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Essays
by Alice Meynell
August, 1998 [Etext #1434]
****The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays, by Alice Meynell****
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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
literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the
immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is
perdurable because he is not completed. His humours are strangely
matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die; for
there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I
thank my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke
that the French so pleasantly call une joyeusete; these are to smile
at. But the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or
woman in a book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.
That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living
windows. Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by
moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things.
There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief
glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of
meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever
and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid--"wouldst thou
do such a deed for all the world?"
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words
in union or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union
in the art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are
for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to
take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in
place of the virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly
consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily
affairs--is to forgo Innocence and Experience at once and together.
Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate;
and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not
dip his hands into other men's histories, and does not give to his
own word the common sanction of other men's summaries and
conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and
take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from
man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to forgo that manner of
personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I
would rather appropriate their future than their past. Let me put
on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my
memory with an unjustifiable history.
And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-
poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no
reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom
they have not even been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-
made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life--
supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides
sex--could quite suffice for so much experience, so much
disillusion, so much deception. To achieve that tone in its
fullness it is necessary to take for one's own the praeterita (say)
of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not to live but--
to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man
lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all
kinds of poets.
As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one friar goes
about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain
order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not
otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or
rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive
individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is
understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it. And yet, if
choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's fellow men's
old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one's art in
a motley of past passions. Moreover, to utilize the mental
experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase. For
the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are familiar enough.
One of them is the absence of the word of promise and pledge, the
loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love: which is
the vow. "Till death!" "For ever!" are cries too simple and too
natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least
tolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions.
Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of
assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose
love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus
simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the
gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in common.
THE HOURS OF SLEEP
There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less
are they his by some state within the mind, which answers
rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work,
without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night
mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling
which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as
sleep's. The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable,
are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour
of their return as it is the hour of a tide's, and they do return.
In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper
her influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves
of the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and
love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real
day persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the
capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is
punctual to the night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at
arm's length.
The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and
their dominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he
puts off his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the
other state, by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown
up" is not oftener in a young child's mind than "I shall endure to
think of it in the day-time." By this he confesses the double habit
and double experience, not to be interchanged, and communicating
together only by memory and hope.
Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is
to miss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might
imagine the rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to
the time, and tempering the extremities of either state by messages
of remembrance and expectancy.
Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any
delirium, would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less
would be the loss of him who had not exercised his waking thought
under the influence of the hours claimed by dreams. And as to
choosing between day and night, or guessing whether the state of day
or dark is the truer and the more natural, he would be rash who
should make too sure.
In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too
much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of
night as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or the
quietude. The hours of sleep are too much altered when they are
filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded,
and her rhythm broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets
make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when the London gas
is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark,
may be set all astray as to the hour. You may spend the peculiar
hours of sleep amid so much noise and among so many people that you
shall not be aware of them; you may thus merely force and prolong
the day. But to do so is not to live well both lives; it is not to
yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to be cradled in
the swing of change.
There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such a
cradle of alternate hours. "It cannot be," says Herbert, "that I am
he on whom Thy tempests fell all night."
It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox,
has the extremest sense of light. Almost the most shining lines in
English poetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake,
written confessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and
dreams, and those dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all
is as dark as he can make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's
dream of the green plain and the river is too bright for day. So,
indeed, is another brightness of Blake's, which is also, in his
poem, a child's dream, and was certainly conceived by him in the
hours of sleep, in which he woke to write the Songs of Innocence:-
O what land is the land of dreams?
What are its mountains, and what are its streams?
O father, I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair.
Among the lambs clothed in white,
She walk'd with her Thomas in sweet delight.
To none but the hours claimed and inspired by sleep, held awake by
sufferance of sleep, belongs such a vision.
Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep. In
some landscapes of his early manner he has the very light of dreams,
and it was surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and
dreams claimed his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an
illumination. Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because in
summer so many of the hours of sleep are also hours of light. He
carries the mood of man's night out into the sunshine--Corot did so-
-and lives the life of night, in all its genius, in the presence of
a risen sun. In the only time when the heart can dream of light, in
the night of visions, with the rhythmic power of night at its dark
noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring of the actual sun.
He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To
that life belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other
kinds of beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the
extreme perception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the
explanation of all the memories of dreams recalled by these
visionary paintings, done in earlier years than were those, better
known, that are the Corots of all the world. Every man who knows
what it is to dream of landscape meets with one of these works of
Corot's first manner with a cry, not of welcome only, but of
recognition. Here is morning perceived by the spirit of the hours
of sleep.
SOLITUDE
The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom
civilization has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom
civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its
chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to
them solitude is a right foregone or a luxury unattained; a right
foregone, we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a
luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined. These has the
movement of the world thronged together into some blind by-way.
Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded,
and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed,
unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their
kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have
not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a place
of unhidden liberty and of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not
claim even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy of the
lock and key; nor could they command so much. For the solitude that
has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish.
It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,
landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the
woods, and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be
measured by miles; they are to be numbered by days. They are
freshly and freely the dominion of every man for the day of his
possession. There is loneliness for innumerable solitaries. As
many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there
for men. This is the open house of the earth; no one is refused.
Nor is the space shortened or the silence marred because, one by
one, men in multitudes have been alone there before. Solitude is
separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days,
but by men themselves. Every man of the living and every man of the
dead might have had his "privacy of light."
It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country;
and a thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult
to get for a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude
be enclosed, it is still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister
for the eyes," and a space of far country or a cloud in the sky be
privy to your hiding-place. But the best solitude does not hide at
all.
This the people who have drifted together into the streets live
whole lives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation
of even the solitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never
have a whole hour alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent
companionship, as people may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical
choice, familiar with one another and not intimate. They live under
careless observation and subject to a vagabond curiosity. Theirs is
the involuntary and perhaps the unconscious loss which is futile and
barren.
One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or
the hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple,
visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication
and practice of action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or
futile loss, and they have a conviction, and they bestow the
conviction, of solitude deferred.
Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone
and inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in
many a drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof.
The girl stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the
sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she
looks, out of sight.
Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate
possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural
solitude of a woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed
and talked about, handled and jolted and carried about by aliens,
and there is so much importunate service going forward, that a woman
is hardly alone long enough to become aware, in recollection, how
her own blood moves separately, beside her, with another rhythm and
different pulses. All is commonplace until the doors are closed
upon the two. This unique intimacy is a profound retreat, an
absolute seclusion. It is more than single solitude; it is a
redoubled isolation more remote than mountains, safer than valleys,
deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea.
