they had never been profaned; the capturer
+of an art so quick and close that it is the voice less of a poet
+than of the very Muse.
+
+
+
+INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
+
+
+
+I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words
+in union or in antithesis.  They assuredly have an inseverable union
+in the art of literature.  The songs of Innocence and Experience are
+for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to
+take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in
+place of the virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly
+consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily
+affairs--is to forego Innocence and Experience at once and together.
+Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate;
+and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not
+dip his hands into other men's histories, and does not give to his
+own word the common sanction of other men's summaries and
+conclusions.  Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and
+take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from
+man--of his uniqueness.  But if I had a mind to forego that manner
+of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I
+would rather appropriate their future than their past.  Let me put
+on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
+borrow.  Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
+ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my
+memory with an unjustifiable history.
+
+And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-
+poetry consider this matter.  These are the love-poets who have no
+reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom
+they have not even been introduced.  Their verse is full of ready-
+made memories, various, numerous, and cruel.  No single life--
+supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides
+sex--could quite suffice for so much experience, so much
+disillusion, so much deception.  To achieve that tone in its fulness
+it is necessary to take for one's own the praeterita (say) of Alfred
+de Musset and of the men who helped him--not to live but--to have
+lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives,
+and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all kinds of
+poets.
+
+As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one Friar goes
+about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain
+order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves.  Not
+otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or
+rather so many, in the feminine plural.  The man of very sensitive
+individuality might hesitate at the adoption.  The Franciscan is
+understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it.  But these
+poets so triumph over their repugnance that it does not appear.  And
+yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's
+fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress
+one's art in a motley of past passions.  Moreover, to utilise the
+mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and
+phrase.  For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are
+familiar enough.  One of them is the absence of the word of promise
+and pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of
+love:  which is the vow.  'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too
+simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there
+is the least tolerable of banalities--that of other men's
+disillusions.
+
+Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
+delicate Innocence.  Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of
+assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose
+love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus
+simple and inviolate.  This is the private man, in other words the
+gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in public.
+
+
+
+PENULTIMATE CARICATURE
+
+
+
+There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of
+a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
+earlier.  Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the
+vulgarising of the married woman.  No one now would read Douglas
+Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that
+humourist's serial, Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which were
+presumably considered good comic reading in the Punch of that time,
+and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque.
+Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which others
+consider or have considered humorous is to put one's-self at a
+disadvantage.  He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the
+superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought
+it worth his eyesight.  The last-named has to bear the least
+tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care.  Now to
+turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
+mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the
+arriere boutique.  On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of
+literature.  Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of
+Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted.
+But the essential vulgarity is that of the woman.  There is in some
+old Punch volume a drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing
+named the gentle, the refined--where the work of the artist has vied
+with the spirit of the letter-press.  Douglas Jerrold treats of the
+woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays.  They lie on a chair by the
+bed, beyond description gross.  And page by page the woman is
+derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish ugliness of
+person, of manners, and of language.  In that time there was,
+moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in
+vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the
+vulgarising of the act of maternity.  Woman spiteful, woman suing
+man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman
+incoherent, woman abandoned without restraint to violence and
+temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of these ignominies is
+woman so common, foul, and foolish for Dickens as she is in child-
+bearing.
+
+I named Leech but now.  He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
+contemporary.  And accordingly the married woman and her child are
+humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly.  For him she is
+moderately and dully ridiculous.  What delights him as humorous is
+that her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of
+her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her.  It amuses him
+that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the
+annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire
+to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable.  It pleases
+him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its
+hat--a burlesque baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for
+that too makes subtly for her abasement.  Charles Keene, again--
+another contemporary, though he lived into a later and different
+time.  He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy--
+indignities of civic physique, of stupid prosperity, of dress, of
+bearing.  He transmits these things in greater proportion than he
+found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of
+inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not sure which
+is the impulse.  The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a
+completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness
+of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced
+that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
+insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through
+almost a whole career.  There is one drawing in the Punch of years
+ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to
+even the invention of that day.  A drunken citizen, in the usual
+broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and
+his umbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when
+she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a night-cap.  Every one
+who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was
+drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the
+bourgeois whiskers were indicated.  This obscene drawing is matched
+by many equally odious.  Abject domesticity, ignominies of married
+life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against
+the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill-dressed women
+with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised;
+abominable weddings:  in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling
+sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and
+she answers, 'No, never was.'  In all these things there is very
+little humour.  Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his
+schoolboys.  The hint of tenderness which in really fine work could
+never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from his touch of
+one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is absolutely
+lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that here
+is humour.  It is also in some of his clerical figures when they are
+not caricatures, and certainly in 'Robert,' the City waiter of
+Punch.  But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all
+Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally
+upon her.  Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never
+for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but
+always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man
+upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights.
+If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what
+then is she?
+
+This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
+Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular
+form of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only:  the
+habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex,
+whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.  But the
+vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English--
+the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of
+many another--and it was not able to survive an increased commerce
+of manners and letters with France.  It was the chief immorality
+destroyed by French fiction.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Rhythm of Life by Alice Meynell
+
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