Essays
by
Alice Meynell
Part 1 out of 4
This etext was prepared from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition
by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Essays by Alice Meynell
Contents:
WINDS AND WATERS
Ceres' Runaway
Wells
Rain
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Rushes and Reeds
IN A BOOK ROOM
A Northern Fancy
Pathos
Anima Pellegrina!
A Point of Biography
The Honours of Mortality
Composure
The Little Language
A Counterchange
Harlequin Mercutio
COMMENTARIES
Laughter
The Rhythm of Life
Domus Angusta
Innocence and Experience
The Hours of Sleep
Solitude
Decivilized
WAYFARING
The Spirit of Place
Popular Burlesque
Have Patience, Little Saint
At Monastery Gates
The Sea Wall
ARTS
Tithonus
Symmetry and Incident
The Plaid
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
Victorian Caricature
The Point of Honour
"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"
The Colour of Life
The Horizon
In July
Cloud
Shadows
WOMEN AND BOOKS
The Seventeenth Century
Mrs. Dingley
Prue
Mrs. Johnson
Madame Roland
"THE DARLING YOUNG"
Fellow Travellers with a Bird
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
The Unready
That Pretty Person
Under the Early Stars
The Illusion of Historic Time
CERES' RUNAWAY
One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of
a Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the
charming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does
not exist that would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth
of green in the high places of the city. It is true that there have
been the famous captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths
of Caracalla; moreover a less conspicuous running to earth takes
place on the Appian Way, in some miles of the solitude of the
Campagna, where men are employed in weeding the roadside. They
slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the ancient stones--rows of
little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders
why. The governors of the city will not succeed in making the Via
Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a thriving
commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and shattered
Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is
spread," says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the
pyramid. But a couple of active scythes are kept at work there
summer and spring--not that the grass is long, for it is much
overtopped by the bee-orchis, but because flowers are not to laugh
within reach of the civic vigilance.
Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these
accessible places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing
success and victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits,
lodges in the sun, swings in the wind, takes wing to find the
remotest ledges, and blooms aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth
century, of the seventeenth, and of the eighteenth. As the historic
ages grow cold it banters them alike. The flagrant flourishing
statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment (and Rome is chiefly
the city of the broken pediment) are the opportunities of this
vagrant garden in the air. One certain church, that is full of
attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great
stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest
summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the
fair middle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of
accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the
Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds
its account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco
and stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea-
wind, sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has
lodged in a little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild
oats!
If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and
cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot
catch it. And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the
flight of the agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress,
or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a
twelfth-century tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grass grows
under their discomfited feet. It actually casts a flush of green
over their city piazza--the wide light-grey pavements so vast that
to keep them weeded would need an army of workers. That army has
not been employed; and grass grows in a small way, but still
beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles.
Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly prompts
the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazza into a
square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of the pavement
as of the importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--and the
weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes
its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in
tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the
"third" (which is in truth the fourth) Rome.
When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf;
it is full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer
scents throng each other, close and warm, than these from a little
hand-space of the grass one rests on, within the walls or on the
plain, or in the Sabine or the Alban hills. Moreover, under the
name I will take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most
welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican. That great and
beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon
house, here magnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious
and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window on a ledge to
the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham
Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot
well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any
parapet it may have round a corner.
Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness,
a suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the
tilling. Wildish peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which
seems to have disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts
in his manifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than
half-way from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale
and corpulent of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance
lost--these are all Italian things of savage savour and simplicity.
The most cultivated of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet
not a garden, but something better, as her city is yet not a town
but something better, and her wilderness something better than a
desert. In all the three there is a trace of the little flying
heels of the runaway.
WELLS
The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or
unattractive secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and
perennial means of life. A very dull secret is made of water, for
example, and the plumber sets his seal upon the floods whereby we
live. They are covered, they are carried, they are hushed, from the
spring to the tap; and when their voices are released at last in the
London scullery, why, it can hardly be said that the song is
eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether earthly or
heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this capture of
streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is not a
sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For
style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a
gesture, as it were, in the doing of small things; it is the
ignorance of secret ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its
neatness seem to be secured by a system of little shufflings and
surprises.
Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such
fittings; they form its very construction. Style does not exist in
modern arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for
all the successes--which are not to be denied--of their outer part;
the happy little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of
its absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath,
and the triumph and success of the present art of raiment--"fit"
itself--is but the result of a masked and lurking labour and device.
The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of
the beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and
slighter actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the
way. In a word, the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is
the dexterous provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-
appointed, and decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his
hands; whereas the artist craftsman of other times made a
manifestation of his means. The first hides the streams, under
stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which we all must make haste to
call upon the earth to cover, and the second lifted up the arches of
the aqueduct.
The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way
to ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure
way. In all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed
by hidden means must needs, from the beginning, prepare the
abolition of dignity. This is easy to understand, but it is less
easy to explain the ill-fortune that presses upon the expert
workman, in search of easy ways to live, all the ill-favoured
materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them serviceable and
effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and inter them, turning
the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily world.
It is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to
explain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which
are, after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy
conditions, neither from the material, suggesting to the workman,
nor from the workman looking askance at his unhandsome material,
comes a first proposal to pour in cement and make fast the
underworld, out of sight. But fate spares not that suggestion to
the able and the unlucky at their task of making neat work of the
means, the distribution, the traffick of life.
The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the
means of our lives those which we should wish to see open to the
sun, with their waters on their progress and their way to us; but,
no, they are lapped in lead.
King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.
Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-
place that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of
wells are, at their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No
other mine is so visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible
there; and it is fine to think of the waters of this planet, shallow
and profound, all charged with shining suns, a multitude of waters
multiplying suns, and carrying that remote fire, as it were, within
their unalterable freshness. Not a pool without this visitant, or
without passages of stars. As for the wells of the Equator, you may
think of them in their last recesses as the daily bathing-places of
light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter fitful figures of the
sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those deeps.
Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the
sun is shattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken
across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that
fall through chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile
figures of leaves. To all these waters the agile air has perpetual
access. Not so can great towns be watered, it will be said with
reason; and this is precisely the ill-luck of great towns.
Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have
the grace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every campo has
its circle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the
pavement, its soft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the
water below, and the cheerful work of the cable.
Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their
plain with the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the
watersheds in the hills to the and city; and having the waters
captive, they knew how to compel them to take part, by fountains, in
this Roman triumph. They had the wit to boast thus of their
brilliant prisoner.
