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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Essays from 'The Guardian' + +Author: Walter Horatio Pater + +Posting Date: June 7, 2009 [EBook #4036] +Release Date: May, 2003 +First Posted: October 19, 2001 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' *** + + + + +Produced by Alfred J. Drake. HTML version by Al Haines. + + + + + +</pre> + + +<BR><BR> + +<H1 ALIGN="center"> +ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' +</H1> + +<H2 ALIGN="center"> +By WALTER HORATIO PATER +</H2> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR: +</P> + +<P> +E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date +10-12-01 +</P> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you +read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard +edition—Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition—please exercise scholarly +caution in using it. It is not intended as a substitute for the +printed original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may +prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where +both instructor and students accept the possibility of some +imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article, +dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions +of any works you cite. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I +have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeral +such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the +number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preserved +paragraph structure except for first-line indentation. +</P> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text +does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation. +</P> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated +Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, +it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a +Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater +and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<H2 ALIGN="center"> +CONTENTS +</H2> + +<H4> +1. <A HREF="#chap01">English Literature</A>: 1-16 +<BR> +2. <A HREF="#chap02">Amiel's "Journal Intime"</A>: 17-37 +<BR> +3. <A HREF="#chap03">Browning</A>: 39-51 +<BR> +4. <A HREF="#chap04">"Robert Elsmere"</A>: 53-70 +<BR> +5. <A HREF="#chap05">Their Majesties' Servants</A>: 71-88 +<BR> +6. <A HREF="#chap06">Wordsworth</A>: 89-104 +<BR> +7. <A HREF="#chap07">Mr. Gosse's Poems</A>: 105-118 +<BR> +8. <A HREF="#chap08">Ferdinand Fabre</A>: 119-134 +<BR> +9. <A HREF="#chap09">The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon</A>: 135-149 +</H4> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<H1 ALIGN="center"> +ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' +</H1> + +<H2 ALIGN="center"> +WALTER HORATIO PATER +</H2> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume +originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P CLASS="transnote"> +E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this +volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included +any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first +substantive page. +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap01"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +I. ENGLISH LITERATURE +</H3> + +<H4 CLASS="center"> +FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE +</H4> + +<BR> + +<P> +[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have +occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or +of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and variety +of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively +some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is +so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately) +poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's +well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to +Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness +to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a +[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in +the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along +with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters +of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose +style. The essential difference between poetry and prose—"that other +beauty of prose"—in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, +the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:—that is Mr. +Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great +importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially, +where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of +an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical +distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its +students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of +our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of +that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we +are not richer than other people. Great poetry and great prose, it +might be found, have most of their qualities in common. But [5] their +indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just +the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it +is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in +mind. Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose +thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form +the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those +qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the +quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on +language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty—"that +other beauty of prose"—fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the +reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from +being a collection of "purple patches." +</P> + +<P> +Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader +will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made +to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose +rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those +rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied +examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in +English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic +merit—their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure +primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose structure, or +architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even +generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence. +Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which +overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an +incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then, +in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers +through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in +the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in +Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against +this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth +century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle: +such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature +divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical +suggestions, upon a survey of them. +</P> + +<P> +[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the +spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper +than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse, +which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's +otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency +(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury +admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the +other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its +French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense +with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable +qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate +poetry—the qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such +qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts. A collection of +specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the +achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is +a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the +development, the product of those very different indispensable +qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal +or superior to all other modern literature—the native, sublime, and +beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English +poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, +in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. +That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in +the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone +to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold +upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the +study of what belongs to the past. Beginning with an elaborate notice +of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets +that his subject is, after all, poetry. The followers of Chaucer, and +the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him—old +Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of +a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who +desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and +varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for +Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,) +explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained by literary +antecedents. +</P> + +<P> +That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but +certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the +typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and his followers through the +eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and +irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but +cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only +because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic +philosophy—in which men's minds must needs be limited to the +superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a +positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of +an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods +and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners +themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be +seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele +(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life." The well-known +qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient +guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a +collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of +the essayists are grouped under certain heads—"Character Sketches," +"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like—so as to +diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays +on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like +character to the specimens. +</P> + +<P> +Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his +way of taking the world—for this pioneer of an everybody's literature +had his subjectivities—into books. What a survival of one long-past +day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"! What truth +to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest! +yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he +writes, for instance: +</P> + +<P> +"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse +of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge, +hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link." +</P> + +<P> +[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye +far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an +Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then +common in some City churches. Among those who were come only to see or +be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a +heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they +had gone to sleep with expectation of it." +</P> + +<P> +The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens +from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners +of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a +picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal +with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely +aspects—those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds +what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural +strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its +tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness. To the +unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style! Steele is, perhaps, +the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he +abounds in felicities of impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his +style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat +uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and +unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may +observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside +at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget +themselves. +</P> + +<P> +No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred +Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which +was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that +sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual +interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even +with those best able to comprehend its laws. In Mrs. Leicester's +School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger +has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb, +too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten +periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The story of the Odyssey, +abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children—of all ages—will +speak for itself. But the garland of graceful stories which gives name +to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their +assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the +brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others +their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circumstance which +strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, +one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even +of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of +pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is—a way, however, very +different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But +one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of +Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the +nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr. +Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as +originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb, like +Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision, +unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might +have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the +strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow +barriers. And so it happens that these simple stories are touched, +much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power. Dealing +with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they +record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from +anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood +over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of +childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which +children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind +of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart. Let the +reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what +Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his +sister Mary. +</P> + +<P> +The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to +adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited, +[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr. Saintsbury +is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English +literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age, the +defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and +confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is +well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as +possible—opposite excellences, it may be—those other beauties of +prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let +its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and +completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way +in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their +own. If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in +a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter. And +there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man; +justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what +he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed +connection with this or that literary age or school. Let us close with +the words of a most [16] versatile master of English—happily not yet +included in Mr. Saintsbury's book—a writer who has dealt with all the +perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as +idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's: +</P> + +<P> +"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer in +words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing, +but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist, +whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and +his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way +adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker." +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +17th February 1886 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap02"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +II. