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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 *** |