None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a
more invincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the
leap of the heart of the waters have outlived their captors. They
have remained in Rome, and have remained alone. Over them the
victory was longer than empire, and their thousands of loud voices
have never ceased to confess the conquest of the cold floods,
separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the head and front
of the world.
Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact
of Rome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to
the distance from the city without seeing the approach of those
perpetual waters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services.
This, then, was the style of a master, who does not lapse from
"incidental greatness," has no mean precision, out of sight, to
prepare the finish of his phrases, and does not think the means and
the approaches are to be plotted and concealed. Without anxiety,
without haste, and without misgiving are all great things to be
done, and neither interruption in the doing nor ruin after they are
done finds anything in them to betray. There was never any disgrace
of means, and when the world sees the work broken through there is
no disgrace of discovery. The labour of Michelangelo's chisel,
little more than begun, a Roman structure long exposed in disarray--
upon these the light of day looks full, and the Roman and the
Florentine have their unrefuted praise.
RAIN
Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there
is nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the
familiar rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long
shafts from the clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy
downward journey with them by the glancing of our eyes, would be
infinitely separate, units, an innumerable flight of single things,
and the simple movement of intricate points.
The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at
once, being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our
impression is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of
our senses. What we are apt to call our quick impression is rather
our sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly
bewildered sense of things that flash and fall, wink, and are
overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes of man hesitate and
mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert eyes,
delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzles
them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part
slowly from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose
moments are not theirs. There seems to be such a difference of
instants as invests all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes,
and causes the past, a moment old, to be written, vanishing, upon
the skies.
The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records
of our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant
woodman's stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is
repeated in the impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel
dazzles it, and the stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a
captivity evaded. Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of
these timid senses; and their perception, outrun by the shower,
shaken by the light, denied by the shadow, eluded by the distance,
makes the lingering picture that is all our art. One of the most
constant causes of all the mystery and beauty of that art is surely
not that we see by flashes, but that nature flashes on our
meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionist to make
haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon
him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.
Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the
ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that
the husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet
unclaimed in the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that
he binds the shower withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the
coming cloud. His sense of property takes aim and reckons distance
and speed, and even as he shoots a little ahead of the equally
uncertain ground-game, he knows approximately how to hit the cloud
of his possession. So much is the rain bound to the earth that,
unable to compel it, man has yet found a way, by lying in wait, to
put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud "outweeps its rain,"
and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and to enforce his
cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable. The rain
is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's waste be
made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up street.
Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling
unfruitfully.
Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain,
as the end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its
flight warning away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing
shadow. It is a threat and a reconciliation; it removes mountains
compared with which the Alps are hillocks, and makes a childlike
peace between opposed heights and battlements of heaven.
THE TOW PATH
A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided
must have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird
your shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on
the even path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side
of meadows.
The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain,"
only too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of
the riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink,
are swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The
line drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows
taut; it makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress
of your easy power.
The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the
joys of "feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a
verse of Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the
joys of sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual
act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy
labourers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means
of violence. Here, on the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned
meadows and opal waters, you need but to walk in your swinging
harness, and so take your friends up-stream.
You work merely as the mill-stream works--by simple movement. At
lock after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to
the wheel that turns by no greater stress, and you and the river
have the same mere force of progress.
There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the
bright Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing
by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.
Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as
the wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings
the lighted clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying
high for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own
weight. You will not envy them for so brief a success. Did not
Wordsworth want a "little boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him
a blockhead therefor? Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.
All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry.
Even the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than
you, walking your effectual walk with the line attached to your
willing steps. Your moderate strength of a mere everyday physical
education gives you the sufficient mastery of the towpath.
If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give
it life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the
buoyant burden--the yielding check--than ever before. An
unharnessed walk must begin to seem to you a sorry incident of
insignificant liberty. It is easier than towing? So is the drawing
of water in a sieve easier to the arms than drawing in a bucket, but
not to the heart.
To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the
wings of metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the
spirit and the line.
No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it
depends upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any
depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it
apt to set you at naught or charge you with a make-believe. It
accompanies, it almost anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just
so much as to give your briskness good reason, and to justify you if
you should take to still more nimble heels. All your haste,
moreover, does but waken a more brilliantly-sounding ripple.
The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to
carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your
figure, enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes
free. No watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path.
What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer
smoothly towed. Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your
head high and watch the birds, or listen to them. They fly in such
lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of
their flight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in
that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons. The
days are so still that you do not merely hear the cawing of the
rooks--you overhear their hundred private croakings and creakings,
the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by wings.
As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an
end. This year's robins are in full voice; and the only song that
is not for love or nesting--the childish song of boy-birds, the
freshest and youngest note--is, by a happy paradox, that of an
autumnal voice.
Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist's
wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding
note. Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent,
stealthy soles of the barefooted in the south.
THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS
It is no small thing--no light discovery--to find a river Andromeda
and Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer
night around a pole-star in the waters. One star or two--delicate
visitants of streams--we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of
the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition. Or the
southern waves may show the light--not the image--of the evening or
the morning planet. But this, in a pool of the country Thames at
night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image of a
whole large constellation burning in the flood.
These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more
vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or
the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters
play a painter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two
movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright
flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark
flashes of the vague bats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate
with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of
large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the
steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote,
have a suddenness of gleaming life. You imagine that some
unexampled gale might make them seem to shine with such a movement
in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in
its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered
stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet's "wanton"
with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At moments some
rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set,
widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars,
and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then
one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and
a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague,
wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else
at once so keen and so elusive.
The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no
such vanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft
night are reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by
the large and vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the
Pleiades.
There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the
river Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys
on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of
summer. It is a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-
tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty
points when it is not flying. The streets of London are among its
many highways, for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of
weather. But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the
water so that its finely-feathered feet are wet. On gentle breezes
it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the waters.
All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations. It
is far adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It offers thistle
plants (or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to
the tops of many thousand hills. Doubtless the farmer would rather
have to meet it in battalions than in these invincible units astray.
But if the farmer owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid
riverside garden wherein it would be a great pleasure to sow the
thistles of the nearest pasture.
RUSHES AND REEDS
Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another
growth that feels the implicit spring. It had been more abandoned
to winter than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east
wind, more than the dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges,
rushes, canes, and reeds were the appropriate lyre of the cold. On
them the nimble winds played their dry music. They were part of the
winter. It looked through them and spoke through them. They were
spears and javelins in array to the sound of the drums of the north.
The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those
that stand solid. The sedges whistle his tune. They let the colour
of his light look through--low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of
winter day.
