Initial commit of ebook 78949 filesHEADmain

6 files changed, 8039 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9f57f44
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
+*.htm text
+*.html text
+*.png binary
+*.jpg binary
+*.svg text
+*.pdf binary
+*.bmp binary
+*.zip binary
+*.midi binary
+*.mp3 binary
diff --git a/78949-0.txt b/78949-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cc1a060
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78949-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3246 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78949 ***
+
+
+
+
+                       THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR
+                            AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+
+                                   BY
+
+                              ALICE MEYNELL
+
+
+                            SECOND IMPRESSION
+
+
+                            HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                         OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+   LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE
+               TOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI PEKING
+
+                                  1922
+
+
+                             TO CELIA CLARK
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                 PAGE
+                  SUPERFLUOUS KINGS                 7
+                  STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST   12
+                  ‘A MODERN POETESS’               18
+                  TO ITALY WITH EVELYN             25
+                  WATERFALLS                       31
+                  A TOMB IN BAYSWATER              37
+                  A CORRUPT FOLLOWING              42
+                  THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD            49
+                  JOANNA BAILLIE                   56
+                  THE CLASSIC NOVELIST             62
+                  A HUNDRED YEARS AGO              68
+                  THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES            75
+                  GEORGE DARLEY                    82
+                  SYDNEY DOBELL                    87
+                  COVENTRY PATMORE                 94
+                  POETRY AND CHILDHOOD            110
+                  GEORGE MEREDITH                 117
+                  PESSIMISM IN FICTION            122
+                  GIACINTO GALLINA                127
+                  THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR      133
+
+
+_The papers which follow have been chosen from those of Mrs. Meynell’s
+literary essays that have not yet been reprinted in book-form. The
+selection has been made at the instance of the Oxford University Press._
+
+
+
+
+                           SUPERFLUOUS KINGS
+
+            Which had superfluous kings for messengers
+            Not many moons gone by.
+                                    _Antony and Cleopatra._
+
+
+As the kings lag, and then pass away from the stage of the world, many
+men will ask what there is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty
+in the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time probably forget or deny
+that there was ever anything in the life of the world answering to
+Shakespeare’s royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in Arviragus
+and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in Lear, or to his glory in
+Cleopatra. It may be so, as to the world; there may have been nothing
+thus answerable. But there was Shakespeare.
+
+And our regrets in regard to him cover all his regalities—the hidden and
+hereditary and unconscious, and the conscious and braggart and manifest:
+Perdita’s dignity among the romps, and her sportive disputes as to Art
+and Nature among the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the
+junketings, and also Lear’s loud and indignant death. The splendour of
+Shakespeare’s veneration for kings is perhaps deeper where the
+kingliness—the blood of it—is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess of _The
+Winter’s Tale_, for here it is matter of Shakespeare’s faith. So with
+the brothers of Imogen who, by the way—and not merely by the way—like
+her, discuss flowers—‘Then to arms!’ They too have the implicit
+distinction, unknown to the world of their exile, but known to
+Shakespeare, who is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in _The
+Winter’s Tale_, Shakespeare makes his resolute and implicit act of
+belief in the blood of kings.
+
+In _Lear_ that faith suffers outrage and defies it. Many years ago the
+great actor, Rossi, who did not gain in England such honour as was
+rendered to Salvini—I fear because his physical personal dignity was not
+so obvious as Salvini’s—played King Lear in Italian. But there was one
+cry, one royal proclamation, that could not be removed from the English.
+So Rossi said ‘every inch’ in English. It needed Shakespeare’s word to
+vindicate Shakespeare’s royalism. (One might make sport of any kind of
+translation: say ‘_ogni centimetro_’—‘every centimetre a king’ is good
+farce.) No Italian will serve; the Latin mind has not this degree of
+imaginative reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty of
+giving sudden greatness to a customary word.
+
+But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only ‘the beauteous Majesty
+of Denmark’, and the ‘courteous action’ of the dead—‘being so
+majestical’—and the dignity of Hermione’s daughter, and the tempest of
+Lear’s elemental tragedy, will not consent to touch us with nothing more
+than pity and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of pride of
+life in the royalty he sings; confronts us—no, rather brings us to our
+knees before the arrogant splendour he conceives:
+
+          Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
+          And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
+
+It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only hand in hand with a
+queen does Antony venture on the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to
+him are given the most surprising lines in any of the tragedies, it is
+only as the lover of a queen that he has the right to them. To him is
+assigned that startling word, the incomparable word of amorous and
+tender ceremony—‘Egypt’.
+
+                       I am dying, Egypt, dying.
+
+That territorial name, murmured to his love in the hour of death, and in
+her arms—I know not in the records of all genius any other such august
+farewell. Lear’s word is outdone here. Lear a king in every inch of his
+aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in every league of her ancient realm.
+Has not majesty spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of such a
+lover?
+
+Superfluous kings—Shakespeare’s irony could find no other adjective so
+overcharged with insolence as this. Kings must be as he conceived them
+in order to that antithesis:
+
+                   Superfluous kings for messengers.
+
+But an antithesis more complete than that of downfall and of servitude
+is that of mortality. The humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the
+Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face with the mere
+fortunes of war; the derision of the word ‘superfluous’ implies, in
+reversal, an inalienable dignity; so in the act of dying, the visible
+act, done in life; so with ‘sad stories of the death of kings’. The
+final contradiction is not here; but in the grave itself, in the hidden
+burial, out of the sight of the populace: it needs the utmost of
+Shakespeare’s passion of royalty to answer to that depth. And here is
+poetry, not by him, but wonderfully worthy of him, that tells us of
+
+                                           High-born dust
+           In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings.
+
+Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have written this.
+
+Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with this glory this
+humiliation. Who will say which is greater, the thesis or the
+antithesis? But they cannot be parted to be compared. There they are, in
+our national literature, and cannot be effaced. But who shall hinder
+their becoming, for the student, first a matter of mere literary
+interest, then a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter of
+some new derision? (We need no new derisions: our wits are apt to
+mockery.) Is it well that any one of Shakespeare’s many passions should
+come under our frigid inspection, to be examined so?
+
+When kings are in fact superfluous, Shakespeare’s great word
+‘superfluous’ will be cancelled out; when kings are no longer flattered,
+Young’s great word ‘unflattered’ will be a futile word; when there are
+no full assiduous courts, the ‘thin courts’ will suggest no spectres.
+Regret is for Shakespeare, as has been said; not for Saul, or Louis the
+Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But, short of Shakespeare’s
+devotion, there will be some sentiment damaged. When the mortality of
+kings is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all inherit, then
+the lamps and the gold that enshrine the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior,
+and Balthasar at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathedrals,
+with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who preceded the kings to the
+manger.
+
+Shakespeare’s greatest splendour, then, that so shines down the
+splendour of history and the world, is under sentence, and under
+sentence his greatest compassion, and under sentence his greatest
+terror, and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have placed at the
+head of these pages a word of neither terror nor compassion, because the
+word of irony implies the rest.
+
+
+
+
+                     STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST
+
+
+England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only
+broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of
+minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a
+few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their
+posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national
+poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon
+after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the
+sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language
+was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the
+masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and
+who were themselves England, having history in common with their
+country.
+
+But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man and boy. He was born
+in the year of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was dancing, an
+old man of thirty-four, dropsical and horrible, full of repentance, as
+were then all of his manner of life when they had an illness
+sufficiently long to give them time. Greene died from too much
+banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, but his sorry
+death-bed gave him room for ample self-reproach, and doubtless
+Christopher Marlowe also would have left a record of his repentance had
+the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age than his friend’s,
+been less violent. In later years Carew asked pardon, with many cries,
+for the greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during these two
+bright centuries you may hear, if you turn your ear that way, the loud
+lamentation of poet after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not
+a death-bed without the clamour that closed the song. It is a parting
+cry, so poignant and sudden that the air rings with it even while the
+succeeding singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the present.
+Greene had not a little to repent of in his actions, but nothing to
+retract in his songs; therefore, the reader who has not beheld his
+life—his wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it, and
+certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the grief, pain, and fear
+of the closing scene, and may well be content with the sweetness of the
+songs. They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized. Without
+following the fashion of using the terms of one art to describe another,
+we may permit ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of music to
+represent the sixteenth-century lyric, harmonics for the seventeenth,
+counterpoint for the nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to
+Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in which so much as two
+notes are to be heard; and the double string makes the sound more human.
+
+It is not human to be single as the songs of Greene are single; the
+fading of pleasure, the cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the
+happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each thing, one at a
+time, is so unaccompanied that you wonder how a primitive poet should
+have had time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying thoughts
+together. For it is hardly youth, hardly inexperience that this
+simplicity suggests, but rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating
+other conditions than those which govern an actual world of which the
+poet has somewhat grown tired.
+
+‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of sweetly jarring notes in
+the lines that tell the parting of father and mother over their laughing
+child—lines that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the mind, of Blake
+in his own song of birth. Blake’s verse has a tempestuous and
+threatening spiritual wildness of which Greene did not know the
+language; and it is only in the leaping metre, the clamour of the rhymes
+that seem striving to be heard above a deafening childish noise, that
+the two songs have so much likeness.
+
+                    The wanton smiled, father wept,
+                    Mother cried, baby leapt;
+                    More he crowed, more we cried.
+
+There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling of the child, and
+you hear also the crying that the mother is seeking to still with her
+recital of that late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.
+
+Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes, perhaps, ‘The Praise of
+Faunia’:
+
+                  Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,
+                  Or but as mild as she is seeming so,
+
+is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less strong, and less
+masculine Shakespeare sonnet. There is sweet line after line in this
+poem, and many such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling throat’
+and ‘When she sings, all singers else be still!’ But the poem is famous
+chiefly, it may be guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has
+a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible beauty:
+
+              O glorious sun, imagine me the west!
+              Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast!
+
+Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in Dianam’, which is to be praised
+not as a whole, but for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep a
+golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’, and from nymphs in white.
+There never was any scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain is
+cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow through, but the sense
+of outer sunshine is intense and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame
+blackly, as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the way, is a
+familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is a presence hardly removed in
+the southern summer.
+
+This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is caused by the most careless
+of verses. As a lyrist, he never leant hard upon anything; he has the
+lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to sing his tunes upon
+the way. So lightly is the verse given to the wind that you are apt to
+read it as carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of the
+Fountain, for instance, should be read with more leisure than at a
+glance it seems to merit.
+
+Greene is dull to any reader who does not take the pains to cancel all
+the conventions of the times that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure
+fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy green, must be
+simply forgotten; and the task is not difficult. Greene has all the good
+luck by his Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was neither to
+be repeated by others, nor to be taken from his own head upon whom it
+alighted first. We, who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need not
+be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and this not because his were
+best, but because his were first.
+
+See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, wild, and dear:
+
+              Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
+              His wings were wet with ranging in the rain.
+
+But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat dull, especially when
+he is not at his best, because he has so little to say. There never was
+a poet who said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his own
+estimation, not important enough to be written for their own sake; they
+were but snatches of songs in his prose writings—novels and what not;
+and poems so set flying at any other time and in any other English could
+not have kept their motion and their spirit so long. They never cost him
+a thought; and the only sign of attention is in the versification. This
+is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon in Dianam’ it is very good
+indeed; the foot is elastic and moves with a rebound.
+
+But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take his charming
+description of ‘A Shepherd and His Wife’. As though in the idleness of
+an empty mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly matter for
+verse—the way, for example, in which the flaps of the shepherd’s coat
+were turned over. It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail
+as that. But in the same poem are some lively verses about the wife
+which seem not only to set her up for admiration and delight, but to
+dance about her in a round when that is done.
+
+Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’, in which the happiest
+shepherdess in Thessaly compares her love and state with those of
+queens, and makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt refrain.
+But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has a weakness and listlessness that
+spoil its grace; and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was a
+small poet among the minor poets; but his hour struck in the cool of the
+morning, and, whatever kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic
+simplicity was in his English.
+
+
+
+
+                           ‘A MODERN POETESS’
+
+
+The cruel places of history are for ever emptied of their suffering
+tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong
+prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours
+and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the
+guard. Every martyrdom of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one
+how sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There is no living pain
+now in all the universe to continue it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or
+perhaps to regret it. And if we complain that the past is not to be
+revoked or undone, we might rather confess the complete consolation of
+the passing of time, the undoing, the effacement, and the more than
+death. It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is to be past, or
+that we perceive how clean is natural oblivion; the uneasy human
+retrospection stirs nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart
+with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing now on earth
+remembers.
+
+The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the thing is over and done;
+but it afflicts me to think of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no
+trouble but in the present, and that though our minds seem to travel
+into the past, in truth they do not budge; and we, prisoners of our own
+moment, are fluttered with the present sympathy, and not with the
+vanished sorrow, for this is not.
+
+By far the greater number of human sufferings have been forgotten by man
+as purely and freshly as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory
+which is history and tradition renews the report with so much attention
+as to preserve something like the dramatic unity of time. To read of
+them and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to endure them.
+But of others again we have the brief record that shows long hollow
+spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is the
+bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by our popular historians
+in a short paragraph that ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the
+extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style and making the page
+conspicuous to childish learners.
+
+Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, although she is not in the
+catalogue of those whom he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the
+Duchess of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the young Plinie,
+Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’ and Lucretia Marinella, who is not
+mentioned as any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a work _Dell’
+excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e mancamenti degli Huomini_—with
+the inferiority of these and such as these does he flatter the
+surpassing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart would have made her
+name too sad a sacrifice for such a train. The other ladies are
+presented gaily and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but that
+divided which your Grace retaines in one.’
+
+Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when women of station were
+well taught, notable for her education. Her Latin letters are still
+there to attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by Mr. Philips, who
+was Milton’s nephew. These secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions
+are in touching disproportion with her original, immediate, and
+authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp edging that a more or less
+literary training gives to the natural human mind, making it aware, had
+been given to hers; and she was so prepared by delicate erudition that
+the loss of all she loved was complete to her, the suspense of
+imprisonment inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. She lost
+better than her life, for the prison ruined her reason before it
+released her body, twice rifled and destitute, and dismissed it to
+Westminster Abbey and the grave.
+
+It is in her letters to her husband, and only in these, that Arabella
+Stuart is perceptible as she lived. The letters of entreaty to King
+James are the letters of those abject times. They declare her to be in
+despair, not because of the separation from her husband and only friend,
+and not because of her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of
+the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence, and by reason of
+the remorse and contrition of one who had disobeyed him, even
+unwittingly. By these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, not
+their phrases only, but, apparently, their very thoughts. Such
+declarations were much more than a courtesy due to kings or the decorum
+of a style in letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most grotesque
+tune; those were real self-reproaches; they banished real sleep, human
+sleep, afflicted real consciences, set the tears of men running, and
+squandered and scattered to waste that human treasure, humility.
+
+Lady Arabella’s remorse, as she took leave to remind the King, was
+poignant for her offence in having bestowed herself in marriage _upon
+the King’s permission_. He seems to have either forgotten or silently
+rescinded his consent, and for this she overwhelmed herself in
+professions of regret and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen
+some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which, she said, had
+beguiled the time ‘for her whose serious mind must invent some
+relaxation’. ‘Womanish toys’, she called them, conscious of her
+education, and she thanked the gentleman who was her gaoler for
+consenting to present them. Her way of submission was even approved by
+the tyrant. One of her letters to the King, said Montford, ‘was penned
+by her in the best terms, as she can do right well. It was often read
+without offence; nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with the
+applause of Prince and Council.’ The best terms are of course the most
+reverent. The clergy exhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping,
+to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill of fear, was that
+of the Bishop of Durham.
+
+She had the heart to deny her commended letters so far as to practise
+some secret disobedience, heaping up self-reproach for the vigils of her
+solitude. The letters to her husband, from whom she had been parted
+after but a few months of marriage, were contraband. Even in these, her
+allusions to the King were most dutiful, but her husband was her theme.
+‘Rachel wept,’ she wrote, ‘and would not be comforted, because her
+children were no more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow, and
+none else! And, therefore, God bless us from that, and I will hope well
+for the rest, though I see no apparent hope.’ Her husband was ill, as
+she heard from others. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am exceeding sorry to hear
+that you have not been well. I am not satisfied with the reason Smith
+gives for it; but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sympathy
+betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a
+cold. For God’s sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your body.
+You may see by me what inconvenience it will bring one to; and no
+fortune, I assure you, daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find
+in myself; for “si nous vivons l’âge d’un veau”, as Marot says, we may,
+by God’s grace, be happier than we look for, in being suffered to enjoy
+ourself with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not able to live it, I,
+for my part, shall think myself a pattern of misfortune, in enjoying so
+great a blessing as you so little while.’
+
+Again, she reminded him that he had not written to her ‘this good
+while’. ‘You see when I am troubled, I trouble you with tedious
+kindness, for so I think you will account so long a letter. But, sweet
+Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with writing but when you please.
+Be well, and I shall account myself happy in being your faithful and
+loving wife.’
+
+As soon as these letters were discovered the writing was stopped. Enough
+was written, and enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous,
+worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief, of this
+unfortunate. A graver revolt against her tyrants was her escape to join
+her husband in flight from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times,
+tides, and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She would not save
+herself without him. She was brought back, and from the new imprisonment
+there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied justice by refusing
+another little offering of her needlework. In her appeal to the Queen
+she had entreated that the gloves she had made might be accepted ‘in
+remembrance of the poor prisoner that wrought them, in hopes her royal
+hands will vouchsafe to wear them, which, till I have the honour to
+kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow’.
+
+‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate creature that ever
+lived prostrates itselfe at the feet of the most merciful King that ever
+was.’ These are among the last ‘best terms’ that Arabella Stuart penned.
+
+Her King and Queen and country sent her civilization into solitude,
+gagged her classics, disproved her poetry, and thrust her ‘expanded
+mind’ into the inner darkness.
+
+
+
+
+                          TO ITALY WITH EVELYN
+
+
+Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse of the city and the
+landscape of the future, two centuries and a half hence? Even if so, he
+can hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted desires the sight
+of the past. At any rate, if there be any scene that we would willingly
+be admitted to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy.
+
+Thither would we willingly journey not later than in the day of John
+Evelyn, when he travelled in his youthful dignity, provided with
+letters, and spent some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the
+University of Padua. Every one knows his journal of the English Church
+under the Commonwealth, of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of
+Charles II. But not the least charming part of one of the most readable
+of books—a book written in an English prose that had not yet undergone
+much manipulation, but was still a little rigid, but rigid with
+vitality—is somewhat neglected; it is the part that records this
+progress through France to the Coast, and thence into Italy as far as
+Naples, and home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and
+Switzerland. The happy man! When he drew near, after peril of shipwreck,
+to the port of Genoa, he ‘perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy’. This was
+off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now you may smell the
+odour of factories—soap-boiling and other things—for it has lately come
+to be stifled with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are dying with
+their blackened arbours. Only of late have those ancient, coloured
+terraces, coloured as a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that a
+little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might be set in a ring
+and worn as a jewel—only of late have the gardens, once in rich and
+fortunate neglect, ceased to breathe their ancient breath.
+
+‘We recovered the shore, which we now kept in view within half a league,
+in sight of those pleasant villas, and within scent of those fragrant
+orchards which are on this coast, full of princely retirements for the
+sumptuousnesse of their buildings and noblesse of the plantations, from
+whence, the wind blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes
+of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jasmine flowers for
+divers leagues seaward.’ And Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of
+this coast as to record it again in the dedication of his ‘Fumifugium’
+to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpierdarena—that one place precisely,
+of all others—in the years just past makes the whole incident of this
+welcoming message from the cultivated lands, and of the ensuing treatise
+and its title, sound somewhat cruel in irony.
+
+John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approaching smoke, as he tried
+also—by an application to the same monarch—to avert the course of
+fashion in the then important dress of men. The East he thought better
+worth following than France, and he proposed a whole revision of the
+Western mode, and presented the King with a plan whereby the trivial
+fashions of ‘the monsieurs’ were to be exchanged for an Oriental
+‘noblesse’. Charles accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to
+wear a Persian robe; but he rather shabbily left Evelyn to conjecture,
+in silence, that it was his advice that had been taken. In the end, the
+King slid back, and ‘the monsieurs’ had it. If John Evelyn had had that
+glimpse into the future which few of us desire to-day, how could he have
+endured those French inventions to which the East has now been partly
+converted, and the fumes of that ash-strewn piece of coast? ‘But a
+soap-factory!’ cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy
+national sarcasm in the industry that, among others, has brought about
+this special local change. It happens, however, pat to this matter of
+soap, that Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought, in one of
+the towns of North Italy, certain ‘wash-balls’ which seemed to be new to
+him; he speaks of them as a useful invention. Before the factory had
+taken the place of the fragrant orchards the people of that coast had
+the constant custom of washing all their clothes. It is much to be
+feared that the smoke of the soap-factory has already put an end to that
+habit by making it too difficult, or impossible.
+
+Some consolation is to be found in this—that if a mile of that
+incomparable coast is spoilt, there remain scores of miles all
+untouched, differing only in the lesser majesty of the houses and
+gardens with their great sea-walls. The ‘sumptuousnesse’ admired by
+Evelyn will never be restored; but of the mere walls of those rougher
+houses too, in their place in the landscape, pieces might be set as
+jewels. It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn wrote. Otherwise
+the general modern complaint as to the insensibility of the older
+writers to the daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his case.
+He, without noting, saw the change of skies that sets alight the world
+when you have crossed the Alps; and of the further illumination of a
+southern spring he says nothing; but he makes mention of the
+‘extraordinary long’ tail of a horse, which he saw in a collection of
+curiosities, nor do two horns of as many unicorns go unrecorded, for he
+had a grave and simple admiration of such things as petrifactions, flies
+in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor does he cease to be a learned and
+most responsible man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to see
+nothing contrary to the dignities of State and office. The false air of
+childishness which this kind of English gives to the style of Pepys
+always makes his public functions and honours seem to us incongruous. In
+Evelyn’s _Diary_, by the way, we meet Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty
+business, with so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.
+
+It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an air of childishness in
+our eyes to-day. I have to confess that when I hear an Italian say
+something to the purpose I always cry inwardly ‘How intelligent!’ But in
+those days England took frankly a lower place. It could not be
+otherwise, seeing that the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had
+imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe. Evelyn had nothing
+whatever to be proud of at home, inasmuch as he was ashamed of York
+Minster, Lincoln, Durham, and the rest; inasmuch, too, as Shakespeare’s
+name occurs not once in his book. He never doubts that modern art had
+reached its culmination in St. Peter’s and the Lateran, in Guido Reni
+and Domenichino.
+
+He found all those splendours new, and it is no wonder if he was
+convinced that all this art in course of progress, as it was visibly,
+must be better integrally than what had gone before. He took no notice
+of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but admired precisely as
+Horace Walpole admired, and on the same scale and according to the same
+order. He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of to-day is
+dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down the page, and to find the
+polite English traveller in rapture before the blatant Bernini.
+
+Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great compliment of taking her at
+the highest estimation as she was at the moment. There was no painful
+comparison with any period of the past, for we have evidence in his
+works that Bernini was not afraid of antiquity itself. In arts, in
+letters, in arms, in science especially, Italy was foremost in present
+action—_there_ was her splendour, as we may find it hard to realize.
+Evelyn sent home preparations from her schools of anatomy to the Royal
+Society, to which such things were new.
+
+And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller, who was soon after to
+plan the hedges and alleys of Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a
+school of gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the perpetual
+inequalities which have hardly been sufficiently recognized as
+distinctive of our plains. In Italy he found the plains to be flat with
+that peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight. Most
+beautiful with the mountains for a distance—but he hardly had eyes for
+the mountains. It is rather difficult to forgive him for calling the
+rocks and bays of the coast ‘horrid gaps’ and ‘dreadful mountains’; but
+‘Oh, the sweet Paradise!’ he cries among the fountains and the vines.
+
+His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed he went upright; and if we
+desire to travel with him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his
+Italy but for the sake of himself. Something we would have from him in
+exchange for our better information on the ‘Gotiq ordonance’.
+
+
+
+
+                               WATERFALLS
+
+
+‘We then went out to see a cascade. I trudged unwillingly, and was not
+sorry to find it dry.’ Dr. Johnson was not often pleased, it seems, upon
+this tour in Wales in the company of ‘my mistress’ and her family, and
+the arid waterfall was no doubt a welcome incident, for the scenery had
+been tedious to his spirit. He made light of the mountains, and did not
+hesitate to propose a strange image to the fancy of his companions when
+he derided a river unlucky enough to come into the prospect: ‘Why, sir,
+I could clear any part of it by a leap.’ He rated very low the old house
+of Mrs. Thrale’s family, though as a house it amused him more than any
+view. ‘The addition of another storey would make an useful house, but it
+cannot be great.’ The old parish clerk who, seeing Mrs. Thrale again,
+‘foolishly said that he was now willing to die,’ is no doubt justly
+rebuked; but so seems to be Mrs. Thrale herself: ‘He had only a crown
+given him by my mistress.’ Then there was that dispute on the Chester
+walls; and, first and last, Dr. Johnson was not found to be best of
+companions by the ‘pretty woman’ witty enough to ‘add something to the
+conversation’, with whom he himself would have been all content.
+
+There is reason to think that scenery in those days was rather unfairly
+and dully insisted upon as a matter of taste. ‘Dispositions of wood and
+water’ were the subjects of a kind of expert study, and it is easy to
+understand what a bore a landscape might become under the eye of a
+judge. Miss Austen shows a distinct tendency to bring water, rising
+ground, and well-wooded slopes under review. If a modern mansion has
+been erected, with ignorance, in too low a situation, she has an instant
+eye for the barbarism. The shrubberies, the curving carriage drives, the
+conifers, the farm-buildings, if any, duly planted out, come under the
+rapid approval of an elegant mind, and so does the far prospect no less.
+The distance is declared to be in harmony with the demands of a lover of
+nature; and as you read you can hardly think of the scenery as thrilled
+with summer wind, or believe that its miles would mark human feet with
+dust, or would be measured by the wavering rods of human weariness, or
+subject to any incidents except those of a careful engraving. There is
+some charm in the false-classical landscape of that time, merely looked
+back upon; but it would be something less than interesting to be
+presently in the company of people who talked much of the dispositions
+of wood and water. There is a certain way of looking at a view that
+affects one almost with dismay to hear of. When a professor of scenery
+asks you to enjoy what he always calls a peep, with several kinds of
+fir-trees coyly betraying the way to it, there is little delight there;
+nor are cottages so pleasant when they, too, are said to peep; but this
+is a later and even a duller fancy. Landscape a hundred years ago had
+more dignity, though no more ‘spirit in the woods’.
+
+If the dispositions of wood and water allowed of a waterfall, it is
+impossible to imagine a more welcome addition at that day to scenery
+constructed, like Mr. Pecksniff’s younger daughter, upon good
+principles. The cascade had not yet been made quite a common convention,
+for the ‘picturesque’ had not then come and gone, making dull in its
+passage, at least in art and in letters, the sallies of nature. To find
+a waterfall, in the right place, was in those days an elegant and
+natural joy; and it must have been no small disappointment to see Dr.
+Johnson trudging unwillingly. But no doubt there had been too much said.
+
+Taste, always so nearly in peril of derogation, and, in fact, so
+quickly, according to all experience, dimmed by habit, has done wrong,
+by its weak preferences, to all the flowers of scenery—not to the actual
+flowers of vegetation only, though these have long been turned to the
+basest uses of all decoration—but to the other outbreaks of the movement
+and vitality of earth. The white tops of mountains and the climax of
+storms, forests in their utmost leaf, waves at the crest, the clouds of
+sunset newly on fire, waters in haste—what a gathering of blossoms is
+this from the summits of the world, whether on heights or on plains!
+Light and sound seem to be set free by the mere resounding thought of so
+much fruition. But, for their all-intelligible beauty, these crowns of
+things were long tossed together for the use of any one who so much as
+knew their names, and not the less cheaply because the language of
+description grew to be more subtle, more expert, and more poetic. Soon
+that expert quality also became, as it were, the waste and refuse of
+literature.
+
+Waterfalls, then, have been too much in use. Not only by the travelling
+party of the Thrales have they been proposed too pressingly to
+admiration. They cannot be restored at second hand to their dignity. A
+very great man might restore them to his readers by a word, but no one
+of less authority than his need begin to take the trouble to look for
+it. The right course is to see them where they are, and to let the
+literature of the matter rest. Any phrase written here in praise of
+waterfalls—if such should escape—is not intended to do more than point
+the way whither the traveller may trudge if he will. Norway and the
+Pyrenees keep for us the surprise of perpetually new waters drawing to
+the ancient fall.
+
+The Alps, even, have many a slender stream, perhaps bearing no name, and
+certainly known by no names out of sight of their nearest peaks, that
+are remembered in their solitude, or at least recognized at each return
+of the traveller, where they drop, hushed by their distance as much as
+by the noisy train. There is one, for instance, seen for but a moment,
+that has so long a fall as to grow weak and to swing in all the light
+winds. The strong stem of the cascade springs from the bed of its upland
+stream; and as from a strong stem a sapling wavers upwards, entangled at
+last in all breezes, so the dropping brook wavers downwards to its last
+and lighter motion.
+
+Waterfalls that are turned to torrents have not been so much the subject
+of the landscape of convention. Their wildness did not so take the
+general fancy when conventions were made; but they are the vitality of
+the mountains. Theirs is an expression of movement so great that all the
+Alpine region seems to manifest its life only by these noisy valleys.
+All communications, all signals and messages of the range, hasten in and
+out by these brilliant cataracts, one in the depth of every ravine.
+
+They are not only the traffic and the mission of their mountains, the
+coursing of that cold blood and the pulse of the rock, but they carry
+the mountain spirit far out. There is no country under mountains but has
+its quietness awakened by wilder rivers than other lands are watered by.
+When the range is out of sight, the torrents are still hasty, cataract
+below cataract, shallow and clear, quick from the impulse of waterfalls.
+No loitering rivers in earthy beds keep level banks in those plains that
+have their horizon lifted by the line of great mountains; no silent
+rivers.
+
+If the torrent runs dry, there is no one to be vexed by the silence. Dr.
+Johnson would not, perhaps, be asked to trudge for the sake of the rough
+charms of a mere torrent; but even if the disposition of wood and water
+comprised a torrent, he would have no revenge for his literary weariness
+in seeing his guide abashed. For a dry torrent is a most beautiful
+wreck, the ruin of a splendid progress and procession, of which the
+leader, when he went by, did not pass unknown. Such are the wide
+watercourses of the valleys in the Canton de Vaud, the colour of their
+innumerable stones a bright daylight grey, and the threads of water of
+their time of drought rippling just audibly by night.
+
+Not all waterfalls make the conspicuous show of the cascades that take
+their leap from the rocks. In early autumn there is nothing fresher or
+sweeter than the minute, perpetual waterfall that hides in moss and
+undergrowth, and slips everywhere from the Alps. The air is nowhere
+silent, and hardly a blade of grass is unstirred by the delicate thrill
+of water. Without paths it drops minutely and invisibly into the lakes,
+the gentlest of all the signs of the barren and lofty snow.
+
+
+
+
+                          A TOMB IN BAYSWATER
+
+
+Not many Londoners, it seems, know where amongst them Sterne was buried;
+but his tomb stands where it did, duly tended, so that the
+superscription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound of the voices,
+of the feet, of the hootings, and of the wheels on the long westward
+road that starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the story told by
+the surgeon who thought he recognized a dead man anonymous upon a
+dissecting table, at the time of Sterne’s death in Bond-street, has
+discouraged the national and the local interest in an accessible London
+grave of the great. Yet it matters little whether the dust beneath this
+grey, Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous headstone be now
+mingled with the dust that was the body of Sterne; or at least it is a
+question that touches no more than the fancy.
+
+The lapse of time might be important in our thoughts on Sterne’s tomb if
+we measured by the long years of childhood; but we do not, because it is
+the short mature years that are historical. Added together the adult two
+centuries since Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did garden,
+court, or house, remembered with the large remembrance of ancient and
+spacious infancy, so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man as
+the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp. Time is all depreciated,
+disproved. No device, such as Thoreau’s for reducing the past to its
+real brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old woman and had
+wondered at the date whereto her birth referred him, but bethought
+himself how few of such lives as hers outstride all history and the very
+life of the race. But to join long life to long life is to pass in fancy
+by so many consecutive childhoods, for then the time will seem not short
+but immeasurably long. The childish years prolong time; the adult years,
+a man’s middle years, the short years of life, make Time’s changes,
+doing Time’s work.
+
+A mere score of such decades take us back through Wordsworth and Keats,
+the great English painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day
+when Sterne was born. What a trifle!
+
+A score of our little adult decades have passed since the _Memoirs of
+Martinus Scriblerus_, planned by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit
+and actual satire upon science; since a medical pedant—learned, not a
+simpleton—was to be rallied for relying upon dreams and certain
+prescriptions of Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires since
+Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the copyist.) It is the effect
+of the twenty poor decades that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of
+time. To unpack these years is somewhat like the unloading of a ripe
+bulrush, or of some other lately-closed house of seeds in autumn,
+whereof the wings were bound until they opened with a spring, never to
+close again; and the air is filled with the released burden of the
+slender rod.
+
+Not because of the flight of time, then, is this solitude of brilliant
+sky, broad grass, and trees tossed by the summer wind, a place of
+interest; nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too easily
+forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a _Tristram Shandy_ purged (or _à peu
+près_), but the stealthy offence is so constant in Sterne’s intention
+that something like his own ignoble agility might be necessary for one
+who would at every point evade it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or
+so (apt action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy), and he
+seems to have done the work as well as an honest man ought to hope to be
+able to do it. Of that no honest man can be precisely apprised—it would
+need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for those who intend to read
+_Tristram Shandy_, or to read it again, Henry Morley’s (in the Universal
+Library Series) is an edition to be welcomed; to lose one page in ten is
+to lose nothing essential to the masterpiece.
+
+What moves curiosity here is the question why this bullying headstone
+should have been erected at the will of two anonymous ‘Brother Masons’,
+inconsequently so called in their own inscription, inasmuch as Sterne
+was not of their craft. Here are the couplets, turned with the metrical
+ability of that day, and making slovenly thinking to move with
+precision. After announcing that in that place ‘lyes the body of the
+Reverend Laurence Sterne, A.M.’—‘Ah! molliter ossa quiescant!’—the lines
+run thus:
+
+            If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane,
+            Unsully’d worth, and soul without a stain;
+            If mental powers could ever justly claim
+            The well-won tribute of immortal fame;
+            Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride
+            Mow’d down luxuriant follies far and wide.
+            Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind,
+            Unseal’d to him the springs that move the mind;
+            What did it boot him? Ridicul’d, abus’d,
+            By fools insulted and by prudes accus’d.
+            In his, mild reader, view thy future fate:
+            Like him, despise what ’twere a sin to hate.
+
+The confusion of images and of purposes in this composition needs no
+exposing. Its coherence is nevertheless invested with that virtue of
+propriety which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extraordinary
+gain of all its secondary literature, and of the less than secondary.
+Dignity is too lofty a name for a quality so inessential; but it must be
+owned that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning powers of the same
+order, and so angry as these two seem to have been, would to-day, or in
+any other day than that, have turned their verse with less
+self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with a single flourish that
+never delighted any human eye, classical and paltry at once, is the
+characteristic funereal stone that bears the lines.
+
+Modern philanthropy—perhaps that of the mild reader himself so
+inconsequently threatened in the verse—has changed the old burial-ground
+into a place of recreation absolutely unnecessary in a road that has
+Hyde Park on the other side of its railings. The mild reader has
+levelled the grass and cleared all the tombstones—Sterne’s and one or
+two more excepted—from the wide square, ranging them against the four
+walls, two deep. The names will be but a little the later forgotten. One
+poor little name, because of the primness of the title, remains in the
+mind—that of ‘Miss Susannah Headlam, who departed this life March the
+6th, 1819, aged three years’.
+
+No one comes to the superfluous pleasure-ground. Under the beautiful
+plane-trees flocks of sparrows alight with the leaves of a crisp, dry
+London autumn having a sun of summer, and the cats look at them, knowing
+there is no cover to spring from. Cover or no cover, on the impulse, a
+happy dog would hunt these flocks at random; the cat contains the
+passion of his wish as he strolls. He makes no crouch or spring, except,
+now and then, upon some minute moth which he afterwards eats with much
+ado and working of the jaws.
+
+At the entrance stands the Chapel of Rest with the frescoes offered by
+Shields to the meditation of whomsoever will pause to take advantage of
+the quiet hour; and hither, in fact, come a very few Londoners, out of
+the noise.