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME" +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +Amiel's Journal. The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. +Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two +vols. Macmillans. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much +curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has +already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's +translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers +of good literature. Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version +reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof +that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be +done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, +are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20] +for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not +wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has +prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy +pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position. And certainly there +is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader, +to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer +types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and +practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such +philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and +especially at the present day. +</P> + +<P> +Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his +parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare +and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him +early. His student days coming to an end, the years which followed, +from 1842 to 1848—Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy, +Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany—seem to have been the +happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and +there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events. +He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only +feeling after his true literary métier. Those last seven years were a +long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at +the age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal is in 1848. +From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this +Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed +nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have +selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English. +</P> + +<P> +With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy +life—melancholy with something not altogether explained by the +somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the +consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from +a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile +himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from +sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire. +</P> + +<P> +You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a +thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern +spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied +intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many +very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to +cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by +which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of +their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a +page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment +which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an +effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things +that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best +French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of +Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in +them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity. +</P> + +<P> +But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface +of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we +discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity +of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate +literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the +modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have +been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education, +than either of them had attained to. So multiplex is the result that +minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their +own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might +think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched +for in vain. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those +varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many +contending persons. The perplexed experience gets the apparent +clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the +disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion. "This +nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has +discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist +in me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my +territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten +men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; +and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself." +</P> + +<P> +Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel—two sufficiently opposed +personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself; +compare with, and try by each other—as we think, correct also by each +other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the +man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of +desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about +him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René, even to Werther, +and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do +only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life +followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, +interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of +life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and +therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature. +Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood—the culture of +ennui for its own sake—is certainly carried to its ideal of negation +by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely +take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold, +is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is +also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"—that other, and far +stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of +gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all +that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and +adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable +circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and +in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was +deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost +certainly find a Church. +</P> + +<P> +The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known +in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be +represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural +description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction. +In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of +such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel, +we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26] +effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to +define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good description of an +effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London: +</P> + +<P> +"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own—a grace, a dreamy charm. It +does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the +mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, +as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist +draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged +with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; +that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child +of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great +world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. +Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only +reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the +greatest thoughts come from the heart—so says the moralist." +</P> + +<P> +It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows, +of Swiss frost: +</P> + +<P> +[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and +peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the +cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their +bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and +the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!" The +weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in +this: +</P> + +<P> +"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time +favourable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as +these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to +live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a +minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its +very centre. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange +state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the +empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so +because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed, +localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality +and is conscious of herself." +</P> + +<P> +[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the +soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the +forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to +that; all other studies bring us back to this study." And, in truth, +if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent +literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the +moral order. His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the +moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the +sort of literary work which stirs men—stirs their intellect—through +feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the +means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers, +the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's +curiosity. +</P> + +<P> +And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for +causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too +would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would +wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts." Such indications there +certainly are in them. He was [29] meant—we see it in the variety, +the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of +one after another of these thoughts—on religion, on poetry, on +politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and +on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of +those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated +subjects, such as music, and special musical composers—he was meant, +if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best +sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is +itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through +the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner +constitution of the producer, shaping his work. Of such critical +skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth +century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs. Corneille, +Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and +Wagner—all who are interested in these men will find a value in what +Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent +criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations, +skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative +estimate. Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with +one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he +is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance. A +powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such +form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have +looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance, +which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not +exist yet. "Construction," he says—artistic or literary +construction—"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon +will." The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and +above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite +natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and +metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been +rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the +understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect +has produced. +</P> + +<P> +But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of +temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men +of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely +intellectual—the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of +opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex +nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my +mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula, +which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it. +Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious +metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action" +that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity +lay, he followed—followed often—that fastidious utterance to a +cynical and pessimistic conclusion. +</P> + +<P> +Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the +"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved +only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the +go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague +pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force +of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all +imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts +the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I +feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal, +disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with +him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with +approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt +sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between +"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after +what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the +physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this +touching confession. Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that +metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual +conscience. "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my +back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course, +that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature, +or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it +meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the +very best sort of production. +</P> + +<P> +And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of +concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible +for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have +been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been +able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the +proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament. +There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of +metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete—that fear of the actual—in +this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which +form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, on +probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense, +he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the +beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those +judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts, +the venerable institutions of the past—with the lives of the saints. +By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could +speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial +condition of rationalistic Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never +replace religion." Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a +religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's. +</P> + +<P> +"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive +religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the Church to which +I belong in heart rise into being?" To many at least of those who can +detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to +all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal, +from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large +hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost +hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we +think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence +which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a +force, an intellectual force, in the world—in the special business of +his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel +of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life +unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan." Bring, +we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your +plan—your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of +your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered +(we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein +not unworthy of Pascal. +</P> + +<P> +And so we get only the Journal. Watching in it, in the way we have +suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and +observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the +shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize +with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to +have been but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how excellent a +literary product, after all, the Journal is. And already we have found +that it improves also on second reading. A book of "thoughts" should +be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable +sayings. Here are some of its random offerings: +</P> + +<P> +"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if +what you want is a sense of beauty." +</P> + +<P> +"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the +conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting—it is we who +correct it by the persistence of our ideal." +</P> + +<P> +"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To +do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius." +</P> + +<P> +"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world, +while at the same time detaching us from it." +</P> + +<P> +"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to +dwell in Him." +</P> + +<P> +"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood, +the least comprehended." +</P> + +<P> +"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the +artist." +</P> + +<P> +There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of +things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like. +Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel +nursed so jealously did come into evidence. And the [37] reader, we +hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her +work. She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour +which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of +mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the +achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by +giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers +will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion, +not to be forgotten. +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +17th March 1886 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap03"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +III. BROWNING +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +An Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons. Cassells. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable +with "obscurity"—with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the +intrinsic difficulty of his matter—it is very probable that an +Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons, +will add to the number of his readers. Mr. Symons's opening essay on +the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable +appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at this +late day. We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised yet +enthusiastic student in literature—in intellectual problems; always +quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement +and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of +the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a +critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his +hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to +his intention, before all things a useful one. Appreciating Mr. +Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to +point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the +dubious portions of his author's work. Not content with his own +excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he guides the reader to +his works, or division of work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and +special study, and giving a great deal of welcome information about the +poems, the circumstances of their composition, and the like, with +delightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest +of a brief but effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he +has added an excellent biography. +</P> + +<P> +Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr. +Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone—"He comes +very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare." The quantity of his +work? Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a sign +of genius. "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments that +we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to +exhausting them." Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a +multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the +simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled +them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful +personality. The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that +is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet—a +poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which, +having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences, +must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:— +</P> + +<P> +"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation +are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and +lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes, +Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the +wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the +devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent +grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and +bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, +scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low +estate—men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them." +</P> + +<P> +The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet +revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal—that is Mr. +Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of +the universe, a centre of creation." It is always the particular soul, +and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular +soul—the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test—in +which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of the interior, +a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes +conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello, +Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study +except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that. +And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him. +It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and +variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern, +to modern people the most important, of poets. +</P> + +<P> +So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons +right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These +extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and +"Porphyria's Lover"— +</P> + +<P> +"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost +finished art—a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with +clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect +lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it +completely." +</P> + +<P> +Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's +work. A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an +experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous. But in spite of the +dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and +native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists, +Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished +skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself—tender, +manly, humorous, awe-stricken—when speaking in his own proper person. +Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic +episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in +which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:— +</P> + +<P> +"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated +within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as +well as a poet. Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years, +he decided in the negative. But the latent qualities of painter and +musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest +and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the +language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken. +No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music, +none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. 'Abt Vogler' is +the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. It is not +the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that +it speaks. 'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on +music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A +Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found +of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt +Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born." +</P> + +<P> +It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart +there is chilling of sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a poet (and +only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to +modern demands) will have his difficulties. They were a part of the +poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:— +</P> + +<P> +"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never +mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the +hour of the poet—as indeed he has himself said, to much the same +effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer +such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at +dominoes to an idle man." +</P> + +<P> +"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse +if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and +imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a +corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop +Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that +some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or, +if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone +are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges +whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided—those only who +will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how +far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have +been put in a plainer manner.'" +</P> + +<P> +In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect +piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless +expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very +likely right. He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly +stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes. It is only to be +regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those +two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other +headings. We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no +more than justice to The Ring and the Book. The Ring and the Book is +at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the +culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more +decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style. Yet just here he +rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:— +</P> + +<P> +"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the +style and versification have undergone a change. I might point to the +profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, +or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness +of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality +for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediæval +and foreign life." +</P> + +<P> +Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive +with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50] +perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all +that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret. After all, +we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who stand +in or behind the range of volumes on our book-shelves; and our ideal +Browning would have for his entire structural type those two volumes of +Men and Women with Pippa Passes. +</P> + +<P> +Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given us +the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of so +much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their +works—all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great +imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into +imperishable things of art:— +</P> + +<P> +"'With souls should souls have place'—this, with Mr. Browning, is +something more than a mere poetical conceit. It is the condensed +expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers +of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of +wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men, +listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the acts of men, and +he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen. +Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only in his own words— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + It lives,<BR> + If precious be the soul of man to man."<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +9th November 1887 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap04"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +IV. "ROBERT ELSMERE" +</H3> + +<P> +[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a +little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of +pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our +own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere. A chef d'oeuvre +of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance, +introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and carried to +perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the point, because, +like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge novel-readers to an +interest in religious questions), it abounds in sympathy with people as +we find them, in aspiration towards something better—towards a certain +ideal—in a refreshing sense of second thoughts everywhere. The author +clearly has developed a remarkable natural aptitude for literature by +liberal reading and most patient care [56] in composition—composition +in that narrower sense which is concerned with the building of a good +sentence; as also in that wider sense, which ensures, in a work like +this, with so many joints, so many currents of interest, a final unity +of impression an the part of the reader, and easy transition by him +from one to the other. Well-used to works of fiction which tell all +they have to tell in one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three +volumes with unflagging readiness. +</P> + +<P> +For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues +undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the reader's +reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in intercourse with +no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of character, firmly +and fully conceived. We are persuaded that the author might have +written a novel which should have been all shrewd impressions of +society, or all humorous impressions of country life, or all quiet fun +and genial caricature. Actually she has chosen to combine something of +each of these with a very sincerely felt religious interest; and who +will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character +is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel? In truth, the +modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it +sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged +by religion, of whatever type it may be—and we may say at once that +the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad," +is not really the broadest. Having conceived her work thus, she has +brought a rare instinct for probability and nature to the difficult +task of combining this religious motive and all the learned thought it +involves, with a very genuine interest in many varieties of average +mundane life. +</P> + +<P> +We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a +delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of +character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons +represented in these volumes. It may be congruous with this, perhaps, +that her success should be more assured in dealing with the characters +of women than with those of men. The men who pass before us in her +pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem, +nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings. They are +composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy +we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other. And their +goodness, when they are good, is—well! a little conventional; the kind +of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in their +estimates of each other. Robert himself is certainly worth knowing—a +really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of shrewd sense +and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and pity the absence +of which so often abates the actual value of those other gifts. Mrs. +Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its best (it is a proof of +her high cultivation of this power that so it should be) in the +analysis of minor characters, both male and female. Richard Leyburn, +deceased before the story begins, but warm in the memory of the few who +had known him, above all of his great-souled daughter Catherine, +strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as being in this way one of +the best things in the book:— +</P> + +<P> +"Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain? +</P> + +<P> +"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently. 