That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is
the Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a
betrayal of that confidence might well be held to be the least
pardonable of all crimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as
sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying
beside the longer, as a child's foot runs. But the favourite crime
of the sentimentalist is that of a woman against her child. Her
power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers,
are held to excuse her. She gains the most slovenly of indulgences
and the grossest compassion, on the vulgar grounds that her crime
was easy.
Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by
the way, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from
common opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the
situation. He was master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was
his secret, and the public was not privy to his artistic conscience.
He does violence to the obligations of which he is aware, and which
the world does not know very explicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he
is lawless in a more literal sense, but only hopes the world will
believe that he has a whole code of his own making. It would,
nevertheless, be less unworthy to break obvious rules obviously in
the obvious face of the public, and to abide the common rebuke.
It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the
preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and
wide and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial
of the accessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or
so aside, is enough to lead thither.
A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very
sincerely. In order to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep
the published promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover
of long seclusion or of a very life of loneliness. He should have
gained the state of solitariness which is a condition of life quite
unlike any other. The traveller who may have gone astray in
countries where an almost life-long solitude is possible knows how
invincibly apart are the lonely figures he has seen in desert places
there. Their loneliness is broken by his passage, it is true, but
hardly so to them. They look at him, but they are not aware that he
looks at them. Nay, they look at him as though they were invisible.
Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in the wild degree.
They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are curious, and
turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone. Now, no
one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that look in
any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a life-long
solitary. He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He
never had the impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter
Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling.
Millet would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in
the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes of France. And yet nothing
but a life-long, habitual, and wild solitariness would be quite
proportionate to a park of any magnitude.
If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness,
so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual
crowds. It is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris
expression. It is the quickly caught, though not interested, look,
the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their
forfeited place apart; who have neither the open secret nor the
close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse of
flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the street, no hope
of news from solitary counsels.
DECIVILIZED
The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--
sparing him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge
of barbarism. Especially from new soil--remote, colonial--he faces
you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded
of his own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems
about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the
recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the
lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself,
voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang. But his
colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does
but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set
into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse
feeling of a race decivilizing. He who played long this pattering
part of youth, hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he
did not wear war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult
to communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder
than a second-hand (figurative) dress coat. And when it was a
question not of rebuke, but of praise, even the American was ill-
content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some
delicate successes in continuing something of the literature of
England, something of the art of France; he was more eager for the
applause that stimulated him to write poems in prose form and to
paint panoramic landscape, after brief training in academies of
native inspiration. Even now English voices are constantly calling
upon America to begin--to begin, for the world is expectant.
Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a fine and
admirable continuity which only a constant care can guide into
sustained advance.
But decivilized man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town,
too, knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a
literature, an art, a music, all his own--derived from many and
various things of price. Trash, in the fullness of its insimplicity
and cheapness, is impossible without a beautiful past. Its chief
characteristic--which is futility, not failure--could not be
achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory reproduction, the
quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the
utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality,
purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the antecedents
of trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because of them. And
nothing can be much sadder that such a proof of what may possibly be
the failure of derivation.
Evidently we cannot choose our posterity. Reversing the steps of
time, we may, indeed choose backwards. We may give our thoughts
noble forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be;
they shall be also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our
inheritance, and not our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our
minds may trace upwards and follow their ways to the best well-heads
of the arts. The very habit of our thoughts may be persuaded one
way unawares by their antenatal history. Their companions must be
lovely, but need be no lovelier than their ancestors; and being so
fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may be intrusted to keep the
counsels of literature.
Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which
of us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of
subsequent depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the
contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards
dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes
degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The
decivilized have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities,
every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. No
ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh, but has the
excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by some living
sweetness once. Nor are the decivilized to blame as having in their
own persons possessed civilization and marred it. They did not
possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
inclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can
hardly do other than continue.
Nothing can look duller than the future of this second-hand and
multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they are
many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what
dullness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly
discovered this truth--that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and
that there is no growth for them--it does not look like a future at
all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious
barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more
young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this
prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast
or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable
only in senility. He promises the world a literature, an art, that
shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just
built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words
were dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age. Dreadful and
pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them
when they are the promise of an impotent people? "I will do such
things: what they are yet I know not."
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets
have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too
much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her
inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The
bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake
together a nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste,
nor can you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your
turn, whereas wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere
movement and hustling. I have known some grim bells, with not a
single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human
festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop
of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry
highwayman.
The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the
bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild
prisoners--by twos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives--
one or twelve taking wing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are
gone; they are delivered from the close hands of this actual
present. Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the
sky; they are away, hours of the past.
Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most
surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of
France when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be
forgotten than the bells in "Parsifal." They mingle with the sound
of feet in unknown streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower;
they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, which is
to be seen in the shapes of the fields and the manner of the crops,
to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the breath of the earth,
overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith,
calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks its local
tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and
greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you
know how familiar, how childlike, how lifelong it is in the ears of
the people. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they
must be. Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a
dialect.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its
subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place,
seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents,
its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime,
having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one
living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place--not to
be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never
absent, without variation--lurks in the by-ways and rules over the
towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always
in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within
its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Long white
roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular
and unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy
to be made. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay
such a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the
pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for
antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know
one another; nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality than
a child. He is well used to words and voices that he does not
understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when
those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as
homely and as old as lullabies.
If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in
gay measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile
march with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter
companies. If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a
most curious local immemorial music in many a campanile on the
heights. Their way is for the ringers to play a tune on the
festivals, and the tunes are not hymn tunes or popular melodies, but
proper bell-tunes, made for bells. Doubtless they were made in
times better versed than ours in the sub-divisions of the arts, and
better able to understand the strength that lies ready in the mere
little submission to the means of a little art, and to the limits--
nay, the very embarrassments--of those means. If it were but
possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for those
melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for
the bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy,
and what effect of liberty.
These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the
world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.
The belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century,
the time when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But,
needless to say, this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy.
At that time they must have had foundries for bells of tender
voices, and pure, warm, light, and golden throats, precisely tuned.
The hounds of Theseus had not a more just scale, tuned in a peal,
than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send
them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the order of the game
of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by man this is by
far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from the great
churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the
bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does
not ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness,
depth, and dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly
fills the country.
The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble
bells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can
therefore hear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no
other bells in earshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set
open to the cloud, on a festa morning, to let fly those soft-voiced
flocks, but the nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our
local tune is uninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little,
secluded, sequestered art of composing melodies for bells--charming
division of an art, having its own ends and means, and keeping its
own wings for unfolding by law--dwells in these solitary places. No
tunes in a town would get this hearing, or would be made clear to
the end of their frolic amid such a wide and lofty silence.
Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own;
the custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the
nervous tourist complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact
he is made to hear an honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous
tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of
place does not signal to him to go and find it among innumerable
hills, where one by one, one by one, the belfries stand and play
their tunes. Variable are those lonely melodies, having a differing
gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air is played for the burial
of a villager.
As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that
seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten
when the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in
thought to earth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that
sways across one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--
"the wide-watered."
POPULAR BURLESQUE
The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the
motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets
with the sound of processionals and of recessionals--a certain
popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I
hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likeness of
something unworshipful on the earth beneath, so much the more am I
convinced that the national humour is that of banter, and that no
other kind of mirth so gains as does this upon the public taste.
Here, for example, is the popular idea of a street festival; that
day is as the people will actually have it, with their own
invention, their own material, their own means, and their own
spirit. They owe nothing on this occasion to the promptings or the
subscriptions of the classes that are apt to take upon themselves
the direction and tutelage of the people in relation to any form of
art. Here on every fifth of November the people have their own way
with their own art; and their way is to offer the service of the
image-maker, reversed in hissing and irony, to some creature of
their hands.
It is a wanton fancy; and perhaps no really barbarous people is
capable of so overturning the innocent plan of original portraiture.
To make a mental image of all things that are named to the ear, or
conceived in the mind, being an industrious custom of children and
childish people which lapses in the age of much idle reading, the
making of a material image is the still more diligent and more
sedulous act, whereby the primitive man controls and caresses his
own fancy. He may take arms anon, disappointed, against his own
work; but did he ever do that work in malice from the outset?
From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the person
of the guy. If it were but an antithesis to the citizen's idea of
something admirable which he might carry in procession on some other
day, the carrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot
at a suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to make a
good-looking doll in its praise. There is absolutely no image-
making art in the practice of our people, except only this art of
rags and contumely. Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were
that of anger for a certain cause, the destruction would not be the
work of so thin an annual malice and of so heartless a rancour.
But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily--or
so it seems--more and more the holiday temper of the majority.
Mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the
only intelligence. They make an image of some one in whom they do
not believe, to deride it. Say that the guy is the effigy of an
agitator in the cause of something to be desired; the street man and
boy have then two motives of mocking: they think the reform to be
not worth doing, and they are willing to suspect the reformer of
some kind of hypocrisy. Perhaps the guy of this occasion is most
characteristic of all guys in London. The people, having him or her
to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity of their annual
procession. They anticipate time, and make an image when it is not
November, and sell it at the market of the kerb.
Hear, moreover, the songs which some nameless one makes for the
citizens, perhaps in thoughtful renunciation of the making of their
laws. These, too, seem to have for their inspiration the universal
taunt. They are, indeed, most in vogue when they have no meaning at
all--this it is that makes the succes fou (and here Paris is of one
mind with London) of the street; but short of such a triumph, and
when a meaning is discernible, it is an irony.
Bank Holiday courtship (if the inappropriate word can be pardoned)
seems to be done, in real life, entirely by banter. And it is the
strangest thing to find that the banter of women by men is the most
mocking in the exchange. If the burlesque of the maid's tongue is
provocative, that of the man's is derisive. Somewhat of the order
of things as they stood before they were inverted seems to remain,
nevertheless, as a memory; nay, to give the inversion a kind of
lagging interest. Irony is made more complete by the remembrance,
and by an implicit allusion to the state of courtship in other
classes, countries, or times. Such an allusion no doubt gives all
its peculiar twang to the burlesque of love.
With the most strange submission these Englishwomen in their
millions undergo all degrees of derision from the tongues of men who
are their mates, equals, contemporaries, perhaps in some obscure
sense their suitors, and in a strolling manner, with one knows not
what ungainly motive of reserve, even their admirers. Nor from
their tongues only; for, to pass the time, the holiday swain annoys
the girl; and if he wears her hat, it is ten to one that he has
plucked it off with a humorous disregard of her dreadful pins.
We have to believe that unmocked love has existence in the streets,
because of the proof that is published when a man shoots a woman who
has rejected him; and from this also do we learn to believe that a
woman of the burlesque classes is able to reject. But for that sign
we should find little or nothing intelligible in what we see or
overhear of the drama of love in popular life.
In its easy moments, in its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles all
tradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy clowning after a
fashion that is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same
twang in country places; and whether the English maid, having, like
the antique, thrown her apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets
of Hampstead Heath or among sylvan trees, it seems that the most
humorous thing to be done by the swain would be, in the opinion in
vogue, to stroll another way. Insular I have said, because I have
not seen the like of this fashion whether in America or elsewhere in
Europe.
But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual
inversion of the worship of images on the fifth of November, is that
of a sentence of Wordsworth's--"We live by admiration."
HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT
Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy
ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of
communication with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the
interior act most gentle; there may be a tacit apology, and a
profound misgiving unexpressed; a reluctance not only to refuse but
to be arbiter; a dislike of the office; a regret, whether for the
unequal distribution of social luck or for a purse left at home,
equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or sign, nothing
whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or a calf
in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and
breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes
to you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge
it. But the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a
question, no recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of
your eyelid in his direction, and never a word to excuse you.
Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer
to the beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning."
When complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no
merit but what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from
courtesy with more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely
requires--the habit of manner towards beggars is probably not so
much as thought of. To the simply human eye, however, the prevalent
manner towards beggars is a striking thing; it is significant of so
much.
Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the
intelligible act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity
that marks the caste answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere,
in Italy, for example. An elderly Italian lady on her slow way from
her own ancient ancestral palazzo to the village, and accustomed to
meet, empty-handed, a certain number of beggars, answers them by a
retort which would be, literally translated, "Excuse me, dear; I,
too, am a poor devil," and the last word she naturally puts into the
feminine.
Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms
as nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the
phrase to English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The
excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby,
and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other
manners, that one cannot recall it without a smile. To a mind
having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to
imagine an elderly lady of corresponding station in England replying
so to importunities for alms; albeit we have nothing answering to
the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently by rich and
poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all speakers--a
dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in
which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect "familiar,
but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman could by
any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the
opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine,
which does so complete the character of the sentence.
The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase
of excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And
everywhere in the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who
suddenly begins to beg from you when you least expected it, calls
you "my daughter," you can hardly reply without kindness. Where the
tourist is thoroughly well known, doubtless the company of beggars
are used to savage manners in the rich; but about the byways and
remoter places there must still be some dismay at the anger, the
silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive haughtiness wherewith
the opportunity of alms-giving is received by travellers.
In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so
emphatically as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so
manifestly put themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant
to see them there; but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a
protest that appeals vaguely less to the beggars than to some not
impossible police--does not seem the most appropriate manner of
rebuking them. We have, it may be, a scruple on the point of human
dignity, compromised by the entreaty and the thanks of the
mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating that dignity
when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a simply
human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It is
not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal
of intercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress
those conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we
deny the presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if,
because fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?