+
+
+
+
+                          A CORRUPT FOLLOWING
+
+
+During the whole nineteenth century our language underwent a certain
+derogation, notorious, different in kind from the corruptions of all
+other ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the
+architecture of stations—and apparently of yesterday, and to-day, and of
+a morrow seen in rather dull and discouraging prospect. But the truth is
+that this common speech is due to the enormous influence of a great
+author who was born in 1737, was for forty-seven years the contemporary
+of Dr. Johnson, and died well within the eighteenth century.
+
+Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect’ for a conjecture referring
+to the past? It is Gibbon’s: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs were not
+expelled from the palace.’ What is the ‘and which’, ‘and who’ of the
+slovenly? and what the ‘whose’ applied to inanimate things by authors
+too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof’? Gear of Gibbon’s style,
+both: ‘Below the citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with precious
+stones, and whose value might be esteemed,’ &c.; and ‘A Menapian of the
+meanest origin, but who had long signalized his skill as a pilot’. There
+is, it is true, the inanimate ‘whose’ of a more illustrious and older
+author, but that claims the excuse of metre.
+
+Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vulgarism, ‘so much per month’,
+instead of ‘so much a month’, or ‘per mensem’? From Gibbon. ‘And coal
+will be by the sack or per the scuttle,’ said a seaside landlady, in
+some one’s observant ear. In her innocence she would not have said it
+but for Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that cannot give
+the word ‘same’ its proper completion, but saddles it with a relative
+pronoun? Gibbon’s: ‘The Western countries were civilized by the same
+hands which subdued them.’ ‘The hands which subdued them’ would be
+correct, and certainly more majestic.
+
+Gibbon set the example of this common lax grammar: ‘Instead of receiving
+with manly resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing cries and
+entreaties disgraced the last moments of his life’; and ‘The election of
+Carus was decided without expecting the approval of the Senate’; and ‘A
+peasant and a soldier, his nerves yielded not easily to the impressions
+of sympathy’. And there is nothing that (Gibbon always says ‘which’)
+illiterate politeness is so fond of as this unconstructed and decorated
+phrase. Gibbon’s literature was scholarly, and these errors of his alter
+little or nothing of the honour due to his eminent elegance of style.
+But it was these laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it
+was the ‘corrupt following’ of this apostle that set the fashion of an
+animated strut of style—a strut that was animated in its day and soon
+grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon never does. His own
+narrative never fails to reply to a perpetual stimulation.
+
+But to deal with the rest of the grammatical ill-example, left to
+unlucky generations from the very middle of the century of propriety,
+and made so much our own. It is very modern to have ‘either’ or
+‘neither’ followed by more than two things, and it is pure Gibbon; all
+the more conspicuous as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of three: ‘The
+policy of the senate, the active emulation of the consuls, and the
+martial enthusiasm of the people’; ‘The undertaking became more
+difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious.’
+But the three go ill with ‘either’: ‘either food, plunder, or glory;’
+‘either salt, or oil, or wood’. ‘The generals were either respected by
+their troops, or admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and
+generosity.’
+
+Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what is more modern and
+current and popular than this: ‘Magnus, with four thousand of his
+supposed accomplices, were put to death’? And even this is Gibbon.
+
+To have done with mere grammar, there is surely no author in the history
+of our literature who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon an
+admiring people. He changed a hundred years of English prose. The dregs
+of his style have encumbered the nation. Changes that have been ascribed
+to Johnson were his doing and not Johnson’s.
+
+He belonged to the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth century
+belonged to him, because he possessed it. That is why he and his English
+are thus modern; the times became conformed to him; and he was himself
+not his own age, but that which succeeded and admired him.
+
+It was to the broad face of astonishment, and with the self-conscious
+face of novelty, that Gibbon addressed his prose. That shortened
+sentence (for it was he who shortened the sentence, and Macaulay did but
+imitate his full stops for the pauses of historical surprise) was to
+strike and to demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly renewed.
+‘Suspicion was equivalent to proof. Trial to condemnation.’ ‘The strict
+economy of Vespasian was the source of his magnificence. The works of
+Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.’ His, too, is the full ceremony of
+the ushering phrase: ‘It is easier to deplore the fate, than to describe
+the actual condition, of Corsica.’ His, too, the ‘the latter and the
+former’, which became a favourite fashion. ‘Oh, do not condemn me to the
+latter!’ exclaims a lover in one of Mrs. Inchbald’s stories, after a
+statement of his hopes and fears; and this phrase of emotion was a debt
+to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady does not condemn him to the
+latter; she permits some prospect of the former. ‘Peruse’ is Gibbon’s
+verb, and ‘extensive’ a favourite adjective. To him we owe ‘the mask of
+hypocrisy’ and ‘the voice of flattery’. It is not his fault that
+posterity divided this property so lavishly among themselves.
+
+And yet is there no fault in his own frigid prodigality? Take this
+sentence in all its splendour: ‘The Tyber rolled at the foot of the
+seven hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the Latins, and the
+Volsci, from that river to the frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of
+her infant victories.’ And this: ‘A distant hope, the child of a
+flattering prophecy.’ This all-inhuman image reminds us, by contrast, of
+Shelley, who often has this figure of a child, and never, however remote
+the thought, without a sense of childhood. So cold is Gibbon that when
+the incessant stimulation of his rhetorical intention spurs him to
+describe a murder thus: ‘A thousand swords were plunged at once into the
+bosom of the unfortunate Probus,’ we are moved to tell him trivially
+that he exaggerates. When Burke said ‘A thousand swords’ he meant a
+thousand, and had a right to mean them, but Gibbon did not, obviously,
+mean a thousand.
+
+‘The unfortunate Probus’ is the model of a sentence that sometimes
+becomes monotonous even with the carefully various Gibbon: ‘The prudent
+Atticus’ begins a phrase, and ‘the equitable Nerva’ passes it on to ‘the
+cautious Athenian’, and then again to ‘the generous Atticus’. His is a
+frigidity that deals broadly with massacre and the sack of cities. And
+from amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless viewed from
+afar, he suddenly plucks us this man’s ‘smile’, or that man’s ‘blush’.
+Whatever Gibbon’s race, there never was a writer so exceedingly Latin in
+spirit.
+
+‘To view’, by the way, is one of his favourite verbs: ‘Viewing with a
+smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar ... and
+sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition,
+they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.’
+Readers with a sense of humour may remember under what conditions
+Zenobia ‘reiterated the experiment’; and the fatal manner in which the
+tradesman’s circular of to-day has ‘diffused’ (as Gibbon would say) the
+last ruins of his prose by post, is rather curiously illustrated thus: a
+little while ago some infamous face-wash was described in advertisements
+as a mixture of drugs brought across the desert by fleet dromedaries.
+And here is Gibbon’s Zenobia ‘mounting her fleetest dromedary’.
+
+How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the nobler habits of his
+language: ‘The veteran legions of the Rhine and the Danube.’ What
+armies! what time! what space! what war! ‘Give back my legions, Varus!’
+Give back our legions, Gibbon! We may count our regiments, but thou hast
+named, not counted, multitudes.
+
+And when Gibbon ‘gratifies’ these legionaries, the polite word does but
+make them more historical: ‘After suppressing a competitor who had
+assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the
+plunder of the rebellious city.’ So that we do not forgive the
+corrupters who so scattered the word that burlesque was necessary for
+sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber confesses his ‘gratifying
+emotions of no common description’, Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon.
+
+Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and of Johnson in the nearer,
+past, was the first writer of pure prose—the first by a long tale of
+years—to reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils of Gibbon; yet
+even he has one little patch of them: ‘A steep bank of earth that has
+been at all exposed to the weather contains in it ... features capable
+of giving high gratification to a careful observer.’ It is solitary in
+_Modern Painters_; it is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon.
+
+But now I spoke of burlesque; and Dickens’s burlesque of style is
+admirable; there is also a burlesque of another and more innocent kind:
+when the author of a recent English work on the _Divine Comedy_ says
+that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante ‘such alleviation as
+circumstances would allow’, that also is a distant, a shattered Gibbon,
+a drift of Gibbon.
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD
+
+
+Miss Anna Seward should not be made answerable for the poetry of the
+late eighteenth century but that no office or responsibility could be
+conferred upon a more willing recipient; the honour is hardly more than
+she demanded from the respect of the age to come; and when she
+bequeathed her works to this great man for editing, her letters to that,
+and her name to posterity, she would have heard with the satisfaction of
+her conscious hopes, rather than with elation or surprise, that another
+century would charge her with all the accumulated opinions of 1799.
+
+It is Mr. Lucas’s witty commentary[1] that recalls the name of Anna
+Seward and her claim to speak for those days—the time between two ages.
+I have no intention whatever to write of her with irony. Neither has Mr.
+Lucas yielded to the obvious temptation. There is something worthy of no
+slight respect in the justified security of her representative attitude.
+To deride her would be to deride that age, almost the latest that had
+full confidence, that took its historic place absolutely, without
+reluctance, suffered no misgiving, and did not disturb the order and
+course of history.
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  _A Swan and her Friends._
+
+The centuries before our own have resembled a river whereof the
+direction is known, for it is still far from the tidal regions of its
+journey; so was the course of things in 1799; but in another fifty years
+the stream of the modern age had, as it were, begun to feel the tides.
+Waves have set in towards the head of the waters, or they double the
+current of the ebb. Waters breast waters, and travel against the journey
+of the stream, making brief excursions foot to foot with Time. Or there
+is a swing that sends the river turning with the tide, outstripping the
+pace of the natural pilgrimage.
+
+So was the mind of the nineteenth century lifted and cradled, in
+suspense like the pause of a vehement heart; so did it tend to the past
+and set to the future, a tidal flux and influx that flew from the end,
+flowed from the goal, filled and brimmed upper reaches, revisited
+pastures of yesterday with eager waves, or ebbed with a run and made
+haste to leave them twice.
+
+If this, then, was the tidal surge of the stream of letters and the
+arts, the end of the eighteenth century was almost the last date before
+the tides began to be perceptible. Almost—for perhaps the days when
+Walter Savage Landor was seriously discussing the merits of a poem by
+Miss Chose upon the Queen were really the last of the stream above
+tides. It may be that the perturbing shock first interrupted the onward
+flowing just after him. Smooth days, those—there were no doubts as to
+the way of the wave, and no need to watch the hour in order to know
+whether backward or forward its course was shaped. A stream is a stately
+stream above the tidal influence. And in Miss Anna Seward’s years the
+historic river of the mind was unchecked: it glided.
+
+I think there never was a day of more orderly confidence. The ‘taste’,
+the laws, that had come to pass were the only laws and the only taste
+that were timely or possible. From the later Milton to Dryden, from
+Dryden to Addison, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Cowper, Crabbe—the way is a way
+that has no turning. We mark it with some mingled feelings, but surprise
+is not one of them. It is much the same in the matter of town
+architecture. The brick box that came to pass in the building of London
+streets, in the course of the same age, followed the time of dignity,
+beauty, and fancy which was Wren’s, and all the degrees thereto were in
+a kind of order. Doubtless, this is why we have learnt, in the
+fluttering centre of a renewed architectural town, to look with some
+degree of esteem upon the black brick box, if only it be truly of that
+time. And this not because it has a quiet civic majesty of approach to
+its door _à deux battants_, and passages and rooms proportionate within,
+but because that very exterior, which was the negation of architecture,
+was the last truly punctual style of building. And before its day they
+might be classical, but they were classical in a manner that was of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an intense spirit of the
+time. Perhaps the clearest sign of the times before the beating tides is
+this—their secure self-confidence; for they never doubted that their
+taste was the best and their criticism the result of accumulated
+judgement. Nay, in the dregs of times—in 1840—they had faith in their
+romances, Italian landscape, steel engraving, portraits with large eyes,
+in a word, in their ‘finish’ (the word is ominous); and because of their
+good faith we may deride even these with good humour.
+
+Now, Miss Seward has an incontestable right to speak in the name of her
+contemporaries. There is hardly any one else who had all her good faith
+and solemnity. But first let me pause upon the title given to her with
+so much dullness and elegance—the Swan of Lichfield. The Swan of Avon
+had at least a river; he was never the Swan of Stratford-on-Avon. But
+with all respect to the poet who devised the name for Shakespeare, we
+may hold that it was not well inspired to suit a poet who sang in his
+middle days and was silent some time before he died. Let this, however,
+pass as the perversity of a phrase not without charm. It is the
+perversity, perhaps, that has made the name so dear and a household
+word. But at any rate a Swan of Avon could swim, he was not placed on a
+high road, or in a street, or within the precincts of a cathedral close.
+The Swan of Lichfield must have been named with an agreeable intention
+to confer a sweet dignity, and something of that faded dignity remains.
+The episcopal palace was her home, and she was called a Swan when she
+was in full career; they did not wait for a swan-song.
+
+So close was she to the first beginnings of the tides that she blundered
+when she left much of her poetry to Sir Walter Scott, not doubting his
+willingness to serve her as editor. He did the work, with some
+considerable excisions, and gave the volumes to the world, but in an
+‘aside’ he has called her poems execrable. So that she was all too
+confident of the immediate future. Dying early in the nineteenth
+century, she continued a little too long the assurance of the
+eighteenth; that was her sole fault. In regard to her own day she had
+none.
+
+It seems even that ‘execrable’ is an unjust word. Miss Seward did not
+attempt to describe a moonlight night without forgoing her bed to match
+it with a phrase. Her sincerity is not without its literary value, for
+it succeeds in a measure; if not fully communicated, it is suggested,
+and this is no small thing. Moreover, there is a poetic thought—an
+implicit thought, an inclusion—in her sonnet on ‘December Morning’:
+
+                                   ... Then to decree
+             The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold
+             To friendship or the Muse.
+
+This surely is not without subtlety; nor is the final line, in which the
+reader and student is said to fill his days so full that though he be
+not old he ‘outlives the old’. A poet capable of this sense of present
+time (for here is no mere commonplace as to future influence or literary
+immortality; she means that the outliving is present)—a poet who had
+this thought might have been a fine poet; she used her intellect, and
+that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but
+poetry and song.
+
+This is so high a specimen that I will quote no more. Over Miss Seward’s
+criticism it would be but too easy to make merry. ‘For the magnificent,’
+she says of her century, ‘we have Akenside, Thomson, Collins, Dr.
+Johnson, Mason, Gray, Chatterton, Darwin, and the sublime Joanna
+Baillie; in the _simpler_ style, Shenstone, Beattie, Cowper, Crowe,
+Bowles, Burns, Bloomfield, Walter Scott and his school; Coleridge,
+Southey, and _their_ school. Poetry can have no nobler models than these
+supply to her various styles.’ She must have read the ‘Ancient Mariner’;
+she names Coleridge with Southey!
+
+She had the eighteenth-century love for something that was _not_ purity
+of style. I think that the critics of our own day have hardly perceived
+the violence of an age that wrote ‘taught the doubtful battle where to
+rage’; ‘red Arbela’; ‘gory horrors crowned each dreadful day’; ‘the
+madding crowd’; ‘maddened o’er the land’; and a thousand other things in
+tatters. Miss Seward rebuked a writer for stealing ‘gulphy’ from Pope.
+‘Gulphy’, she thought, was too good to steal. ‘He stole the picturesque
+epithet “gulphy” from Pope’:
+
+               And gulphy Xanthus foams along the field.
+
+‘Than which a more poetic line,’ she decides, ‘was _never_ written.’
+
+
+
+
+                             JOANNA BAILLIE
+
+
+Would Joanna Baillie’s _Plays on the Passions_ have been so shunned by
+later generations and then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary
+Histories had remembered to mention the ‘Comedies on the Passions’ as
+well as the ‘Tragedies’? For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan of
+dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular completeness, wrote also a
+comedy; and one at least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so
+busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the limits of
+eighteenth-century wit, that a modern manager might surely do worse than
+try his luck with it.
+
+If any man should desire to possess the full intention of Joanna Baillie
+in her undertaking, in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it in
+a great many pages of most explicit introduction, with her own decisions
+on all such controversies as those touching the individual and the type,
+in tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such matters. But her few
+readers are, perhaps, content to take as read this treatise, with its
+good sense and its very small charm. She knows well what she is about,
+this at any rate is certain: and when she addresses herself with a most
+simple sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation of Hatred,
+Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her good faith and gravity, and the
+admirable manner in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly quiet
+the reader’s natural resentment and inclination to revolt.
+
+With average good will and a fair readerly spirit, you may take these
+resolute tragedies, with their enormous _parti pris_, as works of no
+despicable art. Joanna Baillie would by no means permit you to slight
+her art. She has a passage in which she disclaims the crude intention of
+setting up the image of a single passion as the whole nature of a man.
+If there were no conflict, she says, there would be no force, for the
+passion would have nothing to compel, to break or bend, within the
+passionate heart. But neither will she allow the units of humankind to
+puzzle us on the tragic stage with their asymmetry of nature. Her
+jealous man has other impulses for jealousy to grapple with, but they
+serve his jealousy so. She will not endure, as she tells us,
+eccentricity.
+
+Add to this manner of planning an eighteenth-century blank verse of the
+second order, and you have the drama which seemed Shakespearian to many.
+
+It is not too much to say that any other drama—Antiquity and Shakespeare
+apart—would have had grave reason to be proud of Joanna Baillie. Her
+plays seem to be built up and locked together soundly; they close with a
+conventional but not obtrusive dignity. Knowing the Passion that has
+been the theme, you are apt to turn to the final speech over the hero’s
+long-vexed body, the comment that proclaims an impartial sentence in
+tragic peace, and you find no weaknesses; the silence follows upon no
+manifest failure. Vivacity among the smaller characters, and some of the
+strength of the ages (being the strength of tradition) in the greater,
+leave her tragedies in no mean place; leave them there too literally,
+for few are the readers to put them to any test or question. In their
+day they and the ‘metaphysical preface’, as Mrs. Thrale calls it, were
+the occasion of some sayings hard to our ears. ‘A masculine performance’
+is the expected opinion, duly expressed, but we are not so well prepared
+for Sir Walter Scott’s reply to Lockhart: ‘If you wish to speak of a
+real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest genius of our country.’
+
+It is the comedy following the tragedy of ‘Basil’ that takes my fancy.
+Love seems to be the passion in hand, and Joanna Baillie makes such
+pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme (her hero keeping the fine
+sensibilities, expressed with impassioned elegance, of Steele’s
+_Conscious Lovers_) that it is not easy to realize that she passed the
+middle of the nineteenth century, albeit in extreme old age. Of the
+preceding tragedy I will say merely that one may detect in it a fancy of
+Antiquity, as the eighteenth century dressed it, which is wonderfully
+pleasing: a little boy, Mirando, vexes the capricious heroine by naming
+her lovers; he creeps into her arms and begins to trouble her free
+heart, making guesses for sugar-plums. The reader likes to think that by
+a candid allegory, fit for Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of a
+gold-headed boy and a brown-eyed maid, Miss Joanna Baillie had given the
+name of Mirando to none other than Love himself, Cupid the bee.
+
+But to the comedy. It is called ‘The Trial’, and turns upon the device,
+since repeated, perhaps, more than once, of shuffling a couple of
+heroines, so that she who is the heiress may disguise herself in the
+dresses of her penniless cousin, and receive impertinences, suffer
+neglect, and also test the true heart proffered in intention to her as a
+girl without wealth. It is the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls
+bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp) that makes the charm of
+this happy play. They exchange names upon the wildest impulse consistent
+with their Georgian manners. They are audacious and decorous; confess
+their quest, which is for a ‘sensible lover’; busy themselves therein,
+make inquiries, hide behind screens, plot together the exposure of the
+fortune-hunter, acknowledge the full value of their own beauty, and this
+with a propriety all of its own time.
+
+Agnes has the better wit as well as the gold, but the lesser beauty. She
+it is who lays the plot, and persuades the uncle, when he would fall out
+with her and her cousin, to second their game. He would not, he avers,
+make a holiday mummery for their pleasure, and his wig is too old for a
+ball. ‘Nay, don’t lay the fault upon the wig, good sir, for it is as
+youthful and as sly, and as saucy-looking as the best head of hair in
+the county. As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much
+curmudgeon-like austerity about it that young people fled before it, as,
+I daresay, the birds do now.’ As for the unlucky ‘fops’—the fops whom
+Joanna Baillie brings forward and overthrows in incredible effigy, after
+the fashion of the other satirists—Agnes, or, rather, her cousin
+Mariane, is troubled by many. Each one is mimicked in the dressing-room
+dialogues of these two enterprising rogues, and the appropriate
+humiliation is prepared for each with all precision. ‘Such a man must be
+laughed at, not scorned; contempt must be his portion.’ Mariane falls
+in: ‘He shall have it then. And as for his admirer and imitator ... any
+kind of bad treatment, I suppose, that happens to come into my head will
+be good enough for him.’ This last is pretty wit. So is this gipsy’s
+reply to her uncle’s reproof in regard to her dealings with yet another:
+‘He would not let me have time to give a civil denial, but ran on
+planning settlements.... I could just get in my word with a flat refusal
+as he was about to provide for our descendants to the third
+generation.... He is only angry that he can’t take the law of me for
+laughing at him.’
+
+Even when you hear of the ‘genteel young man, with dark grey eyes, and a
+sensible countenance’, and are at once aware that it is indeed _he_,
+this charming Agnes is hard to capture. As he walks backwards before her
+with a play of homage (for he too can be light) she mocks him with her
+dance, and dances him up the stage and out at the door. And if there
+were any living actress who had the eighteenth-century propriety it
+would be pretty to see her do it. The eighteenth-century baggages! They
+called their admirers by their surnames _tout court_, and their breeding
+was admirable.
+
+Hardly less pleasant is the comedy on ‘Hatred’, in which a candidate for
+a parliamentary election hears good news about his detested rival: ‘Art
+thou sure that they laughed at him? In his own inn and over his own
+liquor? Ha, ha! ungrateful merry varlets!’
+
+She, who had this humour, to be called ‘the highest genius in our
+country’, and to be so taken up with ‘the passions of human kind’! One
+of the eulogists of her tragic power calls her ‘undeviating’; yet she
+deviated delightfully.
+
+
+
+
+                          THE CLASSIC NOVELIST
+
+
+Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without a deliberate chapter—generally
+a family chapter. A masterly consciousness of her own authority gives
+her the right of control over her reader’s impatience or slovenliness.
+The order of things is hers, not his, and he must wait her time for wit.
+Hers are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls ‘measures of
+address’. Her openings imply a firmer hold upon narrative than later
+novelists, with their verbless first sentences, their ‘he’ and ‘she’ for
+persons to be named later, thought to grasp at. The moderns would be
+much depressed were they required to open thus: ‘The family of Dashwood
+had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their
+residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where,
+for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to
+engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.’ We
+consent to read the dismal opening; we endure the pother of the
+unmusical words; we tolerate it all because we know that in a page or
+two the respectable Dashwoods will be deprived of some of the general
+good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We know that Miss Austen
+will make of her personages good sport for her reader, her sense of
+derision being equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines.
+For another example, would any later author, having a Mrs. Bennet to
+deride for our delight, consent to introduce her thus: ‘Mrs. Bennet was
+a woman of mean understanding’? But in this case Miss Austen’s art loses
+nothing, even by the chill of that presentation.
+
+That Jane works upon very small matters is hardly worth saying, and
+certainly not worth complaining of. Things are not trivial merely
+because they are small; but that which makes life, art, and work trivial
+is a triviality of relations. Mankind lives by vital relations; and if
+these are mean, so is the life, so is the art that expresses them
+because it can express no more. With Miss Austen love, vengeance,
+devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice, are infinitely trivial. There is
+also a constant relation of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people in
+her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen seem to be watching
+them, and her curiosity is intense indeed; she realizes their colds—her
+female characters take a great many colds—so that one seems to hear her
+narrate the matter in a muffled voice, but not precisely because of her
+sympathy. That such close observation can work on without tenderness
+must be a proof of this author’s exceeding cynicism.
+
+Triviality of relations among Miss Austen’s personages does not prevent
+a certain kind of intensity. Lying and spite among her women work at
+close quarters. With the men we hear of a somewhat wider range; there
+is, in the case of one justly rejected suitor, a suspicion, a rumour of
+‘Sunday travelling’; the accusation is not precisely brought home.
+
+No one who has not read _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Emma_ is able to say
+that he knows worldliness in its own proper home. There, ‘engaging the
+general good opinion of surrounding acquaintance’ (the mouthful of thick
+words!) worldliness keeps its dowdy and hopeless state and ceremony.
+There is, in almost every second page of Miss Austen, a detestable thing
+called, in the language of the day, ‘consequence’. No slang of our own
+time, by the way, has ever misused a word more foolishly. To
+‘consequence’, and to the heroine’s love of it, is promptly sacrificed
+all that might have seemed the beginnings or suggestions of
+spirituality. There is more that is spiritual in the heroines of
+to-day—in the ‘female animal’ herself—than in Anne, in Harriet, in Jane,
+in Fanny, or in any other of the young women who gossip through the
+pages of these famous novels. The men gossip, too; they are minutely
+occupied with the engagements, colds, arrowroot, tea-parties, and
+correspondence of the women.
+
+All this, it may be said, relates to Miss Austen’s subjects and not to
+her perfect art. But Miss Austen’s art and her matter are made for one
+another. Miss Austen’s art is not of the highest quality; it is of an
+admirable secondary quality. Her gentle spinsterly manner prevents us
+from perceiving at first how much of her derision—for she is mistress of
+derision rather than of wit or humour—is caricature of a rather gross
+sort. ‘Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea with all the
+philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving
+her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every
+day.’ Far finer is Miss Austen’s success when she gains her effect by
+delicate persistence in reiteration. This is the way in which she enjoys
+Mr. Woodhouse, the old gentleman in whose eyes every woman who has had
+the good luck to marry out of his tedious house is a ‘poor dear’. His
+compassion makes excellent sport, of a kind, by the effect of
+cumulation. The author’s patience and vigilance are, indeed, perfect,
+insomuch as they never neglect or fail to perceive an opportunity for
+giving the turn to his phrase, the tone to his word. And the whole thing
+would advance, by the slow degrees of this method, and close in a little
+masterpiece, but that something of the fineness, as well as something of
+the increase, of the result is now and then marred by Miss Austen’s own
+explanation. She prepares her reader deliberately; she instructs him at
+the outset in what he would have become convinced of at the end.
+
+Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. ‘Who could tell’—Miss
+Austen is presenting the thoughts of Mrs. John Dashwood in regard to her
+unwelcome sisters-in-law—‘that they might not expect to go out with her
+a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always
+be hers. But that was not enough.’ About the following little sentence
+there is something of the wit of surprise. It describes the joys of a
+young woman of the less admirable sort, lately married: ‘They passed
+some months in great happiness at Dawlish; for she had many relations
+and old acquaintances to cut.’ Miss Austen has a word in dismissing the
+inconstant Mr. Willoughby: ‘His wife was not always out of humour; and
+in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found
+no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.’
+
+The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest in Miss Austen’s
+indifference to children. They hardly appear in her stories except to
+illustrate the folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as
+children; they are her subjects as spoilt children, and as children
+through whom a mother may receive flattery from her designing
+acquaintance, and may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. The
+novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little girl of three. She
+sharpens her pen over the work. The passage is too long to quote, but
+the reader may refer to _Sense and Sensibility_. In this coldness or
+dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.
+
+Most dully expressive are Miss Austen’s country houses. One description
+places her people in a few words in the scene that suits them with a
+quite subtle suitableness; and the thing is presented in words which,
+here again, by their very lack of music define mediocrity: ‘Cleveland
+was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. The
+pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and, like every other place
+of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer
+wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding round a plantation, led to
+the front.’ There, there in the modern-built mansion was the goal of the
+hopes of heroines. To the shrubbery they betook themselves, in a ‘hurry
+of spirits’, or other limited forms of emotion that might make them wish
+to escape remark. In and out pottered the men—the men of the period, the
+men of so strange a sex. In the tolerably extensive grounds walked
+‘consequence’, and its wheels marked the smooth gravel that wound round
+the plantation.
+
+Before quitting the noble subject of ‘consequence’ let it be noted that
+Emma had the following hesitation about a youth she was inclined to
+admire (Emma was not twenty-one): ‘Of pride, indeed, there was perhaps
+scarcely enough; his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too
+much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, however, of the evil
+he was holding cheap.’ It is an unheavenly world.
+
+
+
+
+                          A HUNDRED YEARS AGO
+
+
+An old book called _The Mirror of the Months_, published anonymously in
+1826, seemed, at a glance, to a random reader, to contain little thin
+springs of thoughts that walked the world in volume and dignity fifty
+years later. There was nothing else to hint that the book was the work
+of the father of a poet, but the father of one among all poets was
+manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader found it attributed,
+in a bookseller’s catalogue, to P. G. Patmore.
+
+The earliest or the directest spring is called the source of a river;
+but we know not how far apart and on what scattered watersheds rose the
+tributary waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning and
+gathering stream, and charged it with rains of the four courts of
+heaven. It need not dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be
+something so slight as—for example—a passage on the month of February in
+_The Mirror of the Months_ (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode
+on ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ of Coventry Patmore was the ultimate
+fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant to find a small thought, lying
+cold in a minor mind, to be the certain beginning of a great thought in
+an illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet insignificant origin
+of what we love is more surprising than would be a stranger beginning.
+Perhaps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we had been too ready to
+believe that what is original is strong, and what is original is warm.
+It was easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming more
+composed, of a passion gradually losing light and flame, than of this
+increase, kindling, and quickening. It is because the small source of
+‘St. Valentine’s Day’ is really authentic that its inadequacy does
+little less than startle us. At any rate the incident is one that may
+instruct us in the history of that second step which is momentous in
+intellectual things.
+
+Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of heredity seem thereby to gain in
+mystery; and some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all
+undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who
+can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding
+inconceivable things to his meditation? And, in like manner, the bond of
+fathers and sons seems to become somewhat more intelligible if we add to
+the comparatively easy thought of the responsibility of a father for the
+mind of a child some confession of the retrospective answer to be
+exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the child is the fulfilment of
+what was but prophesied in the father, whom the son at last justifies.
+
+In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly. _The Mirror of the
+Months_ would evidently have been graver, fresher, and more frank, in
+thought and in English alike, but for the example of the excessive
+amiability that makes Leigh Hunt’s poem of _Rimini_, among others,
+ridiculous. It was a mere fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult
+to imagine that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better simplicity than
+the simplicity of the universal literary smile he practised in his
+books. There is something that does but ape the humane, the liberal, the
+gracious. It is an early nineteenth-century attempt at the favour and
+prettiness of the Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the
+Elizabethan ‘horrors’.
+
+Yet without ‘horrors’, without a real murder among the dances, without
+royal madness embowered, and noble distraction wearing flowers, without
+the wild convention, without the noble spirit, wilder than nature—a
+barbaric artifice outfacing nature—what were the Elizabethan favour and
+prettiness worth? Nay, they would never have been there but to adorn
+frightful deeds. The men of a hundred years ago took one part and left
+the other, and were delighted in the civilized choice they had the
+grace—as they held it—to make, in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal
+approval, of the great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not being
+fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read _Rimini_ until a year or two ago, and
+now already the most conspicuous memory I have of the story of that poem
+is the memory of an incidental picnic.
+
+It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may have exaggerated the
+cause of its own derision—and that the event sung in the canto in
+question may have been some modification of a picnic; as it were a
+mitigated picnic; I have not the poem for reference. Nevertheless, there
+stands a picnic of some sort—a contribution of the English man of
+letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the antecedents of
+Dante’s Hell.
+
+A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the trees, are there. I
+am quite certain, at any rate, that the place chosen therefor is called
+by Leigh Hunt, in so many words, ‘a rural spot’.
+
+A far greater man than Leigh Hunt—nay, there is no common measure of
+comparison—has, by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment of our
+literary history, also made the same Francesca da Rimini the subject of
+some entirely nineteenth-century feeling. I speak of Walter Savage
+Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the _Imaginary Conversations_
+(the _Pentameron_). What he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with
+genius; but—one must have the courage to say so—in error as complete as
+the little writer’s. The reader may be reminded of that tender page
+about Francesca: ‘She stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her:
+he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says,
+“Galeotto is the name of the book,” fancying by this timorous little
+flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves.
+No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her.
+“Galeotto is the name of the book.” “What matters that?” “And of the
+writer.” “Or that either?” At last she disarms him; but how? “_That_ day
+we read no more.” Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such a delicacy
+of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius.’ And this
+judgement, for greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of Boccaccio,
+because he loved him, and intended that he should speak from Landor’s
+heart; and so, indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not ours,
+and there is no possible exchange of hearts. Are we candid if we
+persuade ourselves to find these pauses in the speech of Francesca? I
+protest that I read the line in one cold breath of almost indifferent
+anger. ‘The name of the book’, as Landor has it, is not in Dante at all.
+‘A pander was that book, and the writer thereof,’ is simply what the
+Francesca of Dante says.[2]
+
+Footnote 2:
+
+  Francesca calls the book a Galeotto and him who wrote it a Galeotto,
+  because ‘Galeotto’ was then the synonym for ‘pander’. Galeotto
+  (Gallehault) was he who brought Lancilotto and Ginevra to their first
+  sin, according to the _Tavola Rotonda_, a romance popular in
+  Francesca’s time. Dante had none of the pretty and complex meanings
+  imputed to him by Landor. Dante, the insistent moralist, simply
+  intended a simple warning against dangerous reading; he was in this
+  obedient to a Bull (in 1313) whereby the Pope condemned _La Tavola
+  Rotonda_—one of the earliest books to be thus banned.
+
+To come back to _The Mirror of the Months_. This is a volume so full of
+charm that it is something less than just to reproach it so hastily with
+Leigh Hunt’s universal literary smile. Something of that it has, indeed,
+but it has also the smile of spirit and that of sweetness. Of two wits
+of yesterday two phrases, for example, are familiar in admiring
+quotation: ‘The age of indiscretion’, and ‘Yes, nature is creeping up’,
+or, in another form, ‘Not like his portrait? He _will_ be like it.’
+Every one recognizes the phrases so well that there is perhaps not a
+reader in England who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now ‘the
+age of indiscretion’ is in _The Mirror of the Months_, where it got no
+fame, or little; and ‘Nature is creeping up’ is fairly anticipated in
+the passage: ‘Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water, and
+stand half the day there stock still, in exact imitation of Cuyp’s
+pictures.’ Take this description of the parent birds’ business of
+bringing out their young broods and dismissing them, ‘while they (the
+parents) proceed in their periodical duty of providing new flocks of the
+same kind of “fugitive pieces”, as regularly as the editors of a
+magazine.’ And this for a mere laugh: ‘The only specific reason why I
+object to March is that she drives hares mad; which is a great fault.’
+
+Moreover, the procession and recession of the year is here noted in the
+garden and in the open field of England by senses full of spirit. The
+separate and atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other grain is
+well expressed in the phrase where the oats are said to hang ‘like
+raindrops in the air’. And the author has eyes for the scarcely
+perceptible and most slender growth that in July pricks through the
+short and level turf and makes the grassy downs live in the winds, as
+poplars make the woods. ‘April’, says this forgotten writer, ‘is worth
+two Mays, because it tells of May’—a subtlety somewhat like that of his
+son’s minor fancies.
+
+And finally another small spring of the poetry to come in the following
+generation is in the mere phrase ‘The pomp of health and the lustre of
+loveliness’. Coventry Patmore, with the poet’s finer verbal art, had
+afterwards
+
+                     So much simplicity of mind
+                     In such a pomp of loveliness.
+
+
+
+
+                         THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
+
+
+There are some writers whom the judicious reader forgets by name, with
+the express intention of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always
+a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no slight care, and has
+regard to all the distinctive characteristics of the one to be
+forgotten, effacing him with every possible precision, good aim, and
+attention. Others, again, it is more convenient to forget in little
+companies, according to their ‘school’; and there is no great precision
+necessary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, ‘into the brown’,
+for they go close-ranked.
+
+Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be virtually forgotten—and
+there is hardly a doubt as to that—the act has to be a single and
+separate one. And yet this measure of distinction is not quite fairly
+come by. He gains it chiefly because he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the
+early nineteenth century, and so gained a kind of isolation. But
+inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like Keats, and lyrics to be like
+Shelley, he might disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble. He
+was not without talent, and he should have our cordial pity for living
+in a time when the inspiration of English poetry was withdrawn. When—for
+a far longer period—this had befallen before, there had been no one
+living aware of the lapse. When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth
+and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of what had happened, and
+knew all the conditions in which his own life had come to pass. He may
+remind you of a poor rabbit that came to consciousness in the midst of a
+physiological experiment. Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as the
+trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of being an Englishman during a
+pause of poetry that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary
+consciousness. We know the shortness of the time, but if the struggle of
+his dismay was violent, and if he caught at the past—the immediate past
+and the distant—with a frantic gesture, shall we deride him who did not
+know the future that is now our past? The gap hardly shows in our view
+of the mountain range of poets.