The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds. They
belong to the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the
river, beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes
perilous footing for the cattle. They are the fringe of the low
lands, the sign of streams. They grow tall between you and the near
horizon of flat lands. They etch their sharp lines upon the sky;
and near them grow flowers of stature, including the lofty yellow
lily.
Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness
of the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the
distinction of its points, its needles, and its resolute right
lines.
Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need
the sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy
breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops
knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges
whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend,
showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the
silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea. They are
unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm
gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a thousand reasons for
their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept into a
single attitude, again and again, at every renewal of the storm.
Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds
in England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so
changed (except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England,
and has in fact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape
elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south
are not conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a
gipsy people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is
rather a gross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if
he is a man of sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior
doubts. His property, he says, goes right down to the centre of the
earth, in the shape of a wedge; how high up it goes into the air it
would be difficult to say, and obviously the shape of the wedge must
be continued in the direction of increase. We may therefore
proclaim his right to the clouds and their cargo. It is true that
as his ground game is apt to go upon his neighbour's land to be
shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his showers elsewhere.
But the great thing is the view. A well-appointed country-house
sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But he who
tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes
should happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his-
-he had the pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for
a time. But the bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very
thorough landowner, but a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would
endure this sort of thing no longer, and went out armed and had a
long acre of sedges scythed to death.
They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and
upon margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a
road. No wild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and
their primroses are good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and
then, though, one has a kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds
of trees--the Corot trees. Standing at a distance from the more
ornamental trees, from those of fuller foliage, and from all the
indeciduous shrubs and the conifers (manifest property, every one),
two or three translucent aspens, with which the very sun and the
breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes seemed to wear a
certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it. They are
suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.
And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not
say so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins,
are in spirit almost as extraterritorial as the rushes. In proof of
this he very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all.
The view is better, as a view, without them. Though their roots are
in his ground right enough, there is a something about their heads--
. But the reason he gives for wishing them away is merely that they
are "thin." A man does not always say everything.
A NORTHERN FANCY
"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat
Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and
witty answer to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to
write like a madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing
to write like a madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a
fool.'" Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be
heard, a light high note, in English poetry throughout two centuries
at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the
mad maid's song, flying again.
A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against
the crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that
had made the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy,
inconstancy--may have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this
tune of innocence, and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.
"I heard a maid in Bedlam," runs the old song. High and low the
poets tried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be a
maid and crazed for love. Except for the temporary insanity so
indifferently worn by the soprano of the now deceased kind of
Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays with the
flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe (and
this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have
found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met
elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the
treble note astray.
At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast
Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that
high note, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of
words might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales,
and laughed at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived
so long in the strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out
Packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry
and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid
called Barbara.
It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs
of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there
is nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some
have died for love." To one who has always recognized the greatness
of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much
Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in
Modern Painters, where this grave lyric is cited for an example of
great imagination. It is the mourning and restless song of the
lover ("the pretty Barbara died") who has not yet broken free from
memory into the alien world of the insane.
Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam
entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he
could endure to lose "the bliss, but not the place." (And although
this dramatic "Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics
except to be scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative
thought.) It is nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature
visits the fancy of English poets with such a wild recurrence. The
Englishman of the far past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-
lighted winters, and the intricate life and customs of the little
town, must have been generally a home-keeper. No adventure, no
setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But Tom-a-Bedlam, the
wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his horn for
alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free
to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy
of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey that had
no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the
swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it
was one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.
Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English
Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they
had a name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky
Swallow, Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came
the "Abram men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to
the fairs and wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body
was dressed like a maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap." But after the
Civil Wars they vanished, and no man knew how. In time old men
remembered them only to remember that they had not seen any such
companies or solitary wanderers of late years.
The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and
not singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring."
Wordsworth, who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes
the crazed one a wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by
chance, rare as an Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-
I too have passed her in the hills
Setting her little water-mills.
His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall
in such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization,
BOURGEOIS in the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her
after death to the company of man, to the "holy bell," which
Shakespeare's Duke remembered in banishment, and to the congregation
and their "Christian psalm."
The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad,
than Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the
maid crazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and
she might be drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile
nor bury her. She might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her
heart was light after trouble. "Many light hearts and wings"--she
had at least the bird's heart, and the poet lent to her voice the
wings of his verses.
There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant
woman of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer
Elliott's fine lines in "The Excursion" -
Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried!
Wife of my bosom, wedded to my soul!
Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She
had no child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had
long forgotten how it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more
weary than she, with a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her
"good-morrow" rings from Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow. She
knows that her love is dead, and her perplexity has regard rather to
the many kinds of flowers than to the old story of his death; they
distract her in the splendid meadows.
All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange
was the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The
world has become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less
serious and more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and
perhaps will never recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more
starry madness. Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself
bound to recur to the legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed
maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful but dull, and sings of her own
"burning brow," as Herrick's wild one never sang; nor is there any
smile in her story, though she talks of flowers, or, rather, "the
herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the surest of all signs
that the strange inspiration of the past centuries was lost,
vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been wholly English,
whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English.
It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example,
could so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and
intelligible sentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities
into the momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his
disregard of this northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was
an alien upon earth, what were she in the Inferno? What word can
express her strangeness there, her vagrancy there? And with what
eyes would they see this dewy face glancing in at the windows of
that City?
PATHOS
A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a
magazine: "For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is
the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of
the pathos that is worked out more fully, though by different ways,
in Bottom and Malvolio." Has it indeed come to this? Have the
Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz or their yet later equivalents,
compared with which "le spleen" of the French Byronic age was gay,
done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature
free from the preoccupation of a sham real-life? So it would seem.
Even what the great master has not shown us in his work, that your
critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it. By the
penetration of his intrusive sympathy he will come at it. It is of
little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it
is precisely Snug who stirs their emotions so painfully. Not the
lion; they can make shift to see through that: but the Snug within,
the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that
latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions
arise as to the end of old Double; and Harpagon is the tragic figure
of Monomania; and as to Argan, ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de
Monsieur" must have been wrought by those prescriptions! Et patati,
et patata.
It may be only too true that the actual world is "with pathos
delicately edged." For Malvolio living we should have had living
sympathies; so much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of
refinement; so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed
for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the weaver
our pity might be reached for the sake of his single self-reliance,
his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the
niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not
art another? Is it not the privilege of literature to treat things
singly, without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous
completeness of the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this
reason, our refuge? Fortunately unreal is his world when he will
have it so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque
man: without misgiving, without remorse, without reluctance. If
great creating Nature has not assumed for herself she has assuredly
secured to the great creating poet the right of partiality, of
limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, of taking one
impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day. Art and
Nature are complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with one
another. And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the
corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the
flat--(the borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency;
but let this pass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general
lack of a sense of the separation between Nature and her sentient
mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is
as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in
comedy--he is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to know what
is not to his purpose, he is light-heartedly capricious. And in
that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us--or used to give us,
for even the word is obsolete--the pleasure of OUBLIANCE.
Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have
caught him a clout as he went. Yet he will do it again; and those
like-minded will assuredly also continue to show how much more
completely human, how much more sensitive, how much more
responsible, is the art of the critic than the world has ever dreamt
till now. And, superior in so much, they will still count their
importunate sensibility as the choicest of their gifts. And
Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his
admiration than the pathos of the time. It is bred now of your mud
by the operation of your sun. 'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears
of it are wet.
ANIMA PELLEGRINA!
Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the
stranger's fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a
phrase that is its own essential possession, and yet is dearer to
the speaker of other tongues. Easily--shall I say cheaply?--
spiritual, for example, was the nation that devised the name anima
pellegrina, wherewith to crown a creature admired. "Pilgrim soul"
is a phrase for any language, but "pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly
and sweetly to one who cannot be over-praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a
phrase of fondness, the high homage of a lover, of one watching, of
one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has admired and
gazed while the object of his praises visibly surpassed them--this
is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an Italian heaven.
It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this
impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a
sentence of life passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and
the modern editor had thought it necessary to explain the
exclamation by a note. It was, he said, poetical.
Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than
Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the
more modern love-song suited the day of Bellini. But it is only
Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any
other European nation, but only of this.
To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-
Felice chi vi mira,
Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!
And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would
be but a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the
profounder advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such
feeling as the very language keeps in store. In another tongue you
may sing, "happy who looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other
tongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what other
shall you get from so weak an antithesis the illusion of a lovely
intellectual epigram? Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to
call it an illusion; he should rather be glad to travel into the
place of a language where the phrase IS intellectual, impassioned,
and an epigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate
himself, and not the poetry.
I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the
charm may still be unknown to Englishmen--"piuttosto bruttini." See
what an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not
reluctant, but tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of
pictures, or works of art of several kinds, and you confess at once
that not otherwise should they be condemned. BRUTTO--ugly--is the
word of justice, the word for any language, everywhere translatable,
a circular note, to be exchanged internationally with a general
meaning, wholesale, in the course of the European concert. But
BRUTTINO is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive that forbears to
express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is,
moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the rear--
"rather than not." "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the
printed and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that
shall go no further. After the sound of it, the European concert
seems to be composed of brass instruments.
How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into
which a traveller hither has to enter! Do we possess anything here
more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany)
than our particle "un"? Poor are those living languages that have
not our use of so rich a negative. The French equivalent in
adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itself--or hardly;
it does not attain the participle; so that no French or Italian poet
has the words "unloved", "unforgiven." None such, therefore, has
the opportunity of the gravest and the most majestic of all ironies.
In our English, the words that are denied are still there--"loved,"
"forgiven": excluded angels, who stand erect, attesting what is not
done, what is undone, what shall not be done.
No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain
of loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in
sight. All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-
foretelling is the word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.
We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this,
proper to character and thought, and by no means only an accident of
untransferable speech. And it is impossible for a reader, who is a
lover of languages for their spirit, to pass the words of
untravelled excellence, proper to their own garden enclosed, without
recognition. Never may they be disregarded or confounded with the
universal stock. If I would not so neglect PIUTTOSTO BRUTTINI, how
much less a word dominating literature! And of such words of
ascendancy and race there is no great English author but has
abundant possession. No need to recall them. But even writers who
are not great have, here and there, proved their full consciousness
of their birthright. Thus does a man who was hardly an author,
Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He has
incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at
that time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood,
and the head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."
This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a
local rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an
intellectual place--Felice chi vi mira--or the art-critic's phrase--
piuttosto bruttini--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.
As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--who
would not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has
given us, but that has kept for its own--ensoleille? Nowhere else
is the sun served with such a word. It is not to be said or written
without a convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come
light and radiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it,
nor the accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-
south; therefore neither England nor Italy can rival it. But there
needed also the senses of the French--those senses of which they say
far too much in every second-class book of their enormous, their
general second-class, but which they have matched in their time with
some inimitable words. Perhaps that matching was done at the moment
of the full literary consciousness of the senses, somewhere about
the famous 1830. For I do not think ensoleille to be a much older
word--I make no assertion. Whatever its origin, may it have no end!
They cannot weary us with it; for it seems as new as the sun, as
remote as old Provence; village, hill-side, vineyard, and chestnut
wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air is light, and white
things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white cattle,
shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense of
sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the
paraphrase is but a picture. For ensoleille I would claim the
consent of all readers--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit
of that French. But perhaps it is a mere personal preference that
makes le jour s'annonce also sacred.
If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this
could be only that it might in time find its true language and
incomparable phrase at last--that it might await the day of life in
its proper German. I found it there (and knew at once the authentic
verse, and knew at once for what tongue it had been really destined)
in the pages of the prayer-book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck
church, and in the accents of her voice.
A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY
There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--
who has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of
Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a
modern reference to the manifold death and destruction with which
the air, the branches, the mosses are said to be full.
But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice
of the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and
of the dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are
they--all the dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do
they hide their little last hours, where are they buried? Where is
the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit?
You may see, it is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may
hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are,
as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a
well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is too
slight for direct mention, and which a meaner man might hide or
avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, you twinkle back at the
bird.
But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and
plunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes
violently into other forms, flashes without pause into another
flame; but not all. Amid all the killing there must be much dying.
There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our more
accessible counties now, and many thousands of birds must die
uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing is done so
modestly, so then is their dying also. Short lives have all these
wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of them always alive;
they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep the
millions of the dead out of sight.
Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold
winter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so
complete, that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth
conspired that February to make known all the secrets; everything
was published. Death was manifest. Editors, when a great man dies,
are not more resolute than was the frost of '95.
The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and
forced to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which
the art and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory
at Oxford.
Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought
wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of
a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a
soldier--passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal.
And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that,
as has just been said, no one in the world is aware of their dying,
except only in the case of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled
to die with observation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a
rule. There is no display of the battlefield in the fields. There
is no tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with
strange decorum. You may pass a fine season under the trees, and
see nothing dead except here and there where a boy has been by, or a
man with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a
butcher's shop in the woods.