'Was teaching +what he liked?' +</P> + +<P> +[59] "'Oh! yes, only—' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in +spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew +anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always +believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that +anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He vas +always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the +noblest, purest, most devoted—' +</P> + +<P> +"She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was +startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of +the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of +her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though +the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even +now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an +over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she +feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life—even by her—even by +religion? Was that the sting?" +</P> + +<P> +A little later she gives the record of his last hours:— +</P> + +<P> +[60] "'Catherine! Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than ever. +I die—and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath by which +the voice was broken—'in much—much perplexity about many things. You +have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them +safe to the day of account.'" +</P> + +<P> +And then the smaller—some of them, ethically, very small—women; Lady +Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful +Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we +seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight +of her capital letter on the page, as we read on. In truth, if a high +and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among +the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically, +with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author +throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is +the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves, +the sincerity of her more serious thinking:— +</P> + +<P> +"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back +with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to +tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special +hobby, and in her last new summer-house. +</P> + +<P> +"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are +twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness +in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies? +That's one—then I've two more. My album—oh, you will all write in my +album, won't you? When I was young—when I was Maid of Honour'—and +she drew herself up slightly—'everybody had albums. Even the dear +Queen herself! I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it; +something quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies—the garden and the +album—are quite harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, do they?' +Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in +it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked." +</P> + +<P> +Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and +really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by +becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and +dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very +genii of isolation and division. It is depressing to see so really +noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time +goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which +solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of +Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the +closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this +episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been conceived and +executed. Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the +development of Robert's improved gospel. The "stray sheep," we think, +has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is +really a sadder, more testing one than his. Though both alike, we +admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of +"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those +wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in +their aesthetic charm. +</P> + +<P> +These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting, +which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid +sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient +analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in +female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable +virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable +intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George +Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape +background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward has been a true +disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its +influence. Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its +spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by +the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the +formation, in the refining, of character. It has been a stormy day:— +</P> + +<P> +"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the +white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper +end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in +air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering +[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling +rain-clouds." +</P> + +<P> +There is surely something of "natural magic" in that! The wilder +capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of +a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more +imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general +tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of +sensation—witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility +to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover, +and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other +exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper +ethical interests of the book. The Oxford episodes strike us as being +not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively conventional, +coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is reality. Yet +her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the genius of +places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings out the so +well-known grey and green of college and garden—touches which bring +the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any elaborate description +[65] —for the beauty of the place itself resides also in delicate +touches. The book passes indeed, successively, through distinct, +broadly conceived phases of scenery, which, becoming veritable parts of +its texture, take hold on the reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the +places described. Surrey—its genuine though almost suburban wildness, +with the vicarage and the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient +library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably done, the landscape naturally +counting for a good deal in the development of the profoundly +meditative, country-loving souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters. +</P> + +<P> +Well! Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and +accomplishments for a certain purpose. Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a +priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is +the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about +"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning, +his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of +Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a +long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the +part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending +with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is +the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly +sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position. +</P> + +<P> +For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are +no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious +question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes—that it has +advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's +Vie de Jésus. Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought +not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church. The priest is still, and +will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he +is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this +doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those +influences which make for faith. It is his triumph to achieve as much +faith as possible in an age of negation. Doubtless, it is part of the +ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should +find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy. Still, with +these, as [67] with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not +the negative result that justifies the position. We have little +patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the +difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite +force. Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a +clergyman. But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical +pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the +difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great +and complex a question. Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or +scientific temper he would have hesitated. This is not the place to +discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously +argued by Mrs. Ward. All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's +objections may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less +equal weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and +issues, as that in which we live. +</P> + +<P> +Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be +sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, +and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate +them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral +duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which +cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of +conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will +think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack +of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life +for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of +possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most +important fact in the world. +</P> + +<P> +The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love; +and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a +Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty, +has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of +worthy priests. They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees, +of all ages. As against the purely negative action of the scientific +spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic +priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so admirably sketched, +present [69] perhaps no unconquerable differences. The question of the +day is not between one and another of these, but in another sort of +opposition, well defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between— +</P> + +<P> +"Two estimates of life—the estimate which is the offspring of the +scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world +fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint +Augustine." +</P> + +<P> +To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of +Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and force +as Mrs. Ward supposes. At his death Elsmere has started what to us +would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he preaches an +admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life of Christ. But +we think there would be very few such sermons in the new church or +chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be very varied, when +all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for our sakes He became +poor" have ceased to be applicable to it. It is the infinite nature of +Christ which has led to such diversities of genius in preaching as St. +Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley. +</P> + +<P> +[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work. If +so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the +profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter—chapter forty-three in +her third volume—in which she describes the final spiritual reunion, +on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and wife. Her +view, we think, could hardly have been presented more attractively. +For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and profit in the +reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the first and deepest +springs of feeling, while it has charmed the literary sense. +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +28th March 1888 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap05"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +V. THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean. By +Dr. Doran, F.S.A. Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe. John C. Nimmo. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of +literature, or for the history of that general development of human +manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very lively +measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this revised and +charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant old book. Three +hundred years and more of a singularly varied and vivacious sort of +history!—it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work +well—did it with adequate "love." These Annals of the English Stage, +from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of +life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in +proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially +intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life. The long +story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to +age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs—Evelyn's, and the +like—which bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to +the dry tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it +naturally becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the +flowers which lie so abundantly scattered here and there. +</P> + +<P> +A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history of +one of the most delightful of subjects—old London, of which from time +to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages. From 1682 +to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but one theatre +in London. In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of +London par excellence.— +</P> + +<P> +"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but +it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently +died. The baptismal register of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains +Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to the +heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name of +many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the churchyard." +</P> + +<P> +Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite +locality for play-houses. The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden, +represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful woodcuts. +For this new edition adds to the original merits of the work the very +substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate in subject and +execution, and of three kinds—copper-plate likenesses of actors and +other personages connected with theatrical history; a series of +delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of theatrical +topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way of tail-pieces +to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a vigour and reality of +information, within very limited compass, which make one think of +Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and +other famous actors in their favourite scenes. +</P> + +<P> +In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance, +the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air +of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very +theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of +the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully +in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's +illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of +the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though +that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be. Then +there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of +all, two views—street and river fronts—the Duke's Theatre, Dorset +Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by +Gibbons—graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined +Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in +the already crowded city on the Thames side. +</P> + +<P> +[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range +from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the +contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund +expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative +impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage, +like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle +stolid. Field—Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an +actor of reputation—in his singular costume, and with a face of +perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of +those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the +fancy of Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly +dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these +portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to +whom they belonged. That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect; +the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many +very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into +play. Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble +foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength +and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for +sentiment,—Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the +skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man; +while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair +of just very nice young people. On the other hand, the tail-pieces, +chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety +there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study. +Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly +reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John, +Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched +countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might +well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into +power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose. +</P> + +<P> +The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times, +when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of +emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole, +actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Molière +was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog. Very different was +the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:— +</P> + +<P> +"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland +nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which +latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid +gloves. In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as +actress never received before, nor has ever received since. The lady +lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. Had she been really a queen the +public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after +the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been +observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and +prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when +all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation, +as it seems to me, that he 'buried her very willingly, and with much +satisfaction.'" +</P> + +<P> +Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors. +"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my +lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only +property they have to depend on." Wit, indeed, with the other gifts +that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too +often little to the benefit of the gifted persons. Theatrical society, +rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in +these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic. +</P> + +<P> +If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable +cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book +abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like; +one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a +blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!" When he +heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its +wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the +journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, +told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced +[81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than +I." Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great +liberties with authors and audience. He made Settle half mad and the +house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on +his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, +"died," according to the direction of the acting copy. Quaint enough, +but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a +French translation of a play of Vanbrugh—not architect of Blenheim +only, but accomplished in many other ways—appeared at the Odéon, in +1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire +recently discovered. The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in +this as in the last century." +</P> + +<P> +Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to +note:—that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so +unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful +patron." We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time +at the popularity of Richard the Second:—"The deposition and death of +King Richard the [82] Second." "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this +play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder +kings." It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare, +William's brother, survived till the Restoration. +</P> + +<P> +Oldys says, à propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:— +</P> + +<P> +"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance, +more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother +could relate of him. But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and +possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them +but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be +recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint, +general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a +part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a +decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and +drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and +carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some +company who were eating, and one of them sang a song." +</P> + +<P> +[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It. Many are +the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a +struggle to maintain itself. James Howard, in Pepys's day— +</P> + +<P> +"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no +popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged +Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double dénouement—one serious, +the other hilarious. If your heart were too sensitive to bear the +deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding +afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured +domestic felicity." +</P> + +<P> +In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the +acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius +as "Jack Puddins." +</P> + +<P> +Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the +difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For +Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of +actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young +[84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices. Who +the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not +known, but her part was Desdemona. And yet it was long after that— +</P> + +<P> +"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712). He lies buried in the churchyard of +St. Paul's, Covent Garden. If not the greatest actor of his day, +Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.' So exalted was his +reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the +judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the +audience as he.'" +</P> + +<P> +In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission +to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act. +Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in +without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond +the time limited. Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort +even of Royalty. The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even +more discomforting. An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682 +between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85] +Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows +not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought +there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited +fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the +players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor, +Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would +turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the +stage. Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would +scarcely be heard. It was about 1710 that the word encore was +introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much +objected to by plain-going Englishmen. It was also the custom of some +who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta! Altra volta! +</P> + +<P> +Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords +many unexpected lights on historical characters. Oliver Cromwell, +though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with, +men of less dignity than actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled +[86] from his otherwise grave court. Oxford and Drury Lane itself +dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where +a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a +line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring +palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St. +Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon. When +this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of +Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said +nothing but what the facts authorized. +</P> + +<P> +"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of +fashion, that have sense?" And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave +many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them. +Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would +utter one single expression in a play. Dr. Doran gives some curious +instances from later actors. "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered +in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such +emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87] +which swelled into thunders of applause. Her noble head is here +engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man. +</P> + +<P> +Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have +them before us? Should we find them too different from our accent of +thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which +are of the essence of all three? Dr. Doran's long and interesting +records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in +their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the +doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been +the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere, +bears no very distinct figure. One hardly sees the wood for the trees. +On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of +English actors," is delightfully fresh. That intimate friend of +Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by +Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his +career brings out the best elements in stage life. The stage in these +volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but +as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and +characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the +most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the +private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and +women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents +itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the +theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world. +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +27th June 1888 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap06"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +VI. WORDSWORTH +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With an +Introduction by John Morley. Macmillans. +</P> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. Macmillans. +</P> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +Selections from Wordsworth. By William Knight and other Members of the +Wordsworth Society. With Preface and Notes. Kegan Paul. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's +careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth, +of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the +first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an +excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof +that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is +increasing among us. Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything +more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the +faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought +and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the +present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the +essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself. In the collected +edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be +ascertained, in the order of their composition—an arrangement which +has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's +genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large +groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic +motives, and more especially as coming from himself. +</P> + +<P> +In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the +circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having +had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation—a calm, +irresistible, well-being—almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless +[93] connected with physical conditions. Long ago De Quincey noted it +as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career, +pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the +material side of life. The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine +mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good +deal to do with that. What a store of good fortune, what a goodly +contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is +really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament; +especially, in the case of a poet—a great poet—who will, of course, +have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet. +</P> + +<P> +Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present +century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction +of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the +imagination. Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical +theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one, +with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between +the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception +of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work. It was +Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis +for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new +edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more +realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be +called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a +value in all that remains of him—could read anything he wrote, "even +the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'—everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and +Julia,'"—yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made +by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very +obvious difference of level in his poetic work. +</P> + +<P> +This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and +higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the +reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the +study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those +mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination. It +begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their +spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in +the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right +appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth +having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain +discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect. Wordsworth +meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a +very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and +seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination. To +follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to +distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life +generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only +conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive. +</P> + +<P> +A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which +ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed +consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general +temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history have again +[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals +itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic +in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is +exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist +poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its +growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand, +from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure +relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied +people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much +difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is +between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait +by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of +Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more +exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet. +Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated +by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not +often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; +and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet, +habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world. +His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most +human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world, +so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his +flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the +Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence. His life's +changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, +untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have +very little to tell. What it really most resembles, different as its +superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious +artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly +visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic +industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it. This placid life +developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate +sensibility to natural sights and sounds—the flower and its shadow on +the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and +Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of +lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To +read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day +spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its +precise and vivid incidents:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,<BR> + On some grey rock:<BR> + The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,<BR> + And the bleak music from that old stone wall:—<BR> + In the meadows and the lower ground,<BR> + Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:—<BR> + And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!