+
+If Beddoes thought that he was called upon to live a citizen of an
+England with no present literature, it is not wonderful that he should
+have been a desperate man. It was desperate to be so unwilling to
+confess that Keats would write no more couplets as to make this after
+Keats was dead:
+
+          And none went near; none in his sweep would venture,
+          For you might feel that he was but the centre
+          Of an inspired round, &c.
+
+It is not, perhaps, quite Keats’s rhyme; but the helpless leaning on the
+rhyme, the unbraced couplings, the slipping, the giving way of those two
+poor props of lines ill-built, are all proper to _Endymion_. So are the
+same things in this couplet, where the character of the words chosen for
+rhyming is also, almost subtly, a piece of Keats:
+
+               Thou know’st it not; it is a fearful coop—
+               Dark, cold, and horrible—a blinded loop
+               In Pluto’s, &c.
+
+Here, again, is a passage so full of all the errors of this deplorable
+way of couplet writing that it shall be put upon record here as a final
+warning before it is finally forgotten. The passage begins in the course
+of a line (and therefore after another wretched couplet has fallen down
+just above), and the phrase, quite unable to stop itself, needs two and
+a half more couplets to come before it is precipitated, and reaches a
+stable equilibrium by coming to the bottom:
+
+                                           There sits,
+               Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits
+               Of this rag’s daughter, paper, &c.
+
+Beddoes studied Elizabethan blank verse, and achieved no small measure
+of imitation, if hardly the astonishing success of these unheroic
+couplets. In _The Bride’s Tragedy_ he imitates more than the
+versification. The large passions, removed from the conditions of human
+life and yet closing in that human accident—madness—the playing with
+flowers and prettiness in the horrors of a murder, the curiously aloof
+appeal to the intimate replies of pity and terror; the state, the
+royalty; the barbaric convention, the savage and noble unnaturalness,
+where naturalness would seem to be the looked-for motive, justification,
+crown, and end—for the sake of these Elizabethan characters Beddoes
+wrote his tragedy, and, but for a wavering into sentimentalism (less
+than any of his contemporaries would have shown, no doubt), he would
+have made something wonderfully like his model. But sentimentalism was
+generally a vice of his time from which Beddoes was strangely free. It
+is in his imitation of that inimitable favour and prettiness, and in the
+kind of aristocratic madness of a song, that the mistake comes to
+pass—the mistake of this overwrought decoration for the sentiment that
+is so near and yet so unlike to it. When Hesperus, who has murdered his
+bride and is to die, lies down before his distraught father and covers
+himself with the loose earth, he undoubtedly does an Elizabethan action.
+And when his father, dying of grief, lies down beside him, that too is
+Elizabethan, more Elizabethan still than the other. But when Hesperus
+says:
+
+              But I shall die the better for this meeting,
+
+then, it seems to me, the feeling is modern; and so it is elsewhere.
+Then it seems inconsistent to reproach Beddoes because he is not modern
+enough, and writes of dragons and not of men. But yet, who has not
+acknowledged the effect of Rossetti’s phrase, ‘lidless eyes in hell’?
+That human eyes should ever be lidless—that is Rossetti’s frightful
+thought. Beddoes also has ‘lidless eyes’, but he gives them to a dragon,
+and it matters less than nothing that a dragon should have lidless eyes.
+Coleridge, by the way, had ‘her lidless dragon eyes’.
+
+Neither passion nor sweetness is frequent with Beddoes, but once or
+twice in the course of many lyrics on the subject of death he apprehends
+Shelley’s thought of death, and sometimes there is a Shelley-shyness, an
+escape in the moment of capture, or an alien nestling and murmuring,
+close and strange:
+
+               What hast caught, then? What hast caught?
+               Nothing but a poet’s thought!
+
+There is something more than his customary fancy in his phrase for love,
+‘Bee of hearts’; and in the almost tender song, _Dream-Pedlary_:
+
+                     If there were dreams to sell,
+                       What would you buy?
+                     Some cost a passing bell,
+                       Some a light sigh.
+
+This, too, of a sad romantic story:
+
+                  Like a ruffled nightingale
+                    Balanced upon dewy wings,
+                  Through the palace weeps the tale,
+                    Leaving tears where’er she sings.
+
+This is a strong image in a fragment, _Concealed Joy_:
+
+             Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;
+             But as I looked it sank into his eye,
+             Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
+             Into a darkening hole.
+
+The poetry of madness is, needless to say, one of the peculiar choruses
+of English literature. To the centuries of wild conventions, of
+distracted majesties, of artifice outfacing nature and astonishing the
+untamed heart, to the greatness and the liberty of the English fancy,
+the world owes those musical light discords, from the song of Tom
+o’Bedlam, quoted by Isaac D’Israeli, to the mad song by Aubrey de Vere,
+and the stanzas added to the first-named by Francis Thompson; for he
+seems to be the latest of a long line of English poets to make music for
+the distracted. Beddoes addresses himself to the kind of resolute pathos
+that set all these singers to singing. For the pathos was most resolute;
+however sweetly it sounded at the full, it had cold origins. Imagination
+and simplicity, not passion, made all its virtue. I cannot think that
+Beddoes in _Emily’s Plaint_ has fancy or simplicity fine enough for the
+addition of this song to the heart-broken, heart-released lyrics of
+Ophelia and her sisters.
+
+Beddoes’ lyrics of death are rather German than magical—I feel these
+adjectives to be somewhat antithetical in this connexion; and they call
+him ‘grim’. But he lacked humour. His reference to a place—
+
+                         That’s not genteel to tell,
+                   Where demonesses go to church,
+
+is the best thing I can find in that temper.
+
+
+
+
+                             GEORGE DARLEY
+
+
+It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten poet, his contemporary, the
+name of violence. Being conscious of the brief and unimportant pause of
+poetic inspiration during which they lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of
+dismay wondering whether it were to the sentimental L.E.L. or to the
+violent George Darley that the trust of English poetry should be
+committed. It was, as we now confess with peace of mind, to neither; and
+there is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question—to the
+effect that all is not lost because an interregnum befalls and the crown
+of poetry is visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his twenty
+years or so. The twenty years close up in the natural perspective, and
+the utterance of that anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon
+sounds of more moment.
+
+George Darley’s violence, such as it was, had its way principally in a
+choice of words intended to retrieve the language from the Teutonism
+that began its fashion before he died in the middle of the century. He
+apparently did not hold the English language to be finally closed in,
+and in this he agreed with other and greater men who have used all their
+strength, at times with a single hand, to hold that door open. But
+perhaps Darley was not always careful enough of the difference between
+scholarly Latinisms and those whereof a poet in his haste might not stop
+to test the doubtful scholarship.
+
+Apart, however, from the Latinisms, which are not many, there is with
+Darley a certain delight in quaintness which makes of Teutonic words a
+disagreeable kind of slang. ‘Streamy vales’, for example, is not a
+welcome phrase. Like to this is the prank of writing ‘bittern ooze’. The
+ambiguity makes the words even grotesque; for the poet is writing of a
+marsh; is he then making the word ‘bitter’ more ‘quaint’, or is he
+taking the name of a bird for an adjective? Either way he is trifling.
+But as George Darley died a disappointed man, and as his poetry had
+light and space in it, and there was lacking the perception of these in
+his readers at the time, it is rather his beauties than his faults that
+shall be dealt with here. Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to
+leave on the mind’s eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant
+less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the
+light celestial, and the space remote; though no red, not even red
+veiled by the blond and tender colours of humanity, shines in Darley’s
+verse, there is assuredly no dimness in his gold nor dullness in his
+azure. At the first page of _Nepenthe_ the reader takes a larger and
+more liberal view of the world of the poet before him, reading this line
+on the daytime sun
+
+                    High on his unpavilioned throne.
+
+It is followed, unfortunately, by some commonplaces, but in itself it is
+fine. Less beautiful, but also a felicity for the visionary eye, is the
+phrase, ‘that huge-meadowed plain’. It is, at any rate, a word to sigh
+for in the narrow town and the narrow winter.
+
+George Darley wrote of fairies—a dull subject, let us confess at last;
+and more than half of his drama of _Sylvia, the May-Queen_, is acted by
+fairies and fiends at war. But there are some happy fancies even in the
+prattle of fairy-queens to their courtiers, as where Morgana rallies her
+tender follower:
+
+                                 I’ve seen thee stand
+               Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy.
+
+And again:
+
+                           Thou once didst cherish
+             In thy fond breast a snowdrop dead with cold.
+
+Darley was as resolute an Elizabethan as Beddoes, but while Beddoes
+darkened his skies for the drama of passions graced with trivial flowers
+blooming in an angry light, Darley addressed himself rather to the
+imitation of the humour and the prettiness. He copied the Shakespeare of
+the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and though the critics say that his
+rustics are tedious, it seems to me an unjust judgement. Granted the
+delight that Shakespeare finds in the derision of clowns as they blunder
+with words too long for their fortunes, and it is not fair to say that
+Darley is really a bore. His Andrea in the _May-Queen_ makes no bad
+sport of that kind. Darley has the situation and the quality of the
+laughter from Shakespeare, but the phrase is of his own exceeding
+ingenuity; and when the transformed serving-man meets that dapper elf
+Nephon, there is some very fair success in the frolicking. ‘Where is
+this mighty small-spoken gentleman?’ asks Andrea (unluckily Darley did
+not know that the penultimate of this Italian name is long). ‘Hillo,
+Signor Nobody; at what point of the compass must I look, to be
+mannerly?’ The most charming thing in the play is this exquisite
+beginning of the song of a fairy who has lost the mortal lady in her
+care:
+
+                      Where can my young beauty be
+                        That I have not found her?
+                      Out alas! this is not she,
+                        With a shroud around her?
+
+This is beautiful and ancient versification and rhythm. But Darley had
+never got free from the habit of anapaestic vulgarities, out of date
+with all he wrote; and immediately after that delicate verse he begins
+again to caper:
+
+For the pride of the valley, the flower of the glen, and so forth.
+
+Among the phrases that give a flash to the verse is one, of graver
+value, that seems to recall something of Coventry Patmore’s ‘bright
+anger’. And Darley takes a flight about the world, in his happy mood and
+his foreboding, and there are rich lines in his landscape, such as
+these:
+
+                 And mine ear rung with ocean’s roar,
+                 And mine eye glistened with its blue.
+
+With how much perception, how pliant a turn of thought, how instant a
+reflection, how delicate a sense of mood and habit Darley could play the
+seventeenth-century poet is proved by his famous lyric, _It is not
+beauty I demand_, with this among its stanzas:
+
+                Tell me not of your starry eyes,
+                  Your lips that seem on roses fed,
+                Your breasts where Cupid tumbling lies,
+                  Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed.
+
+In the first edition of the _Golden Treasury_ this poem, of then unknown
+authorship, was placed, carefully timed, between Wotton and Carew. It
+seems to have been withdrawn altogether when its writer was found to be
+of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+                             SYDNEY DOBELL
+
+
+It would be better to be purely forgotten, and then rediscovered (or
+not, as may befall) than to be half remembered, or remembered by rumour,
+as Sydney Dobell seems to have been for many years, and compromised by
+the praises that send a straightforward reader shying and swerving to
+left or right—anywhere out of the way of their finger-posts. Oblivion is
+clean, but not so the encumbered remembrance, and not so the reputation
+taken into custody and care by the Introductory Memoir.
+
+There is a small accessible volume of selections from Sydney Dobell’s
+poems, of which the biographical and critical introduction is more than
+usually disheartening. It is apparently by several hands, and one of
+them has the most uncertain hold upon grammatical collocation, while
+others seem to express in the thick English of a certain period the
+portly zeal of the writers for a poet who had associations with their
+own youth. It is, of course, easy not to read an introductory memoir;
+and this one should not be read by those who might charge the poet with
+the insignificant sincerity (equal in literature to insincerity) of the
+honest critics who admired him. There must have been better things
+written in his praise than these. We know, for instance, Rossetti’s
+admiration (carelessly and thinly alluded to in his rather vacant
+letters to Allingham) for _Keith of Ravelston_; and the poets who were
+Dobell’s contemporaries must surely have had something better to offer
+him than the dull enthusiasm of biographical introductions. He was a
+lyrical poets’ lyrical poet, in this sense: the thought, the motive, the
+thing for which his best lyric lives, is not only a poetic thought, it
+is also a brief one. It closes, it is finished in shape, it holds well
+within the verse. There are, needless to say, long thoughts and short
+thoughts, which are fit for poetry, reconciled from the beginning with
+the poetic intellect, and justified by themselves. It is the brief
+thought that is so essentially lyrical. Take, as an example, the
+conception of which was born the poem called _Isabel_. She who is dead
+was, in love, in piety, in grief, too shy for life, more spiritual, more
+wild, and more warm than the world, losing her in her own light, and not
+so much as knowing her for a secret creature, had ever seen her to be.
+Therefore her poet chooses no time but the dark summer dawn and the
+summer sunrise for his songs and for his memories. Her path had missed
+men’s footsteps, and he travels into the hours that also are aloof, to
+think of her with the thoughts of the imagination. I have thus
+reluctantly disarrayed the phrases of the poem in order that the reader
+may have the short thought at a glance.
+
+All fine sonnets and other poems in brief final forms have in like
+manner brief thoughts—large, great, but short. A short thought which is
+poetic is the highest inspiration of the lyric poet, even though there
+may be many and many a splendid lyric that has it not, but is as
+unclosed as the passage of a bird in flight. So are the greater number
+of the poems of Sydney Dobell; he has not the perfect inspiration of the
+short thought always, or even often. That inspiration distinguishes
+_Isabel_ greatly. Of that poetic poem let me give a stanza or two—
+
+              That early hour I meet
+              The daily vigil of my life to keep,
+              Because there are no other lights so sweet,
+              Or shades so long and deep,
+                      Isabel.
+
+              And best I think of thee
+              Beside the duskest shade and brightest sun,
+              Whose mystic lot in life it was to be
+              Outshone, outwept by none,
+                      Isabel.
+
+This poem has assuredly rare sweetness and much rarer passion in its
+solitary tones; it has in a small measure the emotion of the hours of
+sleep, as the waking heart still owns it in face of the breaking of a
+summer dawn. The short thought is the matter and form again of those two
+sonnets whereby chiefly Dobell’s name is now remembered—_The Army
+Surgeon_ and _Home in War Time_. When a poetic short thought is
+transfigured in a single beautiful image, then the sonnet is satisfied,
+the sonnet is fulfilled. It remained for the English poets so to
+conceive the sonnet, not re-arraying but creating it. Of these two
+sonnets it is _The Army Surgeon_ that has this fundamental completeness;
+the other has not imagery, though it has, with extraordinary finality,
+the short thought. In both imagination is intellectual and visual, and
+the tide of impassioned feeling is a high tide, that has lifted all the
+poet’s blood. These are not, perhaps, in the full sense, great poems;
+they have not the peace which seems, beyond all our understanding, to
+make an eternal quality of poetry of the tumult of Lear. They are poems
+of emotional unrest, but among poems of emotional unrest they are
+singularly fine and true, and something at least of the fusing work of
+passion is done upon their beautiful diction.
+
+All in all, the whole series of war-poems have a strange success. They
+were written during the Crimean war, and they have all the best quality
+of their time, which may be called good faith. Sydney Dobell takes his
+types as all the Romance poets and their posterity knew them, and he
+does not lie in wait for the accidents and incidents of fragmentary
+life. He has a milkmaid in all her symmetry, a Lady Constance in hers, a
+French chasseur, a wounded officer, a market wife; they are all
+conventional. But if the poet found his persons ready for him in a not
+all unwise legend, he did no small thing in filling them full of warm
+traditionary life. It may well be that the more modern author achieves
+somewhat less—or perhaps it would be better to say that he achieves his
+work at a less expense of life—when he makes his human creature (his
+unit with all the natural lack of unity) to live and to be seen by its
+natural singleness; when he so marks the gnarls and knots of the life,
+surprised in a separate man, as to give proof of a man by his very
+accidents. It may well be easier work to do thus than to do as Sydney
+Dobell does with his expected Romance, breathing so fully. The one poet
+shall not justly charge the other with any unhandsome or slovenly
+dealing.
+
+There is, however, one poem in the war series which has another kind of
+life than that of the milkmaid’s song. This is one of the
+finest—_Tommy’s Dead_. Who shall say that this poem of actual knowledge,
+and of a life lived, is not better than the rest? More full of the
+poet’s authentic life it may not be, but the thing is better worth
+doing. Tommy’s father is a single and separate creature, and every line
+of his song is a strong surprise, though it is but of the thinness, the
+dullness, and the last old age in a day of bad news at the farm.
+
+On the other hand, _The Little Girl’s Song_ is only in part the cry of a
+child; and yet even in the least childish lines, there is the excuse
+that the poet, in the urgency of his feeling, has broken through the
+limitations of the childish speech because he could not restrain the
+haste of his own pity-driven word. The little girl’s father is at the
+war, and she wonders whether indeed she sees her mother wasting with
+grief, or whether that face was always so pale. The trivial word of the
+child—‘Papa’—seems to make the line more forlorn:
+
+       Do not mind my crying, Papa, I am not crying for pain;
+       Do not mind my shaking, Papa, I am not shaking with fear;
+       Though the wild wind is hideous to hear,
+       And I see the snow and the rain.
+       When will you come back again,
+       Papa, Papa?
+
+The beautiful _Keith of Ravelston_ is in the series of Crimean poems;
+and some who know its undefined sweetness and its mystery may not be
+aware with how admirable an art Sydney Dobell introduces its vague
+outlines. It is a song sung by one who is happy in the year of sorrow—
+
+                    She sings the sorrow of the air,
+                      Whereof her voice is made.
+
+Then follows the strain of Romance in an immemorial cadence:
+
+                    The murmur of the mourning ghost
+                      That keeps the shadowy kine;
+                    ‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
+                      The sorrows of thy line!’
+
+I must own that _Balder_ and _The Roman_ have not yet persuaded me to
+read them through; but the lyrics, if so chosen that a certain vein of
+weakness may not appear anywhere, are surely a perdurable part of our
+incomparable literature.
+
+
+
+
+                            COVENTRY PATMORE
+
+
+To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a
+hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the
+critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their
+judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit
+code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious
+measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to
+recognize the law of _The Unknown Eros_. It is to look, not only for
+such precision, but for its rare companions—liberty, flight, height,
+courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for
+spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the
+lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to
+come, _The Unknown Eros_ will hardly then have many readers, and will no
+doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by
+reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness
+is its own quality, conferred by no world’s neglect; not an effect of
+conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative
+to nothing.
+
+The reader undertakes at least to know and to watch that solitude. It
+was assuredly a sense of the gravity of this enterprise that inspired
+the phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies’; a star is lonely, and its
+student, whatever his conditions, lonely as he watches. Pausing upon
+that significant phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not Keats’s,
+evidently; and it proves at last to be a word of Patmore’s own; and the
+lonely watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In a now cancelled
+passage of Coventry Patmore’s ode, _Tired Memory_, occurs the ‘lonely’
+astronomer. Who can complain that there are not many prepared for such a
+vigil? Moreover, _The Unknown Eros_, although we may attempt images of
+sidereal distance to express its profound flight, has the more dreadful
+solitude of an experience, and goes far in an inverse flight, through
+the essentially single human heart—intimately into time and space,
+remotely into the heart of hearts.
+
+Of many words of praise, the word ‘classic’ is chosen here because it
+suggests no exclusions of schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for
+poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of poetry of another.
+None the less is it the most sharp and severe of all words of criticism,
+or it shall here have that character, if the reader will agree to
+understand as ‘classic’ all poetry that is _one_—thought and word. The
+fusion of thought and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an
+impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close coldness of fancy
+made perfect; for since we hear that metals pass into one another, _in
+vacuo_, by pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible; but even
+if, with Thomas à Kempis, we contemplate the metal that is one with fire
+and is changed into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that a
+greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by a more vital union; mind
+and body, where tidal thought and feeling are quick with the blood and
+various with the breath of life, give a juster, as well as a simpler and
+a human, image of a vital poem. Besides, the fire of life is made
+sensible to us by warmth and not by flame, and there are in literature a
+far greater number of humanly warm poems that are classic and vital,
+than of poems that are classic and vital with apparent and uncovered
+flame. Some of these last, indeed, there are, but few. The image of warm
+life is the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry proved classic and
+alive when a reader, struck to the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes
+looking on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour, her height,
+her light, her age, knows her indeed, and confesses her at last by
+another sign: ‘Oh, she’s warm!’
+
+In _The Unknown Eros_ the poet’s intention, single, separate, strikes
+unique strokes against which the reader’s human heart is all unarmed by
+custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so comes home, dividing
+soul and spirit. There is not a violence in the world that does not seem
+a dissipation and an essential weakness when reproached by such a
+majestic energy, able to curb its hand.
+
+Not without profoundly conscious art did Coventry Patmore achieve the
+ultimate, the mortal, pathos of such an ode as _Eurydice_. He was ready
+to tell the secret which no others could use as he used it, however it
+might be guessed; and the secret of _Eurydice_ was: ‘After exceeding
+ill, a little good.’ The slenderness of the good and the poignancy of
+the ill are mingled, in this ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear
+as no other poet has ever endured. _Eurydice_ is the dream of the
+mourner, who night by night follows some dreary clue through labyrinths
+without hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote, neglected
+life that the dead do live in these intolerable dreams. But Coventry
+Patmore does not always capture terror for such purposes of eternal
+sadness; he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent ode of
+reunion, _The Day after To-morrow_:
+
+            O, heaving sea,
+            That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,
+            And separatest not dear heart from heart,
+            Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart
+
+            O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,
+            Love in each moment years and years of rest.
+
+                   ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+            O Life, too liberal, when to take her hand
+            Is more of hope than heart can understand.
+
+                   ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+            One day’s controlled hope, and one again,
+            And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,
+            O Life, Death, Terror, Love!
+
+_Ultima dolcezza_ was once exquisitely said of the skylark; _ultima
+amarezza_ should be the words for the lines:
+
+             Thou whom ev’n more than Heaven lov’d I have,
+             And yet have not been true, even to thee;
+
+and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the grief that kisses and
+says a conscious ‘farewell, farewell’, is in _Departure_, and in this
+passage of too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly implied
+by a negative:
+
+             When the one darling of our widowhead,
+             The nurseling Grief, is dead,
+             And no dews blur our eyes
+             To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies.
+
+Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death. The ode entitled
+_Proem_ foretells with a singular peace of grief the day when England,
+‘a dim heroic nation, long since dead’, shall be benignly remembered no
+otherwise than by ‘the bird-voice and the blast of her omniloquent
+tongue’—by the poets of her then dead language.
+
+As to the ‘natural description’ for which the reader is apt to look—it
+might not unfairly be said that Patmore never described. He claimed the
+truths of science, to which in youth he had devoted his attention, to
+serve his poem with images; and thus he used them in his speech, as when
+the perception he gained of Divine truths by the act of contemplation
+and the holding his spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to
+the photographic picture of stars invisible even to the camera but made
+visible by a long accumulation of continuous imperceptible impressions.
+And nature, evasive to the mere describer, yielded imagery to him with
+an indescribable freshness. There is an instance in the ode, _Wind and
+Wave_, with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and waves that
+
+      Traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
+      The fair and fleckless sands
+
+             ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+      And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the deafening beach.
+
+The smile of Psyche is
+
+                Like sunny eve in some forgotten place;
+
+love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman,
+
+              As when a south wind sombres a March grove.
+
+In _Amelia_ we receive the candid, simple shock of the line in which
+every meeting with her beauty is likened to a first beholding of the
+ocean. In this ode, also, stands the ‘little bright, surf-breathing
+town’, and the westering sun fills with shade ‘the dimples of our
+homeward hills’. Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is with a
+sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden insight. The blackbird at
+dawn, a lonely thrush at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ‘sad
+with promise of a different sun’, brought him in full the message of the
+wild suggestion that never left poet’s heart at rest. When he wrote the
+_Odes_, and used thus a free metre because he knew himself to be set at
+liberty by his very knowledge and love of law, that heart beat in the
+sensitive line, and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as a spirit
+blowing whither it will.
+
+The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated
+question. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows
+that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that
+is to be judged. This true lover may well have outlived the desire to
+give to others a convincing or converting reason for his own certainties
+as to the most poetic things in poetry, but he still desires to know
+whose mind’s ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time goes on. To
+the treasure of these most beautiful things, to which the dramatic and
+the epic poets have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets stanzas
+or lines, it is a wonder to find how much Coventry Patmore has added.
+The slender volume of his odes furnishes them out of all measure. Even
+those readers who will not hold the author of that small volume to have
+answered all the conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great, will
+confess this extraordinary disproportion. The mental apprehension of
+poetry can be put to the proof by Patmore’s odes—and indeed by not a few
+passages of the contemned _Angel in the House_—much oftener than by
+honoured classical poems from which we gather those testing lines by
+precious threes and twos. _The Unknown Eros_ yields them to us in
+overwhelming beauty and in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of
+imagery—so enkindling, so exalting that we say of imagery that it is
+poetry itself, until we find the poetry of the yonder side, for some
+again are of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is beyond
+imagery. One of the testing lines of our literature has this latter
+character—Chaucer’s, chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man:
+
+               Now with his love, now in the coldë grave.
+
+From Coventry Patmore’s odes we gather them with both hands, exalted,
+subdued, and greatly moved by our riches.
+
+Why _The Unknown Eros_ should have found so few readers it might be hard
+to say. We should have expected something different from the literary
+liberty and literary variety of England. Ignorance of Patmore’s odes
+might have been looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind in
+the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is not easily to be explained
+in readers of various minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Crashaw,
+Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare the lyrist. Probably a doubt as
+to the whole meaning of many among the odes has discouraged even
+Patmore’s willing readers. The beauty was there, but it was to them an
+uncertain magnificence, a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call of
+an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the heart-piercing utterance of an
+obscure grief—obscure as waters are obscure because they are profound,
+not because they are turbid. Some of our esteemed poets have left us
+meanings troubled by the lowest of difficulties—the grammatical. Their
+waters have matter in mechanical suspension rather than in chemical
+solution. It is often impossible to decide to what nouns some of the
+pronouns in _Sordello_ refer. But Patmore’s pure diction, uttered in the
+composure that gives high dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no
+such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of the odes of _The Unknown
+Eros_ are difficult. Some, we say, and are again puzzled at finding them
+so few. _The Day after To-morrow_ is not readily understood to refer to
+reunion after death; the Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience
+alien to the history, to the aspirations, and even the desires, of the
+greater number of deeply spiritual men; the matter of the mystical ode
+called _The Unknown Eros_ itself is all but hidden; _Deliciae Sapientiae
+de Amore_ darkly sings the triumph of virginity and its sacrifice at
+once; few or no readers will guess the _Arbor Vitae_ of a very fine ode
+to be the Catholic Church, and the ‘nests of the hoarse bird, who talks
+and understands not his own word’ to be (a most unjust image) the
+clusters of her clergy; and a few other necessities for explanation
+there may be. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt, to all
+initiate in the world of poetry, as to the full significance—the
+furthest significance, to every inner alley and retreat of meaning, to
+every ultimate pang of sensitiveness—expressed in that terrible record
+of a mourner’s dreams, _Eurydice_; in _Departure_; in _If I were dead_;
+in _Saint Valentine’s Day_; or in the ode on the decline of England,
+already named, which contains the memorable description of her
+literature. Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one generally
+known, even with the relative generalness possible among the little
+minority that cares for poetry? That one is, needless to say, _The
+Toys_, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one containing less
+essential poetry than any other page of the odes.
+
+It must be owned that some of the accessory persons and conditions of
+the story of _The Angel in the House_ are unwelcome to poetry as we have
+learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we are either content, or
+very weakly, very ineffectually, ill content, to live in a social world
+that we confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry Patmore, as we
+understand his attitude, refused to be content with such a world, and
+refused, moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the world was unfit
+for his poem, he would reject the world—and he at least knew how to
+reject and did not play at rejection. He did not believe that there was
+such unfitness, because love and immortality were there, as elsewhere,
+with humanity. The modern age chose to be ashamed of the manner in which
+it chose to live, to be associated, to prosper, to order its affairs; no
+other age had condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry Patmore
+was not modern in this matter. He thought the daily civilized ways of a
+Cathedral town, granted that they were delicate and gay, and not dull,
+no more unfit for ‘realistic’ art than other contemporary ways, neither
+delicate nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably since, the
+writing of _The Angel in the House_. Coventry Patmore wrote of
+conventions in the manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents
+older than his critics stopped to remember. If so much of explanation is
+to be offered in answer to still current criticisms, how does it befall
+that any reader should pause upon the mere intervals in poetry so
+profound and penetrating as, in a hundred passages, shakes the metre
+with a hand of control?
+
+Among such passages are these records of beauty:
+
+                   Her eyes incredulously bright,
+                     And all her happy beauty blown
+                   Beneath the beams of my delight.
+
+                   So much simplicity of mind
+                     In such a pomp of loveliness!
+                   Eyes that softly lodge the light.
+
+And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so close as these:
+
+                  His only Love, and she is wed!
+                    His fondness comes about his heart
+                  As milk comes when the babe is dead.
+
+And again:
+
+                     Alone, alone with sky and sea
+                     And her, the third simplicity.
+
+Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with meaning:
+
+                  Far round each blade of harvest bare
+                    Its little load of bread;
+                  Each furlong of that journey fair
+                    With separate sweetness sped.
+
+Again:
+
+               Blest in her place, blissful is she;
+               And I, departing, seem to be
+               Like the strange waif that comes to run
+               A few days flaming near the sun,
+               And carries back, through boundless night,
+               Its lessening memory of light.
+
+It is possible that this early poem is contemned because the reader
+takes the ‘Angel’ to be the woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a
+kind of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the ‘Angel’ to be Love.
+Patmore’s masculine mind probably referred the name rather to such an
+angel as he who in the Old Testament took up a prophet by the hair of
+his head and carried him across country. Together with Love, Patmore’s
+subject was the Child in the House, before ever Pater had so varied
+Patmore’s title. Together with the revelation of youthful love he has
+coupled all the sweet revelations made to a child:
+
+                  This and the Child’s unheeded Dream
+                    Was all the light of all his day.
+
+We find that there are two master-emotions in modern poetry—in that
+Romance literature which has been the complementary life of Europe now
+for many centuries; one dates from Dante’s day, and one chiefly from the
+day of Henry Vaughan (Wordsworth’s virtually immediate precursor). Love,
+and the love of Nature, mystically passionate, are what they are with
+us, not because all men, but because two boys, conceived them. It needs
+the childish dream to raise these emotions into the regions of mystery,
+sweetness, tenderness, and terror which they have gained because Dante
+was a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in love with
+Nature. Other lovers have loved in childhood, or else they have profited
+by Dante’s childhood; other poets have conceived the passion for Nature
+in their childhood, or have profited by the childhood of Wordsworth, of
+Vaughan, and of Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more
+delirious and the more innocent these remote experiences, the more has
+the lover’s love the quality of Romance, and the poet’s imaginative
+verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men could never have done for
+mankind what these boys have done; literature owes her two ideal adult
+passions to the dreams of childhood.
+
+Coventry Patmore’s ardour and mystery acknowledged that dear and
+ignorant origin. He did more than remember that incomparable antiquity;
+with him childhood hardly needed remembering, for it remained, the
+companion of his complete intellect, the rapture of his profoundly
+experienced heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly sorrows.
+
+The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather
+forest or field than garden, the ‘landscape garden’ of a false taste;
+nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with
+an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned,
+rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and definite, but later
+set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having
+an enclosed wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and
+excess. Comparable to such a garden is Coventry Patmore’s mind, obedient
+to an ancient law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of visiting
+winds and a splendid sun of genius.
+
+No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or attributed to it a
+greater dignity than the value and the dignity that consecrated it in
+Patmore’s heart. As he very literally and actually held the members of
+the body to be divine, so may it be said that he saw in poetry also the
+incarnate word; the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the phrase
+were not accidental but essential. Hence his extraordinary mastery of
+style. And as to his sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and
+domination we have but to compare it with the sense of one who spared no
+words in praise of poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work and
+mission—Matthew Arnold.[3] Failing the religious sanction, failing the
+fundamental law with its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its
+place, whether as temporary regent or regent without a term. It would,
+he said, console and soothe mankind. As though a race in need of the
+spur and the curb, the example, the threat, and the canon, were
+sufficiently to be served by those unmanly ministrations! As though to
+be soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill-humour were the
+chief necessities of men, a race worthy of the dignities of
+chastisement! In raising poetry to what he thought this eminence,
+assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never was poetry more
+conscious than Patmore’s. Nor, perhaps, if we seek among the homages of
+the poets to their art shall we find graver or profounder veneration
+than Patmore’s, hardly even excepting Wordsworth’s, explicit and
+implicit.
+
+Footnote 3:
+
+  He thought the value of the religions to be their ‘unconscious
+  poetry’. ‘It is part of the man’s unconscious poetry,’ says Harold
+  Skimpole—he is alluding to the family butcher (unpaid)—‘that he always
+  calls it “his little bill”.’
+
+He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So must we learn to do, and
+to value her for him.
+
+
+
+
+                          POETRY AND CHILDHOOD
+
+
+Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that
+first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or
+whatever thing touched a child’s mind with a remote and yet familiar
+love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others
+are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be
+to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part,
+reading again the _Chants du Crépuscule_, the _Feuilles d’Automne_,
+_Contemplations_, and _Voix Intérieures_, I own the power of the poet
+who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger’. ‘Le
+verger’ is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above
+their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and
+therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and
+spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing
+and the word in one.
+
+Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of one who has profound
+childish memories connected with his common words, by writing so closely
+of infantine things as though to secure the charm for all a reader’s
+lifetime to come, and to establish the authority of his French precisely
+upon those names of childish import that are most subject to such an
+early spell.
+
+A reader who, when he had learnt that there are birds, had learnt their
+English name, and had, moreover, received his father, his mother, his
+bed, his sleep, his nurse’s song, his little breakfast, in English, has
+not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse for him those words, those
+things rather, in his later years. For there seems to be no poet in our
+master-poetry to do for him that singular office, and to sing the
+language of his first nurse to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn
+all nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel first in an
+incomparable tongue; and his first sense of Greece doubtless comes with
+an adequate word. But he has no august poet to resume his ancient
+lullabies, heard once in ancient regions between sleeping and waking,
+the immemorial night-light, the homely language of antiquity and old
+romance as children have the sense of them in their little words at play
+upon the floor, at play upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo’s
+French.
+
+Furthermore still, an English reader whose childish life was uttered in
+French has half forgotten, amid later English, some of the daily words
+of that time, unused by grown men and women. These Victor Hugo sings to
+him. They return to him out of the past and out of his poetic page at
+once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperishable memory; they wake
+again, and they are more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than
+torrents from the Alps.
+
+Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him. The child and the poet know
+it together. They meet, they understand, they have the way of it
+together. And if they meet again across age and change and disuse, how
+close, how light, how natural is this encounter, how sudden and how old
+the intimacy! Poet and child have their traffic, no doubt, in every
+life; but what incomparable traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an
+English reader who had a French childhood! How ingenious is fortune to
+bring their communion to pass! Many are the things, small and
+all-important, known fully, and more than known—recognized, known after
+estrangement—between these two only of all the pairs of poet and child,
+in the world. Where else can there be just such a commerce? In the first
+place that poet is unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss
+closely; he has not only the child’s sense of it, but also the child’s
+inexpert and invaluable word. And the reader, on his part, has, as I
+have said, a peculiar experience both of memory and of oblivion. For
+him, then, the French language has that grace of election which makes it
+wholly, invincibly successful—the grace of each man’s first tongue; and
+in overplus it has the powers of the tongue in which Victor Hugo was
+wont to write of children, and, again, the powers of the tongue of a
+great romance. Of a word in that language, therefore, it may be said, as
+of the elect lady in a violent world—
+
+                       Her gentle step to go or come
+                 Gains her more merit than a martyrdom.
+
+The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and tragic by will, by force
+and conquest; the word, in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be
+uttered. ‘Le verger’ possesses not only a young child’s sight of trees
+under the sun and moon, a young child’s touch of the grass, but also the
+genius of the South of France, of ancient agriculture and of early song.