But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the
wild world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have
turned over scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether
now and again there might be a "Life" which was not more
emphatically a death. But there never is a modern biography that
has taken the hint of Nature. One and all, these books have the
disproportionate illness, the death out of all scale.
Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
illness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been
rightly his own secret. But because he did not recover, it is
assumed to be news for the first comer. Which of us would suffer
the details of any physical suffering, over and done in our own
lives, to be displayed and described? This is not a confidence we
have a mind to make; and no one is authorised to ask for attention
or pity on our behalf. The story of pain ought not to be told of
us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not be told.
There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more
exclusively, and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and
illusions of a long delirium. When he is in common language not
himself, amends should be made for so bitter a paradox; he should be
allowed such solitude as is possible to the alienated spirit; he
should be left to the "not himself," and spared the intrusion
against which he can so ill guard that he could hardly have even
resented it.
The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door
of Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His
mortal illness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather
affected objection is taken every now and then to the publication of
some facts (others being already well known) in the life of Shelley.
Nevertheless, these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is
not biography is the detail of the accident of the manner of his
death, the detail of his cremation. Or if it was to be told--told
briefly--it was certainly not for marble. Shelley's death had no
significance, except inasmuch as he died young. It was a detachable
and disconnected incident. Ah, that was a frost of fancy and of the
heart that used it so, dealing with an insignificant fact, and
conferring a futile immortality. Those are ill-named biographers
who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of death is a part of
their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a last chapter
does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, of all
survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon a
death with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely,
this is, for a time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year,
disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night.
They have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they
have to mourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a
mingling of distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not
known even to dreams save in that first year of separation. But
they are not biographers.
If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously
secret because it is their only privacy. You may watch or may
surprise everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The
chase goes on everywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase
seems to cause no perpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life
is undefended, careless, nimble and noisy.
It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost
ceased, to paint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually
in that British School of water-colour art, stippled, of which
surrounding nations, it was agreed, were envious. They must have
killed their bird to paint him, for he is not to be caught dead. A
bird is more easily caught alive than dead.
A poet, on the contrary, is easily--too easily--caught dead. Minor
artists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor
and a University together modelled their Shelley on his back,
unessentially drowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of
Dante Rossetti.
THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY
The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly
arisen, to devote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in
illustrated papers--the enormous production of art in black and
white--is assuredly a confession that the Honours of Mortality are
worth working for. Fifty years ago, men worked for the honours of
immortality; these were the commonplace of their ambition; they
declined to attend to the beauty of things of use that were destined
to be broken and worn out, and they looked forward to surviving
themselves by painting bad pictures; so that what to do with their
bad pictures in addition to our own has become the problem of the
nation and of the householder alike. To-day men have began to learn
that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests. Art
consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that are
doomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows
a most dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process,"
and for oblivion.
Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap
costs the artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the
inevitable that is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in
the singular and manifest increase of vitality in this work which is
done for so short a life. Fittingly indeed does life reward the
acceptance of death, inasmuch as to die is to have been alive.
There is a real circulation of blood-quick use, brief beauty,
abolition, recreation. The honour of the day is for ever the honour
of that day. It goes into the treasury of things that are honestly
and--completely ended and done with. And when can so happy a thing
be said of a lifeless oil-painting? Who of the wise would hesitate?
To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day, separate from
all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited time tedious?
COMPOSURE
Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure
do these words bring for their own great disquiet! Without the
remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and
shake too cruelly. In order to the sane endurance of the intimate
trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful. Johnson
feared death. Did his noble English control and postpone the
terror? Did it keep the fear at some courteous, deferent distance
from the centre of that human heart, in the very act of the leap and
lapse of mortality? Doubtless there is in language such an
educative power. Speech is a school. Every language is a
persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note
indeed but gives the tone. Every language imposes a quality,
teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the
tone--the voice--of the instrument. Every language, by counter-
change, returns to the writer's touch or breath his own intention,
articulate: this is his note. Much has always been said, many
things to the purpose have been thought, of the power and the
responsibility of the note. Of the legislation and influence of the
tone I have been led to think by comparing the tranquillity of
Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close
emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers who have entered as
disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.
For if every language be a school, more significantly and more
educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that
part. Few languages offer the choice. The fact that a choice is
made implies the results and fruits of a decision. The French
author is without these. They are of all the heritages of the
English writer the most important. He receives a language of dual
derivation. He may submit himself to either University, whither he
will take his impulse and his character, where he will leave their
influence, and whence he will accept their re-education. The
Frenchman has certainly a style to develop within definite limits;
but he does not subject himself to suggestions tending mainly
hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of various race within one
literature. Such a choice of subjection is the singular opportunity
of the Englishman. I do not mean to ignore the necessary mingling.
Happily that mingling has been done once for all for us all. Nay,
one of the most charming things that a master of English can achieve
is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their results so
exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools are
made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove
them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world
knew they were. Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as
to which school of words shall have the place of honour in the great
and sensitive moments of an author's style: which school shall be
used for conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service. And
the choice being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses
of so many hearts quickened in thought and feeling in this day
suggests to me a deliberate return to the recollectedness of the
more tranquil language. "Doubtless there is a place of peace."
A place of peace, not of indifference. It is impossible not to
charge some of the moralists of the eighteenth century with an
indifference into which they educated their platitudes and into
which their platitudes educated them. Addison thus gave and took,
until he was almost incapable of coming within arm's-length of a
real or spiritual emotion. There is no knowing to what distance the
removal of the "appropriate sentiment" from the central soul might
have attained but for the change and renewal in language, which came
when it was needed. Addison had assuredly removed eternity far from
the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the "pleasing
hope," the "fond desire"; and the touch of war was distant from him
who conceived his "repulsed battalions" and his "doubtful battle."
What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored
once more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times. Men were too
eager to go into the workshop of language. There were unreasonable
raptures over the mere making of common words. "A hand-shoe! a
finger-hat! a foreword! Beautiful!" they cried; and for the love of
German the youngest daughter of Chrysale herself might have
consented to be kissed by a grammarian. It seemed to be forgotten
that a language with all its construction visible is a language
little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its
images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain
spiritualizing and subtilizing effect of alien derivations is a
privilege and an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half
of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque
allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead
tongue, without the death.
