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