+
+Assuredly those to whom the word first learnt was ‘the orchard’ must be
+content with something less than this.
+
+A reading of later French persuades one easily that Victor Hugo was
+alone, and is alone, the speaker of what has become so mysterious and so
+intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a language:
+
+           Oh, ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis Heaven she speaks!
+
+cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much French as childhood, and a
+peculiar childhood; Romance, and a unique Romance; nature, too, as no
+eyes of Latin race had seen it until then, with insight as well as with
+perception—in Emerson’s phrase, ‘a little wildly, or with the flower of
+the mind’.
+
+Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of this great poet so dear,
+for exclusive and accidental reasons, to one reader among many, I have
+no praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true that the word
+‘souffle’ is for my ear all a summer wind at night—it has more merit
+than a martyrdom of description; that is by chance. It is by genius,
+however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so fresh and dark.
+
+What I have to suggest is that the poets, since he ceased to write
+(ceased as a lyrist, not as a rhetorician), have done little more for
+the enlargement of their language than he did in the distant days when
+his work was a very revolution; and this in spite of their metrical
+liberty, which seems to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from the
+bonds of the preceding century or so was precisely no more than his art
+needed. Nothing was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake of
+others, for the sake of pioneership, or for any other of the causes that
+mediocrity is fond of. All was purely for his own poetry, and because,
+being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the laws that held Boileau
+content. Where he found no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another,
+or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility that has left his verse
+to-day far behind the reforms of modern French prosody, ‘reforms’ that
+seem to have been inspired by the revolt of a Walt Whitman, and make
+easy havoc of the whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged
+liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo’s advance, the wave of
+verse met salutary bars and measures as strong as rocks. But his
+successors have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and the flat
+country is already under shallow water.
+
+I have under my hand the volume of a little recent symbolist, side by
+side with _Les Voix Intérieures_, and the comparison persuades me that
+not all this new licence is able to make the French language a really
+liberal instrument. What has been written here must be the proof that if
+I have a prejudice it is for French, and that for me magic and the
+caprice of destiny are on that side. But there are disabilities; and it
+is not metrical liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and feminine
+endings, or the ignoring of the e mute, or rhymes that are but the
+suggestion of a jingle, or any other of these later liberties that can
+make this language sufficient. It lacks the second part, the other side,
+the splendour of alternative. It has the strangest blanks. It cannot so
+much as call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea.
+
+As it has no alternative of derivation, French has none of time; no
+place apart for poems and prayers, but the whole language is at the
+disposal of the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French of
+commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets to make that ready
+eloquence resound, when the lyric could do no more, for lack of strings.
+
+A word as to syllables—those great units of verse—and their motions. The
+Italian syllables dance, springing from their double consonants and long
+vowels; the English walk, with all variety of gait, and fly with all
+variety of wing; the French trot. ‘Égalisez les syllabes.’ The Frenchman
+who speaks right Parisian equalizes the syllables not only of his own
+language but of every other. Hear him speak Italian thus; hear him, as a
+good pastor in England, read the English Testament.
+
+
+
+
+                            GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+
+If the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our
+time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the
+intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor
+Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation
+of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his
+generation the companion of poetry, and thus the second great
+imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony,
+the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion—the
+work of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë—works of genius as
+they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are
+on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel
+that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the
+spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament
+but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.
+
+George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge of the human heart as
+though knowledge in itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he
+stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used his sympathy. He
+worked much beyond and far above the regions in which the wrangle about
+art with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward. No critic will
+ever impugn Meredith’s transcendent purpose. It is not possible to
+imagine his prose or poetry without it.
+
+The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable even in the eyes of
+those who think it incomplete. Great he was—in thought, in passion, in
+the art of letters, a student of mankind who sought to help, without
+consoling, the race he watched, suffering and hoping with that which he
+studied, as a physician pressing a finger upon a brother’s wrist, caring
+much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man’s life, caring also
+much for his own science. The incompleteness which so many readers
+charged against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great and high
+repose of art which is unconscious of appearances. A great author should
+be anxious for effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated
+ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appearances or the result
+of his phrase upon the untaught. Meredith’s prose has not this
+loftiness, and therefore misses the classic simplicity. He must be
+afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights, and Meredith
+feared commonplace. Strange fear for so distinguished a mind! But the
+fear is unmistakable. It appears most plainly in narrative. He will not
+consent to employ the usual forthright order of words in telling what
+happened. Even in recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly bear
+to use the customary ‘he said’—he prefers ‘she heard’. This perpetual
+kind of device mars the manner of his work only in so far as a fine
+style can be marred by a little manner, and that is not very far.
+Generally when we find such a weakness of fear and human respect in
+literature, it is the companion of a weakness of the whole man—or at any
+rate of the whole author. But when a great man suffers from this
+frailty, we gladly recognize the truth that style is a profound thing
+that cannot gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith’s style is at
+the foundation of his literature. It has often been said of some author
+that he has little intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of
+Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnificent style, yet writes
+but ill, wild as the paradox may sound. Everything worthy to be called
+style is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked, and bent. No
+other man’s writing could keep its strength, its gravity, and its beauty
+under such a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind or another
+is, by a long convention, in its right home, Meredith’s fault of manner
+is the use of words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs in none
+but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining to the full meaning is too
+great in both the earlier and the later poems, and in the slighter
+pieces the fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagination is
+Meredith’s, but a quibbling fancy.
+
+When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, the phrase was
+taken away from the novel, to which it should belong. Philosophic
+novelists (there have not been many in the history of English letters)
+are the chief critics of human life—social life, civilized life, the
+life of the race and of races, and that of a man and a woman; even a
+great novelist who is not a philosopher—Thackeray, for example—is a
+critic of life in its ethics, its emotions, and its shows; the novelist
+who is a humorist does his admirable part of criticism. But Meredith in
+his day took the whole social man into his grasp and his vision. A mere
+user of his arresting hand and of his searching eyes Meredith was not;
+he bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a human heart upon the
+study of character. The study was also the creation. Meredith formed the
+most possible, the most complex, the most complete and least explicable
+of women and men, now and then varying these vitally-mingled persons by
+presenting a man who, having one quality only, such as the Egoism of the
+Egoist, is yet alive with a most indubitable life. George Meredith
+seldom tells a story of these people—he tells nothing less than their
+history. What he tells us is so much their history that the error, the
+sin, or the blunder that draws their fate about them is detected in
+their youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early or late, in
+their doom. No other important student of life, except perhaps George
+Eliot, has found such visible revenges. He saw them, and he was resolved
+to show them. His doctrine of consequences seems to stand between that
+of the Buddhist with his inevitable body of results, and that of the
+Christian with his directed and decreed retribution. Meredith’s Avenger
+is an offended Nature or wronged Reason, working by the force of some
+undecreed law; nevertheless of a law. Undecreed; and yet Meredith, by
+figure of language at any rate, attributes to the visiting and avenging
+Power now something of formidable indignation and now something of
+formidable indifference; and even indifference has to be felt! Even
+blindness implies an eye capable of sight! Meredith had a philosophy of
+Nature which taught him not—as other students of brute life might
+suppose—a simple and irresponsible egoism, but self-denial,
+self-conquest, and unflinching endurance. He would have the individual
+man to learn the almost unlearnable lesson that his own fate is of no
+importance. Of no importance to the race others have perceived and
+pronounced it; Meredith would have the unit to accept and make his own
+that interior resignation—if resignation is not too half-hearted a word.
+All the graver poems too bear this as their principal teaching, and
+their many lessons rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this
+doctrine he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as his heart of
+tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no surer mission than to attack the
+outworks of that self-love within which lurks the condemned desire for
+personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared with which the courage of
+the Stoic is but shallow in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing
+in its wounding of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+                          PESSIMISM IN FICTION
+
+
+The told story was not at first used for the purposes of pity, terror,
+and purification, but mainly for fun. Shall we make a great exception of
+the Book of Job, the inspired novel all occupied with its subject, the
+history of a single valuable soul? A family swept out of life are of no
+moment to that novelist, save as their fate causes the affliction of
+Job. By and by he shall be comforted with other sons and daughters.
+These, like the dead ones, are negligible except as sons and daughters
+to one not negligible man. Never was art truer to a single intention.
+The earlier family have no names named, but the later receive names
+because they are to go on living for the final joy of a momentous man.
+
+If we may be permitted (or may be permitted as time goes on) to read
+Genesis, too, as a divine and all-significant novel, here is an even
+earlier example of the novel written with the gravest intention, and
+with simple and economic art. Here the ‘stars also’ are swept into being
+as the sons of Job are swept out of it, in a phrase that does not pause
+upon the universe that was to live, as the phrase did not pause upon the
+beautiful young men who were to die. The earth is central for that
+purpose, and Job for this.
+
+But leaving aside, as a digression, the case of these divine examples of
+grave fiction, and that of the parables of the Gospel with them, we find
+an art of story-telling, whether in Arabia or in Tuscany, devised
+chiefly or altogether for pastime. It is an art of childish origins—the
+pretending that such or such things came to pass, the making things come
+to pass at the speaker’s whim. It is an arbitrary make-believe and
+irresponsible, whereas the drama must, as it were, make good its words
+by making a show. When the novel began in Italy it raised a childish
+laugh by jests unchildish. Its stories ended happily even though
+iniquitously. A mere pastime, it filled none but the idlest hour, or the
+weariest hour of rest. Boccaccio’s fictions were proportionate. There
+was little of them, and they did not encroach. It is a question whether
+the habit into which we in our time have slipped—fiction as a custom and
+a habit—is proportionate; and all our modern pastimes are in like manner
+questionable as to their quantity. And when the pastime of the greater
+number—the reading of the novel—is charged by the novelist with so many
+functions as it now carries we cannot but wonder that irresponsible
+hands should claim, and into those hands should be given, purposes so
+various and purporting to be so grave.
+
+It is the novelist, then, with no one to whom he must answer, with no
+facts to which he must be bound, and with only such truths as he sets in
+secret before his eyes—it is the novelist at whose discretion lies the
+power of suggestion that is followed by a million souls. The idle reader
+opens the novel for pleasure and learns to find that pleasure in painful
+things. A pessimist has him by the ear, having captured him at the
+mischief of his idleness and his desire for passive pleasure. On the
+pessimist author’s side also there is some spiritual sloth in his
+activities, for pessimism is the easier way. If he would confess himself
+he would tell us that it is so. And one of his fruits is the obvious
+destruction of comedy, but the other, equally lamentable though less
+obvious, is the destruction of tragedy.
+
+We have all been troubled by Dante’s lack of pity for the people of his
+infernal pilgrimage. It is true that he has compassion upon Francesca
+(for the dreadful fact is that he had known as ‘a little radiant girl’
+the very woman whom he saw in eternal woe), but he witnesses unmoved the
+other wounded displaying before him their immortal wounds and the other
+miserable recounting to him their immedicable grief. Are we to
+understand that some misery is beneath living compassion, and that pity
+and terror do not pass the limits of life’s known and intelligible ways,
+the ways of customary men, where anguish is not cut off from good, and
+hope, a banished angel, is not abolished? If so, it is easier to
+understand why the literature of despair is indeed not tragic, why it
+denies tragedy as comedy itself does not. If pessimism robs us of
+laughter it has done worse by ‘beguiling us of our tears’, not that for
+its sake they are, but that they are not, shed.
+
+It is no wonder that the proffer of Browning’s optimism, half-heartedly
+made again on the day of his centenary, did again fail. His ‘All’s right
+with the world’ is as vain as the pessimist’s ‘All’s wrong with it’. It
+is out of the range of customary life. Intelligible joy and grief are in
+the midways, and in the midways there is cause for as much sadness as
+our human hearts can hold. One of the most heart-piercing lines in our
+poetry is Patmore’s
+
+                   After exceeding ill a little good.
+
+But if the ill had so exceeded that the little good was not, the pierced
+heart would have closed upon an insensible cicatrice.
+
+Perhaps, by the way, another reason why Browning’s remedies are
+proffered in vain is his denial of fear. Browning refused to submit to
+fear, at once the penalty and the duty of mankind. Pessimists, on the
+other hand, are afraid, and they and Browning do not understand one
+another in their opposition, they are not intelligible enemies. Our
+pessimists fear, not without cause, and Browning is vociferously
+hopeful, without full cause. The antagonists are not within touch. And
+yet that robustious poet is held, or was held by his own generation, to
+be a realist. In certain evil things he was, on the contrary, an
+idealist. Having never known such a Spanish friar, or such a Bishop
+Blougram, he created them before he detected them—and at such close
+quarters, so point-blank! He was too intimate with the Sludge he made.
+But the pessimist, though so partial and so imperfect, is a better
+realist than he.
+
+A tragedy the noblest and most dreadful of our time—I refer to Monsieur
+Paul Claudel’s drama, _L’Otage_—is the truer antithesis of pessimism in
+fiction, whether in the story told or on the stage. It is a tale of
+exceeding ill and a little good, of a world wherewith all is not right.
+I have lately read a novel in which everything went wrong, and what
+final solace appears takes the form of a little chatter about a
+servant’s photograph. In Monsieur Claudel’s play the solace is in the
+form of a momentary act of divine death after exceeding ill.
+
+_L’Otage_ should be ministered to pessimists, or rather to their
+readers, for tears, and Mr. Jacobs for laughter. The age is not without
+its remedies.
+
+
+
+
+                            GIACINTO GALLINA
+
+
+When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the nineteenth century, at the
+moment of the high tide of his work for the Venetian stage, English
+people were put into possession of some idea of his drama in the
+readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to be, more or less, a later
+Goldoni with a warmer heart. This was a brief description—or rather a
+mere sign—of an author whom few strangers would ever seek to know
+better. He is, indeed, so barred out of the knowledge of English readers
+by his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase was necessary as a
+first and final _mémoire_. It gave the news of his death with a first
+mention of his name and a compendious definition of his career, in one
+sentence.
+
+Gallina certainly followed Goldoni in finding the arguments, action, and
+passions of his plays in the home life of the Venetians—a life more
+domestic than anything an English dramatist would have the courage to
+offer to a self-conscious public inclined to ‘humour’. Although our
+countrymen are much afraid lest men should accuse them of exceeding
+domesticity, and are inclined to defend themselves with irony, they are
+in fact less domestic than any of their neighbours. You may hear two
+young Italian men, of what would be called among ourselves with some
+pride the frivolous world, exchange reports of the state and progress of
+their children (their babies really, but one hardly dares to say so; and
+one’s reluctance denotes the peculiar insular sense of dignities and
+indignities, the reserve, and the clowning that covers its hasty
+retreat). One hesitates, for fear of burlesque, to report in English a
+conversation that is in Italy quite simple, human, and unconnected with
+any kind of raillery.
+
+If this almost majestic candour is found in ‘the world’, the home is at
+least equally important in the classes whereof Goldoni chiefly wrote,
+and Giacinto Gallina in succession to him. These middle classes are very
+homely, and also peculiarly Italian. Nothing quite so local is to be
+found among the very poor, whose customs are those of necessity all the
+world over, and whose manners are small; the rich also tend to resemble
+each other, luxury grows monotonous, and cookery, for example, is as
+French in a good hotel in Athens as in a good hotel in Rome. But the
+little professional world everywhere in Italy keeps deep and inner
+places wherein it is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller,
+and beyond the reach of alteration. The same thing that makes so much of
+Goldoni and of Gallina illegible to the rest of Europe encloses that
+sequestered home, and this is dialect. Business, especially if it be
+official, the business of an _impiegato_, is done in choice Italian, and
+all acquaintance with foreigners (which in these classes is not much)
+uses the same polite manner of speech. ‘Toscaneggia’—‘he
+tuscanizes’—says one provincial of another, bantering the choice of
+words and the careful conjugations of verbs which he himself also will
+put on with the dignities of office.
+
+But within the flat, within the _palazzo_, within the country _villino_
+alike, dialect has its nest of intimacy, and makes all speech homely
+with an intensity of homeliness that people without patois can hardly
+conceive. It sets up an understanding, it runs up a code of signals, it
+makes confidence, and is heard in a laugh. Habit has not blunted the
+people’s sense of their locality of speech, even as it has left them the
+full consciousness of their sun. The barbarisms of local dialect are to
+the Italian citizens snug (as Swift would say) beyond description: their
+speech closes in their gossip, it prompts their allusions, it
+interprets, it understands, at close quarters. It is a kind of refuge
+from the generalities of literature; it consoles the heart from the
+threats of the preacher. But it scolds as no other kind of language can
+scold: scolds the servants with an equality of expression and a tyranny
+of oppression together that makes one of the curiosities of Italian
+domestic life; it scolds with the peculiar fury of the southern
+kitchen—a fury that casts itself implicitly upon the fellow-feeling of
+bystanders for excuse in the future time of calm. Dialect, in fine,
+sustains, comforts, winks, excludes the burden of the unintelligible
+world, deprecates, assuages; it keeps up the old, old habits of
+childhood, it knows the things that the citizen and the citizen’s wife
+know best, it is aloof from politics.
+
+Inasmuch as the little professional classes of the South do not live
+without society, their dialect associates them closely with their
+neighbours—closely yet without any defect of ceremony. The rites are as
+many, the farewells are as repeated, as though Tuscan were the language;
+and the speakers of a comparatively gross dialect, full of twang, are
+yet not people to spend their evenings in ungraceful isolation. Their
+domesticity is not of the English kind that is made by the habit of
+reading, and dialect dispenses them from none of the duties and
+dignities of entertainment. It is only that all is done within, within
+certain bonds of concentrated mutual understanding.
+
+Indeed, the necessity of companionship for every evening causes a very
+courteous waiving of the differences of rank. The general asks the
+village druggist (who is also the barber), and all others of like
+condition, to his country house to play tombola, there being no other
+neighbours, or but few. The intercourse between them is that of
+perfectly equal and easy courtesy, the only sign of difference being the
+use of the address ‘eccellenza’ on one side only, but with the
+infrequence of natural good manners. Without dialect you could hardly
+have an understanding so close yet so decorous.
+
+Even a remote dialect serves this intimate purpose. It was my fortune to
+know in childhood the inner interior of such a house. Genoese was my own
+tongue, and the barber’s, and all the countryside’s, and the General’s
+was Modenese. His Modenese and his wife’s had never abated a jot, for
+all their many years of dwelling in Liguria; as for their Italian, it
+was singularly exquisite (the General’s recitation of Dante was the most
+perfect speech in the world), but it was not forthcoming for their
+tombola parties. Modenese met the quite alien Genoese in a kind of
+rivalry of historic provincialism. Hosts and guests understood each
+other barely, and the hard Modenese consonants snapped in reply to the
+Ligurian sing-song; but it was at any rate dialect, it was _noi altri_,
+it was the strong Italian home.
+
+That the women should have their interests in these narrow things—narrow
+but not dull—is intelligible enough. Many of the older women remain
+indoors from Sunday noon to the next Sunday morning, in a jacket and
+slippers; not a few of the younger have their distractions, romances,
+emotions, at the window. Poverty, moreover, fosters these customs by
+forbidding much toilette, and thus the Italian woman of these middle
+classes, and of remote towns, who always dresses _much_, is content to
+dress _seldom_, and this perforce means a habit of home-keeping. But the
+men, with the slight alternative of the _caffè_, are equally absorbed by
+the things of the house. So does Goldoni show them to be in the whole
+series of his plays, and so must the men of his audience have been in
+the eighteenth century, or they would not have endured this perpetual
+comedy of domestic affairs, in the least exalted sense of the word
+domestic. Venetian men, and the citizens of other cities equally noble,
+sat to see the play that turns chiefly on the strife of a man’s mother
+and his wife for the services of a single maid, and they sit to-day to
+see the same thing. Giacinto Gallina, too, has half a comedy occupied
+with that contention. He need hardly—but for its unflagging
+popularity—have taken the self-same motive, inasmuch as Goldoni is by no
+means out of date; he holds the stage as freshly as ever. Indeed,
+Italian women, except in the richer classes that have international
+examples more constantly before their eyes, alter little in a matter of
+a hundred or two hundred years. In the women of Goldoni and in the women
+of Giacinto Gallina you may see the virtual contemporaries of Mrs.
+Samuel Pepys and of Mercer.
+
+
+
+
+                       THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR
+
+
+The cause of the modern monotony of ‘you’ might be sought in the mere
+slovenliness of our civilization in the practice of the inflexions of
+grammar. All things tend to become specialized, except only words.
+Though in the house of life itself the organs, as life grows more
+perfect, begin to draw apart to their own separate functions; though the
+labourer, in the later association of mankind, finds his task by degrees
+to dwindle in range and to be enforced within closer and closer
+repetitions; and though only a small division of any of the sciences
+that have come towards adult and responsible age falls to the share of a
+single specialist, the word alone grows not expert and special, but
+general and inexpert.
+
+It is obliged to do more various things, and to do them with less
+directness and, as it were, a less sequestered intention. It is engaged
+upon enterprises of unskilled labour. The industrial word has less and
+less craft, less dignity, less leisure, less rest, and more mere
+utility.
+
+Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its own varieties, amid the
+varieties of the casual task. It changes not its vesture, and the
+inflexion is lost.
+
+Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized peoples, in the
+inevitable evolution of things, should tend to become poor, careless,
+and inexact grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact is, needless
+to say, well enough known. Some of the French missionaries, students of
+American-Indian languages, have astonished us with reports of the
+enormous vocabularies and the scientific order of those tongues. The
+people are in the nomadic stage of society, their languages in the
+finished, the special, the sub-divided condition; intricate in system,
+organic, arranged, logical, full of expressive differences, cases that
+precisely assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time, turning
+the future to look upon the past, and anticipating that turn, and making
+a shifting perspective of the past; distinguishing persons not merely by
+pointing the rude forefinger of a pronoun, but by the allusion of all
+the inflexions of a verb. All that the antique grammars did, and more,
+is done, we hear, by those doomed languages of an unaltering people, a
+people with neither literature nor history, a people whose antiquities
+have no interest nor value, nor date, because their centuries resembled
+each other.
+
+Not only the tactics of grammar, but an innumerable variety of words is
+theirs, so that a speaker might hardly name a common thing without a
+conscious play of choice, according as the syllables of a sentence were
+to fold and close. Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has the
+charge of thought, without some degree of a like liberty of choice, and
+modern prose in all languages has, obviously, for the lack of this
+liberty—for lack of rich alternatives—somewhat forgone the practice of
+rhythm; forgone it altogether in the explanations of science, for
+instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red-Indian speech, translated
+even into sentimental English, as used formerly to be done, must have
+undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier change when it was done
+into sentimental French.
+
+It is, however, among English races chiefly that an unwillingness to be
+troubled with the distinctions of grammar has had this effect of making
+a word run errands and serve the first purpose at hand; and it is among
+English races that inflexions (never very numerous or subtle) have been
+neglected and let fall. That most orderly of grammars, the Spanish, is
+still in full use; the Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use
+them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in Rome, retain as few as
+possible in Liguria—making shift with auxiliary verbs rather than
+conjugate properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts. The
+French go about to avoid certain of their own subjunctives, even in
+literature, and in speech the perfect tenses are passed askance, for
+fear of pedantry. None but ourselves have been so impatient as to put
+out of common use the second person singular. ‘You’ was manifestly a
+trick of politeness in all languages, until it became depreciated by
+general use, when Germans, Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more
+distant pronoun of courtesy.
+
+The literary Genius was kind to its wayward chosen people, and kept for
+us a plot of the language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry. As
+things are, we need not envy the French their second person singular.
+For them it has but two keen significances—the first use in love and the
+disuse in the reproof of children. The second is, perhaps, the more
+important; it is renewed, and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence.
+To say ‘vous’ to a naughty child is to enforce insatiate retribution;
+few children deserve so much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches
+the personality, and alters the relations of life.
+
+As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is by no means certain
+that the second person singular, with its single delight—the first—never
+to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar regrets of the world for
+the flights of its joys. ‘Toi’, the first ‘toi’, is an arbitrary, a
+conventional happiness, a happiness because it is single—it has no
+quality but that. The ‘many thousand’ of ‘toi’ are insignificant, and
+therefore it has no ‘poor last’; it sets a paltry example, therefore.
+
+And then, while the second person singular plays this ambiguous part
+in love, see how primly it is eschewed in prayer. ‘May your name be
+sanctified’ is a second phrase of the _oraison dominicale_ (_oraison
+dominicale!_ the name says everything) which we should be loth to
+have in place of our own. With us there is not only the poetic
+‘thy’, but the obsolete valuing of the last syllable of the past
+participle—‘hallowed’—and the unworn, the still fresh word itself to
+make the sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such words into
+familiar use we should gain much, but we should lose a most
+distinctive characteristic, bestowed upon us by the literary Genius,
+as though in reward of our very sins—our unique plot of disregarded
+language that the traffic of the world passes by. For though the
+Italians have a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their
+daily prose are rather in the form of the words than in the words
+themselves. Now the French have the Psalms of David in the language
+of the trade circular charged with a little rhetoric.
+
+As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and its effectual
+influence in effacing them, it could not be more distinctly proved than
+by the Quaker speech. Restoring the second person singular to the
+language (by way of denying the primitive hyperbole of courtesy from
+which the general second person plural took its use), the followers of
+Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for a generation or so these
+were in practice, yet the increase of carelessness and the generalizing
+habit of speech in a world more and more intent upon special tasks in
+all things else, quickly made an end of them. So that Quakerism began to
+talk a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If Mrs. Beecher Stowe
+makes Quakers speak according to their use, they suppressed ‘thou’ more
+or less, and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing but the
+slovenly indifference that has made all our verbs so dull could be the
+cause of this perversion of a reform.
+
+Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of our own poets, who seem to
+find a difficulty in carrying the second person singular safely through
+a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one there is another, a
+little more out of sight, that does not. As Shelley wrote—
+
+            Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety,
+
+so write others of the moderns.
+
+Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not done in the other
+centuries. Must we needs, as we go on, grow so lax, and do these
+unhandsome things? If we do by some obscure process grow so lax, why
+should there not be, in a time of revisions, a revision of these
+customs? A little of the subjunctive was restored many years ago by Mr.
+Henley in the _National Observer_; that this little soon fell aside
+again is not encouraging; nevertheless, ‘it were’ worth while for some
+author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the second person
+singular, and with it certain tenses long out of use.
+
+There might be such a literary restoration—a literary and a familiar
+restoration—as would make our language again more various and more
+charming, and yet would not turn the speech poetic to vulgar use, nor
+decrease the dignity of what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ‘the
+essential and ornamental measures of address’.
+
+Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary grammar, we have the treasure
+of the sequestered poetic and religious language in good order and
+perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two derivations may well be
+dwelt upon afresh, now when so many of our writers are obsequious to the
+French language. (How is it, by the way, that Ireland is so little
+joyful for the gift of English?) French cannot be the great poetic
+language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc, delivered from a
+grandfatherly hearth-rug: ‘L’anglais et le français; ce sont les deux
+langues qui resteront; l’anglais pour le commerce, le français pour la
+littérature.’ The blood of a silent listener was only ten years old, but
+it boiled. And here is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French
+judgement upon Browning: ‘What a singular man! his middle is not in the
+centre.’ That Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle of an
+English poet is not in the centre; it is one focus of an ellipse, like
+the sun. Our national imagination takes wide adventures and unequal
+velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler) that the earth’s orbit
+must be circular, because a circle is ‘perfect’. And this is the kind of
+perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the French mind has long
+cherished.
+
+Not only in this matter of middles and centres is English poetry out of
+bounds. She does not know when she is beaten, as was said of English
+armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow her way in? Into great
+drama she intrudes, bidding the stage to wait; by lyre and song she
+commands epic narrative to halt the marching columns of its processions;
+waves rhetoric from its right throne in the grand style and in heroic
+verse, and usurps its place by an imperial supersession; scatters
+literary boundaries, and makes all the kingdoms hers—Poetry’s. And no
+imaginable academies could have prevailed against her.
+
+French lacks much besides those alien powers, our Latin and Teutonic
+inheritances, forbidden as it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with
+the Danube between, or the Alps between.
+
+It lacks also negatives worth having; making shift with half-hearted
+particles or the grotesquely insufficient _peu_. _Peu_ is the only
+negative for some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile we have
+our profound and powerful particle, in our ‘undone’, ‘unloved’
+‘unforgiven’, the ‘un’ that summons in order that it may banish, and
+keeps the living word present to hear sentence and denial, showing the
+word ‘unloved’ to be not less than archangel ruined.
+
+
+                           PRINTED IN ENGLAND
+                     AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                           BY FREDERICK HALL
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+POEMS: By ALICE MEYNELL. With a portrait by J. S. Sargent, R.A. 7s. 6d.
+
+  ‘What makes these poems singular amid all the poems of to-day is the
+  fact that mind and spirit, intellect and imagination, mortal and
+  immortal, have equal parts in them.’—_New Statesman._
+
+  ‘It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry that it is
+  itself creative. Its grace and beauty are the flower, not only of her
+  life, but of her contemplation of life. Her books have taken their
+  chosen, quiet, unfaltering way—too lofty a way for ease or weariness
+  or absent-mindedness to follow. She is sure.’—_The Times._
+
+  ‘Mrs. Meynell found herself long ago, and was found by all
+  English-speaking lovers of poetry.’—_Manchester Guardian._
+
+ESSAYS: By ALICE MEYNELL. Selected and arranged from her previously
+published books. 7s. 6d. net.
+
+  ‘One of the very rarest products of nature and grace—a woman of
+  genius, one who, I am bound to confess, has falsified the assertion I
+  made some time ago that no female writer of our time has attained to
+  true “distinction”.’—COVENTRY PATMORE in the _Fortnightly Review_.
+
+  ‘The writing is limpid in its depths.’—GEORGE MEREDITH.
+
+  ‘Exercises in close thinking and expert expression almost unique in
+  the literature of the day.’—_Athenaeum._
+
+  ‘The most stimulating Essays that have appeared since Mr. Stevenson
+  delighted us with his _Virginibus Puerisque_. To appreciate them is a
+  step forward in education.’—_The Guardian._
+
+
+                LONDON: BURNS OATES AND WASHBOURNE LTD.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Renumbered footnotes.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78949 ***
diff --git a/78949-h/78949-h.htm b/78949-h/78949-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ad81f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78949-h/78949-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,4768 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>The Second Person Singular and Other Essays | Project Gutenberg</title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+       body { margin-left: 8%; margin-right: 10%; }
+       h1 { text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: xx-large; }
+       h2 { text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: x-large; }
+       .pageno { right: 1%; font-size: x-small; background-color: inherit; color: #585858;
+               
+               text-indent: 0em; text-align: right; position: absolute; 
+               border: thin solid #585858; padding: .1em .2em; font-style: normal; 
+               font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; }
+       p { text-indent: 0; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; text-align: justify; }
+       sup { vertical-align: top; font-size: 0.6em; }
+       .sc { font-variant: small-caps; }
+       .large { font-size: large; }
+       .xlarge { font-size: x-large; }
+       .small { font-size: small; }
+       .under { text-decoration: underline; }
+       .lg-container-b { text-align: center; }
+       .x-ebookmaker .lg-container-b { clear: both; }
+       .linegroup { display: inline-block; text-align: left; }
+       .x-ebookmaker .linegroup { display: block; margin-left: 1.5em; }
+       .linegroup .group { margin: 1em auto; }
+       .linegroup .line { text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em; }
+       div.linegroup > :first-child { margin-top: 0; }
+       .linegroup .in14 { padding-left: 10.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in18 { padding-left: 12.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in2 { padding-left: 4.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in22 { padding-left: 14.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in24 { padding-left: 15.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in28 { padding-left: 17.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in32 { padding-left: 19.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in6 { padding-left: 6.0em; }
+       .linegroup .in8 { padding-left: 7.0em; }
+       .ul_1 li {padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em; }
+       ul.ul_1 {padding-left: 0; margin-left: 2.78%; margin-top: .5em;
+               margin-bottom: .5em; list-style-type: disc; }
+       div.footnote > :first-child { margin-top: 1em; }
+       div.footnote p { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: 0.25em; margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+       div.pbb { page-break-before: always; }
+       hr.pb { border: none; border-bottom: thin solid; margin-bottom: 1em; }
+       .x-ebookmaker hr.pb { display: none; }
+       .chapter { clear: both; page-break-before: always; }
+       .table0 { margin: auto; margin-top: 2em; }
+       .nf-center { text-align: center; }
+       .nf-center-c0 { text-align: left; margin: 0.5em 0; }
+       .c000 { margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; }
+       .c001 { page-break-before: always; margin-top: 4em; }
+       .c002 { margin-top: 2em; }
+       .c003 { margin-top: 1em; }
+       .c004 { page-break-before:auto; margin-top: 4em; }
+       .c005 { vertical-align: top; text-align: left; text-indent: -1em;
+               padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; }
+       .c006 { vertical-align: top; text-align: right; }
+       .c007 { margin-top: 2em; text-indent: 1em; margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+       .c008 { margin-top: 2em; font-size: .9em; }
+       .c009 { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: 0.25em; margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+       .c010 { text-indent: 0; margin-top: 0.25em; margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+       .c011 { text-decoration: none; }
+       .c012 { margin-top: 4em; }
+       .c013 { font-size: .9em; text-indent: 1em; margin-top: 0.25em;
+               margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+       div.tnotes { padding-left:1em; padding-right:1em; background-color:#e6e6fa;
+               color: #000000; border:thin solid silver; margin:2em 10% 0 10%;
+               clear: both; }
+       .covernote { visibility: hidden; display: none; }
+       div.tnotes p { text-align:left; }
+       .x-ebookmaker .covernote { visibility: visible; display: block; }
+       h1 {line-height: 150%; }
+       .footnote {font-size: .9em; }
+       div.footnote p {text-indent: 2em; margin-bottom: .5em; }
+       blockquote {font-size: 90%; }
+       .chapter  { clear: both; page-break-before: always; }
+       body {text-align: justify; }
+       table {font-size: .9em; padding: 1.5em .5em 1em; page-break-inside: avoid;
+               clear: both; overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: auto; }
+       .pageno {font-size: small; background-color:#ffffff; }
+       div.titlepage {text-align: center; page-break-before: always;
+               page-break-after: always; }
+       div.titlepage p {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold;
+               line-height: 1.5; margin-top: 3em; }
+       .ph2 { text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; font-size: x-large; margin: .75em auto;
+               page-break-before: always; }
+       .x-ebookmaker p.dropcap:first-letter { float: left; }
+    </style>
+  </head>
+
+  <body>   
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78949 ***</div>
+
+
+<div class='tnotes covernote'>
+
+<p class='c000'><strong>Transcriber’s Note:</strong></p>
+
+<p class='c000'>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='titlepage'>
+
+<div>
+  <h1 class='c001'>THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR<br> <span class='xlarge'>AND OTHER ESSAYS</span></h1>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div>BY</div>
+    <div class='c003'><span class='large'>ALICE MEYNELL</span></div>
+    <div class='c002'>SECOND IMPRESSION</div>
+    <div class='c002'>HUMPHREY MILFORD</div>
+    <div>OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS</div>
+    <div>LONDON   EDINBURGH   GLASGOW   COPENHAGEN NEW YORK   TORONTO   MELBOURNE   CAPE TOWN BOMBAY   CALCUTTA   MADRAS   SHANGHAI   PEKING</div>
+    <div class='c003'>1922</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div>TO CELIA CLARK</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c004'>CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class='table0'>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'></td>
+    <th class='c006'>PAGE</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Superfluous Kings</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_7'>7</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_12'>12</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'>‘<span class='sc'>A Modern Poetess</span>’</td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_18'>18</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>To Italy with Evelyn</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_25'>25</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Waterfalls</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_31'>31</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>A Tomb in Bayswater</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_37'>37</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>A Corrupt Following</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_42'>42</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>The Swan of Lichfield</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_49'>49</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Joanna Baillie</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>The Classic Novelist</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_62'>62</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>A Hundred Years Ago</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_68'>68</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Thomas Lovell Beddoes</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_75'>75</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>George Darley</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_82'>82</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Sydney Dobell</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_87'>87</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Coventry Patmore</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_94'>94</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Poetry and Childhood</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_110'>110</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>George Meredith</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_117'>117</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Pessimism in Fiction</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_122'>122</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>Giacinto Gallina</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_127'>127</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c005'><span class='sc'>The Second Person Singular</span></td>
+    <td class='c006'><a href='#Page_133'>133</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class='c007'><i>The papers which follow have been chosen from those
+of Mrs. Meynell’s literary essays that have not yet been
+reprinted in book-form. The selection has been made
+at the instance of the Oxford University Press.</i></p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>SUPERFLUOUS KINGS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c008'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Which had superfluous kings for messengers</div>
+      <div class='line'>Not many moons gone by.</div>
+      <div class='line in24'><cite>Antony and Cleopatra.</cite></div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>As the kings lag, and then pass away from the
+stage of the world, many men will ask what there
+is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty in
+the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time
+probably forget or deny that there was ever anything
+in the life of the world answering to Shakespeare’s
+royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in
+Arviragus and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in
+Lear, or to his glory in Cleopatra. It may be so, as
+to the world; there may have been nothing thus
+answerable. But there was Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And our regrets in regard to him cover all his
+regalities—the hidden and hereditary and unconscious,
+and the conscious and braggart and
+manifest: Perdita’s dignity among the romps, and
+her sportive disputes as to Art and Nature among
+the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the
+junketings, and also Lear’s loud and indignant
+death. The splendour of Shakespeare’s veneration
+for kings is perhaps deeper where the kingliness—the
+blood of it—is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess
+of <cite>The Winter’s Tale</cite>, for here it is matter of Shakespeare’s
+faith. So with the brothers of Imogen who,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span>by the way—and not merely by the way—like
+her, discuss flowers—‘Then to arms!’ They too
+have the implicit distinction, unknown to the
+world of their exile, but known to Shakespeare, who
+is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in
+<cite>The Winter’s Tale</cite>, Shakespeare makes his resolute
+and implicit act of belief in the blood of kings.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>In <cite>Lear</cite> that faith suffers outrage and defies it.