But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in
origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase. The most
beautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in
Shakespeare. "Superfluous kings," "A lass unparalleled,"
"Multitudinous seas": we needed not to wait for the eighteenth
century or for the nineteenth or for the twentieth to learn the
splendour of such encounters, of such differences, of such nuptial
unlikeness and union. But it is well that we should learn them
afresh. And it is well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmic
reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the Latin. Such a
reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day. We want to
quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want the poise
and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong
movement expresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of
verse might render us timely service. The controlling couplet might
stay with a touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows
of Canning for his son. But it should not be attempted without a
distinct intention of submission on the part of the writer. The
couplet transgressed against, trespassed upon, used loosely, is like
a law outstripped, defied--to the dignity neither of the rebel nor
of the rule.
To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the
very closeness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes
necessary. Shall not the Thing more and more, as we compose
ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the
leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?
THE LITTLE LANGUAGE
Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish
master of the magic of local things.
In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it
nourishes; inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom
Goldoni and Gallina and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois
of the Veneto, use no dialect at all.
Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with
so much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their
almost unwritten tongue. Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into
the homes of dialect, does but show us how the language staggers
under such a stress, how it breaks down, and resigns that office.
One of the finest of the characters in the ranks of his admirable
fiction is that old manageress of the narrow things of the house
whose daughter is dying insane. I have called the dialect a
shelter. This it is; but the poor lady does not cower within; her
resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homely refuge,
suffering and inarticulate. The two dramatists in their several
centuries also recognized the inability of the dialect. They laid
none but light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in
their homely plays than it carries in homely life. Their work
leaves it what it was--the talk of a people talking much about few
things; a people like our own and any other in their lack of
literature, but local and all Italian in their lack of silence.
Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people than
to one less pleased with chatter or more pleased with books. I am
writing of men, women, and children (and children are not forgotten,
since we share a patois with children on terms of more than common
equality) who possess, for all occasions of ceremony and
opportunities of dignity, a general, national, liberal, able, and
illustrious tongue, charged with all its history and all its
achievements; for the speakers of dialect, of a certain rank, speak
Italian, too. But to tamper with their dialect, or to take it from
them, would be to leave them houseless and exposed in their daily
business. So much does their patois seem to be their refuge from
the heavy and multitudinous experiences of a literary tongue, that
the stopping of a fox's earth might be taken as the image of any act
that should spoil or stop the talk of the associated seclusion of
their town, and leave them in the bleakness of a larger patriotism.
The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of
languages that might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be
taught hard things in their dialect, although they can live, whether
easy lives or hard, and evidently can die, therein. The hands and
feet that have served the villager and the citizen at homely tasks
have all the lowliness of his patois, to his mind; and when he must
perforce yield up their employment, we may believe that it is a
simple thing to die in so simple and so narrow a language, one so
comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, and compassionate; so
confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling, inapt to wing any
wearied thought upon difficult flight or to spur it upon hard
travelling.
Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be
undergone; but the words that have done no more than order the
things of the narrow street are not words to put a fine edge or a
piercing point to any human pang. It may even well be that to die
in dialect is easier than to die in the eloquence of Manfred, though
that declaimed language, too, is doubtless a defence, if one of a
different manner.
These writers in Venetian--they are named because in no other
Italian dialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so
excellent as Signor Fogazzaro's--have left the unlettered local
language in which they loved to deal, to its proper limitations.
They have not given weighty things into its charge, nor made it
heavily responsible. They have added nothing to it; nay, by writing
it they might even be said to have made it duller, had it not been
for the reader and the actor. Insomuch as the intense
expressiveness of a dialect--of a small vocabulary in the mouth of a
dramatic people--lies in the various accent wherewith a southern
citizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to
restore its life to the written phrase. In dialect the author is
forbidden to search for the word, for there is none lurking for his
choice; but of tones, allusions, and of references and inferences of
the voice, the speaker of dialect is a master. No range of phrases
can be his, but he has the more or the less confidential inflection,
until at times the close communication of the narrow street becomes
a very conspiracy.
Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is something
all unlike, for instance, the mere jargon of London streets. The
difference may be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have a
highly organized and orderly grammar. The Londoner cannot keep the
small and loose order of the grammar of good English; the Genoese
conjugates his patois verbs, with subjunctives and all things of
that handsome kind, lacked by the English of Universities.
The middle class--the piccolo mondo--that shares Italian dialect
with the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either
the opulent or the indigent of the same city. They have moreover
the busy intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its
keenest. Their speech keeps them a sequestered place which is
Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and beyond the
reach of alteration. And--what is pretty to observe--the speakers
are well conscious of the characters of this intimate language. An
Italian countryman who has known no other climate will vaunt, in
fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like manner he is conscious
of the local character of his language, and tucks himself within it
at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad. A properly spelt
letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs Dingley and
Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill-
written, was "snug."
Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler
language insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller?
discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in
despair thus prattle and gibber and stammer? Rather perhaps this
departure from English is but an excursion after gaiety. The ideal
lovers, no doubt, would be so simple as to be grave. That is a
tenable opinion. Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and
age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children
they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved. Why so?
They might have chosen broken English of other sorts--that, for
example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the
Frenchman conceived by the Englishman--a complication of humour
fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a
fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the
masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English devised by Mrs
Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian. But none of these
found favour. The choice has always been of the language of
children. Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping
Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion
erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the
inspirers of those prattlings. "See then thy selfe likewise art
lyttle made," says Spenser's Venus to her child.
Swift was the best prattler. He had caught the language, surprised
it in Stella when she was veritably a child. He did not push her
clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged
in her a childhood he had loved. He is "seepy." "Nite, dealest
dea, nite dealest logue." It is a real good-night. It breathes
tenderness from that moody and uneasy bed of projects.
A COUNTERCHANGE
"Il s'est trompe de defunte." The writer of this phrase had his
sense of that portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine;
but--the paradox must be risked--because he was French he was not
able to possess all its grotesque mediocrity to the full; that is
reserved for the English reader. The words are in the mouth of a
widower who, approaching his wife's tomb, perceives there another
"monsieur." "Monsieur," again; the French reader is deprived of the
value of this word, too, in its place; it says little or nothing to
him, whereas the Englishman, who has no word of the precise
bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but who must use one
of two English words of different allusion--man or I gentleman--
knows the exact value of its commonplace. The serious Parisian,
then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there had been a
divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is not yet
aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"
in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de
defunte."
The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with
national character is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking
author who was debarred by his own language from possessing the
whole of his own comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his
English that an Englishman does possess it. Your official, your
professional Parisian has a vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled
mediocrity. When the novelist perceives this he does not perceive
it all, because some of the words are the only words in use. Take
an author at his serious moments, when he is not at all occupied
with the comedy of phrases, and he now and then touches a word that
has its burlesque by mere contrast with English. "L'Histoire d'un
Crime," of Victor Hugo, has so many of these touches as to be, by a
kind of reflex action, a very school of English. The whole incident
of the omnibus in that grave work has unconscious international
comedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus had
been, it will be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the
perpetrator of the Coup d'Etat, but each had his official scarf.
