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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; 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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,’ &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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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, &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, &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, &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 Binary files differnew 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. 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