+Many years ago the great actor, Rossi, who did not
+gain in England such honour as was rendered to
+Salvini—I fear because his physical personal dignity
+was not so obvious as Salvini’s—played King
+Lear in Italian. But there was one cry, one royal
+proclamation, that could not be removed from the
+English. So Rossi said ‘every inch’ in English.
+It needed Shakespeare’s word to vindicate Shakespeare’s
+royalism. (One might make sport of any kind
+of translation: say ‘<i><span lang="it">ogni centimetro</span></i>’—‘every centimetre
+a king’ is good farce.) No Italian will serve;
+the Latin mind has not this degree of imaginative
+reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty
+of giving sudden greatness to a customary word.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only
+‘the beauteous Majesty of Denmark’, and the
+‘courteous action’ of the dead—‘being so majestical’—and
+the dignity of Hermione’s daughter, and
+the tempest of Lear’s elemental tragedy, will not
+consent to touch us with nothing more than pity
+and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of
+pride of life in the royalty he sings; confronts us—no,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>rather brings us to our knees before the arrogant
+splendour he conceives:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only
+hand in hand with a queen does Antony venture on
+the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to him
+are given the most surprising lines in any of the
+tragedies, it is only as the lover of a queen that he
+has the right to them. To him is assigned that
+startling word, the incomparable word of amorous
+and tender ceremony—‘Egypt’.</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>I am dying, Egypt, dying.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>That territorial name, murmured to his love in the
+hour of death, and in her arms—I know not in the
+records of all genius any other such august farewell.
+Lear’s word is outdone here. Lear a king in every
+inch of his aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in
+every league of her ancient realm. Has not majesty
+spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of
+such a lover?</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Superfluous kings—Shakespeare’s irony could
+find no other adjective so overcharged with insolence
+as this. Kings must be as he conceived
+them in order to that antithesis:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Superfluous kings for messengers.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>But an antithesis more complete than that of downfall
+and of servitude is that of mortality. The
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the
+Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face
+with the mere fortunes of war; the derision of the
+word ‘superfluous’ implies, in reversal, an inalienable
+dignity; so in the act of dying, the visible act,
+done in life; so with ‘sad stories of the death of
+kings’. The final contradiction is not here; but
+in the grave itself, in the hidden burial, out of the
+sight of the populace: it needs the utmost of
+Shakespeare’s passion of royalty to answer to that
+depth. And here is poetry, not by him, but wonderfully
+worthy of him, that tells us of</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in32'>High-born dust</div>
+      <div class='line'>In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have
+written this.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with
+this glory this humiliation. Who will say which
+is greater, the thesis or the antithesis? But they
+cannot be parted to be compared. There they are,
+in our national literature, and cannot be effaced.
+But who shall hinder their becoming, for the
+student, first a matter of mere literary interest, then
+a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter
+of some new derision? (We need no new derisions:
+our wits are apt to mockery.) Is it well that any
+one of Shakespeare’s many passions should come
+under our frigid inspection, to be examined so?</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>When kings are in fact superfluous, Shakespeare’s
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>great word ‘superfluous’ will be cancelled
+out; when kings are no longer flattered, Young’s
+great word ‘unflattered’ will be a futile word;
+when there are no full assiduous courts, the
+‘thin courts’ will suggest no spectres. Regret is
+for Shakespeare, as has been said; not for Saul, or
+Louis the Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But,
+short of Shakespeare’s devotion, there will be some
+sentiment damaged. When the mortality of kings
+is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all
+inherit, then the lamps and the gold that enshrine
+the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar
+at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathedrals,
+with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who
+preceded the kings to the manger.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Shakespeare’s greatest splendour, then, that so
+shines down the splendour of history and the world,
+is under sentence, and under sentence his greatest
+compassion, and under sentence his greatest terror,
+and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have
+placed at the head of these pages a word of neither
+terror nor compassion, because the word of irony
+implies the rest.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>England has little primitive poetry, because
+the Reformers not only broke graven images but
+destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of
+minor literature to the flames. We have much ado
+in raking together a few stones of their hacking and
+scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the
+trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national
+poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious
+exceptions), begin soon after the invention of
+movable type, and so modern are they that the
+sixteenth century must serve us for comparative
+antiquity. The language was mobile between Elizabeth
+and James, tuned by the hands of the masters
+whose lives lasted from one developing time into
+another, and who were themselves England, having
+history in common with their country.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man
+and boy. He was born in the year
+of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was
+dancing, an old man of thirty-four, dropsical and
+horrible, full of repentance, as were then all of his
+manner of life when they had an illness sufficiently
+long to give them time. Greene died from too much
+banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries,
+but his sorry death-bed gave him room for ample
+self-reproach, and doubtless Christopher Marlowe
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>also would have left a record of his repentance had
+the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age
+than his friend’s, been less violent. In later years
+Carew asked pardon, with many cries, for the
+greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during
+these two bright centuries you may hear, if you turn
+your ear that way, the loud lamentation of poet
+after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not
+a death-bed without the clamour that closed the
+song. It is a parting cry, so poignant and sudden
+that the air rings with it even while the succeeding
+singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the
+present. Greene had not a little to repent of in his
+actions, but nothing to retract in his songs; therefore,
+the reader who has not beheld his life—his
+wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it,
+and certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the
+grief, pain, and fear of the closing scene, and may
+well be content with the sweetness of the songs.
+They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized.
+Without following the fashion of using the
+terms of one art to describe another, we may permit
+ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of
+music to represent the sixteenth-century lyric,
+harmonics for the seventeenth, counterpoint for the
+nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to
+Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in
+which so much as two notes are to be heard; and
+the double string makes the sound more human.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is not human to be single as the songs of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>Greene are single; the fading of pleasure, the
+cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the
+happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each
+thing, one at a time, is so unaccompanied that
+you wonder how a primitive poet should have had
+time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying
+thoughts together. For it is hardly youth, hardly
+inexperience that this simplicity suggests, but
+rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating
+other conditions than those which govern an actual
+world of which the poet has somewhat grown
+tired.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of
+sweetly jarring notes in the lines that tell the parting
+of father and mother over their laughing child—lines
+that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the
+mind, of Blake in his own song of birth. Blake’s
+verse has a tempestuous and threatening spiritual
+wildness of which Greene did not know the language;
+and it is only in the leaping metre, the
+clamour of the rhymes that seem striving to be
+heard above a deafening childish noise, that the
+two songs have so much likeness.</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>The wanton smiled, father wept,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Mother cried, baby leapt;</div>
+      <div class='line'>More he crowed, more we cried.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling
+of the child, and you hear also the crying that
+the mother is seeking to still with her recital of that
+late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes,
+perhaps, ‘The Praise of Faunia’:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Or but as mild as she is seeming so,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less
+strong, and less masculine Shakespeare sonnet.
+There is sweet line after line in this poem, and many
+such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling
+throat’ and ‘When she sings, all singers else be
+still!’ But the poem is famous chiefly, it may be
+guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has
+a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible
+beauty:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>O glorious sun, imagine me the west!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast!</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in
+Dianam’, which is to be praised not as a whole, but
+for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep
+a golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’,
+and from nymphs in white. There never was any
+scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain
+is cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow
+through, but the sense of outer sunshine is intense
+and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame blackly,
+as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the
+way, is a familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is
+a presence hardly removed in the southern summer.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is
+caused by the most careless of verses. As a lyrist,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>he never leant hard upon anything; he has the
+lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to
+sing his tunes upon the way. So lightly is the verse
+given to the wind that you are apt to read it as
+carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of
+the Fountain, for instance, should be read with
+more leisure than at a glance it seems to merit.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Greene is dull to any reader who does not take
+the pains to cancel all the conventions of the times
+that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure
+fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy
+green, must be simply forgotten; and the task is
+not difficult. Greene has all the good luck by his
+Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was
+neither to be repeated by others, nor to be taken
+from his own head upon whom it alighted first. We,
+who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need
+not be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and
+this not because his were best, but because his
+were first.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>See now how he made the mere Cupid childish,
+wild, and dear:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Cupid abroad was lated in the night,</div>
+      <div class='line'>His wings were wet with ranging in the rain.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat
+dull, especially when he is not at his best, because
+he has so little to say. There never was a poet who
+said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his
+own estimation, not important enough to be written
+for their own sake; they were but snatches of songs
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>in his prose writings—novels and what not; and
+poems so set flying at any other time and in any
+other English could not have kept their motion and
+their spirit so long. They never cost him a thought;
+and the only sign of attention is in the versification.
+This is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon
+in Dianam’ it is very good indeed; the foot is
+elastic and moves with a rebound.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take
+his charming description of ‘A Shepherd and His
+Wife’. As though in the idleness of an empty
+mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly
+matter for verse—the way, for example, in which
+the flaps of the shepherd’s coat were turned over.
+It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail
+as that. But in the same poem are some lively
+verses about the wife which seem not only to set her
+up for admiration and delight, but to dance about
+her in a round when that is done.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’,
+in which the happiest shepherdess in Thessaly compares
+her love and state with those of queens, and
+makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt
+refrain. But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has
+a weakness and listlessness that spoil its grace;
+and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was
+a small poet among the minor poets; but his hour
+struck in the cool of the morning, and, whatever
+kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic
+simplicity was in his English.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>‘A MODERN POETESS’</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>The cruel places of history are for ever emptied
+of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable
+sympathies that the lifelong prisoners
+seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable
+hours and places, long after they have once for all,
+unchallenged, passed the guard. Every martyrdom
+of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one how
+sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There
+is no living pain now in all the universe to continue
+it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or perhaps to regret
+it. And if we complain that the past is not to be
+revoked or undone, we might rather confess the
+complete consolation of the passing of time, the
+undoing, the effacement, and the more than death.
+It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is
+to be past, or that we perceive how clean is natural
+oblivion; the uneasy human retrospection stirs
+nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart
+with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing
+now on earth remembers.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the
+thing is over and done; but it afflicts me to think
+of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no trouble
+but in the present, and that though our minds seem
+to travel into the past, in truth they do not budge;
+and we, prisoners of our own moment, are fluttered
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>with the present sympathy, and not with the
+vanished sorrow, for this is not.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>By far the greater number of human sufferings
+have been forgotten by man as purely and freshly
+as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory
+which is history and tradition renews the report
+with so much attention as to preserve something
+like the dramatic unity of time. To read of them
+and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to
+endure them. But of others again we have the
+brief record that shows long hollow spaces of time,
+perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is
+the bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by
+our popular historians in a short paragraph that
+ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the
+extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style
+and making the page conspicuous to childish
+learners.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Evelyn has her in his list of learned women,
+although she is not in the catalogue of those whom
+he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the Duchess
+of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the
+young Plinie, Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’
+and Lucretia Marinella, who is not mentioned as
+any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a
+work <cite><span lang="it">Dell’ excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e
+mancamenti degli Huomini</span></cite>—with the inferiority of
+these and such as these does he flatter the surpassing
+Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart
+would have made her name too sad a sacrifice for
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>such a train. The other ladies are presented gaily
+and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but
+that divided which your Grace retaines in one.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when
+women of station were well taught, notable for
+her education. Her Latin letters are still there to
+attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by
+Mr. Philips, who was Milton’s nephew. These
+secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions are in
+touching disproportion with her original, immediate,
+and authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp
+edging that a more or less literary training gives
+to the natural human mind, making it aware, had
+been given to hers; and she was so prepared by
+delicate erudition that the loss of all she loved was
+complete to her, the suspense of imprisonment
+inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal.
+She lost better than her life, for the prison ruined
+her reason before it released her body, twice rifled
+and destitute, and dismissed it to Westminster
+Abbey and the grave.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is in her letters to her husband, and only in
+these, that Arabella Stuart is perceptible as she
+lived. The letters of entreaty to King James are
+the letters of those abject times. They declare her
+to be in despair, not because of the separation from
+her husband and only friend, and not because of
+her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of
+the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence,
+and by reason of the remorse and contrition of one
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>who had disobeyed him, even unwittingly. By
+these forms of ignominy did men and women rule,
+not their phrases only, but, apparently, their very
+thoughts. Such declarations were much more than
+a courtesy due to kings or the decorum of a style in
+letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most
+grotesque tune; those were real self-reproaches;
+they banished real sleep, human sleep, afflicted real
+consciences, set the tears of men running, and
+squandered and scattered to waste that human
+treasure, humility.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Lady Arabella’s remorse, as she took leave to
+remind the King, was poignant for her offence in
+having bestowed herself in marriage <i>upon the
+King’s permission</i>. He seems to have either forgotten
+or silently rescinded his consent, and for
+this she overwhelmed herself in professions of regret
+and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen
+some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which,
+she said, had beguiled the time ‘for her whose
+serious mind must invent some relaxation’.
+‘Womanish toys’, she called them, conscious of her
+education, and she thanked the gentleman who was
+her gaoler for consenting to present them. Her way
+of submission was even approved by the tyrant.
+One of her letters to the King, said Montford,
+‘was penned by her in the best terms, as she can
+do right well. It was often read without offence;
+nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with
+the applause of Prince and Council.’ The best
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>terms are of course the most reverent. The clergy
+exhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping,
+to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill
+of fear, was that of the Bishop of Durham.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>She had the heart to deny her commended letters
+so far as to practise some secret disobedience, heaping
+up self-reproach for the vigils of her solitude.
+The letters to her husband, from whom she had
+been parted after but a few months of marriage,
+were contraband. Even in these, her allusions to
+the King were most dutiful, but her husband was
+her theme. ‘Rachel wept,’ she wrote, ‘and would
+not be comforted, because her children were no
+more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow,
+and none else! And, therefore, God bless us from
+that, and I will hope well for the rest, though I see
+no apparent hope.’ Her husband was ill, as she
+heard from others. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am exceeding
+sorry to hear that you have not been well. I am
+not satisfied with the reason Smith gives for it;
+but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sympathy
+betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen
+cheek at the same time with a cold. For God’s
+sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your
+body. You may see by me what inconvenience it
+will bring one to; and no fortune, I assure you,
+daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find
+in myself; for “<span lang="fr">si nous vivons l’âge d’un veau</span>”,
+as Marot says, we may, by God’s grace, be happier
+than we look for, in being suffered to enjoy ourself
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not able
+to live it, I, for my part, shall think myself a pattern
+of misfortune, in enjoying so great a blessing as you
+so little while.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Again, she reminded him that he had not written
+to her ‘this good while’. ‘You see when I am
+troubled, I trouble you with tedious kindness, for
+so I think you will account so long a letter. But,
+sweet Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with
+writing but when you please. Be well, and I shall
+account myself happy in being your faithful and
+loving wife.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>As soon as these letters were discovered the
+writing was stopped. Enough was written, and
+enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous,
+worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief,
+of this unfortunate. A graver revolt against her
+tyrants was her escape to join her husband in flight
+from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times, tides,
+and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She
+would not save herself without him. She was
+brought back, and from the new imprisonment
+there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied
+justice by refusing another little offering of her
+needlework. In her appeal to the Queen she had
+entreated that the gloves she had made might be
+accepted ‘in remembrance of the poor prisoner that
+wrought them, in hopes her royal hands will vouchsafe
+to wear them, which, till I have the honour to
+kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate
+creature that ever lived prostrates itselfe
+at the feet of the most merciful King that ever was.’
+These are among the last ‘best terms’ that Arabella
+Stuart penned.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Her King and Queen and country sent her
+civilization into solitude, gagged her classics, disproved
+her poetry, and thrust her ‘expanded mind’
+into the inner darkness.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>TO ITALY WITH EVELYN</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse
+of the city and the landscape of the future, two
+centuries and a half hence? Even if so, he can
+hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted
+desires the sight of the past. At any rate, if there
+be any scene that we would willingly be admitted
+to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Thither would we willingly journey not later than
+in the day of John Evelyn, when he travelled in his
+youthful dignity, provided with letters, and spent
+some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the
+University of Padua. Every one knows his journal
+of the English Church under the Commonwealth,
+of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of Charles II.
+But not the least charming part of one of the most
+readable of books—a book written in an English
+prose that had not yet undergone much manipulation,
+but was still a little rigid, but rigid with
+vitality—is somewhat neglected; it is the part
+that records this progress through France to the
+Coast, and thence into Italy as far as Naples, and
+home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and
+Switzerland. The happy man! When he drew
+near, after peril of shipwreck, to the port of Genoa,
+he ‘perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy’. This was
+off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>you may smell the odour of factories—soap-boiling
+and other things—for it has lately come to be stifled
+with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are
+dying with their blackened arbours. Only of late
+have those ancient, coloured terraces, coloured as
+a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that
+a little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might
+be set in a ring and worn as a jewel—only of late
+have the gardens, once in rich and fortunate neglect,
+ceased to breathe their ancient breath.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>‘We recovered the shore, which we now kept in
+view within half a league, in sight of those pleasant
+villas, and within scent of those fragrant orchards
+which are on this coast, full of princely retirements
+for the sumptuousnesse of their buildings and
+noblesse of the plantations, from whence, the wind
+blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes
+of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and
+jasmine flowers for divers leagues seaward.’ And
+Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of this coast
+as to record it again in the dedication of his ‘Fumifugium’
+to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpierdarena—that
+one place precisely, of all others—in
+the years just past makes the whole incident of
+this welcoming message from the cultivated lands,
+and of the ensuing treatise and its title, sound somewhat
+cruel in irony.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approaching
+smoke, as he tried also—by an application to
+the same monarch—to avert the course of fashion
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>in the then important dress of men. The East he
+thought better worth following than France, and
+he proposed a whole revision of the Western mode,
+and presented the King with a plan whereby the
+trivial fashions of ‘the monsieurs’ were to be
+exchanged for an Oriental ‘noblesse’. Charles
+accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to
+wear a Persian robe; but he rather shabbily left
+Evelyn to conjecture, in silence, that it was his
+advice that had been taken. In the end, the King
+slid back, and ‘the monsieurs’ had it. If John
+Evelyn had had that glimpse into the future which
+few of us desire to-day, how could he have endured
+those French inventions to which the East has now
+been partly converted, and the fumes of that ash-strewn
+piece of coast? ‘But a soap-factory!’
+cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy
+national sarcasm in the industry that, among others,
+has brought about this special local change. It
+happens, however, pat to this matter of soap, that
+Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought,
+in one of the towns of North Italy, certain ‘wash-balls’
+which seemed to be new to him; he speaks
+of them as a useful invention. Before the factory
+had taken the place of the fragrant orchards the
+people of that coast had the constant custom of
+washing all their clothes. It is much to be feared
+that the smoke of the soap-factory has already put
+an end to that habit by making it too difficult, or
+impossible.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>Some consolation is to be found in this—that if
+a mile of that incomparable coast is spoilt, there
+remain scores of miles all untouched, differing only
+in the lesser majesty of the houses and gardens with
+their great sea-walls. The ‘sumptuousnesse’ admired
+by Evelyn will never be restored; but of the
+mere walls of those rougher houses too, in their
+place in the landscape, pieces might be set as jewels.
+It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn
+wrote. Otherwise the general modern complaint
+as to the insensibility of the older writers to the
+daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his
+case. He, without noting, saw the change of skies
+that sets alight the world when you have crossed the
+Alps; and of the further illumination of a southern
+spring he says nothing; but he makes mention of
+the ‘extraordinary long’ tail of a horse, which he saw
+in a collection of curiosities, nor do two horns of as
+many unicorns go unrecorded, for he had a grave
+and simple admiration of such things as petrifactions,
+flies in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor
+does he cease to be a learned and most responsible
+man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to
+see nothing contrary to the dignities of State and
+office. The false air of childishness which this kind
+of English gives to the style of Pepys always makes
+his public functions and honours seem to us incongruous.
+In Evelyn’s <cite>Diary</cite>, by the way, we meet
+Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty business, with
+so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an
+air of childishness in our eyes to-day. I have to
+confess that when I hear an Italian say something
+to the purpose I always cry inwardly ‘How intelligent!’
+But in those days England took frankly
+a lower place. It could not be otherwise, seeing that
+the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had
+imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe.
+Evelyn had nothing whatever to be proud of at home,
+inasmuch as he was ashamed of York Minster,
+Lincoln, Durham, and the rest; inasmuch, too, as
+Shakespeare’s name occurs not once in his book.
+He never doubts that modern art had reached its
+culmination in St. Peter’s and the Lateran, in Guido
+Reni and Domenichino.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>He found all those splendours new, and it is no
+wonder if he was convinced that all this art in course
+of progress, as it was visibly, must be better integrally
+than what had gone before. He took no notice
+of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but
+admired precisely as Horace Walpole admired, and
+on the same scale and according to the same order.
+He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of
+to-day is dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down
+the page, and to find the polite English traveller in
+rapture before the blatant Bernini.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great compliment
+of taking her at the highest estimation as
+she was at the moment. There was no painful
+comparison with any period of the past, for we have
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>evidence in his works that Bernini was not afraid of
+antiquity itself.  In arts, in letters, in arms, in
+science especially, Italy was foremost in present
+action—<i>there</i> was her splendour, as we may find it
+hard to realize. Evelyn sent home preparations
+from her schools of anatomy to the Royal Society,
+to which such things were new.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller,
+who was soon after to plan the hedges and alleys of
+Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a school of
+gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the
+perpetual inequalities which have hardly been
+sufficiently recognized as distinctive of our plains.
+In Italy he found the plains to be flat with that
+peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight.
+Most beautiful with the mountains for a distance—but
+he hardly had eyes for the mountains. It is
+rather difficult to forgive him for calling the rocks
+and bays of the coast ‘horrid gaps’ and ‘dreadful
+mountains’; but ‘Oh, the sweet Paradise!’ he
+cries among the fountains and the vines.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed
+he went upright; and if we desire to travel with
+him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his Italy
+but for the sake of himself. Something we would
+have from him in exchange for our better information
+on the ‘Gotiq ordonance’.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>WATERFALLS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>‘We then went out to see a cascade. I trudged
+unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry.’
+Dr. Johnson was not often pleased, it seems, upon
+this tour in Wales in the company of ‘my mistress’
+and her family, and the arid waterfall was no doubt
+a welcome incident, for the scenery had been tedious
+to his spirit. He made light of the mountains, and
+did not hesitate to propose a strange image to the
+fancy of his companions when he derided a river
+unlucky enough to come into the prospect: ‘Why,
+sir, I could clear any part of it by a leap.’ He rated
+very low the old house of Mrs. Thrale’s family,
+though as a house it amused him more than any
+view. ‘The addition of another storey would make
+an useful house, but it cannot be great.’ The old
+parish clerk who, seeing Mrs. Thrale again, ‘foolishly
+said that he was now willing to die,’ is no doubt
+justly rebuked; but so seems to be Mrs. Thrale
+herself: ‘He had only a crown given him by my
+mistress.’ Then there was that dispute on the
+Chester walls; and, first and last, Dr. Johnson was
+not found to be best of companions by the ‘pretty
+woman’ witty enough to ‘add something to the
+conversation’, with whom he himself would have
+been all content.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>There is reason to think that scenery in those
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>days was rather unfairly and dully insisted upon as
+a matter of taste. ‘Dispositions of wood and water’
+were the subjects of a kind of expert study, and it
+is easy to understand what a bore a landscape
+might become under the eye of a judge. Miss
+Austen shows a distinct tendency to bring water,
+rising ground, and well-wooded slopes under review.
+If a modern mansion has been erected, with ignorance,
+in too low a situation, she has an instant eye
+for the barbarism. The shrubberies, the curving
+carriage drives, the conifers, the farm-buildings, if
+any, duly planted out, come under the rapid
+approval of an elegant mind, and so does the far
+prospect no less. The distance is declared to be in
+harmony with the demands of a lover of nature;
+and as you read you can hardly think of the scenery
+as thrilled with summer wind, or believe that its
+miles would mark human feet with dust, or would
+be measured by the wavering rods of human weariness,
+or subject to any incidents except those of
+a careful engraving. There is some charm in the
+false-classical landscape of that time, merely looked
+back upon; but it would be something less than
+interesting to be presently in the company of people
+who talked much of the dispositions of wood and
+water. There is a certain way of looking at a view
+that affects one almost with dismay to hear of.
+When a professor of scenery asks you to enjoy what
+he always calls a peep, with several kinds of fir-trees
+coyly betraying the way to it, there is little delight
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>there; nor are cottages so pleasant when they, too,
+are said to peep; but this is a later and even a duller
+fancy. Landscape a hundred years ago had more
+dignity, though no more ‘spirit in the woods’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If the dispositions of wood and water allowed of
+a waterfall, it is impossible to imagine a more welcome
+addition at that day to scenery constructed,
+like Mr. Pecksniff’s younger daughter, upon good
+principles. The cascade had not yet been made
+quite a common convention, for the ‘picturesque’
+had not then come and gone, making dull in its
+passage, at least in art and in letters, the sallies of
+nature. To find a waterfall, in the right place, was
+in those days an elegant and natural joy; and it
+must have been no small disappointment to see
+Dr. Johnson trudging unwillingly. But no doubt
+there had been too much said.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Taste, always so nearly in peril of derogation,
+and, in fact, so quickly, according to all experience,
+dimmed by habit, has done wrong, by its weak
+preferences, to all the flowers of scenery—not to the
+actual flowers of vegetation only, though these have
+long been turned to the basest uses of all decoration—but
+to the other outbreaks of the movement
+and vitality of earth. The white tops of mountains
+and the climax of storms, forests in their utmost
+leaf, waves at the crest, the clouds of sunset newly
+on fire, waters in haste—what a gathering of
+blossoms is this from the summits of the world,
+whether on heights or on plains! Light and sound
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>seem to be set free by the mere resounding thought
+of so much fruition. But, for their all-intelligible
+beauty, these crowns of things were long tossed
+together for the use of any one who so much as
+knew their names, and not the less cheaply because
+the language of description grew to be more subtle,
+more expert, and more poetic. Soon that expert
+quality also became, as it were, the waste and
+refuse of literature.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Waterfalls, then, have been too much in use.
+Not only by the travelling party of the Thrales have
+they been proposed too pressingly to admiration.
+They cannot be restored at second hand to their
+dignity. A very great man might restore them to
+his readers by a word, but no one of less authority
+than his need begin to take the trouble to look for
+it. The right course is to see them where they are,
+and to let the literature of the matter rest. Any
+phrase written here in praise of waterfalls—if such
+should escape—is not intended to do more than
+point the way whither the traveller may trudge if
+he will. Norway and the Pyrenees keep for us the
+surprise of perpetually new waters drawing to the
+ancient fall.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The Alps, even, have many a slender stream, perhaps
+bearing no name, and certainly known by no
+names out of sight of their nearest peaks, that are
+remembered in their solitude, or at least recognized
+at each return of the traveller, where they drop,
+hushed by their distance as much as by the noisy
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>train. There is one, for instance, seen for but
+a moment, that has so long a fall as to grow weak
+and to swing in all the light winds. The strong stem
+of the cascade springs from the bed of its upland
+stream; and as from a strong stem a sapling
+wavers upwards, entangled at last in all breezes, so
+the dropping brook wavers downwards to its last
+and lighter motion.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Waterfalls that are turned to torrents have not
+been so much the subject of the landscape of convention.
+Their wildness did not so take the general
+fancy when conventions were made; but they are
+the vitality of the mountains. Theirs is an expression
+of movement so great that all the Alpine
+region seems to manifest its life only by these noisy
+valleys. All communications, all signals and
+messages of the range, hasten in and out by these
+brilliant cataracts, one in the depth of every ravine.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>They are not only the traffic and the mission of
+their mountains, the coursing of that cold blood and
+the pulse of the rock, but they carry the mountain
+spirit far out. There is no country under mountains
+but has its quietness awakened by wilder
+rivers than other lands are watered by. When the
+range is out of sight, the torrents are still hasty,
+cataract below cataract, shallow and clear, quick
+from the impulse of waterfalls. No loitering rivers
+in earthy beds keep level banks in those plains that
+have their horizon lifted by the line of great mountains;
+no silent rivers.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>If the torrent runs dry, there is no one to be vexed
+by the silence. Dr. Johnson would not, perhaps,
+be asked to trudge for the sake of the rough charms
+of a mere torrent; but even if the disposition of
+wood and water comprised a torrent, he would have
+no revenge for his literary weariness in seeing his
+guide abashed. For a dry torrent is a most beautiful
+wreck, the ruin of a splendid progress and procession,
+of which the leader, when he went by, did
+not pass unknown. Such are the wide watercourses
+of the valleys in the Canton de Vaud, the colour of
+their innumerable stones a bright daylight grey,
+and the threads of water of their time of drought
+rippling just audibly by night.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Not all waterfalls make the conspicuous show of
+the cascades that take their leap from the rocks.
+In early autumn there is nothing fresher or sweeter
+than the minute, perpetual waterfall that hides in
+moss and undergrowth, and slips everywhere from
+the Alps. The air is nowhere silent, and hardly
+a blade of grass is unstirred by the delicate thrill of
+water. Without paths it drops minutely and invisibly
+into the lakes, the gentlest of all the signs of
+the barren and lofty snow.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>A TOMB IN BAYSWATER</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Not many Londoners, it seems, know where
+amongst them Sterne was buried; but his tomb
+stands where it did, duly tended, so that the superscription
+is clean and clear, within perpetual sound
+of the voices, of the feet, of the hootings, and
+of the wheels on the long westward road that
+starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the
+story told by the surgeon who thought he recognized
+a dead man anonymous upon a dissecting
+table, at the time of Sterne’s death in Bond-street,
+has discouraged the national and the local interest
+in an accessible London grave of the great. Yet it
+matters little whether the dust beneath this grey,
+Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous
+headstone be now mingled with the dust that was
+the body of Sterne; or at least it is a question that
+touches no more than the fancy.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The lapse of time might be important in our
+thoughts on Sterne’s tomb if we measured by the
+long years of childhood; but we do not, because
+it is the short mature years that are historical.
+Added together the adult two centuries since
+Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did
+garden, court, or house, remembered with the
+large remembrance of ancient and spacious infancy,
+so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man
+as the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>Time is all depreciated, disproved. No device,
+such as Thoreau’s for reducing the past to its real
+brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old
+woman and had wondered at the date whereto
+her birth referred him, but bethought himself
+how few of such lives as hers outstride all history
+and the very life of the race. But to join long
+life to long life is to pass in fancy by so many
+consecutive childhoods, for then the time will
+seem not short but immeasurably long. The
+childish years prolong time; the adult years, a
+man’s middle years, the short years of life, make
+Time’s changes, doing Time’s work.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A mere score of such decades take us back
+through Wordsworth and Keats, the great English
+painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day
+when Sterne was born. What a trifle!</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A score of our little adult decades have passed
+since the <cite>Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus</cite>, planned
+by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit and actual
+satire upon science; since a medical pedant—learned,
+not a simpleton—was to be rallied for
+relying upon dreams and certain prescriptions of
+Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires
+since Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the
+copyist.) It is the effect of the twenty poor decades
+that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of time.
+To unpack these years is somewhat like the unloading
+of a ripe bulrush, or of some other lately-closed
+house of seeds in autumn, whereof the wings were
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>bound until they opened with a spring, never to
+close again; and the air is filled with the released
+burden of the slender rod.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Not because of the flight of time, then, is this
+solitude of brilliant sky, broad grass, and trees
+tossed by the summer wind, a place of interest;
+nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too
+easily forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a <cite>Tristram
+Shandy</cite> purged (or <i><span lang="fr">à peu près</span></i>), but the stealthy
+offence is so constant in Sterne’s intention that
+something like his own ignoble agility might be
+necessary for one who would at every point evade
+it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or so (apt
+action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy),
+and he seems to have done the work as well as an
+honest man ought to hope to be able to do it. Of
+that no honest man can be precisely apprised—it
+would need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for
+those who intend to read <cite>Tristram Shandy</cite>, or to
+read it again, Henry Morley’s (in the Universal
+Library Series) is an edition to be welcomed; to
+lose one page in ten is to lose nothing essential to
+the masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>What moves curiosity here is the question why
+this bullying headstone should have been erected
+at the will of two anonymous ‘Brother Masons’,
+inconsequently so called in their own inscription,
+inasmuch as Sterne was not of their craft. Here
+are the couplets, turned with the metrical ability of
+that day, and making slovenly thinking to move
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>with precision. After announcing that in that place
+‘lyes the body of the Reverend Laurence Sterne,
+A.M.’—‘Ah! molliter ossa quiescant!’—the lines
+run thus:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Unsully’d worth, and soul without a stain;</div>
+      <div class='line'>If mental powers could ever justly claim</div>
+      <div class='line'>The well-won tribute of immortal fame;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride</div>
+      <div class='line'>Mow’d down luxuriant follies far and wide.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Unseal’d to him the springs that move the mind;</div>
+      <div class='line'>What did it boot him? Ridicul’d, abus’d,</div>
+      <div class='line'>By fools insulted and by prudes accus’d.</div>
+      <div class='line'>In his, mild reader, view thy future fate:</div>
+      <div class='line'>Like him, despise what ’twere a sin to hate.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The confusion of images and of purposes in this
+composition needs no exposing. Its coherence is
+nevertheless invested with that virtue of propriety
+which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extraordinary
+gain of all its secondary literature, and of
+the less than secondary. Dignity is too lofty a name
+for a quality so inessential; but it must be owned
+that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning
+powers of the same order, and so angry as these two
+seem to have been, would to-day, or in any other
+day than that, have turned their verse with less
+self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with
+a single flourish that never delighted any human
+eye, classical and paltry at once, is the characteristic
+funereal stone that bears the lines.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>Modern philanthropy—perhaps that of the mild
+reader himself so inconsequently threatened in the
+verse—has changed the old burial-ground into
+a place of recreation absolutely unnecessary in
+a road that has Hyde Park on the other side of its
+railings. The mild reader has levelled the grass and
+cleared all the tombstones—Sterne’s and one or
+two more excepted—from the wide square, ranging
+them against the four walls, two deep. The names
+will be but a little the later forgotten. One poor
+little name, because of the primness of the title,
+remains in the mind—that of ‘Miss Susannah
+Headlam, who departed this life March the 6th,
+1819, aged three years’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>No one comes to the superfluous pleasure-ground.
+Under the beautiful plane-trees flocks of sparrows
+alight with the leaves of a crisp, dry London autumn
+having a sun of summer, and the cats look at them,
+knowing there is no cover to spring from. Cover or
+no cover, on the impulse, a happy dog would hunt
+these flocks at random; the cat contains the
+passion of his wish as he strolls. He makes no
+crouch or spring, except, now and then, upon some
+minute moth which he afterwards eats with much
+ado and working of the jaws.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>At the entrance stands the Chapel of Rest with
+the frescoes offered by Shields to the meditation of
+whomsoever will pause to take advantage of the
+quiet hour; and hither, in fact, come a very few
+Londoners, out of the noise.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>A CORRUPT FOLLOWING</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>During the whole nineteenth century our
+language underwent a certain derogation, notorious,
+different in kind from the corruptions of all other
+ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the
+architecture of stations—and apparently of yesterday,
+and to-day, and of a morrow seen in rather dull
+and discouraging prospect. But the truth is that this
+common speech is due to the enormous influence
+of a great author who was born in 1737, was for
+forty-seven years the contemporary of Dr. Johnson,
+and died well within the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect’
+for a conjecture referring to the past? It is
+Gibbon’s: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs
+were not expelled from the palace.’ What is the
+‘and which’, ‘and who’ of the slovenly? and
+what the ‘whose’ applied to inanimate things by
+authors too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof’?
