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