Scarf--pish!--"l'echarpe!" "Ceindre l'echarpe"--there is no real
English equivalent. Civic responsibility never was otherwise
adequately expressed. An indignant deputy passed his scarf through
the window of the omnibus, as an appeal to the public, "et l'agita."
It is a pity that the French reader, having no simpler word, is not
in a position to understand the slight burlesque. Nay, the mere
word "public," spoken with this peculiar French good faith, has for
us I know not what untransferable gravity.
There is, in short, a general international counterchange. It is
altogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with
its extremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people
should make a phrase, and another should have and enjoy it. And, in
fact, there are certain French authors to whom should be secured the
use of the literary German whereof Germans, and German women in
particular, ought with all severity to be deprived. For Germans
often tell you of words in their own tongue that are untranslatable;
and accordingly they should not be translated, but given over in
their own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands. There would be a
clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a better order in the
phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with the thought it
secures, would find also their advantage.
So with French humour. It is expressly and signally for English
ears. It is so even in the commonest farce. The unfortunate
householder, for example, who is persuaded to keep walking in the
conservatory "pour retablir la circulation," and the other who
describes himself "sous-chef de bureau dans l'enregistrement," and
he who proposes to "faire hommage" of a doubtful turbot to the
neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"--these and all their like speak
commonplaces so usual as to lose in their own country the perfection
of their dulness. We only, who have the alternative of plainer and
fresher words, understand it. It is not the least of the advantages
of our own dual English that we become sensible of the mockery of
certain phrases that in France have lost half their ridicule,
uncontrasted.
Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation
in all Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions,
either majestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this
proffers a frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an
Englishman, no longer detects. A guard on a French railway, who
advised two travellers to take a certain train for fear they should
be obliged to "vegeter" for a whole hour in the waiting-room of such
or such a station seemed to the less practised tourist to be a fresh
kind of unexpected humourist.
One of the phrases always used in the business of charities and
subscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the
farce-writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his
visitors in the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to
them: "Nous jouons cinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses
integralement e la souscription qui est ouverte e la commune pour la
construction de notre maison d'ecole."
"Fletrir," again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this
perfectly common word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well
aware of the spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious
Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters.
But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of
refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents. Refuse
rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's "fossil poetry," would
seem to be the right name for human language as some of the
processes of the several recent centuries have left it.
The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an
Englishman. They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il
s'est trompe de defunte." In the report of that dull, incomparable
sentence there is enough humour, and subtle enough, for both the
maker and the reader; for the author who perceives the comedy as
well as custom will permit, and for the reader who takes it with the
freshness of a stranger. But if not so keen as this, the current
word of French comedy is of the same quality of language. When of
the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor, for instance, the
deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces: "Il s'est
empetre dans les futurs." But for a reader who has a full sense of
the several languages that exist in English at the service of the
several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of
official France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and
uncovenanted smile to be had. With this the wit of the report of
French literature has not little to do. Nor is it in itself,
perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circumstance
makes it so. A very little of the mockery of conditions brings out
all the latent absurdity of the "sixieme et septieme arron-
dissements," in the twinkling of an eye. So is it with the mere
"domicile;" with the aid of but a little of the burlesque of life,
the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal" becomes as
grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "e domicile" merely--the
word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of the
speakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only an
Englishman hears it; so is the advice of the police that you shall
"circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you
shall not, in the churches.
So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale," "maison
mortuaire," and the still more serious "repos dominical," "oraison
dominicale." There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspicious
gravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered
at, the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to
the credit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that,
through this general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand
authors of comedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar
thing, and compels that most elaborate dulness to amuse us. US,
above all, by virtue of the custom of counter-change here set forth.
Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the
English poets that so persist in France may not reveal something
within the English language--one would be somewhat loth to think so-
-reserved to the French reader peculiarly? Byron to the multitude,
Edgar Poe to the select? Then would some of the mysteries of French
reading of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer
explanation that has hitherto satisfied our haughty curiosity. The
taste for rhetoric seemed to account for Byron, and the desire of
the rhetorician to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for
Poe. But, after all, patatras! Who can say?
HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO
The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell
with him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally,
for English drama. That manner of man--Arlecchino, or Harlequin--
had outlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and
the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little
in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one
play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the other, is less quickly
spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man.
Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy and comedy of
Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his brightest, his
most vital shape.
Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the
busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise,
the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of
Moliere. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille
and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a
reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin comedy than to the
Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory survives
differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his friend."
What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio is chiefly
this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully
capable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he lived
indeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the close of a
career of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who
ever heard of Arlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his
sword-play, overtaken by tragedy? His time had surely come. The
gay companion was to bleed; Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas
not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but it served.
Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the
primitive Italian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional
little stage of the past, has a hero's place, whereas when he
interferes in human affairs he is only the auxiliary. He might be
lover and bridegroom on the primitive stage, in the comedy of these
few and unaltered types; but when Pantaloon, Clown, and Harlequin
play with really human beings, then Harlequin can be no more than a
friend of the hero, the friend of the bridegroom. The five figures
of the old stage dance attendance; they play around the business of
those who have the dignity of mortality; they, poor immortals--a
clown who does not die, a pantaloon never far from death, who yet
does not die, a Columbine who never attains Desdemona's death of
innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude and passion--flit in the
backward places of the stage.
Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he
serves. Is there a memory of Harlequin in that delicate figure?
Something of the subservient immortality, of the light indignity,
proper to Pantaleone, Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the
Clown, hovers away from the stage when Ariel is released from the
trouble of human things.
Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell.
And if some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has
transformed so many scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand
children, since Mercutio died, I must reply that our modern
Harlequin is no more than a marionnette; he has returned whence he
came. A man may play him, but he is--as he was first of all--a
doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took life, and, so promoted,
flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be again what he first
was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now a man plays
the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children see, a
poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.
With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the
serious ages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten
burden of responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed,
made dramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and
no heart now is quite light, even for an hour.
LAUGHTER
Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain
nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not
for the paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere
the joke "emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to
catch the attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense
of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.
It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the
violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in
abeyance, and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the
vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of
the game. It stands in untoward places, or places that were once
inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, some
ubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.