We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold
it in the indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint,"
is a phrase that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own
unintelligible fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a
hill-village among the most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts
of stone stand among the stones of an unclothed earth, and there is
no sign of daily bread. The people, albeit unused to travellers,
yet know by instinct what to do, and beg without the delay of a
moment as soon as they see your unwonted figure. Let it be taken
for granted that you give all you can; some form of refusal becomes
necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth while to remember--
is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the portent
of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of
ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is
made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed,
uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote,
thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent
to the violence of the rich.
It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a
beggar is still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer
and comfort us to see; he practises not merely the conventional
seeming, which is hardly intended to convince, but a more subtle and
dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of
the road. He no longer trusts the world with a sight of his gaiety.
He is not a wholehearted mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty
of unstable balance whereby an unattached creature can go in a new
direction with a new wind. The merry beggar was the only adventurer
free to yield to the lighter touches of chance, the touches that a
habit of resistance has made imperceptible to the seated and stable
social world.
The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our
literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have,
by tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has
been stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned,
led underground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of
the song of the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to
capture, have ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's
ears. But it seems that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy
beggar is still the subject of a Spanish song.
That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's,
it is not a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling
note of a man who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-
fortune, but takes it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it
at the hand of unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own
choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems,
therefore, the song of an indomitable liberty of movement, light
enough for the puffs of a zephyr chance.
AT MONASTERY GATES
No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross
it, unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege.
Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of
the monastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see
more than beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her
in guest-house and garden.
The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of the
dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country,
and backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of
buildings in a cleft high up among the hills of Wales. The brown
habit is this, and these are the sandals, that come and go by hills
of finer, sharper, and loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an
Umbrian sky. Just such a Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta,
and from the foot of its final crucifix you can see the sunrise
touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the encircled lake below is cool
with the last of the night. The same order of friars keep that sub-
Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the Kreuzberg beyond Bonn
with the same steep path by the same fourteen chapels, facing the
Seven Mountains and the Rhine.
Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green
over the blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long
wing of smoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly
and languidly cultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is
burrowed with mines; the breath of pit and factory, out of sight,
thickens the lower sky, and lies heavily over the sands of Dee. It
leaves the upper blue clear and the head of Orion, but dims the
flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady ray of the evening star.
The people scattered about are not mining people, but half-hearted
agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottages are rather cabins;
not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates have taken some
beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upon their
edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure
to see. How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over
more than half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--
with which the buildings of the world are stained! You could not
wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes
with the slight sunshine and the bright grey of an English sky.
The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it
is modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
brothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists of
yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or
"old world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be
by the excursionists.
With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers
work upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a
prosperous bee-farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass
yesterday, is gaily hanging the washed linen in the sun. A printing
press, and a machine which slices turnips, are at work in an
outhouse, and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose
single evil deed was that under one of the obscure impulses of a
dog's heart -atoned for by long and self-conscious remorse--he bit
the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make doggerel of
him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on monastery
ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got
among the cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge,
from other valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a
moth.
To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look
at them without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation
Army girl that you heard the brutal word of contempt. She had come
to the place with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as
she was welcome to do, within the monastery grounds. She stood, a
figure for Bournemouth pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched
the son of the Umbrian saint--the friar who walks among the Giotto
frescoes at Assisi and between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and
has paced the centuries continually since the coming of the friars.
One might have asked of her the kindness of a fellow-feeling. She
and he alike were so habited as to show the world that their life
was aloof from its "idle business." By some such phrase, at least,
the friar would assuredly have attempted to include her in any
spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might have asked of her
the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy," said the Salvation
Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy making such
a fool of one's self!"
The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in
Zurbaran's ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are
busy. As a pocket it relieves the over-burdened hands. A bottle of
the local white wine made by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to
this house by the West, is carried in the cowl as a present to the
stranger at the gates. The friars tell how a brother resolved, at
Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and not only to make, but also to toss
them. Those who chanced to be in the room stood prudently aside,
and the brother tossed boldly. But that was the last that was seen
of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in La Legende des Siecles of
disappearance as the thing which no creature is able to achieve:
here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by quite an
ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there was an
end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake
from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by the
spectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to
meditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident was
explained.
Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get
up gaily to this difficult service. Of all duties this one never
grows easy or familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is
something to have found but one act aloof from habit. It is not
merely that the friars overcome the habit of sleep. The subtler
point is that they can never acquire the habit of sacrificing sleep.
What art, what literature, or what life but would gain a secret
security by such a point of perpetual freshness and perpetual
initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without a will
that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done,
and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's.
The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of
the French fields, and the hour of night--l'ora di notte--which
rings with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the
Adriatic littoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the
prayer for the dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O
Lord."
The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
sound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work
of the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it
is principally a place of studies. So much elect intellect and
strength of heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True,
the friars are not doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a
refuge from despair. These "bearded counsellors of God" keep their
cells, read, study, suffer, sing, hold silence; whereas they might
be "operating"--beautiful word!--upon the Stock Exchange, or
painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, or reluctantly
jostling other men for places. They might be among the involuntary
busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof is a
discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the
superfluous activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly
renounced by the dwellers within such walls as these. The output--
again a beautiful word--of the age is lessened by this abstention.
None the less hopes the stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once
again upon those monastery gates.
THE SEA WALL
A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright
shadows of grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves
prick above into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living
in London, with its too many windows and too few walls, the city
which of all capitals takes least visible hold upon the ground; or
for the sake of some other attraction or aversion, walls, blank and
strong, reaching outward at the base, are a satisfaction to the eyes
teased by the inexpressive peering of windows, by that weak lapse
and shuffling which is the London "area," and by the helpless
hollows of shop-fronts.
I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of
wrought-iron. A wall is the safeguard of simplicity. It lays a
long level line among the indefinite chances of the landscape. But
never more majestic than in face of the wild sea, the wall,
steadying its slanting foot upon the rock, builds in the serried
ilex-wood and builds out the wave. The sea-wall is the wall at its
best. And fine as it is on the strong coast, it is beautiful on the
weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a northern beach.
That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that
passes away into shingle at its foot. It is at close quarters with
the winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the
sky-line of sea is jagged. Never from any height does the ocean-
horizon show thus broken and battered at its very verge, but from
the flat coast and the narrow world you can see the wave as far as
you can see the water; and the stormy light of a clear horizon is
seen to be mobile and shifting with the buoyant hillocks and their
restless line.
Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as
secures many a mile of gentle English coast to the east. The Dutch
dyke has not that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it
springs with a look of haste and of height; and when you first run
upstairs from the encumbered Dutch fields to look at the sea, there
is nothing in the least like England; and even the Englishman of to-
day is apt to share something of the old perversity that was minded
to cast derision upon the Dutch in their encounters with the tides.
There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the
slight derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more
romantic, and, as it were, more slender. We English, once upon a
time, did especially flout the little nation then acting a history
that proved worth the writing. It may be no more than a brief
perversity that has set a number of our writers to cheer the memory
of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it is no more than another rehearsal
of that untiring success at the expense of the bourgeois. The
bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he is were he to stand
up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of his dismay
is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton art.
And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginary
audience? Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are
not the least of the makings of an author. A few men and women he
achieves within his books; but others does he create without, and to
those figures of all illusion makes the appeal of his art. More
candid is the author who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards
to his own heart. He has at least a living hearer.
This is by the way. Charles II has been cheered; the feat is done,
the dismay is imagined with joy. And yet the Merry Monarch's was a
dismal time. Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from the French
King remembered and claimed by the restored throne of England, and
the Dutch in the Medway--all this was disaster. None the less,
having the vanity of new clothes and a pretty figure, did we--
especially by the mouth of Andrew Marvell--deride our victors,
making sport of the Philistines with a proper national sense of
enjoyment of such physical disabilities, or such natural
difficulties, or such misfavour of fortune, as may beset the alien.
Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment. They
are so still; or they were so certainly in the day when a great
novelist found the smallness of some South German States to be the
subject of unsating banter. The German scenes at the end of "Vanity
Fair," for example, may prove how much the ridicule of mere
smallness, fewness, poverty (and not even real poverty, privation,
but the poverty that shows in comparison with the gold of great
States, and is properly in proportion) rejoiced the sense of humour
in a writer and moralist who intended to teach mankind to be less
worldly. In Andrew Marvell's day they were even more candid. The
poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincere laughter
of the inmost man, the true, infrequent laughter of the heart.
Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughter--at leanness, at
hunger, cold, and solitude--in the face of the world, and in the
name of literature, in one memorable satire. I speak of "Flecno, an
English Priest in Rome," wherein nothing is spared--not the
smallness of the lodging, nor the lack of a bed, nor the scantiness
of clothing, nor the fast.
"This basso-rilievo of a man--"
personal meagreness is the first joke and the last.
It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallness of
the country of Holland matter for a cordial jest. But, besides the
smallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage in
regard to the sea. In the Venetians, commerce with the sea,
conflict with the sea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing
peace--albeit a less instant battle and a more languid victory--were
confessed to be noble; in the Dutch they were grotesque. "With mad
labour," says Andrew Marvell, with the spirited consciousness of the
citizen of a country well above ground and free to watch the labour
at leisure, "with mad labour" did the Dutch "fish the land to
shore."
How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
Thorough the centre, their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their watery Babel far more high
To reach the sea than those to scale the sky!
It is done with a jolly wit, and in what admirable couplets!
The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.
And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-
nymphs should find themselves provided with a capital cabillau of
shoals of pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and
it must be allowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony.
There is not a smile for us in "Flecno," but it is more than
possible to smile over this "Character of Holland"; at the excluded
ocean returning to play at leap-frog over the steeples; at the rise
of government and authority in Holland, which belonged of right to
the man who could best invent a shovel or a pump, the country being
so leaky:-
Not who first sees the rising sun commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands.
We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell,
more than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light
in so burly a frame--we have lost with these the wild humour that
wore so well the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much
order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality-
-in a word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot
stand firm within two lines, but must slip beyond and between the
boundaries, who tolerate the couplets of Keats and imitate them,
should praise the day of Charles II because of Marvell's art, and
not for love of the sorry reign. We had plague, fire, and the Dutch
in the Medway, but we had the couplet; and there were also the
measures of those more poetic poets, hitherto called somewhat
slightingly the Cavalier poets, who matched the wit of the Puritan
with a spirit simpler and less mocking.
It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that some
remembered winter storms lately turned their great artillery. It
was a time of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and so
close, up in the towers of the seaside stronghold, that one seemed
to be indeed admitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds. The
gale came with an indescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemed
to break itself upon the heights, yet passed unbroken out to sea; in
the voice of the sea there were pauses, but none in that of the
urgent gale with its hoo-hoo-hoo all night, that clamoured down the
calling of the waves. That lack of pauses was the strangest thing
in the tempest, because the increase of sound seemed to imply a lull
before. The lull was never perceptible, but the lift was always an
alarm. The onslaught was instant, where would it stop? What was
the secret extreme to which this hurry and force were tending? You
asked less what thing was driving the flocks of the storm than what
was drawing them. The attraction seemed the greater violence, the
more irresistible, and the more unknown. And there were moments
when the end seemed about to be attained.
The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to
describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but
the fierce gale is soft. Along the short grass, trembling and
cowering flat on the scarped hill-side, against the staggering
horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the
battery of the tempest is a quick and enormous softness. What down,
what sand, what deep moss, what elastic wave could match the bed and
cushion of the gale?
This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up
together. The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling
whiteness of foam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such
narrow waters you do not see the distances, the wide levels of
fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and
long wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and
transitory brightness so far out that all the waves, near and far,
seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond the other, and
league beyond league, into foam. But the Channel has its own
strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the
freshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon
the white sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the
light of a shining cloud.
TITHONUS
"It was resolved," said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of
the panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and
other patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would
need renewing from time to time. The colours, therefore,"--and here
is the passage to be noted--"are all mixed with wax liquefied with
petroleum; and the wax surface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax
is left time to form an imperishable surface of ornament, which
would have to be cut out of the stone with a chisel if it was
desired to remove it." Not, apparently, that a new surface is
formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence,
be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" is driven in and
incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is nothing
possible to cut away by any industry. In this humorous form of
ornament we are beforehand with Posterity. Posterity is baffled.
Will this victory over our sons' sons be the last resolute tyranny
prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of the
future? To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the
strongest of human desires. It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by
the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this
success in the stencilling of St Paul's teach us, to our confusion.
There is evidently a man--a group of men--happy at this moment
because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our
posterity to have their cupola of St Paul's with the stone mouldings
stencilled and "picked out" with niggling colours, whether that
undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a survival of one
of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.
It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and
not to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager,
eternal legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of
this former human wish. If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon
the earth, which yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the
Reformers' who arrested the moving man, and inhibited the moving
God. The sixteenth century and a certain part of the age
immediately following seem to be times when the desire had
conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of the sixteenth
century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in England--
for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. THERE is the
obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure
upon power. THEN was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single
sign and style. Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp
the fate of the unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to
come were to be as the day then present would have them, if the dead
hand--the living hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold
in death--could by any means make them fast.
Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that
may be more than willing to build for itself. The day may soon come
when no man will do even so much without some impulse of apology.
Posterity is not compelled to keep our pictures or our books in
existence, nor to read nor to look at them; but it is more or less
obliged to have a stone building in view for an age or two. We can
hardly avoid some of the forms of tyranny over the future, but few,
few are the living men who would consent to share in this horrible
ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleum and this wax.
In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of
Parliament, and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the
future. How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the
day should be made secure against all mischances--smoke, damp, "the
risk of bulging," even accidents attending the washing of upper
floors--all was discussed in confidence with the public. It was
impossible for anyone who read the papers then to escape from some
at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge. From
Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert and
most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to defeat the natural
and not superfluous operation of efficient and effacing time.
The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date,
decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of
architecture. Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place
with unparalleled obstinacy. They had not the malice of the
petroleum that does violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an
indomitable patience. Under the commands of the master Cornelius,
they baffled time and all his work--refused his pardons, his
absolutions, his cancelling indulgences--by a perseverance that
nothing could discourage. Who has not known somewhat indifferent
painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes? Cornelius
caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in the
case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years,
with frequent stirrings. This was in order that the whole fresco,
when at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for
immortality. Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those
mechanical means that should avert the risk of bulging already
mentioned. He neglected no detail. He was provident, and he lay in
wait for more than one of the laws of nature, to frustrate them.
Gravitation found him prepared, and so did the less majestic but not
vain dispensation of accidents. Against bulging he had an underplot
of tiles set on end; against possible trickling from an upper floor
he had asphalt; it was all part of the human conspiracy. In effect,
the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand well. It would have been
more just--so the present age thinks of these preserved walls--if
the day that admired them had had them exclusively, and our day had
been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages have
undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?
In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to
shoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and
art. They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came
from Munich to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a
heart of confidence into the breast of the Commission. The
situation, he averred, need not be too damp for immortality, with
due care. What he had done in the Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek
might be done with the best results in England, in defiance of the
weather, of the river, of the mere days, of the divine order of
alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.
Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime
that had not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its
mission; they would have none of it. They evaded it, studied its
ways, and put it to the rout. "Many failures that might have been
hastily attributed to damp were really owing to the use of lime in
too fresh a state. Of the experimental works painted at Munich,
those only have faded which are known to have been done without due
attention to the materials. THUS, A FIGURE OF BAVARIA, PAINTED BY
KAULBACH, WHICH HAS FADED CONSIDERABLY, IS KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN
EXECUTED WITH LIME THAT WAS TOO FRESH." One cannot refrain from
italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take a little less of
this important care about the lime, to have a better confidence, to
be more impatient and eager, and all had been well: NOT to do--a
virtue of omission.
This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical question
hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged
to face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present,
and in part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured-
-that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of
person or property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are
obliged to claim, and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the
reflex effect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of
fettering the time to come. Every maker of a will does at least
this.
Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They
found the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will.
It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the
dead, nor to efface the records of a past that offended them. It
did not satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative
menace and instant compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and
thrown down monuments and pursued the rebels of the past into the
other world, and had seen to it that none living should evade them,
then they outraged the future.
Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run
in time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed
their subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those
rigid counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the
world, they silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They
wrote in statute books; they would have written their will across
the skies. Their hearts would have burnt for lack of records more
inveterate, and of testimonials that mankind should lack courage to
question, if in truth they did ever doubt lest posterity might try
their lock. Perhaps they did never so much as foresee the race of
the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their prohibitions and
penalties are no more than documents of history.
If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of
these our more diffident times! They, who would have written their
present and actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written
it in petroleum and wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in
withholding from their hands this means of finality and violence.
Into our hands it has been given at a time when the student of the
race thought, perhaps, that we had been proved in the school of
forbearance. Something, indeed, we may have learnt therein, but not
enough, as we now find.
We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and
the probable wisdom of our successors. A certain reverend official
document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately
recommended to the veneration of the present times "those past ages
with their store of experience." Doubtless, as the posterity of
their predecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our
ancestors, none--none. Therefore, if they were a little reverend
our own posterity is right reverend. It is a flippant and novelty-
loving humour that so flatters the unproved past and refuses the
deference due to the burden of years which is ours, which--grown
still graver--will be our children's.
SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT
The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the
art of nations. Being in its own methods and attitude the art of
accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of
accidental value, and not of integral necessity. The virtual
discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second
French Empire, caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate,
and how lovely Incident may look when Symmetry has grown vulgar.
The lesson was most welcome. Japan has had her full influence.
European art has learnt the value of position and the tact of the
unique. But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all her characteristic
art) content with her own conventions; she is local, provincial,
alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a world that
has Greek art in its own history--Pericles "to its father."
Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been
touched by Japanese example of Incident and the Unique. Music had
attained the noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but
in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music,
the music of phase and of fragment, succeeded. The sense of
symmetry is strong in a complete melody--of symmetry in its most
delicate and lively and least stationary form--balance; whereas the
leit-motif is isolated. In domestic architecture Symmetry and
Incident make a familiar antithesis--the very commonplace of rival
methods of art. But the same antithesis exists in less obvious
forms. The poets have sought "irregular" metres. Incident hovers,
in the very act of choosing its right place, in the most modern of
modern portraits. In these we have, if not the Japanese suppression
of minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese exaggeration of major
emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy. The smile, the
figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arranging touch of a
hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationary foot, and
the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a single
breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of
Japanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident. In
passing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture
and the aspect of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf;
whether still or in motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have
the alertness and expectancy of flight in all their flocks of
leaves, while the oaks and elms are gathered in their station. All
this is not Japanese, but from such accident is Japanese art
inspired, with its good luck of perceptiveness.
What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament.
Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counter-
change for their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw the
distinction between this motive and that of the Japanese. The
Japanese motives may be defined as uniqueness and position. And
these were not known as motives of decoration before the study of
Japanese decoration. Repetition and counter-change, of course, have
their place in Japanese ornament, as in the diaper patterns for
which these people have so singular an invention, but here, too,
uniqueness and position are the principal inspiration. And it is
quite worth while, and much to the present purpose, to call
attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanese diaper patterns,
which is INTERRUPTION. Repetition there must necessarily be in
these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which is, to the
Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected. The
place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and
the avoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese
design of this class inimitable. Thus, even in a repeating pattern,
you have a curiously successful effect of impulse. It is as though
a separate intention had been formed by the designer at every angle.
Such renewed consciousness does not make for greatness. Greatness
in design has more peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of
Japanese lines, in their curious brevity. It is scarcely necessary
to say that a line, in all other schools of art, is long or short
according to its place and purpose; but only the Japanese designer
so contrives his patterns that the line is always short; and many
repeating designs are entirely composed of this various and
variously-occurring brevity, this prankish avoidance of the goal.
Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in the unit of their
repeating patterns, by another simple device--that of numbers. They
make a small difference in the number of curves and of lines. A
great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it would
look too much like a contrast. For example, three rods on one side
and six on another would be something else than a mere variation,
and variety would be lost by the use of them. The Japanese
decorator will vary three in this place by two in that, and a sense
of the defeat of symmetry is immediately produced. With more
violent means the idea of symmetry would have been neither suggested
nor refuted.
Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in
Japanese compositions, complete designs in which there is no point
of symmetry. It is a balance of suspension and of antithesis.
There is no sense of lack of equilibrium, because place is, most
subtly, made to have the effect of giving or of subtracting value.
A small thing is arranged to reply to a large one, for the small
thing is placed at the precise distance that makes it a (Japanese)
equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in other countries) the scales
commonly in use are furnished with only a single weight that
increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it nearer or
farther upon a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so many ounces
when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when it hangs
from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays some
such part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a
Japanese composition. Its place is its significance and its value.
Such an art of position implies a great art of intervals. The
Japanese chooses a few things and leaves the space between them
free, as free as the pauses or silences in music. But as time, not
silence, is the subject, or material, of contrast in musical pauses,
so it is the measurement of space--that is, collocation--that makes
the value of empty intervals. The space between this form and that,
in a Japanese composition, is valuable because it is just so wide
and no more. And this, again, is only another way of saying that
position is the principle of this apparently wilful art.
Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped
to justify the more stenographic school of etching. Greatly
transcending Japanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly
accepted moral support from the islands of the Japanese. He too
etches a kind of shorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the
spectator's knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to
nothing but the spectator's simple vision. Thus the two artists
work in ways dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French etcher would
never have written his signs so freely had not the Japanese so
freely drawn his own. Furthermore still, the transitory and
destructible material of Japanese art has done as much as the
multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, to
reconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to
working for the day, the day of publication. Japan lives much of
its daily life by means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means
of paper, printed. But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a
destructive people, paper with us means short life, quick abolition,
transformation, re-appearance, a very circulation of life. This is
our present way of surviving ourselves--the new version of that feat
of life. Time was when to survive yourself meant to secure, for a
time indefinitely longer than the life of man, such dull form as you
had given to your work; to intrude upon posterity. To survive
yourself, to-day, is to let your work go into daily oblivion.
Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper
does not last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to
them a different condition of ornament from that with which they
adorned old lacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For
the transitory material they keep the more purely pictorial art of
landscape. What of Japanese landscape? Assuredly it is too far
reduced to a monotonous convention to merit the serious study of
races that have produced Cotman and Corot. Japanese landscape-
drawing reduces things seen to such fewness as must have made the
art insuperably tedious to any people less fresh-spirited and more
inclined to take themselves seriously than these Orientals. A
preoccupied people would never endure it. But a little closer
attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive
attitude towards landscape--it is an attitude almost traitorously
evasive--a more significant reason. It is that the distances, the
greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains,
and the flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions
of a people intent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to
define by that phrase the curious Japanese search for accidents?
Upon such search these people are avowedly intent, even though they
show themselves capable of exquisite appreciation of the form of a
normal bird and of the habit of growth of a normal flower. They are
not in search of the perpetual slight novelty which was Aristotle's
ideal of the language poetic ("a little wildly, or with the flower
of the mind," says Emerson of the way of a poet's speech)--and such
novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of the pinion, that keeps
verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese are intent upon is
perpetual slight disorder. In Japan the man in the fields has eyes
less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in the
path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure
in fortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque
strangeness he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to
his garden. The art of such a people is not liberal art, not the
art of peace, and not the art of humanity. Look at the curls and
curves whereby this people conventionally signify wave or cloud.
All these curls have an attitude which is like that of a figure
slightly malformed, and not like that of a human body that is
perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or niggling labour.
Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard to say; they
have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place where the
upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately
unexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--is
sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light,
while the lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads
take by nature.
A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no
other art has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The
Japanese have generally evaded even the local beauty of their own
race for the sake of perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is
remote from our sympathy and admiration; and it is quite possible
that we might miss it in pictorial presentation, and that the
Japanese artist may have intended human beauty where we do not
recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is certainly
not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generally
aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate
dignity, even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese
artist, and is represented here and there occasionally, in the
figure of warrior or mousme. But even with this exception the habit
of Japanese figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and
crooked. It is curious to observe that the search for slight
deformity is so constant as to make use, for its purposes, not of
action only, but of perspective foreshortening. With us it is to
the youngest child only that there would appear to be mirth in the
drawing of a man who, stooping violently forward, would seem to have
his head "beneath his shoulders." The European child would not see
fun in the living man so presented, but--unused to the same effect
"in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously humorous in a drawing. But
so only when he is quite young. The Japanese keeps, apparently, his
sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, but not perhaps
altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened figure
should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and
dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it
than the simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion
of ignominy. And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not
precisely scorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous
models. He makes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar
with them.
And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no
need to insist upon the ignoble character of those that are
intentional caricatures.
Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of
symmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek
decoration, and would be glad to forget it, with the intention of
learning that art afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew.
But whatever may be the phases of the arts, there is the abiding
principle of symmetry in the body of man, that goes erect, like an
upright soul. Its balance is equal. Exterior human symmetry is
surely a curious physiological fact where there is no symmetry
interiorly. For the centres of life and movement within the body
are placed with Oriental inequality. Man is Greek without and
Japanese within. But the absolute symmetry of the skeleton and of
the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a principle. It
controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human action.
Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite incidents--
inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of sleep--the
symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is that symmetry
complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the
battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because
this hand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and
that the sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses
the unequal heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and
strength are inflections thereof. All human movement is a variation
upon symmetry, and without symmetry it would not be variation; it
would be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless
art. The order of inflection that is not infraction has been
explained in a most authoritative sentence of criticism of
literature, a sentence that should save the world the trouble of
some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments: "Law, the
rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the
poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the
subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's
will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from
infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the
greatest poets have been those the modulus of whose verse has been
most variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with
feelings and passions which are the inflections of moral law in
their theme. Law puts a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds
with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the
quality of poetic language is a continual SLIGHT novelty. In the
highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of
inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in
praise of the truer order of life."
And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most
beautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof. That
perpetual proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of
life. Symmetry is a profound, if disregarded because perpetually
inflected, condition of human life.
The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may
settle or be fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it
has an obvious life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides
the obvious law and the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as
the symmetry of the form of man, and life occult like his unequal
heart. And this seems to be the nobler and the more perdurable
relation.