<BR> +</P> + +<P> +Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible +imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he +conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to +nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or +colour. He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the +consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions, +silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole +complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of +desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular +folding of the hills. +</P> + +<P> +That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a +rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was +for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to +possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a +companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation, a +particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but +to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, +above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light +across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain +weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. That he awakened "a sort +of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in +Wordsworth's poetry. +</P> + +<P> +It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion +and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life. For +him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, +and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape. +</P> + +<P> +[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in +the presence and under the influence of those effective natural +objects, and linked to them by many associations. Such influences have +sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the +least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To +Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human +nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises physical nature to +the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and +expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him +therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity. +</P> + +<P> +Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of +the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing +human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had +much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves +to definite scenes and places. And what is true of it everywhere is +truest in those secluded valleys, where one generation after another +maintains the same abiding-place; and [101] it was on this side that +Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly. Having so much to do +with the recognition of local sanctities, the habit of connecting the +very trees and stones of a particular spot of earth with the great +events of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the +half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular voices, even the +religion of those people of the dales appeared but as another link +between them and the solemn imageries of the natural world. And, +again, this too tranquillized them, by bringing them under the rule of +traditional, narrowly localized observances. "Grave livers," they +seemed to him under this aspect, of stately speech, and something of +that natural dignity of manners which underlies the highest courtesy. +</P> + +<P> +And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in +proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into +companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to appreciate +passion in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from humble life, +because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more +impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their expression of +passion, than other men; it is for this direct expression of passion +that he values their humble words. In much that he said in exaltation +of rural life he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that +perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise +features of the picture within, without which any profound poetry is +impossible. It was not for their tameness, but for their impassioned +sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations from common life, +"related in a selection of language really used by men." He constantly +endeavours to bring his language nearer to the real language of men; +but it is to the real language of men, not on the dead level of their +ordinary intercourse, but in certain select moments of vivid sensation, +when this language is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment. There are +poets who have chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its +passionless repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols +the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of +poetical culture. But it was not for such passionless calm that he +preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet, +sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in +reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions, +and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of +elementary feelings. +</P> + +<P> +In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The +Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to +be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if completed, +would have consisted of three parts. The second part is The Excursion. +The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part +was left in manuscript by Wordsworth—though in manuscript, it is said, +in no great condition of forwardness for the printers. This book, now +for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it +found place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is the great +novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works. It was +well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to English literature. +The true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he +supposes to be the leading characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's +genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest in putting them to test +by the many and various striking passages in what is there presented +for the first time. +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +17th February 1889 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap07"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +VII. MR. GOSSE'S POEMS +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +On Viol and Flute. By Edmund Gosse. +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in +England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it +is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained +by the nature of the case to be imitative. Our generation, quite +reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses +that it knows too much—knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name +certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may +well look back puzzled.—Could these exquisitely pondered buildings +have been indeed works of the nineteenth century? Were they not the +subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous? In +truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large, +[108] devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing +better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full +intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at. And +something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry. It +is the least that is true—the least that can fairly be said in praise +of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse. +</P> + +<P> +Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as +architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our +day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative +and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative +acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very +subtle intelligence of their charm. Of that fine scholarship in this +matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested +especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of +his level—a high level—in species of composition so varied as the +three specimens which follow. +</P> + +<P> +Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are +still lingering around "white Algiers." In Mr. Gosse's "Return of +[109] the Swallows," the northern birds—lark and thrush—have long +been calling to them:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + And something awoke in the slumbering heart<BR> + Of the alien birds in their African air,<BR> + And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,<BR> + And met in the broad white dreamy square,<BR> + And the sad slave woman, who lifted up<BR> + From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,<BR> + Said to herself, with a weary sigh,<BR> + "To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."<BR> +</P> + +<P> +Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871," +years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The men who sang that pain was sweet<BR> + Shuddered to see the mask of death<BR> + Storm by with myriad thundering feet;<BR> + The sudden truth caught up our breath<BR> + Our throats like pulses beat.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The songs of pale emaciate hours,<BR> + The fungus-growth of years of peace,<BR> + Withered before us like mown flowers;<BR> + We found no pleasure more in these<BR> + When bullets fell in showers.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + For men whose robes are dashed with blood,<BR> + What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,<BR> + Stained with the torturing interlude<BR> + That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,<BR> + In old days harsh and rude?<BR> +</P> + +<P> +[110] +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + For men whose lips are blanched and white,<BR> + With aching wounds and torturing thirst,<BR> + What charm in canvas shot with light,<BR> + And pale with faces cleft and curst,<BR> + Past life and life's delight?<BR> +</P> + +<P> +And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for +still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound. Take, for +an instance, this description of high-northern summer:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,<BR> + But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;<BR> + The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,<BR> + The cranberry-flowers were sweet.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Below us through the valley crept a river,<BR> + Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;<BR> + Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour<BR> + The mountain snows away.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + There is no night-time in the northern summer,<BR> + But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,<BR> + And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,<BR> + Red sunrise, smites the deep.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser<BR> + Across the peaks against the golden sky,<BR> + And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,<BR> + And raised their tender cry,<BR> +</P> + +<P> +[111] +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,<BR> + We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,<BR> + And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,<BR> + Our homeward steps we bent.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +"Sunshine before Sunrise!" There's a novelty in that, for poetic use +at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph +about it in Sartor Resartus. The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however, +had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance +with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed +picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain +amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's +description of which, like his pretty poem on Lübeck, made one think +that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires +is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject. +</P> + +<P> +He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their +old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of +thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice. He seems to +possess complete command of the technique of poetry—every form of what +may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the +final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work +presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and +form. The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into +one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost +simple. Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has, +perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic" +and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of +taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities." He is +certainly not the— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,<BR> +</P> + +<P> +as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree, +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from +poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a +further and finer reach of literary art. And with the perfect grace of +an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the +faculty of structure, the logic of poetry. "The New Endymion" is a +good instance of such sustained [113] power. Poetic scholar!—If we +must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that +humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse. +His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape +of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness +of modern life, of the modern world as it is. His poetry, according +with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed +out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a +kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism. +</P> + +<P> +Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly, +but so carefully educated, strike one more. The sense of his +originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one +sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be +original. In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving +his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position, +reasons on and justifies it. Yet there is a clear note of originality +(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal +compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the +soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century. Far greater, we +think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as +the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those +pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of +colour-change, classic forms and associations into those—say! of +Thames-side—pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a +classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.