+Gear of Gibbon’s style, both: ‘Below the
+citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with
+precious stones, and whose value might be
+esteemed,’ &#38;c.; and ‘A Menapian of the meanest
+origin, but who had long signalized his skill as
+a pilot’. There is, it is true, the inanimate
+‘whose’ of a more illustrious and older author,
+but that claims the excuse of metre.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vulgarism,
+‘so much per month’, instead of ‘so much
+a month’, or ‘per mensem’? From Gibbon.
+‘And coal will be by the sack or per the scuttle,’
+said a seaside landlady, in some one’s observant ear.
+In her innocence she would not have said it but for
+Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that
+cannot give the word ‘same’ its proper completion,
+but saddles it with a relative pronoun? Gibbon’s:
+‘The Western countries were civilized by the
+same hands which subdued them.’ ‘The hands
+which subdued them’ would be correct, and
+certainly more majestic.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Gibbon set the example of this common lax
+grammar: ‘Instead of receiving with manly
+resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing
+cries and entreaties disgraced the last moments
+of his life’; and ‘The election of Carus was
+decided without expecting the approval of the
+Senate’; and ‘A peasant and a soldier, his
+nerves yielded not easily to the impressions of
+sympathy’. And there is nothing that (Gibbon
+always says ‘which’) illiterate politeness is so fond
+of as this unconstructed and decorated phrase.
+Gibbon’s literature was scholarly, and these errors
+of his alter little or nothing of the honour due to
+his eminent elegance of style. But it was these
+laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it
+was the ‘corrupt following’ of this apostle that
+set the fashion of an animated strut of style—a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>strut that was animated in its day and soon
+grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon
+never does. His own narrative never fails to reply
+to a perpetual stimulation.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But to deal with the rest of the grammatical
+ill-example, left to unlucky generations from the
+very middle of the century of propriety, and made
+so much our own. It is very modern to have
+‘either’ or ‘neither’ followed by more than two
+things, and it is pure Gibbon; all the more conspicuous
+as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of
+three: ‘The policy of the senate, the active
+emulation of the consuls, and the martial enthusiasm
+of the people’; ‘The undertaking
+became more difficult, the event more doubtful,
+and the possession more precarious.’ But the
+three go ill with ‘either’: ‘either food, plunder,
+or glory;’ ‘either salt, or oil, or wood’. ‘The
+generals were either respected by their troops, or
+admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and
+generosity.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what
+is more modern and current and popular than
+this: ‘Magnus, with four thousand of his supposed
+accomplices, were put to death’? And even this
+is Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>To have done with mere grammar, there is
+surely no author in the history of our literature
+who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon
+an admiring people. He changed a hundred years
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>of English prose. The dregs of his style have
+encumbered the nation. Changes that have been
+ascribed to Johnson were his doing and not
+Johnson’s.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>He belonged to the eighteenth century; but the
+nineteenth century belonged to him, because he
+possessed it. That is why he and his English are
+thus modern; the times became conformed to
+him; and he was himself not his own age, but that
+which succeeded and admired him.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It was to the broad face of astonishment, and
+with the self-conscious face of novelty, that Gibbon
+addressed his prose. That shortened sentence
+(for it was he who shortened the sentence, and
+Macaulay did but imitate his full stops for the
+pauses of historical surprise) was to strike and to
+demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly
+renewed. ‘Suspicion was equivalent to proof.
+Trial to condemnation.’ ‘The strict economy of
+Vespasian was the source of his magnificence.
+The works of Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.’
+His, too, is the full ceremony of the ushering
+phrase: ‘It is easier to deplore the fate, than
+to describe the actual condition, of Corsica.’ His,
+too, the ‘the latter and the former’, which
+became a favourite fashion. ‘Oh, do not condemn
+me to the latter!’ exclaims a lover in one of
+Mrs. Inchbald’s stories, after a statement of his
+hopes and fears; and this phrase of emotion was
+a debt to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>does not condemn him to the latter; she permits
+some prospect of the former. ‘Peruse’ is Gibbon’s
+verb, and ‘extensive’ a favourite adjective. To
+him we owe ‘the mask of hypocrisy’ and ‘the
+voice of flattery’. It is not his fault that posterity
+divided this property so lavishly among themselves.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And yet is there no fault in his own frigid
+prodigality? Take this sentence in all its splendour:
+‘The Tyber rolled at the foot of the seven
+hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the
+Latins, and the Volsci, from that river to the
+frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of her infant
+victories.’ And this: ‘A distant hope, the child
+of a flattering prophecy.’ This all-inhuman image
+reminds us, by contrast, of Shelley, who often has
+this figure of a child, and never, however remote
+the thought, without a sense of childhood. So
+cold is Gibbon that when the incessant stimulation
+of his rhetorical intention spurs him to describe
+a murder thus: ‘A thousand swords were plunged
+at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus,’
+we are moved to tell him trivially that he exaggerates.
+When Burke said ‘A thousand swords’ he
+meant a thousand, and had a right to mean them,
+but Gibbon did not, obviously, mean a thousand.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>‘The unfortunate Probus’ is the model of a
+sentence that sometimes becomes monotonous
+even with the carefully various Gibbon: ‘The
+prudent Atticus’ begins a phrase, and ‘the
+equitable Nerva’ passes it on to ‘the cautious
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>Athenian’, and then again to ‘the generous
+Atticus’. His is a frigidity that deals broadly
+with massacre and the sack of cities. And from
+amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless
+viewed from afar, he suddenly plucks us this
+man’s ‘smile’, or that man’s ‘blush’. Whatever
+Gibbon’s race, there never was a writer so
+exceedingly Latin in spirit.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>‘To view’, by the way, is one of his favourite
+verbs: ‘Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence
+the various errors of the vulgar&#160;... and
+sometimes condescending to act a part on the
+theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments
+of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.’
+Readers with a sense of humour may remember
+under what conditions Zenobia ‘reiterated the
+experiment’; and the fatal manner in which the
+tradesman’s circular of to-day has ‘diffused’ (as
+Gibbon would say) the last ruins of his prose by
+post, is rather curiously illustrated thus: a little
+while ago some infamous face-wash was described
+in advertisements as a mixture of drugs brought
+across the desert by fleet dromedaries. And here
+is Gibbon’s Zenobia ‘mounting her fleetest
+dromedary’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the
+nobler habits of his language: ‘The veteran
+legions of the Rhine and the Danube.’ What
+armies! what time! what space! what war! ‘Give
+back my legions, Varus!’ Give back our legions,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>Gibbon! We may count our regiments, but thou
+hast named, not counted, multitudes.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And when Gibbon ‘gratifies’ these legionaries,
+the polite word does but make them more historical:
+‘After suppressing a competitor who had assumed
+the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his
+troops with the plunder of the rebellious city.’
+So that we do not forgive the corrupters who so
+scattered the word that burlesque was necessary
+for sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber
+confesses his ‘gratifying emotions of no common
+description’, Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and
+of Johnson in the nearer, past, was the first writer
+of pure prose—the first by a long tale of years—to
+reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils
+of Gibbon; yet even he has one little patch of
+them: ‘A steep bank of earth that has been at all
+exposed to the weather contains in it&#160;... features
+capable of giving high gratification to a careful
+observer.’ It is solitary in <cite>Modern Painters</cite>; it
+is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But now I spoke of burlesque; and Dickens’s
+burlesque of style is admirable; there is also
+a burlesque of another and more innocent kind:
+when the author of a recent English work on the
+<cite>Divine Comedy</cite> says that Paolo and Francesca
+were to receive from Dante ‘such alleviation as
+circumstances would allow’, that also is a distant,
+a shattered Gibbon, a drift of Gibbon.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Miss Anna Seward should not be made answerable
+for the poetry of the late eighteenth century
+but that no office or responsibility could be conferred
+upon a more willing recipient; the honour
+is hardly more than she demanded from the respect
+of the age to come; and when she bequeathed her
+works to this great man for editing, her letters to
+that, and her name to posterity, she would have
+heard with the satisfaction of her conscious hopes,
+rather than with elation or surprise, that another
+century would charge her with all the accumulated
+opinions of 1799.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is Mr. Lucas’s witty commentary<a id='r1'></a><a href='#f1' class='c011'><sup>[1]</sup></a> that recalls
+the name of Anna Seward and her claim to speak
+for those days—the time between two ages.
+I have no intention whatever to write of her with
+irony. Neither has Mr. Lucas yielded to the
+obvious temptation. There is something worthy
+of no slight respect in the justified security of her
+representative attitude. To deride her would be
+to deride that age, almost the latest that had full
+confidence, that took its historic place absolutely,
+without reluctance, suffered no misgiving, and did
+not disturb the order and course of history.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
+<p class='c009'><a href='#r1'>1</a>. <cite>A Swan and her Friends.</cite></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The centuries before our own have resembled
+a river whereof the direction is known, for it is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>still far from the tidal regions of its journey; so
+was the course of things in 1799; but in another
+fifty years the stream of the modern age had, as it
+were, begun to feel the tides. Waves have set in
+towards the head of the waters, or they double
+the current of the ebb. Waters breast waters, and
+travel against the journey of the stream, making
+brief excursions foot to foot with Time. Or there
+is a swing that sends the river turning with the
+tide, outstripping the pace of the natural pilgrimage.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>So was the mind of the nineteenth century
+lifted and cradled, in suspense like the pause of
+a vehement heart; so did it tend to the past and
+set to the future, a tidal flux and influx that flew
+from the end, flowed from the goal, filled and
+brimmed upper reaches, revisited pastures of
+yesterday with eager waves, or ebbed with a run
+and made haste to leave them twice.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If this, then, was the tidal surge of the stream
+of letters and the arts, the end of the eighteenth
+century was almost the last date before the tides
+began to be perceptible. Almost—for perhaps the
+days when Walter Savage Landor was seriously
+discussing the merits of a poem by Miss Chose
+upon the Queen were really the last of the stream
+above tides. It may be that the perturbing shock
+first interrupted the onward flowing just after
+him. Smooth days, those—there were no doubts
+as to the way of the wave, and no need to watch
+the hour in order to know whether backward or
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>forward its course was shaped. A stream is a
+stately stream above the tidal influence. And in
+Miss Anna Seward’s years the historic river of the
+mind was unchecked: it glided.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>I think there never was a day of more orderly
+confidence. The ‘taste’, the laws, that had come
+to pass were the only laws and the only taste that
+were timely or possible. From the later Milton to
+Dryden, from Dryden to Addison, Pope, Johnson,
+Gray, Cowper, Crabbe—the way is a way that has
+no turning. We mark it with some mingled
+feelings, but surprise is not one of them. It is
+much the same in the matter of town architecture.
+The brick box that came to pass in the building of
+London streets, in the course of the same age,
+followed the time of dignity, beauty, and fancy
+which was Wren’s, and all the degrees thereto
+were in a kind of order. Doubtless, this is why
+we have learnt, in the fluttering centre of a renewed
+architectural town, to look with some
+degree of esteem upon the black brick box, if only
+it be truly of that time. And this not because it
+has a quiet civic majesty of approach to its door
+<i><span lang="fr">à deux battants</span></i>, and passages and rooms proportionate
+within, but because that very exterior,
+which was the negation of architecture, was the
+last truly punctual style of building. And before
+its day they might be classical, but they were
+classical in a manner that was of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries, with an intense spirit
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>of the time. Perhaps the clearest sign of the
+times before the beating tides is this—their secure
+self-confidence; for they never doubted that their
+taste was the best and their criticism the result
+of accumulated judgement. Nay, in the dregs of
+times—in 1840—they had faith in their romances,
+Italian landscape, steel engraving, portraits with
+large eyes, in a word, in their ‘finish’ (the word is
+ominous); and because of their good faith we
+may deride even these with good humour.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Now, Miss Seward has an incontestable right to
+speak in the name of her contemporaries. There
+is hardly any one else who had all her good faith
+and solemnity. But first let me pause upon the
+title given to her with so much dullness and elegance—the
+Swan of Lichfield. The Swan of Avon
+had at least a river; he was never the Swan of
+Stratford-on-Avon. But with all respect to the
+poet who devised the name for Shakespeare, we
+may hold that it was not well inspired to suit
+a poet who sang in his middle days and was silent
+some time before he died. Let this, however,
+pass as the perversity of a phrase not without
+charm. It is the perversity, perhaps, that has
+made the name so dear and a household word.
+But at any rate a Swan of Avon could swim, he
+was not placed on a high road, or in a street, or
+within the precincts of a cathedral close. The
+Swan of Lichfield must have been named with an
+agreeable intention to confer a sweet dignity, and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>something of that faded dignity remains. The
+episcopal palace was her home, and she was called
+a Swan when she was in full career; they did not
+wait for a swan-song.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>So close was she to the first beginnings of the
+tides that she blundered when she left much of
+her poetry to Sir Walter Scott, not doubting his
+willingness to serve her as editor. He did the
+work, with some considerable excisions, and gave
+the volumes to the world, but in an ‘aside’ he has
+called her poems execrable. So that she was all
+too confident of the immediate future. Dying
+early in the nineteenth century, she continued
+a little too long the assurance of the eighteenth;
+that was her sole fault. In regard to her own day
+she had none.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It seems even that ‘execrable’ is an unjust word.
+Miss Seward did not attempt to describe a moonlight
+night without forgoing her bed to match it
+with a phrase. Her sincerity is not without its
+literary value, for it succeeds in a measure; if not
+fully communicated, it is suggested, and this is
+no small thing. Moreover, there is a poetic thought—an
+implicit thought, an inclusion—in her sonnet
+on ‘December Morning’:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in22'>... Then to decree</div>
+      <div class='line'>The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold</div>
+      <div class='line'>To friendship or the Muse.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>This surely is not without subtlety; nor is the
+final line, in which the reader and student is said
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>to fill his days so full that though he be not old
+he ‘outlives the old’. A poet capable of this sense
+of present time (for here is no mere commonplace
+as to future influence or literary immortality;
+she means that the outliving is present)—a poet
+who had this thought might have been a fine poet;
+she used her intellect, and that action is the vitality
+of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and
+song.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>This is so high a specimen that I will quote no
+more. Over Miss Seward’s criticism it would be
+but too easy to make merry. ‘For the magnificent,’
+she says of her century, ‘we have Akenside,
+Thomson, Collins, Dr. Johnson, Mason, Gray,
+Chatterton, Darwin, and the sublime Joanna
+Baillie; in the <i>simpler</i> style, Shenstone, Beattie,
+Cowper, Crowe, Bowles, Burns, Bloomfield, Walter
+Scott and his school; Coleridge, Southey, and
+<i>their</i> school. Poetry can have no nobler models
+than these supply to her various styles.’ She must
+have read the ‘Ancient Mariner’; she names
+Coleridge with Southey!</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>She had the eighteenth-century love for something
+that was <i>not</i> purity of style. I think that the
+critics of our own day have hardly perceived the
+violence of an age that wrote ‘taught the doubtful
+battle where to rage’; ‘red Arbela’; ‘gory
+horrors crowned each dreadful day’; ‘the madding
+crowd’; ‘maddened o’er the land’; and a thousand
+other things in tatters. Miss Seward rebuked
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>a writer for stealing ‘gulphy’ from Pope.
+‘Gulphy’, she thought, was too good to steal.
+‘He stole the picturesque epithet “gulphy”
+from Pope’:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And gulphy Xanthus foams along the field.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>‘Than which a more poetic line,’ she decides,
+‘was <i>never</i> written.’</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>JOANNA BAILLIE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Would Joanna Baillie’s <cite>Plays on the Passions</cite>
+have been so shunned by later generations and
+then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary Histories
+had remembered to mention the ‘Comedies
+on the Passions’ as well as the ‘Tragedies’?
+For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan
+of dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular
+completeness, wrote also a comedy; and one at
+least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so
+busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the
+limits of eighteenth-century wit, that a modern
+manager might surely do worse than try his luck
+with it.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If any man should desire to possess the full
+intention of Joanna Baillie in her undertaking,
+in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it
+in a great many pages of most explicit introduction,
+with her own decisions on all such controversies
+as those touching the individual and the type, in
+tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such
+matters. But her few readers are, perhaps, content
+to take as read this treatise, with its good
+sense and its very small charm. She knows well
+what she is about, this at any rate is certain:
+and when she addresses herself with a most simple
+sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>of Hatred, Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her
+good faith and gravity, and the admirable manner
+in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly
+quiet the reader’s natural resentment and inclination
+to revolt.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>With average good will and a fair readerly
+spirit, you may take these resolute tragedies, with
+their enormous <i><span lang="fr">parti pris</span></i>, as works of no despicable
+art. Joanna Baillie would by no means permit
+you to slight her art. She has a passage in which
+she disclaims the crude intention of setting up
+the image of a single passion as the whole nature
+of a man. If there were no conflict, she says,
+there would be no force, for the passion would
+have nothing to compel, to break or bend, within
+the passionate heart. But neither will she allow
+the units of humankind to puzzle us on the
+tragic stage with their asymmetry of nature.
+Her jealous man has other impulses for jealousy
+to grapple with, but they serve his jealousy so.
+She will not endure, as she tells us, eccentricity.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Add to this manner of planning an eighteenth-century
+blank verse of the second order, and you
+have the drama which seemed Shakespearian to
+many.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is not too much to say that any other drama—Antiquity
+and Shakespeare apart—would have
+had grave reason to be proud of Joanna Baillie.
+Her plays seem to be built up and locked together
+soundly; they close with a conventional but not
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>obtrusive dignity. Knowing the Passion that has
+been the theme, you are apt to turn to the final
+speech over the hero’s long-vexed body, the
+comment that proclaims an impartial sentence in
+tragic peace, and you find no weaknesses; the
+silence follows upon no manifest failure. Vivacity
+among the smaller characters, and some of the
+strength of the ages (being the strength of tradition)
+in the greater, leave her tragedies in no mean
+place; leave them there too literally, for few are
+the readers to put them to any test or question.
+In their day they and the ‘metaphysical preface’,
+as Mrs. Thrale calls it, were the occasion of some
+sayings hard to our ears. ‘A masculine performance’
+is the expected opinion, duly expressed,
+but we are not so well prepared for Sir Walter
+Scott’s reply to Lockhart: ‘If you wish to speak
+of a real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest
+genius of our country.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is the comedy following the tragedy of ‘Basil’
+that takes my fancy. Love seems to be the
+passion in hand, and Joanna Baillie makes such
+pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme
+(her hero keeping the fine sensibilities, expressed
+with impassioned elegance, of Steele’s <cite>Conscious
+Lovers</cite>) that it is not easy to realize that she
+passed the middle of the nineteenth century,
+albeit in extreme old age. Of the preceding
+tragedy I will say merely that one may detect in
+it a fancy of Antiquity, as the eighteenth century
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>dressed it, which is wonderfully pleasing: a little
+boy, Mirando, vexes the capricious heroine by
+naming her lovers; he creeps into her arms and
+begins to trouble her free heart, making guesses
+for sugar-plums. The reader likes to think that
+by a candid allegory, fit for Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
+painting of a gold-headed boy and a brown-eyed
+maid, Miss Joanna Baillie had given the name of
+Mirando to none other than Love himself, Cupid
+the bee.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But to the comedy. It is called ‘The Trial’,
+and turns upon the device, since repeated, perhaps,
+more than once, of shuffling a couple of
+heroines, so that she who is the heiress may
+disguise herself in the dresses of her penniless
+cousin, and receive impertinences, suffer neglect,
+and also test the true heart proffered in intention
+to her as a girl without wealth. It is
+the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls
+bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp)
+that makes the charm of this happy play. They
+exchange names upon the wildest impulse consistent
+with their Georgian manners. They are
+audacious and decorous; confess their quest,
+which is for a ‘sensible lover’; busy themselves
+therein, make inquiries, hide behind screens, plot
+together the exposure of the fortune-hunter,
+acknowledge the full value of their own beauty,
+and this with a propriety all of its own time.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Agnes has the better wit as well as the gold,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>but the lesser beauty. She it is who lays the plot,
+and persuades the uncle, when he would fall out
+with her and her cousin, to second their game. He
+would not, he avers, make a holiday mummery
+for their pleasure, and his wig is too old for a ball.
+‘Nay, don’t lay the fault upon the wig, good sir,
+for it is as youthful and as sly, and as saucy-looking
+as the best head of hair in the county.
+As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much
+curmudgeon-like austerity about it that young
+people fled before it, as, I daresay, the birds do
+now.’ As for the unlucky ‘fops’—the fops whom
+Joanna Baillie brings forward and overthrows in
+incredible effigy, after the fashion of the other
+satirists—Agnes, or, rather, her cousin Mariane,
+is troubled by many. Each one is mimicked in
+the dressing-room dialogues of these two enterprising
+rogues, and the appropriate humiliation
+is prepared for each with all precision. ‘Such
+a man must be laughed at, not scorned; contempt
+must be his portion.’ Mariane falls in: ‘He
+shall have it then. And as for his admirer and
+imitator&#160;... any kind of bad treatment, I suppose,
+that happens to come into my head will be good
+enough for him.’ This last is pretty wit. So is
+this gipsy’s reply to her uncle’s reproof in regard
+to her dealings with yet another: ‘He would
+not let me have time to give a civil denial, but
+ran on planning settlements.... I could just get
+in my word with a flat refusal as he was about to
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>provide for our descendants to the third generation....
+He is only angry that he can’t take the
+law of me for laughing at him.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Even when you hear of the ‘genteel young man,
+with dark grey eyes, and a sensible countenance’,
+and are at once aware that it is indeed <i>he</i>, this
+charming Agnes is hard to capture. As he walks
+backwards before her with a play of homage
+(for he too can be light) she mocks him with her
+dance, and dances him up the stage and out at
+the door. And if there were any living actress
+who had the eighteenth-century propriety it
+would be pretty to see her do it. The eighteenth-century
+baggages! They called their admirers by
+their surnames <i><span lang="fr">tout court</span></i>, and their breeding was
+admirable.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Hardly less pleasant is the comedy on ‘Hatred’,
+in which a candidate for a parliamentary election
+hears good news about his detested rival: ‘Art
+thou sure that they laughed at him? In his own
+inn and over his own liquor? Ha, ha! ungrateful
+merry varlets!’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>She, who had this humour, to be called ‘the
+highest genius in our country’, and to be so taken
+up with ‘the passions of human kind’! One of
+the eulogists of her tragic power calls her ‘undeviating’;
+yet she deviated delightfully.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>THE CLASSIC NOVELIST</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without
+a deliberate chapter—generally a family chapter.
+A masterly consciousness of her own authority
+gives her the right of control over her reader’s impatience
+or slovenliness. The order of things is hers,
+not his, and he must wait her time for wit. Hers
+are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls
+‘measures of address’. Her openings imply a
+firmer hold upon narrative than later novelists,
+with their verbless first sentences, their ‘he’ and
+‘she’ for persons to be named later, thought to
+grasp at. The moderns would be much depressed
+were they required to open thus: ‘The family of
+Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their
+estate was large, and their residence was at Norland
+Park, in the centre of their property, where, for
+many generations, they had lived in so respectable
+a manner as to engage the general good opinion of
+their surrounding acquaintance.’ We consent to
+read the dismal opening; we endure the pother of
+the unmusical words; we tolerate it all because we
+know that in a page or two the respectable Dashwoods
+will be deprived of some of the general good
+opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We
+know that Miss Austen will make of her personages
+good sport for her reader, her sense of derision being
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines.
+For another example, would any later author,
+having a Mrs. Bennet to deride for our delight,
+consent to introduce her thus: ‘Mrs. Bennet was
+a woman of mean understanding’? But in this
+case Miss Austen’s art loses nothing, even by the
+chill of that presentation.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>That Jane works upon very small matters is
+hardly worth saying, and certainly not worth complaining
+of. Things are not trivial merely because
+they are small; but that which makes life, art, and
+work trivial is a triviality of relations. Mankind
+lives by vital relations; and if these are mean, so
+is the life, so is the art that expresses them because
+it can express no more. With Miss Austen love,
+vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice,
+are infinitely trivial. There is also a constant relation
+of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people
+in her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen
+seem to be watching them, and her curiosity is
+intense indeed; she realizes their colds—her female
+characters take a great many colds—so that one
+seems to hear her narrate the matter in a muffled
+voice, but not precisely because of her sympathy.
+That such close observation can work on without
+tenderness must be a proof of this author’s exceeding
+cynicism.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Triviality of relations among Miss Austen’s
+personages does not prevent a certain kind of
+intensity. Lying and spite among her women work
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>at close quarters. With the men we hear of a somewhat
+wider range; there is, in the case of one justly
+rejected suitor, a suspicion, a rumour of ‘Sunday
+travelling’; the accusation is not precisely brought
+home.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>No one who has not read <cite>Pride and Prejudice</cite> and
+<cite>Emma</cite> is able to say that he knows worldliness in
+its own proper home. There, ‘engaging the general
+good opinion of surrounding acquaintance’ (the
+mouthful of thick words!) worldliness keeps its
+dowdy and hopeless state and ceremony. There is,
+in almost every second page of Miss Austen, a detestable
+thing called, in the language of the day,
+‘consequence’. No slang of our own time, by the
+way, has ever misused a word more foolishly. To
+‘consequence’, and to the heroine’s love of it, is
+promptly sacrificed all that might have seemed the
+beginnings or suggestions of spirituality. There is
+more that is spiritual in the heroines of to-day—in
+the ‘female animal’ herself—than in Anne, in
+Harriet, in Jane, in Fanny, or in any other of the
+young women who gossip through the pages of these
+famous novels. The men gossip, too; they are
+minutely occupied with the engagements, colds,
+arrowroot, tea-parties, and correspondence of the
+women.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>All this, it may be said, relates to Miss Austen’s
+subjects and not to her perfect art. But Miss
+Austen’s art and her matter are made for one
+another. Miss Austen’s art is not of the highest
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>quality; it is of an admirable secondary quality.
+Her gentle spinsterly manner prevents us from perceiving
+at first how much of her derision—for she
+is mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour—is
+caricature of a rather gross sort. ‘Lady
+Middleton resigned herself to the idea with all the
+philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself
+with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand
+on the subject five or six times every day.’
+Far finer is Miss Austen’s success when she gains
+her effect by delicate persistence in reiteration.
+This is the way in which she enjoys Mr. Woodhouse,
+the old gentleman in whose eyes every woman who
+has had the good luck to marry out of his tedious
+house is a ‘poor dear’. His compassion makes
+excellent sport, of a kind, by the effect of cumulation.
+The author’s patience and vigilance are,
+indeed, perfect, insomuch as they never neglect or
+fail to perceive an opportunity for giving the turn
+to his phrase, the tone to his word. And the whole
+thing would advance, by the slow degrees of this
+method, and close in a little masterpiece, but that
+something of the fineness, as well as something of
+the increase, of the result is now and then marred
+by Miss Austen’s own explanation. She prepares
+her reader deliberately; she instructs him at the
+outset in what he would have become convinced
+of at the end.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter.
+‘Who could tell’—Miss Austen is presenting the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>thoughts of Mrs. John Dashwood in regard to her
+unwelcome sisters-in-law—‘that they might not
+expect to go out with her a second time? The
+power of disappointing them, it was true, must
+always be hers. But that was not enough.’ About
+the following little sentence there is something of the
+wit of surprise. It describes the joys of a young
+woman of the less admirable sort, lately married:
+‘They passed some months in great happiness at
+Dawlish; for she had many relations and old
+acquaintances to cut.’ Miss Austen has a word in
+dismissing the inconstant Mr. Willoughby: ‘His
+wife was not always out of humour; and in his
+breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every
+kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic
+felicity.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest
+in Miss Austen’s indifference to children. They
+hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the
+folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as
+children; they are her subjects as spoilt children,
+and as children through whom a mother may receive
+flattery from her designing acquaintance, and
+may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. The
+novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little
+girl of three. She sharpens her pen over the work.
+The passage is too long to quote, but the reader may
+refer to <cite>Sense and Sensibility</cite>. In this coldness
+or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Most dully expressive are Miss Austen’s country
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>houses. One description places her people in a few
+words in the scene that suits them with a quite
+subtle suitableness; and the thing is presented in
+words which, here again, by their very lack of music
+define mediocrity: ‘Cleveland was a spacious,
+modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn.
+The pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive;
+and, like every other place of the same degree of
+importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer
+wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding
+round a plantation, led to the front.’ There, there
+in the modern-built mansion was the goal of the
+hopes of heroines. To the shrubbery they betook
+themselves, in a ‘hurry of spirits’, or other limited
+forms of emotion that might make them wish to
+escape remark. In and out pottered the men—the
+men of the period, the men of so strange a sex. In
+the tolerably extensive grounds walked ‘consequence’,
+and its wheels marked the smooth gravel
+that wound round the plantation.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Before quitting the noble subject of ‘consequence’
+let it be noted that Emma had the following
+hesitation about a youth she was inclined to
+admire (Emma was not twenty-one): ‘Of pride,
+indeed, there was perhaps scarcely enough; his
+indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too
+much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge,
+however, of the evil he was holding cheap.’ It is an
+unheavenly world.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>A HUNDRED YEARS AGO</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>An old book called <cite>The Mirror of the Months</cite>,
+published anonymously in 1826, seemed, at a glance,
+to a random reader, to contain little thin springs
+of thoughts that walked the world in volume and
+dignity fifty years later. There was nothing else to
+hint that the book was the work of the father of
+a poet, but the father of one among all poets was
+manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader
+found it attributed, in a bookseller’s catalogue, to
+P. G. Patmore.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The earliest or the directest spring is called the
+source of a river; but we know not how far apart
+and on what scattered watersheds rose the tributary
+waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning
+and gathering stream, and charged it with
+rains of the four courts of heaven. It need not
+dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be
+something so slight as—for example—a passage on
+the month of February in <cite>The Mirror of the Months</cite>
+(it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode on
+‘St. Valentine’s Day’ of Coventry Patmore was the
+ultimate fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant
+to find a small thought, lying cold in a minor mind,
+to be the certain beginning of a great thought in an
+illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet
+insignificant origin of what we love is more surprising
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>than would be a stranger beginning. Perhaps
+we feel this unwelcome surprise because we
+had been too ready to believe that what is original
+is strong, and what is original is warm. It was
+easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming
+more composed, of a passion gradually losing light
+and flame, than of this increase, kindling, and
+quickening. It is because the small source of ‘St.
+Valentine’s Day’ is really authentic that its inadequacy
+does little less than startle us. At any
+rate the incident is one that may instruct us in the
+history of that second step which is momentous in
+intellectual things.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of heredity
+seem thereby to gain in mystery; and some
+things must needs gain in mystery before we can
+at all undertake to think upon them. Without
+mystery they are all obscure. Who can think,
+for instance, of the infinity of space without adding
+inconceivable things to his meditation? And,
+in like manner, the bond of fathers and sons
+seems to become somewhat more intelligible if
+we add to the comparatively easy thought of the
+responsibility of a father for the mind of a child
+some confession of the retrospective answer to
+be exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the
+child is the fulfilment of what was but prophesied
+in the father, whom the son at last justifies.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly.
+<cite>The Mirror of the Months</cite> would evidently have been
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>graver, fresher, and more frank, in thought and in
+English alike, but for the example of the excessive
+amiability that makes Leigh Hunt’s poem of
+<cite>Rimini</cite>, among others, ridiculous. It was a mere
+fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult to imagine
+that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better
+simplicity than the simplicity of the universal
+literary smile he practised in his books. There is
+something that does but ape the humane, the
+liberal, the gracious. It is an early nineteenth-century
+attempt at the favour and prettiness of the
+Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the
+Elizabethan ‘horrors’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Yet without ‘horrors’, without a real murder
+among the dances, without royal madness embowered,
+and noble distraction wearing flowers,
+without the wild convention, without the noble
+spirit, wilder than nature—a barbaric artifice
+outfacing nature—what were the Elizabethan
+favour and prettiness worth? Nay, they would
+never have been there but to adorn frightful deeds.
+The men of a hundred years ago took one part and
+left the other, and were delighted in the civilized
+choice they had the grace—as they held it—to make,
+in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal approval, of the
+great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not
+being fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read <cite>Rimini</cite>
+until a year or two ago, and now already the most
+conspicuous memory I have of the story of that
+poem is the memory of an incidental picnic.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may
+have exaggerated the cause of its own derision—and
+that the event sung in the canto in question
+may have been some modification of a picnic; as
+it were a mitigated picnic; I have not the poem for
+reference. Nevertheless, there stands a picnic of
+some sort—a contribution of the English man of
+letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the
+antecedents of Dante’s Hell.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the
+trees, are there. I am quite certain, at any rate,
+that the place chosen therefor is called by Leigh
+Hunt, in so many words, ‘a rural spot’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A far greater man than Leigh Hunt—nay,
+there is no common measure of comparison—has,
+by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment
+of our literary history, also made the same Francesca
+da Rimini the subject of some entirely nineteenth-century
+feeling. I speak of Walter Savage
+Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the
+<cite>Imaginary Conversations</cite> (the <cite>Pentameron</cite>). What
+he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with
+genius; but—one must have the courage to say
+so—in error as complete as the little writer’s. The
+reader may be reminded of that tender page about
+Francesca: ‘She stops: she would avert the eyes
+of Dante from her: he looks for the sequel: she
+thinks he looks severely: she says, “Galeotto is the
+name of the book,” fancying by this timorous little
+flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante
+and his piercing eyes are yet over her. “Galeotto
+is the name of the book.” “What matters that?”
+“And of the writer.” “Or that either?” At last
+she disarms him; but how? “<i>That</i> day we read no
+more.” Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such
+a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other
+work of human genius.’ And this judgement, for
+greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of
+Boccaccio, because he loved him, and intended that
+he should speak from Landor’s heart; and so,
+indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not
+ours, and there is no possible exchange of hearts.
+Are we candid if we persuade ourselves to find these
+pauses in the speech of Francesca? I protest that
+I read the line in one cold breath of almost indifferent
+anger. ‘The name of the book’, as Landor
+has it, is not in Dante at all. ‘A pander was that
+book, and the writer thereof,’ is simply what the
+Francesca of Dante says.<a id='r2'></a><a href='#f2' class='c011'><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f2'>
+<p class='c009'><a href='#r2'>2</a>. Francesca calls the book a Galeotto and him who wrote
+it a Galeotto, because ‘Galeotto’ was then the synonym for
+‘pander’. Galeotto (Gallehault) was he who brought Lancilotto
+and Ginevra to their first sin, according to the <cite>Tavola
+Rotonda</cite>, a romance popular in Francesca’s time. Dante
+had none of the pretty and complex meanings imputed to
+him by Landor. Dante, the insistent moralist, simply
+intended a simple warning against dangerous reading; he
+was in this obedient to a Bull (in 1313) whereby the Pope
+condemned <cite>La Tavola Rotonda</cite>—one of the earliest books
+to be thus banned.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>To come back to <cite>The Mirror of the Months</cite>. This
+is a volume so full of charm that it is something less
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>than just to reproach it so hastily with Leigh Hunt’s
+universal literary smile. Something of that it has,
+indeed, but it has also the smile of spirit and that
+of sweetness. Of two wits of yesterday two phrases,
+for example, are familiar in admiring quotation:
+‘The age of indiscretion’, and ‘Yes, nature is creeping
+up’, or, in another form, ‘Not like his portrait?
+He <i>will</i> be like it.’ Every one recognizes the phrases
+so well that there is perhaps not a reader in England
+who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now
+‘the age of indiscretion’ is in <cite>The Mirror of the
+Months</cite>, where it got no fame, or little; and ‘Nature
+is creeping up’ is fairly anticipated in the passage:
+‘Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water,
+and stand half the day there stock still, in exact
+imitation of Cuyp’s pictures.’ Take this description
+of the parent birds’ business of bringing out their
+young broods and dismissing them, ‘while they (the
+parents) proceed in their periodical duty of providing
+new flocks of the same kind of “fugitive
+pieces”, as regularly as the editors of a magazine.’