All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a
constant signalling, an endless recognition. Forms of approach are
remitted. And the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of
meeting, or no gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the
promiscuity become, go up and down the pages of the paper and the
book. See, again, the theatre. A somewhat easy sort of comic
acting is by so much the best thing upon our present stage that
little else can claim--paradox again apart--to be taken seriously.
There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away
from the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women,
fittest for children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is
everywhere and at every moment proclaimed to be the honourable
occupation of men, and in some degree distinctive of men, and no
mean part of their prerogative and privilege. The sense of humour
is chiefly theirs, and those who are not men are to be admitted to
the jest upon their explanation. They will not refuse explanation.
And there is little upon which a man will so value himself as upon
that sense, "in England, now."
Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like
rhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in some sort a habit when
it is not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must
confess that we laugh oftenest because--being amused--we intend to
show that we are amused. We are right to make the sign, but a smile
would be as sure a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but
be changing the convention; and the change would restore laughter
itself to its own place. We have fallen into the way of using it to
prove something--our sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but
laughter should not thus be used, it should go free. It is not a
demonstration, whether in logic, or--as the word demonstration is
now generally used--in emotion; and we do ill to charge it with that
office.
Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among
such a people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who
laugh without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who
perhaps first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that
they were not gloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not
that excuse; and many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to
what is humorous and what is not. This last is the most harmless of
all kinds of superfluous laughter. When it carries an apology, a
confession of natural and genial ignorance, and when a gentle
creature laughs a laugh of hazard and experiment, she is to be more
than forgiven. What she must not do is to laugh a laugh of
instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that was never worth
the taking.
There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to
a sense of humour, but who laugh from a sense of happiness.
Childish is that trick, and sweet. For children, who always laugh
because they must, and never by way of proof or sign, laugh only
half their laughs out of their sense of humour; they laugh the rest
under a mere stimulation: because of abounding breath and blood;
because some one runs behind them, for example, and movement does so
jog their spirits that their legs fail them, for laughter, without a
jest.
If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to
signal their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall
keep the laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom,
and simply, and not thrice at the same thing--once for foolish
surprise, and twice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it be
known that they are amused--then it may be time to persuade this
laughing nation not to laugh so loud as it is wont in public. The
theatre audiences of louder-speaking nations laugh lower than ours.
The laugh that is chiefly a signal of the laugher's sense of the
ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of
covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the actors. It is a
public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon for a public
laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with private laughter
there.
Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times
of dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour
in a place better guarded, as something worth a measure of
seclusion. It should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in
adventurous places. For the sense of humour has other things to do
than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter. It has
negative tasks of valid virtue; for example, the standing and
waiting within call of tragedy itself, where, excluded, it may keep
guard.
No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best.
This would be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where
the wit "out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine," and to deny Ben
Jonson's "tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus," and the
rest. Doubtless Greece determined the custom for all our Occident;
but none the less might the modern world grow more sensible of the
value of composure.
To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein
as to this of humour, and none other do we indulge with so little
fastidiousness. It is as though there were honour in governing the
other senses, and honour in refusing to govern this. It is as
though we were ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and
suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager
to thrust forward that which loses nothing by seclusion.
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.
Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to
the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged,
ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.
Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last
week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again
next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it
depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in
at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at
longer and longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause
was intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable to-morrow; to-day
it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed. Even the burden
of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a
temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain--it returns.
Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made a course of
notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have
had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world,
there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such
cycles. But Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not
measure them. In his cell alone with the elements--"What wouldst
thou more than these? for out of these were all things made"--he
learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness,
and the remembrance that restrains the soul at the coming of the
moment of delight, giving it a more conscious welcome, but presaging
for it an inexorable flight. And "rarely, rarely comest thou,"
sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight.
Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our
service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is
thus compelled. THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or
parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what
trysts with Time.
It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the "Imitation" should
both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and
to guess at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close
touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate
human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal
movement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppur si
muove. They knew that presence does not exist without absence; they
knew that what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its
long path of return. They knew that what is approaching to the very
touch is hastening towards departure. "O wind," cried Shelley, in
autumn,
O wind,
If winter comes can spring be far behind?
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt
with unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of
onset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in
constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be sought
in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of
the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity. The
souls of certain of the saints, being singularly simple and single,
have been in the most complete subjection to the law of periodicity.
Ecstasy and desolation visited them by seasons. They endured,
during spaces of vacant time, the interior loss of all for which
they had sacrificed the world. They rejoiced in the uncovenanted
beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts. Like them are the
poets whom, three times or ten times in the course of a long life,
the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like
them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the
departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few
poets have fully recognized the metrical absence of their muse. For
full recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America
worship the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but
no tribes are known to adore the sun, and not the moon. On her
depend the tides; and she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the
dews that recurrently irrigate lands where rain is rare. More than
any other companion of earth is she the Measurer. Early Indo-
Germanic languages knew her by that name. Her metrical phases are
the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in approach and in
departure is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet will not
receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did not
live to know that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which
are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the
lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in
the beloved. For man--except those elect already named--is hardly
aware of periodicity. The individual man either never learns it
fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a
matter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is
long lacking. It is in the after-part of each life that the law is
learnt so definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of
continuance. That young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result
of this young ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement.
Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows
nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals between
aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of
sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware
of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their
peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a
sense more subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to
Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is
flying away from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane;
and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases,
knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things--a
sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.
DOMUS ANGUSTA
The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for
its slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but
their complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness,
of the human lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between
man and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted in
literature: so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the
habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a "vain capacity," so well
explained has it ever been.
Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,
discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the
brave Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow
house. Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there,
little argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for
every vain capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain
destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is
the trouble of the wide house we hear of, clamorous of its
disappointments and desires. The narrow house has no echoes; yet
its pathetic shortcoming might well move pity. On that strait stage
is acted a generous tragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an
enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that
slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks that timorous heart.
We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right
language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.
Who, for instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word
of his confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing
the ultimate syllable of his tenderness? There is a "pledging of
the word," in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and
promise. The poet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and
finds therein a peculiar sanction. And I suppose that even physical
pain takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers
a phrase. Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united
as thought and the word. Almost--not quite; in spite of its
inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond,
as it were, its poor power.
But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we
know it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted;
love is great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic
virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed: death,
submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the
vulgar, secret in the familiar. It is destructive, because it not
only closes but contradicts life. Unlikely people die. The one
certain thing, it is also the one improbable. A dreadful paradox is
perhaps wrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and
yet is constrained to die. That is a true destruction, and the
thought of it is obscure.
Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal
pause. It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical
conclusion. Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.
Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion
for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed,
having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and
Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having
kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in
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