—No! after all, +it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present +world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the +land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,<BR> + But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,<BR> + The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?<BR> +</P> + +<P> +Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture, +although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most +successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the +considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + When age comes by and lays his frosty hands<BR> + So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware<BR> +</P> + +<P> +[115] +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,<BR> + I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.<BR> + When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,<BR> + And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,<BR> + May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair<BR> + Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + As silent rivers into silent lakes,<BR> + Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,<BR> + Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,<BR> + So may my life, and calmly burn away,<BR> + As ceases in a lamp at break of day<BR> + The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +Euthanasia!—Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a +young man. His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the +poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be, +is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the +spontaneous originality of his muse. For a writer of his peculiar +philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must +seem irretrievably old or even decadent. +</P> + +<P> +Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also +returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in +Greece, in Italy:— +</P> + +<P> +[116] +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Nor seems it strange indeed<BR> + To hold the happy creed<BR> + That all fair things that bloom and die<BR> + Have conscious life as well as I.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Then let me joy to be<BR> + Alive with bird and tree,<BR> + And have no haughtier aim than this,<BR> + To be a partner in their bliss.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +Convinced, eloquent,—again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy +fall almost unconsciously from his lips. With poetry at hand, he +appears to feel no misgivings. A large faith he might seem to have in +what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and benignity of nature, +if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes with man and beast and +flower. Her method, however, certainly involves forgetfulness for the +individual; and to this, to the prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may +help to brace us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr. +Gosse, we need bracing thereto:— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go<BR> + Between me and the sunset, footing slow;<BR> + My spirit, as an uninvited guest,<BR> + Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,<BR> + May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,<BR> + Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?<BR> +</P> + +<P> +[117] +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + I know not, care not, for I deem no shame<BR> + To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,<BR> + Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding +one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in +which Mr. Gosse is at his best. A favourite motive, he has treated it +even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,<BR> + I only wish to live my life, and find<BR> + My heart in unison with all mankind.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + My life is like the single dewy star<BR> + That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,—<BR> + A microcosm where all things living are.<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death<BR> + Should come behind and take away my breath,<BR> + I should not rise as one who sorroweth;<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + For I should pass, but all the world would be<BR> + Full of desire and young delight and glee,<BR> + And why should men be sad through loss of me?<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The light is flying; in the silver-blue<BR> + The young moon shines from her bright window through:<BR> + The mowers are all gone, and I go too.<BR> +</P> + +<P> +A vein of thought as modern as it is old! More not less depressing, +certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous, modern +age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth of the +world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the sum of +what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life. Or is it, +after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-recurring +pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our generation feels +yet cannot adequately express— +</P> + +<P CLASS="poem"> + The passion and the stress<BR> + Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be<BR> + Enshrined in any melody she knows?<BR> +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +29th October 1890 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap08"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +VIII. FERDINAND FABRE +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power, +writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which +still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of +morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is +worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers. +Something of the gift of François Millet, whose peasants are veritable +priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly +heads so sweetly and their merely human protégés so truly, seems indeed +to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre. In the Abbé Tigrane, in +Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and +patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture— [122] shrewd, +passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of +peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified. The passions he +treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their +ambitions—not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but +movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself. +Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant +ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M. +Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of +average human feeling; but still in contact—in contact, as its +conscience, its better mind, its ideal—with the institutions of +religion. What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the +recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening +masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only +mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does +a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry +effectively. For his background he has chosen, has made his own and +conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in +spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose. +The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the +Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful +authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian. In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar +of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background, +the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the +priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest. +Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce, +unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively; +though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to +time. +</P> + +<P> +In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian littérateur to +the friend of his boyhood, now the curé of one of those mountain +villages. He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty, +sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful +existence—vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale—in their upland +valley. He can appeal safely to the aged curé's friendly justice, even +in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:— +</P> + +<P> +[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart, +methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls +tremble instead of fortifying them—you, I am sure, take things by the +large and kindly side of human life." +</P> + +<P> +The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no +intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the +scenes, that peep out in the course of it. +</P> + +<P> +The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly +conveys. In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer, +those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red, +so to call it—as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a +genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs +of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting +themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:— +</P> + +<P> +"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country +changed. It seemed to me entirely red. Cherries in enormous bunches +were hanging everywhere over our heads.... +</P> + +<P> +[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark. A log of chestnut was +smouldering in a heap of ashes. Every object was in its place: the +table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser. A fairy, in +truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought +cleanliness and order on every side. +</P> + +<P> +"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps +from the fireplace. +</P> + +<P> +"'Yes, mon grand, it is I! The heat was growing greater every moment, +and I have taken in the goats.' +</P> + +<P> +"Norine unclosed the window. A broad light spread over the floor of +beaten earth, like a white cloth. The cottage was illuminated. I saw +an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge +curtain concealed a bed. He held himself slightly bent, the two hands +held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly +polished. In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather—le grand, as +they say up there—had not lost a hair: beautiful white locks fell over +his shoulders—crisp, thick, outspread. I thought of those fine wigs +of tow or hemp with which the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always +entangled. He was close shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and +the entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines +free, commanded by a full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips +were smiling, full of kindness. The eyes, however, though still clear +and soft in expression, had a certain fixity which startled me. He +raised himself. His stature seemed to me beyond proportion. He was +really beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the +trunk of a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of +coarse cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs. +</P> + +<P> +"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me! I am +blind.' +</P> + +<P> +"I approached. He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff. +</P> + +<P> +"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced +you?' +</P> + +<P> +"'Quick, Jalaguier!' I cried, throwing myself into his arms. 'Quick!' +He pressed me till the joints started. Leaned upon his broad chest, I +heard the beating of his heart. It beat under my ears with a burden +like our bell at [126] Camplong. What powerful vitality in Norine's +grand! 'It does an old man good:—a good hug!' he said, letting me go." +</P> + +<P> +The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:— +</P> + +<P> +"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what +nature meant it to be—a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a +short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred. +The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from +an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured +bread in silent self-respect. +</P> + +<P> +"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the +grand to the somewhat sparing Norine). We must also think of our +sustenance. You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand +so much of your arms. In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the +pattern of your dead father. Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my +complaint thereanent. My poor boy died from going too fast. He could +never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the +[128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'" +</P> + +<P> +The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular +spot in the landscape, as if they saw:— +</P> + +<P> +"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from +habit. One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on +which he has laboured. I have given so much of the sweat of my +brow—there—towards Rocaillet! Angélique, my dead wife, was of +Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in +her apron. What a state they're in now!—those poor morsels of land we +used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I! What superb crops of +vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves! +All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angélique +left me for the churchyard, never to come back.' He paused to my great +relief. For every one of those phrases he modulated under the +fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint +overset me—was like death." +</P> + +<P> +[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way! The actual +scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day—a +symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher +valleys of the Cevennes abound. In fact, the boys witness the +accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset. The +latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:— +</P> + +<P> +"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled, +on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft. He paused, +watched awhile, recommenced. The note became more rapid, more +sonorous. What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset! +Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on +the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an +attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan god, +gilded with red gold, on his way across the country—like Pan, if he +chose to amuse himself by charming birds. You should have seen the +enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him. Upright—she too, +slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin +with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of +her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a +sigh—something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the +goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows. +</P> + +<P> +"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden, +a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half +spread, were fluttering from branch to branch. I could have fancied, +amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were +cherries on the wing. Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds +were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude." +</P> + +<P> +It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in +Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:— +</P> + +<P> +"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In +my eyes your age made you my superior. And then, you were so strong, +so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there—a charming word. +And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my +pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by +the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself. He did well +truly when He chose you and rejected me!" +</P> + +<P> +His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which, +in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part—a goldfinch who is +found to understand the Cevenol dialect:— +</P> + +<P> +"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary court +of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me. If he chose to make +his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome. I feel a strong +impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which, whistled after +a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to succeed in the +mountains of Orb—Béni! Béni! Viens! Viens! I dare not! He might +take fright and fly away altogether." +</P> + +<P> +In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his +rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying. Towards the end +of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not lost +their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132] +</P> + +<P> +"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an attentive +spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set both alike in +the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as your good books +express it, murmured to each other their broken consoling words, I saw +them again, in thought, young, handsome, in the full flower of life, +under the cherry-trees, the swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthélemy +Jalaguier. Ah me! It was thus that, five-and-forty years after, in +this dark street of Paris, that festive day was finishing, blessed, in +the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the +alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet." +</P> + +<P> +Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if +it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on +which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr. +l'Archevêque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of +Montparnasse:— +</P> + +<P> +Theodore calls me. I saw him distinctly to-night. He gave me a sign. +After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it +were well to be released from it....' +</P> + +<P> +"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched, +edified, to the bottom of my soul. God grant, when my hour comes, I +may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life. Not a +complaint! not a sigh! Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful, +heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one +word, 'Theodore!' Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the +world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss +for the earth that nourished it.' Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had +the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to +the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was +torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who +persecuted the Christians. I give it with the same respect with which +you would quote some holy writer. Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the +saints have received canonization." +</P> + +<P> +It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes +back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have +something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those +solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of +M. Alphonse Legros. The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium +perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious +sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than +usually recherché work of art, one is presently dominated by their +reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at +least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches +of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most +genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the +ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we seem to visit under the +magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen. He has a real power of taking +one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very +different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction +an escape. +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +12th June 1889 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR> + +<A NAME="chap09"></A> +<H3 ALIGN="center"> +IX. THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON +</H3> + +<P CLASS="intro"> +TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE." PAR AUGUSTIN +FILON. PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ] +</P> + +<BR> + +<P> +[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an +imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies +which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old +régime, and end for the most part with the Revolution. A genial +centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not +only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the +last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent humanity +which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our +own, wholly different though it may look. With a sympathetic sense of +life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the creations of +his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance from ourselves +than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where a fully detailed +antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and economy, is indeed +serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene and character. In +truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism carries with it a genuine +air of personal memory. With him, as happens so rarely, an intimate +knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression +of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative +cooperation of the reader. A stately age—to us, perhaps, in the +company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it +actually was—it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on +these pages, in graceful déshabille. With perfect lightness of touch, +M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic +details of old France, of old Paris and its people—how they made a +holiday; how they got at the news; the fashions. Did the English +reader ever hear before of the beautifully dressed doll which came once +a month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion +how to dress itself? Old Paris! For young lovers at their windows; for +every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage +du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!" We think we shall best do +justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories +(not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view +to the more definite illustration of his method, therein. +</P> + +<P> +Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers. He +dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done +before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia. With his wife, his only +child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote, +he occupied a good house of his own. Of course the disposition of the +young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at first +entirely concur with the parental arrangements. But the story tells, +reassuringly, how—to some extent how sadly—they came heartily to do +so. M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper. The various distinguished +people who had fingered his clavecins, and turned over the [140] folios +of music, for half a century past, had left their memories behind them; +M. de Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed the head of Phlipote +with an aged, skeleton hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable +impression on the child, though her father delighted to recall the +incident, being himself a demi-philosophe. He went to church, that is +to say, only twice a year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the +Sunday when the Luthiers offered the pain bénit. It was his opinion +that everything in the State needed reform except the Corporations. +The relations of the husband to his affectionate, satiric, +pleasure-seeking wife, who knew so well all the eighteen theatres which +then existed in Paris, are treated with much quiet humour. On Sundays +the four set forth together for a country holiday. At such times +Phlipote would walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and +mother, side by side with her intended. But they never talked to each +other: the hands, the eyes, never met. Of what was Phlipote dreaming? +and what was in the thoughts of Claude? +</P> + +<P> +It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers exchanged +confidences. "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote, whom every +one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with admiring eyes— +</P> + +<P> +"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.' +</P> + +<P> +"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?' +</P> + +<P> +"'I too, Claude! Then what may be yours?' +</P> + +<P> +"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered. 'We don't wish to be husband and +wife, but we can be friends—good and faithful friends, helping each +other to change the decision of our parents.' +</P> + +<P> +"'Were I but sure you would not betray me—' +</P> + +<P> +"'Would you like me to confess first? The woman I love—Ah! but you +will laugh at my folly!' +</P> + +<P> +"'No, Claude! I shall not laugh. I know too well what one suffers.' +</P> + +<P> +"'Especially when love is hopeless.' +</P> + +<P> +"'Hopeless?' +</P> + +<P> +"'Alas! I have never spoken to her. Perhaps never shall!' +</P> + +<P> +[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my +heart is given!' +</P> + +<P> +"'Ah! poor Phlipote!' +</P> + +<P> +"'Poor Claude!' +</P> + +<P> +"They had approached each other. The young man took the tiny hand of +his friend, pressing it in his own. +</P> + +<P> +"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!' +</P> + +<P> +"'What! Guimard of the Opera?—the fiancée of Despréaux?'" +</P> + +<P> +Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and +almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love. In return she +reveals her own. It was Good Friday. She had come with her mother to +the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ and +witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires, brought +thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross. In the press of +the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly faints, +when a young man comes kindly to their aid. "She is so young!" he +explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!" "He looked at me," +she tells Claude—"he looked at [143] me, through his half-closed +eyelids; and his words were like a caress."— +</P> + +<P> +"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy. +</P> + +<P> +"'Yes! once again. He pretended to be looking at the window of the +Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our +house. Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to +discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.' +</P> + +<P> +"'You should have shown yourself.' +</P> + +<P> +"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of +shame. +</P> + +<P> +"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard, she +of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely understanding +each other. +</P> + +<P> +"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau. 'What are you +doing out there?' +</P> + +<P> +"The young people arose. Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of +Claude. 'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a +friend—to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were +in love with me. Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall be +nicely in love with you.' The soft warmth of her arm seemed to pass +through Claude, and gave him strange sensations. He resumed naïvely, +'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with you. You +are so pretty!' Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly, 'No +compliments, monsieur. Since we are not to marry each other, it is +forbidden to pay court to me!'" +</P> + +<P> +From that day a close intimacy established itself between the formerly +affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good intentions +of their elders. In long conversations, they talked in turn, or both +together, of their respective loves. Phlipote allows Claude entrance +to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful arrangements, its +virgin cleanliness. He inspects slowly all the familiar objects daily +touched by her, her books, her girlish ornaments. One day she cried +with an air of mischief, "If she were here in my place, what would you +do?" and no sooner were the words uttered than his arms were round her +neck. "'Tis but to teach you what I would do were she here." They +were a little troubled by this adventure. +</P> + +<P> +[145] And the next day was a memorable one. By the kind contrivance of +Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the object of +his affections, but to his immense disillusion. If he could but speak +to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the skill, to bend her. +Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the good news. The great +actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:— +</P> + +<P> +"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to the +Théâtre Français that he could not refuse; and it is yourself will go +this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.' +</P> + +<P> +"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I! This morning I saw a +gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the unknown +at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.' +</P> + +<P> +"'And you didn't tell me!' +</P> + +<P> +"Claude hung his head. +</P> + +<P> +"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously. 'Why not?' +</P> + +<P> +"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself. Do you +forgive me, Phlipote?' +</P> + +<P> +"'I suppose I must. So make yourself as smart as you can, to please +your goddess.'" +</P> + +<P> +[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous disappointment +on seeing the great actress at home—plain, five-and-forty, +ill-tempered. He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight. +</P> + +<P> +And now for Phlipote's idol! It was agreed that Whitsunday should be +spent at Versailles. On that day the royal apartments were open to the +public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back towards the +vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the procession of +the Cordons Bleus. The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights of the Order Du +Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to range themselves +in the choir according to the date of their creation. The press was so +great that the parents were separated from the young people. Claude, +however, at the side of Phlipote, realized the ideal of a faithful and +jealous guardian. The hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble +pavement of the gallery. Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its +ceremonies for the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour; +but before the Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of +the order down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic. +</P> + +<P> +[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moiré, the silver dove +on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with +yellow satin. Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of haughty +figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble cry, +falls fainting into the arms of Claude. +</P> + +<P> +Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she wept +as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow. Claude, without a +word, sustained, soothed her. A sentiment of gratitude mingled itself +with her distress. "How good he is!" she thought. +</P> + +<P> +"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not see +the Cordons Bleus. Fancy! You will laugh at me! But in one of the +handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the stranger who +helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant with you." +</P> + +<P> +Phlipote did not laugh. "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a +faint voice. "Pardi!" cries the father. "'Tis what I always say. Your +stranger was some young fellow from a shop." +</P> + +<P> +Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial +benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire +to the country. At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a +good and devoted husband. Phlipote never again opened her lips +regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart: +only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to +seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but +chimeric image visible for her alone. +</P> + +<P> +And once again she saw him. It was in the terrible year 1794. She +knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed +the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the +curtain. But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to her +place. There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone. She had +not forgotten, could not mistake, him—that pale head, so proud and +fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile eyes, now +encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching. The convict's shirt, +open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's, +and made for that youthful face an aureole, of innocence, of martyrdom. +His looks [149] met hers. Did he recognize her? She could not have +said. She remained there, paralyzed with emotion, till the moment when +the vision disappeared. +</P> + +<P> +Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost +herself in prayer. There was a distant roll of drums. The man to whom +she had given her maiden soul was gone. +</P> + +<P> +"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader. But +Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and +always he is all delicacy—a delicacy which keeps his large yet minute +antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to a direct +interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and after '93. +His book is certainly one well worth possessing. +</P> + +<BR><BR> + +<P CLASS="finis"> +THE END +</P> + +<P CLASS="noindent"> +16th July 1890 +</P> + +<BR><BR><BR><BR> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' *** + +***** This file should be named 4036-h.htm or 4036-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/4/0/3/4036/ + +Produced by Alfred J. Drake. 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