+And this for a mere laugh: ‘The only specific
+reason why I object to March is that she drives
+hares mad; which is a great fault.’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Moreover, the procession and recession of the year
+is here noted in the garden and in the open field of
+England by senses full of spirit. The separate and
+atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other
+grain is well expressed in the phrase where the oats
+are said to hang ‘like raindrops in the air’. And
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>the author has eyes for the scarcely perceptible and
+most slender growth that in July pricks through
+the short and level turf and makes the grassy downs
+live in the winds, as poplars make the woods.
+‘April’, says this forgotten writer, ‘is worth two
+Mays, because it tells of May’—a subtlety somewhat
+like that of his son’s minor fancies.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And finally another small spring of the poetry
+to come in the following generation is in the mere
+phrase ‘The pomp of health and the lustre of loveliness’.
+Coventry Patmore, with the poet’s finer
+verbal art, had afterwards</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>So much simplicity of mind</div>
+      <div class='line'>In such a pomp of loveliness.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>There are some writers whom the judicious
+reader forgets by name, with the express intention
+of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always
+a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no
+slight care, and has regard to all the distinctive
+characteristics of the one to be forgotten, effacing
+him with every possible precision, good aim, and
+attention. Others, again, it is more convenient
+to forget in little companies, according to their
+‘school’; and there is no great precision necessary
+for picking them off. You shoot, as it were,
+‘into the brown’, for they go close-ranked.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be
+virtually forgotten—and there is hardly a doubt
+as to that—the act has to be a single and separate
+one. And yet this measure of distinction is not
+quite fairly come by. He gains it chiefly because
+he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the early nineteenth
+century, and so gained a kind of isolation.
+But inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like
+Keats, and lyrics to be like Shelley, he might
+disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble.
+He was not without talent, and he should have our
+cordial pity for living in a time when the inspiration
+of English poetry was withdrawn. When—for
+a far longer period—this had befallen before,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>there had been no one living aware of the lapse.
+When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth
+and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of
+what had happened, and knew all the conditions
+in which his own life had come to pass. He may
+remind you of a poor rabbit that came to consciousness
+in the midst of a physiological experiment.
+Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as
+the trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of
+being an Englishman during a pause of poetry
+that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary
+consciousness. We know the shortness of the
+time, but if the struggle of his dismay was violent,
+and if he caught at the past—the immediate past
+and the distant—with a frantic gesture, shall we
+deride him who did not know the future that is
+now our past? The gap hardly shows in our view
+of the mountain range of poets.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If Beddoes thought that he was called upon to
+live a citizen of an England with no present
+literature, it is not wonderful that he should have
+been a desperate man. It was desperate to be so
+unwilling to confess that Keats would write no more
+couplets as to make this after Keats was dead:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And none went near; none in his sweep would venture,</div>
+      <div class='line'>For you might feel that he was but the centre</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of an inspired round, &#38;c.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is not, perhaps, quite Keats’s rhyme; but the
+helpless leaning on the rhyme, the unbraced
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>couplings, the slipping, the giving way of those
+two poor props of lines ill-built, are all proper
+to <cite>Endymion</cite>. So are the same things in this
+couplet, where the character of the words chosen
+for rhyming is also, almost subtly, a piece of
+Keats:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Thou know’st it not; it is a fearful coop—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Dark, cold, and horrible—a blinded loop</div>
+      <div class='line'>In Pluto’s, &#38;c.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Here, again, is a passage so full of all the errors
+of this deplorable way of couplet writing that it
+shall be put upon record here as a final warning
+before it is finally forgotten. The passage begins
+in the course of a line (and therefore after another
+wretched couplet has fallen down just above),
+and the phrase, quite unable to stop itself, needs
+two and a half more couplets to come before it is
+precipitated, and reaches a stable equilibrium by
+coming to the bottom:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in28'>There sits,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of this rag’s daughter, paper, &#38;c.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Beddoes studied Elizabethan blank verse, and
+achieved no small measure of imitation, if hardly
+the astonishing success of these unheroic couplets.
+In <cite>The Bride’s Tragedy</cite> he imitates more than
+the versification. The large passions, removed
+from the conditions of human life and yet closing
+in that human accident—madness—the playing
+with flowers and prettiness in the horrors of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>a murder, the curiously aloof appeal to the intimate
+replies of pity and terror; the state, the
+royalty; the barbaric convention, the savage and
+noble unnaturalness, where naturalness would
+seem to be the looked-for motive, justification,
+crown, and end—for the sake of these Elizabethan
+characters Beddoes wrote his tragedy, and, but
+for a wavering into sentimentalism (less than any
+of his contemporaries would have shown, no
+doubt), he would have made something wonderfully
+like his model. But sentimentalism was
+generally a vice of his time from which Beddoes
+was strangely free. It is in his imitation of that
+inimitable favour and prettiness, and in the
+kind of aristocratic madness of a song, that the
+mistake comes to pass—the mistake of this overwrought
+decoration for the sentiment that is so
+near and yet so unlike to it. When Hesperus, who
+has murdered his bride and is to die, lies down
+before his distraught father and covers himself
+with the loose earth, he undoubtedly does an
+Elizabethan action. And when his father, dying
+of grief, lies down beside him, that too is Elizabethan,
+more Elizabethan still than the other.
+But when Hesperus says:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>But I shall die the better for this meeting,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>then, it seems to me, the feeling is modern; and
+so it is elsewhere. Then it seems inconsistent to
+reproach Beddoes because he is not modern
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>enough, and writes of dragons and not of men.
+But yet, who has not acknowledged the effect of
+Rossetti’s phrase, ‘lidless eyes in hell’? That
+human eyes should ever be lidless—that is
+Rossetti’s frightful thought. Beddoes also has
+‘lidless eyes’, but he gives them to a dragon,
+and it matters less than nothing that a dragon
+should have lidless eyes. Coleridge, by the way,
+had ‘her lidless dragon eyes’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Neither passion nor sweetness is frequent with
+Beddoes, but once or twice in the course of many
+lyrics on the subject of death he apprehends
+Shelley’s thought of death, and sometimes there is
+a Shelley-shyness, an escape in the moment of
+capture, or an alien nestling and murmuring, close
+and strange:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>What hast caught, then? What hast caught?</div>
+      <div class='line'>Nothing but a poet’s thought!</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>There is something more than his customary fancy
+in his phrase for love, ‘Bee of hearts’; and in
+the almost tender song, <cite>Dream-Pedlary</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>If there were dreams to sell,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>What would you buy?</div>
+      <div class='line'>Some cost a passing bell,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Some a light sigh.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>This, too, of a sad romantic story:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Like a ruffled nightingale</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Balanced upon dewy wings,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Through the palace weeps the tale,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Leaving tears where’er she sings.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'><span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>This is a strong image in a fragment, <cite>Concealed
+Joy</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;</div>
+      <div class='line'>But as I looked it sank into his eye,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings</div>
+      <div class='line'>Into a darkening hole.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The poetry of madness is, needless to say, one
+of the peculiar choruses of English literature. To
+the centuries of wild conventions, of distracted
+majesties, of artifice outfacing nature and astonishing
+the untamed heart, to the greatness and the
+liberty of the English fancy, the world owes those
+musical light discords, from the song of Tom o’Bedlam,
+quoted by Isaac D’Israeli, to the mad
+song by Aubrey de Vere, and the stanzas added
+to the first-named by Francis Thompson; for he
+seems to be the latest of a long line of English
+poets to make music for the distracted. Beddoes
+addresses himself to the kind of resolute pathos
+that set all these singers to singing. For the
+pathos was most resolute; however sweetly it
+sounded at the full, it had cold origins. Imagination
+and simplicity, not passion, made all its virtue.
+I cannot think that Beddoes in <cite>Emily’s Plaint</cite> has
+fancy or simplicity fine enough for the addition of
+this song to the heart-broken, heart-released lyrics
+of Ophelia and her sisters.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Beddoes’ lyrics of death are rather German than
+magical—I feel these adjectives to be somewhat
+antithetical in this connexion; and they call him
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>‘grim’. But he lacked humour. His reference to
+a place—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in6'>That’s not genteel to tell,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where demonesses go to church,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>is the best thing I can find in that temper.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>GEORGE DARLEY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten
+poet, his contemporary, the name of violence.
+Being conscious of the brief and unimportant
+pause of poetic inspiration during which they
+lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering
+whether it were to the sentimental L.E.L. or to
+the violent George Darley that the trust of English
+poetry should be committed. It was, as we now
+confess with peace of mind, to neither; and there
+is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question—to
+the effect that all is not lost because an
+interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is
+visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his
+twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in
+the natural perspective, and the utterance of that
+anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon
+sounds of more moment.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>George Darley’s violence, such as it was, had
+its way principally in a choice of words intended
+to retrieve the language from the Teutonism that
+began its fashion before he died in the middle of
+the century. He apparently did not hold the
+English language to be finally closed in, and in
+this he agreed with other and greater men who
+have used all their strength, at times with a single
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>hand, to hold that door open. But perhaps Darley
+was not always careful enough of the difference
+between scholarly Latinisms and those whereof
+a poet in his haste might not stop to test the
+doubtful scholarship.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Apart, however, from the Latinisms, which are
+not many, there is with Darley a certain delight
+in quaintness which makes of Teutonic words
+a disagreeable kind of slang. ‘Streamy vales’, for
+example, is not a welcome phrase. Like to this is
+the prank of writing ‘bittern ooze’. The ambiguity
+makes the words even grotesque; for the
+poet is writing of a marsh; is he then making
+the word ‘bitter’ more ‘quaint’, or is he taking
+the name of a bird for an adjective? Either way
+he is trifling. But as George Darley died a disappointed
+man, and as his poetry had light and
+space in it, and there was lacking the perception
+of these in his readers at the time, it is rather his
+beauties than his faults that shall be dealt with
+here. Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem
+to leave on the mind’s eye the impression of red,
+yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as
+the life is less or more impassioned, the light
+celestial, and the space remote; though no red,
+not even red veiled by the blond and tender
+colours of humanity, shines in Darley’s verse,
+there is assuredly no dimness in his gold nor
+dullness in his azure. At the first page of <cite>Nepenthe</cite>
+the reader takes a larger and more liberal
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>view of the world of the poet before him, reading
+this line on the daytime sun</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>High on his unpavilioned throne.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is followed, unfortunately, by some commonplaces,
+but in itself it is fine. Less beautiful, but
+also a felicity for the visionary eye, is the phrase,
+‘that huge-meadowed plain’. It is, at any rate,
+a word to sigh for in the narrow town and the
+narrow winter.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>George Darley wrote of fairies—a dull subject,
+let us confess at last; and more than half of
+his drama of <cite>Sylvia, the May-Queen</cite>, is acted by
+fairies and fiends at war. But there are some
+happy fancies even in the prattle of fairy-queens
+to their courtiers, as where Morgana rallies her
+tender follower:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in18'>I’ve seen thee stand</div>
+      <div class='line'>Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>And again:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in14'>Thou once didst cherish</div>
+      <div class='line'>In thy fond breast a snowdrop dead with cold.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Darley was as resolute an Elizabethan as
+Beddoes, but while Beddoes darkened his skies
+for the drama of passions graced with trivial
+flowers blooming in an angry light, Darley
+addressed himself rather to the imitation of the
+humour and the prettiness. He copied the
+Shakespeare of the <cite>Midsummer Night’s Dream</cite>,
+and though the critics say that his rustics are
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>tedious, it seems to me an unjust judgement.
+Granted the delight that Shakespeare finds in the
+derision of clowns as they blunder with words too
+long for their fortunes, and it is not fair to say
+that Darley is really a bore. His Andrea in the
+<cite>May-Queen</cite> makes no bad sport of that kind.
+Darley has the situation and the quality of the
+laughter from Shakespeare, but the phrase is of
+his own exceeding ingenuity; and when the
+transformed serving-man meets that dapper elf
+Nephon, there is some very fair success in the
+frolicking. ‘Where is this mighty small-spoken
+gentleman?’ asks Andrea (unluckily Darley did
+not know that the penultimate of this Italian
+name is long). ‘Hillo, Signor Nobody; at what
+point of the compass must I look, to be mannerly?’
+The most charming thing in the play is this
+exquisite beginning of the song of a fairy who has
+lost the mortal lady in her care:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Where can my young beauty be</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>That I have not found her?</div>
+      <div class='line'>Out alas! this is not she,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>With a shroud around her?</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>This is beautiful and ancient versification and
+rhythm. But Darley had never got free from
+the habit of anapaestic vulgarities, out of date
+with all he wrote; and immediately after that
+delicate verse he begins again to caper:</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>For the pride of the valley, the flower of the glen,
+and so forth.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>Among the phrases that give a flash to the
+verse is one, of graver value, that seems to recall
+something of Coventry Patmore’s ‘bright anger’.
+And Darley takes a flight about the world, in his
+happy mood and his foreboding, and there are
+rich lines in his landscape, such as these:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And mine ear rung with ocean’s roar,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And mine eye glistened with its blue.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>With how much perception, how pliant a turn
+of thought, how instant a reflection, how delicate
+a sense of mood and habit Darley could play the
+seventeenth-century poet is proved by his famous
+lyric, <i>It is not beauty I demand</i>, with this among
+its stanzas:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Tell me not of your starry eyes,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Your lips that seem on roses fed,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Your breasts where Cupid tumbling lies,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>In the first edition of the <cite>Golden Treasury</cite> this
+poem, of then unknown authorship, was placed,
+carefully timed, between Wotton and Carew. It
+seems to have been withdrawn altogether when
+its writer was found to be of the nineteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>SYDNEY DOBELL</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>It would be better to be purely forgotten, and
+then rediscovered (or not, as may befall) than to
+be half remembered, or remembered by rumour, as
+Sydney Dobell seems to have been for many
+years, and compromised by the praises that send
+a straightforward reader shying and swerving to
+left or right—anywhere out of the way of their
+finger-posts. Oblivion is clean, but not so the
+encumbered remembrance, and not so the reputation
+taken into custody and care by the Introductory
+Memoir.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>There is a small accessible volume of selections
+from Sydney Dobell’s poems, of which the biographical
+and critical introduction is more than
+usually disheartening. It is apparently by several
+hands, and one of them has the most uncertain
+hold upon grammatical collocation, while others
+seem to express in the thick English of a certain
+period the portly zeal of the writers for a poet who
+had associations with their own youth. It is, of
+course, easy not to read an introductory memoir;
+and this one should not be read by those who
+might charge the poet with the insignificant
+sincerity (equal in literature to insincerity) of the
+honest critics who admired him. There must
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>have been better things written in his praise than
+these. We know, for instance, Rossetti’s admiration
+(carelessly and thinly alluded to in his rather
+vacant letters to Allingham) for <cite>Keith of Ravelston</cite>;
+and the poets who were Dobell’s contemporaries
+must surely have had something better
+to offer him than the dull enthusiasm of biographical
+introductions. He was a lyrical poets’ lyrical
+poet, in this sense: the thought, the motive, the
+thing for which his best lyric lives, is not only
+a poetic thought, it is also a brief one. It closes,
+it is finished in shape, it holds well within the
+verse. There are, needless to say, long thoughts
+and short thoughts, which are fit for poetry,
+reconciled from the beginning with the poetic
+intellect, and justified by themselves. It is the
+brief thought that is so essentially lyrical. Take,
+as an example, the conception of which was born
+the poem called <cite>Isabel</cite>. She who is dead was,
+in love, in piety, in grief, too shy for life, more
+spiritual, more wild, and more warm than the
+world, losing her in her own light, and not so
+much as knowing her for a secret creature, had
+ever seen her to be. Therefore her poet chooses
+no time but the dark summer dawn and the
+summer sunrise for his songs and for his memories.
+Her path had missed men’s footsteps, and he
+travels into the hours that also are aloof, to think
+of her with the thoughts of the imagination.
+I have thus reluctantly disarrayed the phrases of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>the poem in order that the reader may have the
+short thought at a glance.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>All fine sonnets and other poems in brief final
+forms have in like manner brief thoughts—large,
+great, but short. A short thought which is poetic
+is the highest inspiration of the lyric poet, even
+though there may be many and many a splendid
+lyric that has it not, but is as unclosed as the
+passage of a bird in flight. So are the greater
+number of the poems of Sydney Dobell; he has
+not the perfect inspiration of the short thought
+always, or even often. That inspiration distinguishes
+<cite>Isabel</cite> greatly. Of that poetic poem
+let me give a stanza or two—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>That early hour I meet</div>
+      <div class='line'>The daily vigil of my life to keep,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Because there are no other lights so sweet,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Or shades so long and deep,</div>
+      <div class='line in8'>Isabel.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And best I think of thee</div>
+      <div class='line'>Beside the duskest shade and brightest sun,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Whose mystic lot in life it was to be</div>
+      <div class='line'>Outshone, outwept by none,</div>
+      <div class='line in8'>Isabel.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>This poem has assuredly rare sweetness and
+much rarer passion in its solitary tones; it has
+in a small measure the emotion of the hours
+of sleep, as the waking heart still owns it in face
+of the breaking of a summer dawn. The short
+thought is the matter and form again of those
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>two sonnets whereby chiefly Dobell’s name is now
+remembered—<cite>The Army Surgeon</cite> and <cite>Home in
+War Time</cite>. When a poetic short thought is
+transfigured in a single beautiful image, then the
+sonnet is satisfied, the sonnet is fulfilled. It
+remained for the English poets so to conceive the
+sonnet, not re-arraying but creating it. Of these
+two sonnets it is <cite>The Army Surgeon</cite> that has
+this fundamental completeness; the other has
+not imagery, though it has, with extraordinary
+finality, the short thought. In both imagination
+is intellectual and visual, and the tide of impassioned
+feeling is a high tide, that has lifted all the
+poet’s blood. These are not, perhaps, in the full
+sense, great poems; they have not the peace
+which seems, beyond all our understanding, to
+make an eternal quality of poetry of the tumult
+of Lear. They are poems of emotional unrest,
+but among poems of emotional unrest they are
+singularly fine and true, and something at least
+of the fusing work of passion is done upon their
+beautiful diction.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>All in all, the whole series of war-poems have
+a strange success. They were written during the
+Crimean war, and they have all the best quality
+of their time, which may be called good faith.
+Sydney Dobell takes his types as all the Romance
+poets and their posterity knew them, and he does
+not lie in wait for the accidents and incidents of
+fragmentary life. He has a milkmaid in all her
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>symmetry, a Lady Constance in hers, a French
+chasseur, a wounded officer, a market wife; they
+are all conventional. But if the poet found his
+persons ready for him in a not all unwise legend,
+he did no small thing in filling them full of warm
+traditionary life. It may well be that the more
+modern author achieves somewhat less—or perhaps
+it would be better to say that he achieves his
+work at a less expense of life—when he makes
+his human creature (his unit with all the natural
+lack of unity) to live and to be seen by its natural
+singleness; when he so marks the gnarls and
+knots of the life, surprised in a separate man, as to
+give proof of a man by his very accidents. It may
+well be easier work to do thus than to do as Sydney
+Dobell does with his expected Romance, breathing
+so fully. The one poet shall not justly charge the
+other with any unhandsome or slovenly dealing.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>There is, however, one poem in the war series
+which has another kind of life than that of the
+milkmaid’s song. This is one of the finest—<cite>Tommy’s
+Dead</cite>. Who shall say that this poem
+of actual knowledge, and of a life lived, is not
+better than the rest? More full of the poet’s
+authentic life it may not be, but the thing is
+better worth doing. Tommy’s father is a single
+and separate creature, and every line of his song
+is a strong surprise, though it is but of the thinness,
+the dullness, and the last old age in a day of
+bad news at the farm.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>On the other hand, <cite>The Little Girl’s Song</cite> is
+only in part the cry of a child; and yet even in
+the least childish lines, there is the excuse that
+the poet, in the urgency of his feeling, has broken
+through the limitations of the childish speech
+because he could not restrain the haste of his own
+pity-driven word. The little girl’s father is at
+the war, and she wonders whether indeed she sees
+her mother wasting with grief, or whether that
+face was always so pale. The trivial word of the
+child—‘Papa’—seems to make the line more
+forlorn:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Do not mind my crying, Papa, I am not crying for pain;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Do not mind my shaking, Papa, I am not shaking with fear;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Though the wild wind is hideous to hear,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And I see the snow and the rain.</div>
+      <div class='line'>When will you come back again,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Papa, Papa?</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The beautiful <cite>Keith of Ravelston</cite> is in the
+series of Crimean poems; and some who know its
+undefined sweetness and its mystery may not be
+aware with how admirable an art Sydney Dobell
+introduces its vague outlines. It is a song sung
+by one who is happy in the year of sorrow—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>She sings the sorrow of the air,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Whereof her voice is made.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Then follows the strain of Romance in an
+immemorial cadence:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>The murmur of the mourning ghost</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>That keeps the shadowy kine;</div>
+      <div class='line'>‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The sorrows of thy line!’</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>I must own that <cite>Balder</cite> and <cite>The Roman</cite> have
+not yet persuaded me to read them through;
+but the lyrics, if so chosen that a certain vein of
+weakness may not appear anywhere, are surely
+a perdurable part of our incomparable literature.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>COVENTRY PATMORE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore
+shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high
+classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics
+of a hundred years hence high classic quality in
+their judgement. It is to look for a definite
+intelligence and for an explicit code of literary
+law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious
+measures and restraints both of thought and of
+verse is needed to recognize the law of <cite>The
+Unknown Eros</cite>. It is to look, not only for such
+precision, but for its rare companions—liberty,
+flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense
+of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and
+all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely
+reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may
+learn in time to come, <cite>The Unknown Eros</cite> will
+hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt
+still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it
+now by reason of the indifference of the majority;
+but its essential loneliness is its own quality, conferred
+by no world’s neglect; not an effect of
+conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast,
+for it is relative to nothing.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The reader undertakes at least to know and to
+watch that solitude. It was assuredly a sense of
+the gravity of this enterprise that inspired the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies’; a star is
+lonely, and its student, whatever his conditions,
+lonely as he watches. Pausing upon that significant
+phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not
+Keats’s, evidently; and it proves at last to be
+a word of Patmore’s own; and the lonely
+watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In
+a now cancelled passage of Coventry Patmore’s
+ode, <cite>Tired Memory</cite>, occurs the ‘lonely’ astronomer.
+Who can complain that there are not many
+prepared for such a vigil? Moreover, <cite>The Unknown
+Eros</cite>, although we may attempt images
+of sidereal distance to express its profound flight,
+has the more dreadful solitude of an experience,
+and goes far in an inverse flight, through the
+essentially single human heart—intimately into
+time and space, remotely into the heart of hearts.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Of many words of praise, the word ‘classic’ is
+chosen here because it suggests no exclusions of
+schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for
+poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of
+poetry of another. None the less is it the most
+sharp and severe of all words of criticism, or it
+shall here have that character, if the reader will
+agree to understand as ‘classic’ all poetry that
+is <i>one</i>—thought and word. The fusion of thought
+and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an
+impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close
+coldness of fancy made perfect; for since we hear
+that metals pass into one another, <i>in vacuo</i>, by
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible;
+but even if, with Thomas à Kempis, we contemplate
+the metal that is one with fire and is changed
+into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that
+a greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by
+a more vital union; mind and body, where tidal
+thought and feeling are quick with the blood and
+various with the breath of life, give a juster, as
+well as a simpler and a human, image of a vital
+poem. Besides, the fire of life is made sensible to
+us by warmth and not by flame, and there are
+in literature a far greater number of humanly
+warm poems that are classic and vital, than of
+poems that are classic and vital with apparent and
+uncovered flame. Some of these last, indeed,
+there are, but few. The image of warm life is
+the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry
+proved classic and alive when a reader, struck to
+the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes looking
+on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour,
+her height, her light, her age, knows her indeed,
+and confesses her at last by another sign: ‘Oh,
+she’s warm!’</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>In <cite>The Unknown Eros</cite> the poet’s intention,
+single, separate, strikes unique strokes against
+which the reader’s human heart is all unarmed by
+custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so
+comes home, dividing soul and spirit. There is
+not a violence in the world that does not seem
+a dissipation and an essential weakness when
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>reproached by such a majestic energy, able to
+curb its hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Not without profoundly conscious art did
+Coventry Patmore achieve the ultimate, the
+mortal, pathos of such an ode as <cite>Eurydice</cite>. He
+was ready to tell the secret which no others could
+use as he used it, however it might be guessed;
+and the secret of <cite>Eurydice</cite> was: ‘After exceeding
+ill, a little good.’ The slenderness of the good
+and the poignancy of the ill are mingled, in this
+ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear as no
+other poet has ever endured. <cite>Eurydice</cite> is the
+dream of the mourner, who night by night follows
+some dreary clue through labyrinths without
+hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote,
+neglected life that the dead do live in these intolerable
+dreams. But Coventry Patmore does not always
+capture terror for such purposes of eternal sadness;
+he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent
+ode of reunion, <cite>The Day after To-morrow</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>O, heaving sea,</div>
+      <div class='line'>That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And separatest not dear heart from heart,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Love in each moment years and years of rest.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>O Life, too liberal, when to take her hand</div>
+      <div class='line'>Is more of hope than heart can understand.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>One day’s controlled hope, and one again,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,</div>
+      <div class='line'>O Life, Death, Terror, Love!</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'><i><span lang="it">Ultima dolcezza</span></i> was once exquisitely said of the
+skylark; <i><span lang="it">ultima amarezza</span></i> should be the words for
+the lines:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Thou whom ev’n more than Heaven lov’d I have,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And yet have not been true, even to thee;</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the
+grief that kisses and says a conscious ‘farewell,
+farewell’, is in <cite>Departure</cite>, and in this passage of
+too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly
+implied by a negative:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>When the one darling of our widowhead,</div>
+      <div class='line'>The nurseling Grief, is dead,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And no dews blur our eyes</div>
+      <div class='line'>To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death.
+The ode entitled <cite>Proem</cite> foretells with a singular
+peace of grief the day when England, ‘a dim
+heroic nation, long since dead’, shall be benignly
+remembered no otherwise than by ‘the bird-voice
+and the blast of her omniloquent tongue’—by the
+poets of her then dead language.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>As to the ‘natural description’ for which the
+reader is apt to look—it might not unfairly be
+said that Patmore never described. He claimed
+the truths of science, to which in youth he had
+devoted his attention, to serve his poem with
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>images; and thus he used them in his speech, as
+when the perception he gained of Divine truths
+by the act of contemplation and the holding his
+spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to
+the photographic picture of stars invisible even to
+the camera but made visible by a long accumulation
+of continuous imperceptible impressions.
+And nature, evasive to the mere describer, yielded
+imagery to him with an indescribable freshness.
+There is an instance in the ode, <cite>Wind and Wave</cite>,
+with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and
+waves that</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Traverse wildly, like delighted hands,</div>
+      <div class='line'>The fair and fleckless sands</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the deafening beach.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The smile of Psyche is</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Like sunny eve in some forgotten place;</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>As when a south wind sombres a March grove.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>In <cite>Amelia</cite> we receive the candid, simple shock
+of the line in which every meeting with her beauty
+is likened to a first beholding of the ocean. In
+this ode, also, stands the ‘little bright, surf-breathing
+town’, and the westering sun fills with
+shade ‘the dimples of our homeward hills’.
+Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is
+with a sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>insight. The blackbird at dawn, a lonely thrush
+at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ‘sad
+with promise of a different sun’, brought him in
+full the message of the wild suggestion that never
+left poet’s heart at rest. When he wrote the <cite>Odes</cite>,
+and used thus a free metre because he knew himself
+to be set at liberty by his very knowledge and
+love of law, that heart beat in the sensitive line,
+and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as
+a spirit blowing whither it will.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The quality of poetry is not strained. It has
+not to abide our repeated question. It tests and
+is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows
+that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry
+but the hearer that is to be judged. This true
+lover may well have outlived the desire to give to
+others a convincing or converting reason for his
+own certainties as to the most poetic things in
+poetry, but he still desires to know whose mind’s
+ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time
+goes on. To the treasure of these most beautiful
+things, to which the dramatic and the epic poets
+have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets
+stanzas or lines, it is a wonder to find how much
+Coventry Patmore has added. The slender volume
+of his odes furnishes them out of all measure.
+Even those readers who will not hold the author
+of that small volume to have answered all the
+conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great,
+will confess this extraordinary disproportion. The
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>mental apprehension of poetry can be put to the
+proof by Patmore’s odes—and indeed by not
+a few passages of the contemned <cite>Angel in the
+House</cite>—much oftener than by honoured classical
+poems from which we gather those testing lines by
+precious threes and twos. <cite>The Unknown Eros</cite>
+yields them to us in overwhelming beauty and
+in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of
+imagery—so enkindling, so exalting that we say
+of imagery that it is poetry itself, until we find
+the poetry of the yonder side, for some again are
+of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is
+beyond imagery. One of the testing lines of our
+literature has this latter character—Chaucer’s,
+chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Now with his love, now in the coldë grave.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>From Coventry Patmore’s odes we gather them
+with both hands, exalted, subdued, and greatly
+moved by our riches.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Why <cite>The Unknown Eros</cite> should have found so
+few readers it might be hard to say. We should
+have expected something different from the
+literary liberty and literary variety of England.
+Ignorance of Patmore’s odes might have been
+looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind
+in the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is
+not easily to be explained in readers of various
+minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Crashaw,
+Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>the lyrist. Probably a doubt as to the whole
+meaning of many among the odes has discouraged
+even Patmore’s willing readers. The beauty was
+there, but it was to them an uncertain magnificence,
+a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call
+of an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the
+heart-piercing utterance of an obscure grief—obscure
+as waters are obscure because they are
+profound, not because they are turbid. Some of
+our esteemed poets have left us meanings troubled
+by the lowest of difficulties—the grammatical.
+Their waters have matter in mechanical suspension
+rather than in chemical solution. It is often
+impossible to decide to what nouns some of the
+pronouns in <cite>Sordello</cite> refer. But Patmore’s pure
+diction, uttered in the composure that gives high
+dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no
+such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of
+the odes of <cite>The Unknown Eros</cite> are difficult. Some,
+we say, and are again puzzled at finding them so
+few. <cite>The Day after To-morrow</cite> is not readily
+understood to refer to reunion after death; the
+Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience alien to
+the history, to the aspirations, and even the
+desires, of the greater number of deeply spiritual
+men; the matter of the mystical ode called <cite>The
+Unknown Eros</cite> itself is all but hidden; <cite>Deliciae
+Sapientiae de Amore</cite> darkly sings the triumph of
+virginity and its sacrifice at once; few or no
+readers will guess the <cite>Arbor Vitae</cite> of a very fine
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>ode to be the Catholic Church, and the ‘nests of
+the hoarse bird, who talks and understands not
+his own word’ to be (a most unjust image) the
+clusters of her clergy; and a few other necessities
+for explanation there may be. But, on the other
+hand, there can be no doubt, to all initiate in the
+world of poetry, as to the full significance—the
+furthest significance, to every inner alley and
+retreat of meaning, to every ultimate pang of
+sensitiveness—expressed in that terrible record of
+a mourner’s dreams, <cite>Eurydice</cite>; in <cite>Departure</cite>; in
+<cite>If I were dead</cite>; in <cite>Saint Valentine’s Day</cite>; or in the
+ode on the decline of England, already named, which
+contains the memorable description of her literature.
+Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one
+generally known, even with the relative generalness
+possible among the little minority that cares
+for poetry? That one is, needless to say, <cite>The
+Toys</cite>, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one
+containing less essential poetry than any other
+page of the odes.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It must be owned that some of the accessory
+persons and conditions of the story of <cite>The Angel
+in the House</cite> are unwelcome to poetry as we have
+learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we
+are either content, or very weakly, very ineffectually,
+ill content, to live in a social world that we
+confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry
+Patmore, as we understand his attitude, refused
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>to be content with such a world, and refused,
+moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the
+world was unfit for his poem, he would reject the
+world—and he at least knew how to reject and
+did not play at rejection. He did not believe that
+there was such unfitness, because love and immortality
+were there, as elsewhere, with humanity.
+The modern age chose to be ashamed of the
+manner in which it chose to live, to be associated,
+to prosper, to order its affairs; no other age had
+condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry
+Patmore was not modern in this matter. He
+thought the daily civilized ways of a Cathedral
+town, granted that they were delicate and gay,
+and not dull, no more unfit for ‘realistic’ art
+than other contemporary ways, neither delicate
+nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably
+since, the writing of <cite>The Angel in the House</cite>.
+Coventry Patmore wrote of conventions in the
+manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents
+older than his critics stopped to remember. If so
+much of explanation is to be offered in answer to
+still current criticisms, how does it befall that any
+reader should pause upon the mere intervals in
+poetry so profound and penetrating as, in a hundred
+passages, shakes the metre with a hand of control?</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Among such passages are these records of beauty:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Her eyes incredulously bright,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>And all her happy beauty blown</div>
+      <div class='line'>Beneath the beams of my delight.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>So much simplicity of mind</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>In such a pomp of loveliness!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Eyes that softly lodge the light.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so
+close as these:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>His only Love, and she is wed!</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>His fondness comes about his heart</div>
+      <div class='line'>As milk comes when the babe is dead.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>And again:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Alone, alone with sky and sea</div>
+      <div class='line'>And her, the third simplicity.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with
+meaning:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Far round each blade of harvest bare</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Its little load of bread;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Each furlong of that journey fair</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>With separate sweetness sped.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Again:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Blest in her place, blissful is she;</div>
+      <div class='line'>And I, departing, seem to be</div>
+      <div class='line'>Like the strange waif that comes to run</div>
+      <div class='line'>A few days flaming near the sun,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And carries back, through boundless night,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Its lessening memory of light.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is possible that this early poem is contemned
+because the reader takes the ‘Angel’ to be the
+woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a kind
+of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the
+‘Angel’ to be Love. Patmore’s masculine mind
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>probably referred the name rather to such an
+angel as he who in the Old Testament took up
+a prophet by the hair of his head and carried him
+across country. Together with Love, Patmore’s
+subject was the Child in the House, before ever
+Pater had so varied Patmore’s title. Together
+with the revelation of youthful love he has coupled
+all the sweet revelations made to a child:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>This and the Child’s unheeded Dream</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Was all the light of all his day.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>We find that there are two master-emotions in
+modern poetry—in that Romance literature which
+has been the complementary life of Europe now
+for many centuries; one dates from Dante’s day,
+and one chiefly from the day of Henry Vaughan
+(Wordsworth’s virtually immediate precursor).
+Love, and the love of Nature, mystically passionate,
+are what they are with us, not because all men,
+but because two boys, conceived them. It needs
+the childish dream to raise these emotions into the
+regions of mystery, sweetness, tenderness, and
+terror which they have gained because Dante was
+a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in
+love with Nature. Other lovers have loved in
+childhood, or else they have profited by Dante’s
+childhood; other poets have conceived the passion
+for Nature in their childhood, or have profited by
+the childhood of Wordsworth, of Vaughan, and of
+Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>delirious and the more innocent these remote
+experiences, the more has the lover’s love the
+quality of Romance, and the poet’s imaginative
+verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men
+could never have done for mankind what these
+boys have done; literature owes her two ideal
+adult passions to the dreams of childhood.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Coventry Patmore’s ardour and mystery acknowledged
+that dear and ignorant origin. He did more
+than remember that incomparable antiquity;
+with him childhood hardly needed remembering,
+for it remained, the companion of his complete
+intellect, the rapture of his profoundly experienced
+heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly
+sorrows.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly
+not that which is rather forest or field than
+garden, the ‘landscape garden’ of a false taste;
+nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed
+and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but
+rather the garden long ago strictly planned,
+rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and
+definite, but later set free, given over to time and
+the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed
+wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence
+and excess. Comparable to such a garden is
+Coventry Patmore’s mind, obedient to an ancient
+law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of
+visiting winds and a splendid sun of genius.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>attributed to it a greater dignity than the value
+and the dignity that consecrated it in Patmore’s
+heart. As he very literally and actually held the
+members of the body to be divine, so may it be
+said that he saw in poetry also the incarnate word;
+the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the
+phrase were not accidental but essential. Hence
+his extraordinary mastery of style. And as to his
+sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and
+domination we have but to compare it with the
+sense of one who spared no words in praise of
+poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work
+and mission—Matthew Arnold.<a id='r3'></a><a href='#f3' class='c011'><sup>[3]</sup></a> Failing the religious
+sanction, failing the fundamental law with
+its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its
+place, whether as temporary regent or regent
+without a term. It would, he said, console and
+soothe mankind. As though a race in need of
+the spur and the curb, the example, the threat,
+and the canon, were sufficiently to be served by
+those unmanly ministrations! As though to be
+soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill-humour
+were the chief necessities of men, a race
+worthy of the dignities of chastisement! In
+raising poetry to what he thought this eminence,
+assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>was poetry more conscious than Patmore’s. Nor,
+perhaps, if we seek among the homages of the
+poets to their art shall we find graver or profounder
+veneration than Patmore’s, hardly even
+excepting Wordsworth’s, explicit and implicit.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f3'>
+<p class='c009'><a href='#r3'>3</a>. He thought the value of the religions to be their ‘unconscious
+poetry’. ‘It is part of the man’s unconscious
+poetry,’ says Harold Skimpole—he is alluding to the family
+butcher (unpaid)—‘that he always calls it “his little bill”.’</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So
+must we learn to do, and to value her for him.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>POETRY AND CHILDHOOD</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>Which is the language of poetry? For each,
+perhaps, the language that first named for him
+a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or whatever
+thing touched a child’s mind with a remote
+and yet familiar love. The poets who have for
+him a lifelong advantage over all others are the
+poets who write that tongue. No other word
+than theirs will be to him the very name of what
+he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading
+again the <cite><span lang="fr">Chants du Crépuscule</span></cite>, the <cite><span lang="fr">Feuilles
+d’Automne</span></cite>, <cite><span lang="fr">Contemplations</span></cite>, and <cite><span lang="fr">Voix Intérieures</span></cite>,
+I own the power of the poet who knows
+the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le
+verger’. ‘Le verger’ is purely yonder steep field
+of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate
+shadows. In another tongue the name is translated,
+and therefore removed by one step; it has no
+longer the shape and figure and spirit which the
+name first known has for the child learning the
+thing and the word in one.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of
+one who has profound childish memories connected
+with his common words, by writing so
+closely of infantine things as though to secure the
+charm for all a reader’s lifetime to come, and to
+establish the authority of his French precisely
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>upon those names of childish import that are
+most subject to such an early spell.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A reader who, when he had learnt that there
+are birds, had learnt their English name, and had,
+moreover, received his father, his mother, his bed,
+his sleep, his nurse’s song, his little breakfast, in
+English, has not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse
+for him those words, those things rather, in his
+later years. For there seems to be no poet in
+our master-poetry to do for him that singular
+office, and to sing the language of his first nurse
+to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn all
+nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel
+first in an incomparable tongue; and his first
+sense of Greece doubtless comes with an adequate
+word. But he has no august poet to resume his
+ancient lullabies, heard once in ancient regions
+between sleeping and waking, the immemorial
+night-light, the homely language of antiquity and
+old romance as children have the sense of them in
+their little words at play upon the floor, at play
+upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo’s
+French.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Furthermore still, an English reader whose
+childish life was uttered in French has half forgotten,
+amid later English, some of the daily words
+of that time, unused by grown men and women.
+These Victor Hugo sings to him. They return to
+him out of the past and out of his poetic page at
+once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperishable
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>memory; they wake again, and they are
+more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than
+torrents from the Alps.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him.
+The child and the poet know it together. They
+meet, they understand, they have the way of it
+together. And if they meet again across age and
+change and disuse, how close, how light, how
+natural is this encounter, how sudden and how
+old the intimacy! Poet and child have their
+traffic, no doubt, in every life; but what incomparable
+traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an
+English reader who had a French childhood!
+How ingenious is fortune to bring their communion
+to pass! Many are the things, small and
+all-important, known fully, and more than known—recognized,
+known after estrangement—between
+these two only of all the pairs of poet and child,
+in the world. Where else can there be just such
+a commerce? In the first place that poet is
+unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss
+closely; he has not only the child’s sense of it,
+but also the child’s inexpert and invaluable word.
+And the reader, on his part, has, as I have said,
+a peculiar experience both of memory and of
+oblivion. For him, then, the French language has
+that grace of election which makes it wholly,
+invincibly successful—the grace of each man’s
+first tongue; and in overplus it has the powers of
+the tongue in which Victor Hugo was wont to
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>write of children, and, again, the powers of the
+tongue of a great romance. Of a word in that
+language, therefore, it may be said, as of the elect
+lady in a violent world—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in6'>Her gentle step to go or come</div>
+      <div class='line'>Gains her more merit than a martyrdom.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and
+tragic by will, by force and conquest; the word,
+in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be
+uttered. ‘Le verger’ possesses not only a young
+child’s sight of trees under the sun and moon,
+a young child’s touch of the grass, but also the
+genius of the South of France, of ancient agriculture
+and of early song.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Assuredly those to whom the word first
+learnt was ‘the orchard’ must be content with
+something less than this.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A reading of later French persuades one easily
+that Victor Hugo was alone, and is alone, the
+speaker of what has become so mysterious and
+so intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a
+language:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Oh, ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis Heaven she speaks!</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much
+French as childhood, and a peculiar childhood;
+Romance, and a unique Romance; nature, too,
+as no eyes of Latin race had seen it until then,
+with insight as well as with perception—in Emerson’s
+phrase, ‘a little wildly, or with the flower
+of the mind’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of
+this great poet so dear, for exclusive and accidental
+reasons, to one reader among many, I have no
+praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true
+that the word ‘souffle’ is for my ear all a summer
+wind at night—it has more merit than a martyrdom
+of description; that is by chance. It is by genius,
+however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so
+fresh and dark.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>What I have to suggest is that the poets, since
+he ceased to write (ceased as a lyrist, not as a
+rhetorician), have done little more for the enlargement
+of their language than he did in the distant
+days when his work was a very revolution; and
+this in spite of their metrical liberty, which seems
+to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from
+the bonds of the preceding century or so was
+precisely no more than his art needed. Nothing
+was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake
+of others, for the sake of pioneership, or for
+any other of the causes that mediocrity is fond of.
+All was purely for his own poetry, and because,
+being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the
+laws that held Boileau content. Where he found
+no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another,
+or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility
+that has left his verse to-day far behind the
+reforms of modern French prosody, ‘reforms’
+that seem to have been inspired by the revolt of
+a Walt Whitman, and make easy havoc of the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged
+liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo’s
+advance, the wave of verse met salutary bars and
+measures as strong as rocks. But his successors
+have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and
+the flat country is already under shallow water.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>I have under my hand the volume of a little
+recent symbolist, side by side with <cite><span lang="fr">Les Voix
+Intérieures</span></cite>, and the comparison persuades me that
+not all this new licence is able to make the French
+language a really liberal instrument. What has
+been written here must be the proof that if I have
+a prejudice it is for French, and that for me
+magic and the caprice of destiny are on that side.
+But there are disabilities; and it is not metrical
+liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and
+feminine endings, or the ignoring of the e mute,
+or rhymes that are but the suggestion of a jingle,
+or any other of these later liberties that can make
+this language sufficient. It lacks the second part,
+the other side, the splendour of alternative. It
+has the strangest blanks. It cannot so much as
+call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>As it has no alternative of derivation, French
+has none of time; no place apart for poems and
+prayers, but the whole language is at the disposal of
+the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French
+of commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets
+to make that ready eloquence resound, when the
+lyric could do no more, for lack of strings.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span>A word as to syllables—those great units of
+verse—and their motions. The Italian syllables
+dance, springing from their double consonants and
+long vowels; the English walk, with all variety
+of gait, and fly with all variety of wing; the
+French trot. ‘Égalisez les syllabes.’ The Frenchman
+who speaks right Parisian equalizes the
+syllables not only of his own language but of every
+other. Hear him speak Italian thus; hear him,
+as a good pastor in England, read the English
+Testament.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>GEORGE MEREDITH</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>If the novel has been raised to the highest place
+in literature in our time, this was mainly by the
+power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the intellect,
+nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot
+the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in
+union could achieve such an exaltation of an art
+that was once pastime. Fiction was made by
+Meredith for his generation the companion of
+poetry, and thus the second great imaginative art
+of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony,
+the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the
+novel of emotion—the work of Le Sage, Cervantes,
+Balzac, Charlotte Brontë—works of genius as they
+are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial
+place; they are on the way to the work of intellect
+and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches
+life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the
+spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and
+not only temperament but passion; that not only
+states the problem, but accounts for it.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge
+of the human heart as though knowledge in
+itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he
+stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used
+his sympathy. He worked much beyond and far
+above the regions in which the wrangle about art
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward.
+No critic will ever impugn Meredith’s
+transcendent purpose. It is not possible to imagine
+his prose or poetry without it.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable
+even in the eyes of those who think it incomplete.
+Great he was—in thought, in passion, in the art of
+letters, a student of mankind who sought to help,
+without consoling, the race he watched, suffering
+and hoping with that which he studied, as a physician
+pressing a finger upon a brother’s wrist, caring
+much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man’s
+life, caring also much for his own science. The
+incompleteness which so many readers charged
+against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great
+and high repose of art which is unconscious of
+appearances. A great author should be anxious for
+effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated
+ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appearances
+or the result of his phrase upon the untaught.
+Meredith’s prose has not this loftiness, and therefore
+misses the classic simplicity. He must be
+afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights,
+and Meredith feared commonplace. Strange fear
+for so distinguished a mind! But the fear is unmistakable.
+It appears most plainly in narrative.
+He will not consent to employ the usual forthright
+order of words in telling what happened. Even in
+recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly
+bear to use the customary ‘he said’—he prefers
+‘she heard’. This perpetual kind of device mars
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>the manner of his work only in so far as a fine style
+can be marred by a little manner, and that is not
+very far. Generally when we find such a weakness
+of fear and human respect in literature, it is the
+companion of a weakness of the whole man—or at
+any rate of the whole author. But when a great
+man suffers from this frailty, we gladly recognize
+the truth that style is a profound thing that cannot
+gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith’s
+style is at the foundation of his literature. It has
+often been said of some author that he has little
+intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of
+Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnificent
+style, yet writes but ill, wild as the paradox
+may sound. Everything worthy to be called style
+is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked,
+and bent. No other man’s writing could keep its
+strength, its gravity, and its beauty under such
+a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind
+or another is, by a long convention, in its right
+home, Meredith’s fault of manner is the use of
+words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs
+in none but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining
+to the full meaning is too great in both the earlier
+and the later poems, and in the slighter pieces the
+fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagination
+is Meredith’s, but a quibbling fancy.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism
+of life, the phrase was taken away from the novel,
+to which it should belong. Philosophic novelists
+(there have not been many in the history of English
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>letters) are the chief critics of human life—social
+life, civilized life, the life of the race and of races,
+and that of a man and a woman; even a great
+novelist who is not a philosopher—Thackeray, for
+example—is a critic of life in its ethics, its emotions,
+and its shows; the novelist who is a humorist
+does his admirable part of criticism. But Meredith
+in his day took the whole social man into his grasp
+and his vision. A mere user of his arresting hand
+and of his searching eyes Meredith was not; he
+bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a
+human heart upon the study of character. The
+study was also the creation. Meredith formed the
+most possible, the most complex, the most complete
+and least explicable of women and men, now and
+then varying these vitally-mingled persons by presenting
+a man who, having one quality only, such
+as the Egoism of the Egoist, is yet alive with a most
+indubitable life. George Meredith seldom tells
+a story of these people—he tells nothing less than
+their history. What he tells us is so much their
+history that the error, the sin, or the blunder that
+draws their fate about them is detected in their
+youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early
+or late, in their doom. No other important student
+of life, except perhaps George Eliot, has found such
+visible revenges. He saw them, and he was resolved
+to show them. His doctrine of consequences
+seems to stand between that of the Buddhist with
+his inevitable body of results, and that of the
+Christian with his directed and decreed retribution.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>Meredith’s Avenger is an offended Nature or
+wronged Reason, working by the force of some undecreed
+law; nevertheless of a law. Undecreed;
+and yet Meredith, by figure of language at any rate,
+attributes to the visiting and avenging Power now
+something of formidable indignation and now
+something of formidable indifference; and even
+indifference has to be felt! Even blindness implies
+an eye capable of sight! Meredith had a philosophy
+of Nature which taught him not—as other students
+of brute life might suppose—a simple and irresponsible
+egoism, but self-denial, self-conquest,
+and unflinching endurance. He would have the
+individual man to learn the almost unlearnable
+lesson that his own fate is of no importance.
+Of no importance to the race others have perceived
+and pronounced it; Meredith would have the
+unit to accept and make his own that interior
+resignation—if resignation is not too half-hearted
+a word. All the graver poems too bear this as
+their principal teaching, and their many lessons
+rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this doctrine
+he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as
+his heart of tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no
+surer mission than to attack the outworks of that
+self-love within which lurks the condemned desire
+for personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared
+with which the courage of the Stoic is but shallow
+in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing in its
+wounding of the heart.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>PESSIMISM IN FICTION</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>The told story was not at first used for the purposes
+of pity, terror, and purification, but mainly
+for fun. Shall we make a great exception of the
+Book of Job, the inspired novel all occupied with
+its subject, the history of a single valuable soul?
+A family swept out of life are of no moment to that
+novelist, save as their fate causes the affliction of
+Job. By and by he shall be comforted with other
+sons and daughters. These, like the dead ones, are
+negligible except as sons and daughters to one not
+negligible man. Never was art truer to a single
+intention. The earlier family have no names named,
+but the later receive names because they are to go
+on living for the final joy of a momentous man.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If we may be permitted (or may be permitted as
+time goes on) to read Genesis, too, as a divine and
+all-significant novel, here is an even earlier example
+of the novel written with the gravest intention, and
+with simple and economic art. Here the ‘stars also’
+are swept into being as the sons of Job are swept out
+of it, in a phrase that does not pause upon the
+universe that was to live, as the phrase did not
+pause upon the beautiful young men who were to
+die. The earth is central for that purpose, and Job
+for this.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But leaving aside, as a digression, the case of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>these divine examples of grave fiction, and that of
+the parables of the Gospel with them, we find an
+art of story-telling, whether in Arabia or in Tuscany,
+devised chiefly or altogether for pastime. It is an
+art of childish origins—the pretending that such
+or such things came to pass, the making things
+come to pass at the speaker’s whim. It is an
+arbitrary make-believe and irresponsible, whereas
+the drama must, as it were, make good its words by
+making a show. When the novel began in Italy it
+raised a childish laugh by jests unchildish. Its
+stories ended happily even though iniquitously.
+A mere pastime, it filled none but the idlest hour,
+or the weariest hour of rest. Boccaccio’s fictions
+were proportionate. There was little of them, and
+they did not encroach. It is a question whether the
+habit into which we in our time have slipped—fiction
+as a custom and a habit—is proportionate;
+and all our modern pastimes are in like manner
+questionable as to their quantity. And when the
+pastime of the greater number—the reading of the
+novel—is charged by the novelist with so many
+functions as it now carries we cannot but wonder
+that irresponsible hands should claim, and into
+those hands should be given, purposes so various
+and purporting to be so grave.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is the novelist, then, with no one to whom he
+must answer, with no facts to which he must
+be bound, and with only such truths as he sets in
+secret before his eyes—it is the novelist at whose
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>discretion lies the power of suggestion that is followed
+by a million souls. The idle reader opens the
+novel for pleasure and learns to find that pleasure
+in painful things. A pessimist has him by the ear,
+having captured him at the mischief of his idleness
+and his desire for passive pleasure. On the pessimist
+author’s side also there is some spiritual sloth
+in his activities, for pessimism is the easier way.
+If he would confess himself he would tell us that it
+is so. And one of his fruits is the obvious destruction
+of comedy, but the other, equally lamentable
+though less obvious, is the destruction of tragedy.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>We have all been troubled by Dante’s lack of
+pity for the people of his infernal pilgrimage. It is
+true that he has compassion upon Francesca (for
+the dreadful fact is that he had known as ‘a little
+radiant girl’ the very woman whom he saw in
+eternal woe), but he witnesses unmoved the other
+wounded displaying before him their immortal
+wounds and the other miserable recounting to him
+their immedicable grief. Are we to understand that
+some misery is beneath living compassion, and that
+pity and terror do not pass the limits of life’s
+known and intelligible ways, the ways of customary
+men, where anguish is not cut off from good, and
+hope, a banished angel, is not abolished? If so, it
+is easier to understand why the literature of despair
+is indeed not tragic, why it denies tragedy as comedy
+itself does not. If pessimism robs us of laughter
+it has done worse by ‘beguiling us of our tears’,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>not that for its sake they are, but that they are
+not, shed.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is no wonder that the proffer of Browning’s
+optimism, half-heartedly made again on the day of
+his centenary, did again fail. His ‘All’s right with
+the world’ is as vain as the pessimist’s ‘All’s wrong
+with it’. It is out of the range of customary life.
+Intelligible joy and grief are in the midways, and
+in the midways there is cause for as much sadness
+as our human hearts can hold. One of the most
+heart-piercing lines in our poetry is Patmore’s</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>After exceeding ill a little good.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>But if the ill had so exceeded that the little good
+was not, the pierced heart would have closed upon
+an insensible cicatrice.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Perhaps, by the way, another reason why Browning’s
+remedies are proffered in vain is his denial of
+fear. Browning refused to submit to fear, at once
+the penalty and the duty of mankind. Pessimists,
+on the other hand, are afraid, and they and Browning
+do not understand one another in their opposition,
+they are not intelligible enemies. Our
+pessimists fear, not without cause, and Browning
+is vociferously hopeful, without full cause. The
+antagonists are not within touch. And yet that
+robustious poet is held, or was held by his own
+generation, to be a realist. In certain evil things
+he was, on the contrary, an idealist. Having never
+known such a Spanish friar, or such a Bishop
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_126'>126</span>Blougram, he created them before he detected
+them—and at such close quarters, so point-blank!
+He was too intimate with the Sludge he made.
+But the pessimist, though so partial and so imperfect,
+is a better realist than he.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>A tragedy the noblest and most dreadful of our
+time—I refer to Monsieur Paul Claudel’s drama,
+<cite><span lang="fr">L’Otage</span></cite>—is the truer antithesis of pessimism in
+fiction, whether in the story told or on the stage.
+It is a tale of exceeding ill and a little good, of
+a world wherewith all is not right. I have lately
+read a novel in which everything went wrong, and
+what final solace appears takes the form of a little
+chatter about a servant’s photograph. In Monsieur
+Claudel’s play the solace is in the form of a momentary
+act of divine death after exceeding ill.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><cite><span lang="fr">L’Otage</span></cite> should be ministered to pessimists, or
+rather to their readers, for tears, and Mr. Jacobs for
+laughter. The age is not without its remedies.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_127'>127</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>GIACINTO GALLINA</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the
+nineteenth century, at the moment of the high tide
+of his work for the Venetian stage, English people
+were put into possession of some idea of his drama
+in the readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to
+be, more or less, a later Goldoni with a warmer
+heart. This was a brief description—or rather
+a mere sign—of an author whom few strangers
+would ever seek to know better. He is, indeed, so
+barred out of the knowledge of English readers by
+his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase
+was necessary as a first and final <i><span lang="fr">mémoire</span></i>. It gave
+the news of his death with a first mention of his
+name and a compendious definition of his career,
+in one sentence.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Gallina certainly followed Goldoni in finding the
+arguments, action, and passions of his plays in the
+home life of the Venetians—a life more domestic
+than anything an English dramatist would have
+the courage to offer to a self-conscious public inclined
+to ‘humour’. Although our countrymen
+are much afraid lest men should accuse them of
+exceeding domesticity, and are inclined to defend
+themselves with irony, they are in fact less domestic
+than any of their neighbours. You may hear two
+young Italian men, of what would be called among
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_128'>128</span>ourselves with some pride the frivolous world,
+exchange reports of the state and progress of their
+children (their babies really, but one hardly dares
+to say so; and one’s reluctance denotes the
+peculiar insular sense of dignities and indignities,
+the reserve, and the clowning that covers its hasty
+retreat). One hesitates, for fear of burlesque, to
+report in English a conversation that is in Italy
+quite simple, human, and unconnected with any
+kind of raillery.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>If this almost majestic candour is found in ‘the
+world’, the home is at least equally important in
+the classes whereof Goldoni chiefly wrote, and Giacinto
+Gallina in succession to him. These middle
+classes are very homely, and also peculiarly Italian.
+Nothing quite so local is to be found among the
+very poor, whose customs are those of necessity all
+the world over, and whose manners are small; the
+rich also tend to resemble each other, luxury grows
+monotonous, and cookery, for example, is as French
+in a good hotel in Athens as in a good hotel in Rome.
+But the little professional world everywhere in
+Italy keeps deep and inner places wherein it is
+Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and
+beyond the reach of alteration. The same thing
+that makes so much of Goldoni and of Gallina
+illegible to the rest of Europe encloses that sequestered
+home, and this is dialect. Business, especially
+if it be official, the business of an <i><span lang="it">impiegato</span></i>, is done in
+choice Italian, and all acquaintance with foreigners
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>(which in these classes is not much) uses the
+same polite manner of speech. ‘Toscaneggia’—‘he
+tuscanizes’—says one provincial of another,
+bantering the choice of words and the careful conjugations
+of verbs which he himself also will put on
+with the dignities of office.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>But within the flat, within the <i>palazzo</i>, within
+the country <i><span lang="it">villino</span></i> alike, dialect has its nest of
+intimacy, and makes all speech homely with an
+intensity of homeliness that people without patois
+can hardly conceive. It sets up an understanding,
+it runs up a code of signals, it makes confidence,
+and is heard in a laugh. Habit has not blunted the
+people’s sense of their locality of speech, even as it
+has left them the full consciousness of their sun.
+The barbarisms of local dialect are to the Italian
+citizens snug (as Swift would say) beyond description:
+their speech closes in their gossip, it prompts
+their allusions, it interprets, it understands, at close
+quarters. It is a kind of refuge from the generalities
+of literature; it consoles the heart from the threats
+of the preacher. But it scolds as no other kind of
+language can scold: scolds the servants with an
+equality of expression and a tyranny of oppression
+together that makes one of the curiosities of Italian
+domestic life; it scolds with the peculiar fury of the
+southern kitchen—a fury that casts itself implicitly
+upon the fellow-feeling of bystanders for excuse
+in the future time of calm. Dialect, in fine, sustains,
+comforts, winks, excludes the burden of the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>unintelligible world, deprecates, assuages; it keeps
+up the old, old habits of childhood, it knows the
+things that the citizen and the citizen’s wife know
+best, it is aloof from politics.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Inasmuch as the little professional classes of the
+South do not live without society, their dialect
+associates them closely with their neighbours—closely
+yet without any defect of ceremony. The
+rites are as many, the farewells are as repeated,
+as though Tuscan were the language; and the
+speakers of a comparatively gross dialect, full of
+twang, are yet not people to spend their evenings
+in ungraceful isolation. Their domesticity is not
+of the English kind that is made by the habit of
+reading, and dialect dispenses them from none of
+the duties and dignities of entertainment. It is
+only that all is done within, within certain bonds
+of concentrated mutual understanding.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Indeed, the necessity of companionship for every
+evening causes a very courteous waiving of the
+differences of rank. The general asks the village
+druggist (who is also the barber), and all others of
+like condition, to his country house to play tombola,
+there being no other neighbours, or but few. The
+intercourse between them is that of perfectly equal
+and easy courtesy, the only sign of difference being
+the use of the address ‘eccellenza’ on one side only,
+but with the infrequence of natural good manners.
+Without dialect you could hardly have an understanding
+so close yet so decorous.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>Even a remote dialect serves this intimate purpose.
+It was my fortune to know in childhood the
+inner interior of such a house. Genoese was my
+own tongue, and the barber’s, and all the countryside’s,
+and the General’s was Modenese. His
+Modenese and his wife’s had never abated a jot, for
+all their many years of dwelling in Liguria; as
+for their Italian, it was singularly exquisite (the
+General’s recitation of Dante was the most perfect
+speech in the world), but it was not forthcoming for
+their tombola parties. Modenese met the quite
+alien Genoese in a kind of rivalry of historic provincialism.
+Hosts and guests understood each other
+barely, and the hard Modenese consonants snapped
+in reply to the Ligurian sing-song; but it was at
+any rate dialect, it was <i><span lang="it">noi altri</span></i>, it was the strong
+Italian home.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>That the women should have their interests in
+these narrow things—narrow but not dull—is intelligible
+enough. Many of the older women remain
+indoors from Sunday noon to the next Sunday
+morning, in a jacket and slippers; not a few of the
+younger have their distractions, romances, emotions,
+at the window. Poverty, moreover, fosters these
+customs by forbidding much toilette, and thus
+the Italian woman of these middle classes, and of
+remote towns, who always dresses <i>much</i>, is content
+to dress <i>seldom</i>, and this perforce means a habit of
+home-keeping. But the men, with the slight
+alternative of the <i>caffè</i>, are equally absorbed by the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>things of the house. So does Goldoni show them to
+be in the whole series of his plays, and so must the
+men of his audience have been in the eighteenth
+century, or they would not have endured this perpetual
+comedy of domestic affairs, in the least
+exalted sense of the word domestic. Venetian men,
+and the citizens of other cities equally noble, sat to
+see the play that turns chiefly on the strife of
+a man’s mother and his wife for the services of
+a single maid, and they sit to-day to see the same
+thing. Giacinto Gallina, too, has half a comedy
+occupied with that contention. He need hardly—but
+for its unflagging popularity—have taken the
+self-same motive, inasmuch as Goldoni is by no
+means out of date; he holds the stage as freshly as
+ever. Indeed, Italian women, except in the richer
+classes that have international examples more
+constantly before their eyes, alter little in a matter
+of a hundred or two hundred years. In the women
+of Goldoni and in the women of Giacinto Gallina
+you may see the virtual contemporaries of Mrs.
+Samuel Pepys and of Mercer.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>
+  <h2 class='c004'>THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'>The cause of the modern monotony of ‘you’
+might be sought in the mere slovenliness of our
+civilization in the practice of the inflexions of
+grammar. All things tend to become specialized,
+except only words. Though in the house of life
+itself the organs, as life grows more perfect, begin to
+draw apart to their own separate functions; though
+the labourer, in the later association of mankind,
+finds his task by degrees to dwindle in range and
+to be enforced within closer and closer repetitions;
+and though only a small division of any of the
+sciences that have come towards adult and
+responsible age falls to the share of a single
+specialist, the word alone grows not expert and
+special, but general and inexpert.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is obliged to do more various things, and to
+do them with less directness and, as it were, a less
+sequestered intention. It is engaged upon enterprises
+of unskilled labour. The industrial word
+has less and less craft, less dignity, less leisure,
+less rest, and more mere utility.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its
+own varieties, amid the varieties of the casual task.
+It changes not its vesture, and the inflexion is lost.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized
+peoples, in the inevitable evolution of things,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>should tend to become poor, careless, and inexact
+grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact
+is, needless to say, well enough known. Some of
+the French missionaries, students of American-Indian
+languages, have astonished us with reports
+of the enormous vocabularies and the scientific
+order of those tongues. The people are in the
+nomadic stage of society, their languages in the
+finished, the special, the sub-divided condition;
+intricate in system, organic, arranged, logical, full
+of expressive differences, cases that precisely
+assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time,
+turning the future to look upon the past, and
+anticipating that turn, and making a shifting
+perspective of the past; distinguishing persons
+not merely by pointing the rude forefinger of
+a pronoun, but by the allusion of all the inflexions
+of a verb. All that the antique grammars did,
+and more, is done, we hear, by those doomed
+languages of an unaltering people, a people with
+neither literature nor history, a people whose
+antiquities have no interest nor value, nor date,
+because their centuries resembled each other.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Not only the tactics of grammar, but an
+innumerable variety of words is theirs, so that
+a speaker might hardly name a common thing
+without a conscious play of choice, according as
+the syllables of a sentence were to fold and close.
+Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has
+the charge of thought, without some degree of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>a like liberty of choice, and modern prose in all
+languages has, obviously, for the lack of this
+liberty—for lack of rich alternatives—somewhat
+forgone the practice of rhythm; forgone it
+altogether in the explanations of science, for
+instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red-Indian
+speech, translated even into sentimental
+English, as used formerly to be done, must have
+undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier
+change when it was done into sentimental French.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is, however, among English races chiefly that
+an unwillingness to be troubled with the distinctions
+of grammar has had this effect of making
+a word run errands and serve the first purpose at
+hand; and it is among English races that inflexions
+(never very numerous or subtle) have been
+neglected and let fall. That most orderly of
+grammars, the Spanish, is still in full use; the
+Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use
+them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in
+Rome, retain as few as possible in Liguria—making
+shift with auxiliary verbs rather than conjugate
+properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts.
+The French go about to avoid certain of their own
+subjunctives, even in literature, and in speech the
+perfect tenses are passed askance, for fear of
+pedantry. None but ourselves have been so impatient
+as to put out of common use the second
+person singular. ‘You’ was manifestly a trick
+of politeness in all languages, until it became
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>depreciated by general use, when Germans,
+Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more
+distant pronoun of courtesy.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>The literary Genius was kind to its wayward
+chosen people, and kept for us a plot of the
+language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry.
+As things are, we need not envy the French their
+second person singular. For them it has but
+two keen significances—the first use in love and
+the disuse in the reproof of children. The second
+is, perhaps, the more important; it is renewed,
+and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence. To
+say ‘vous’ to a naughty child is to enforce
+insatiate retribution; few children deserve so
+much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches the
+personality, and alters the relations of life.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is
+by no means certain that the second person
+singular, with its single delight—the first—never
+to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar
+regrets of the world for the flights of its joys.
+‘Toi’, the first ‘toi’, is an arbitrary, a conventional
+happiness, a happiness because it is single—it
+has no quality but that. The ‘many thousand’
+of ‘toi’ are insignificant, and therefore it has no
+‘poor last’; it sets a paltry example, therefore.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>And then, while the second person singular
+plays this ambiguous part in love, see how primly
+it is eschewed in prayer. ‘May your name be
+sanctified’ is a second phrase of the <i><span lang="fr">oraison
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>dominicale</span></i> (<i><span lang="fr">oraison dominicale!</span></i> the name says
+everything) which we should be loth to have
+in place of our own. With us there is not only the
+poetic ‘thy’, but the obsolete valuing of the last
+syllable of the past participle—‘hallowed’—and the
+unworn, the still fresh word itself to make the
+sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such
+words into familiar use we should gain much, but
+we should lose a most distinctive characteristic,
+bestowed upon us by the literary Genius, as
+though in reward of our very sins—our unique
+plot of disregarded language that the traffic of the
+world passes by. For though the Italians have
+a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their
+daily prose are rather in the form of the words
+than in the words themselves. Now the French
+have the Psalms of David in the language of the
+trade circular charged with a little rhetoric.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and
+its effectual influence in effacing them, it could
+not be more distinctly proved than by the Quaker
+speech. Restoring the second person singular to
+the language (by way of denying the primitive
+hyperbole of courtesy from which the general
+second person plural took its use), the followers of
+Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for
+a generation or so these were in practice, yet the
+increase of carelessness and the generalizing habit
+of speech in a world more and more intent upon
+special tasks in all things else, quickly made an
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>end of them. So that Quakerism began to talk
+a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If
+Mrs. Beecher Stowe makes Quakers speak according
+to their use, they suppressed ‘thou’ more or less,
+and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing
+but the slovenly indifference that has made all our
+verbs so dull could be the cause of this perversion
+of a reform.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of
+our own poets, who seem to find a difficulty in
+carrying the second person singular safely through
+a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one
+there is another, a little more out of sight, that
+does not. As Shelley wrote—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>so write others of the moderns.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not
+done in the other centuries. Must we needs, as
+we go on, grow so lax, and do these unhandsome
+things? If we do by some obscure process grow
+so lax, why should there not be, in a time of
+revisions, a revision of these customs? A little
+of the subjunctive was restored many years ago
+by Mr. Henley in the <cite>National Observer</cite>; that this
+little soon fell aside again is not encouraging;
+nevertheless, ‘it were’ worth while for some
+author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the
+second person singular, and with it certain tenses
+long out of use.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>There might be such a literary restoration—a
+literary and a familiar restoration—as would
+make our language again more various and more
+charming, and yet would not turn the speech
+poetic to vulgar use, nor decrease the dignity of
+what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ‘the
+essential and ornamental measures of address’.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary
+grammar, we have the treasure of the sequestered
+poetic and religious language in good order and
+perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two
+derivations may well be dwelt upon afresh, now
+when so many of our writers are obsequious to
+the French language. (How is it, by the way,
+that Ireland is so little joyful for the gift of
+English?) French cannot be the great poetic
+language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc,
+delivered from a grandfatherly hearth-rug: ‘<span lang="fr">L’anglais
+et le français; ce sont les deux langues qui
+resteront; l’anglais pour le commerce, le français
+pour la littérature.</span>’ The blood of a silent listener
+was only ten years old, but it boiled. And here
+is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French
+judgement upon Browning: ‘What a singular
+man! his middle is not in the centre.’ That
+Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle
+of an English poet is not in the centre; it is one
+focus of an ellipse, like the sun. Our national
+imagination takes wide adventures and unequal
+velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler)
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>that the earth’s orbit must be circular, because
+a circle is ‘perfect’. And this is the kind of
+perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the
+French mind has long cherished.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>Not only in this matter of middles and centres
+is English poetry out of bounds. She does not
+know when she is beaten, as was said of English
+armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow
+her way in? Into great drama she intrudes,
+bidding the stage to wait; by lyre and song she
+commands epic narrative to halt the marching
+columns of its processions; waves rhetoric from
+its right throne in the grand style and in heroic
+verse, and usurps its place by an imperial supersession;
+scatters literary boundaries, and makes
+all the kingdoms hers—Poetry’s. And no imaginable
+academies could have prevailed against her.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>French lacks much besides those alien powers,
+our Latin and Teutonic inheritances, forbidden as
+it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with the
+Danube between, or the Alps between.</p>
+
+<p class='c009'>It lacks also negatives worth having; making
+shift with half-hearted particles or the grotesquely
+insufficient <i><span lang="fr">peu</span></i>. <i><span lang="fr">Peu</span></i> is the only negative for
+some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile
+we have our profound and powerful particle, in
+our ‘undone’, ‘unloved’ ‘unforgiven’, the ‘un’
+that summons in order that it may banish, and
+keeps the living word present to hear sentence
+and denial, showing the word ‘unloved’ to be
+not less than archangel ruined.</p>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div><span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span><span class='small'>PRINTED IN ENGLAND</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>BY FREDERICK HALL</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c003'>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c012'>
+    <div><span class='large'><i><span class='under'>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</span></i></span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>POEMS: By <span class='sc'>Alice Meynell</span>. With
+a portrait by J. S. Sargent, R.A. 7s. 6d.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘What makes these poems singular amid all the poems
+of to-day is the fact that mind and spirit, intellect and
+imagination, mortal and immortal, have equal parts in
+them.’—<cite>New Statesman.</cite></p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry
+that it is itself creative. Its grace and beauty are the
+flower, not only of her life, but of her contemplation of
+life. Her books have taken their chosen, quiet, unfaltering
+way—too lofty a way for ease or weariness or absent-mindedness
+to follow. She is sure.’—<cite>The Times.</cite></p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘Mrs. Meynell found herself long ago, and was found by
+all English-speaking lovers of poetry.’—<cite>Manchester Guardian.</cite></p>
+
+<p class='c010'>ESSAYS: By <span class='sc'>Alice Meynell</span>. Selected
+and arranged from her previously published books.
+7s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘One of the very rarest products of nature and grace—a
+woman of genius, one who, I am bound to confess, has
+falsified the assertion I made some time ago that no female
+writer of our time has attained to true “distinction”.’—<span class='sc'>Coventry
+Patmore</span> in the <cite>Fortnightly Review</cite>.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘The writing is limpid in its depths.’—<span class='sc'>George Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘Exercises in close thinking and expert expression
+almost unique in the literature of the day.’—<cite>Athenaeum.</cite></p>
+
+<p class='c013'>‘The most stimulating Essays that have appeared since
+Mr. Stevenson delighted us with his <cite><span lang="la">Virginibus Puerisque</span></cite>.
+To appreciate them is a step forward in education.’—<cite>The
+Guardian.</cite></p>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div>LONDON: BURNS OATES AND WASHBOURNE LTD.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c003'>
+</div>
+<div class='tnotes x-ebookmaker'>
+
+<div class='chapter ph2'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c012'>
+    <div>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+ <ul class='ul_1 c002'>
+    <li>Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+
+    </li>
+    <li>Renumbered footnotes.
+    </li>
+  </ul>
+
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78949 ***</div>
+</body>
+<!-- created with ppgen.py 3.57i (with regex) on 2026-06-25 21:04:32 GMT -->
+</html>
diff --git a/78949-h/images/cover.jpg b/78949-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..26ee9cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78949-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6c72794
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..09190b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+[Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook [#78949](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78949)