THE PLAID
It is disconcerting to hear of the plaid in India. Our dyes, we
know, they use in the silk mills of Bombay, with the deplorable
result that their old clothes are dull and unintentionally falsified
with infelicitous decay. The Hindus are a washing people; and the
sun and water that do but dim, soften, and warm the native vegetable
dyes to the last, do but burlesque the aniline. Magenta is bad
enough when it is itself; but the worst of magenta is that it spoils
but poorly. No bad modern forms and no bad modern colours spoil
well. And spoiling is an important process. It is a test--one of
the ironical tests that come too late with their proofs. London
portico-houses will make some such ruins as do chemical dyes, which
undergo no use but derides them, no accidents but caricature them.
This is an old enough grievance. But the plaid!
The plaid is the Scotchman's contribution to the decorative art of
the world. Scotland has no other indigenous decoration. In his
most admirable lecture on "The Two Paths," Ruskin acknowledged, with
a passing misgiving, that his Highlanders had little art. And the
misgiving was but passing, because he considered how fatally wrong
was the art of India--"it never represents a natural fact. It forms
its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings
of line . . . It will not draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it
will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zig-zag." Because of
this aversion from Nature the Hindu and his art tended to evil, we
read. But of the Scot we are told, "You will find upon reflection
that all the highest points of the Scottish character are connected
with impressions derived straight from the natural scenery of their
country."
What, then, about the plaid? Where is the natural fact there? If
the Indian, by practising a non-natural art of spirals and zig-zags,
cuts himself off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or
natural delight," to what did the good and healthy Highlander
condemn himself by practising the art of the plaid? A spiral may be
found in the vine, and a zig-zag in the lightning, but where in
nature is the plaid to be found? There is surely no curve or curl
that can be drawn by a designing hand but is a play upon some
infinitely various natural fact. The smoke of the cigarette, more
sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so
multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and
such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence
and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering
curls ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand--and that is not a
Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured
the curve of the section of a sea-wave--its flow, relaxation, and
fall; but this is a single movement, whereas the line of cigarette-
smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions. No,
it is impossible to accept the saying that the poor spiral or scroll
of a human design is anything but a participation in the innumerable
curves and curls of nature.
Now the plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin
says of Oriental design--the plaid is not only cut off from nature,
and cut off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in
inorganic quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional
contradiction of all natural or vital forms. And it is equally
defiant of vital tone and of vital colour. Everywhere in nature
tone is gradual, and between the fainting of a tone and the failing
of a curve there is a charming analogy. But the tartan insists that
its tone shall be invariable, and sharply defined by contrasts of
dark and light. As to colour, it has colours, not colour.
But that plaid should now go so far afield as to decorate the noble
garment of the Indies is ill news. True, Ruskin saw nothing but
cruelty and corruption in Indian life or art; but let us hear an
Indian maxim in regard to those who, in cruel places, are ready
sufferers: "There," says the Mahabharata, "where women are treated
with respect, the very gods are said to be filled with joy. Women
deserve to be honoured. Serve ye them. Bend your will before them.
By honouring women ye are sure to attain to the fruition of all
things." And the rash teachers of our youth would have persuaded us
that this generous lesson was first learnt in Teutonic forests!
Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably be
suffered to reply, to this Hindu profession of reverence.
Accordingly the woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil
to the souls of her mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and great-
grandmother-in-law, in gratitude for their giving her a good
husband. And to go back for a moment to Ruskin's contrast of the
two races, it was assuredly under the stress of some too rash
reasoning that he judged the lovely art of the East as a ministrant
to superstition, cruelty, and pleasure, whether wrought upon the
temple, the sword, or the girdle. The innocent art of innocent
Hindu women for centuries decked their most modest heads, their
dedicated and sequestered beauty, their child-loving breasts, and
consecrated chambers.
THE FLOWER
There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed
by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere
witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the
flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him-
-his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale
habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and
wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had
grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where
the most ordinary things of design and decoration have sifted down
and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a cumulative
force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal and
leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness
and insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly
of all imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-
house arrayed for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is
beset with flowers. It blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron
garden. The floor flourishes with blossoms adust, poorly
conventionalized into a kind of order; the table-cover is ablaze
with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper is set with
bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and lilies
in its very construction; over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
is scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the
plaster picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in
the pediment of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the
barometer, in the finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-
plates of the "grained" door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait
or to be traced the stale inspiration of the flower. And what is
this bossiness around the grate but some blunt, black-leaded
garland? The recital is wearisome, but the retribution of the
flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution of man, the
haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.
The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to
the smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap
patterns is no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain
and transitory author by the phrase. In literature as in all else
man merits his subjection to trivialities by his economical greed.
A condition for using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to
be a measure of reluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine
sounds in a world decivilized--was in the beginning intended to be
something jocund; and jocundity was never to be achieved but by
postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can the prodigality of
the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has something
even more severe than modertion: she has an innumerable singleness.
Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal; they show multitude, but not
multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace of
decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or
who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes--
the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate
that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her
answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the
day when she shall make the one tremendous difference among her
gifts--and make it perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the
ultimate. What, for novelty, what, for singleness, what, for
separateness, can equal the last? Of many thousand kisses the poor
last--but even the kisses of your mouth are all numbered.
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress
of man is so much to be desired. The leg, completing as it does the
form of man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is
at least as important as the scenery of geological structure, or the
scenery of architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the
lovers of mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have
consented to ignore. The leg is the best part of the figure,
inasmuch as it has the finest lines and therewith those slender,
diminishing forms which, coming at the base of the human structure,
show it to be a thing of life by its unstable equilibrium. A
lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the body, springing,
poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never stands without
implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first suggested
the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is
erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,
because of his station, looks new-lighted. All this is true of the
best leg, and the best leg is the man's. That of the young child,
in which the Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither
movement nor supporting strength. In the case of the woman's figure
it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives
the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so
organic. But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the
strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all
garments the most stupid. Inexpressive of what they clothe as no
kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they are neither
implicitly nor explicitly good raiment. It is hardly possible to
err by violence in denouncing them. Why, when an indifferent writer
is praised for "clothing his thought," it is to modern raiment that
one's agile fancy flies--fain of completing the metaphor!
The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other
than the mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the
multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and
demonstrate, and meet, and listen to the speaker. For the
undistinguished are very important by their numbers. These are they
who make the look of the artificial world. They are man
generalized; as units they inevitably lack something of interest;
all the more they have cumulative effect. It would be well if we
could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in
the clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to
be changed. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are
their national customs--and the wretchedest of them all the wearing
of other men's old raiment--that they must wait for reform until the
reformed dress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have
turned second-hand.
VICTORIAN CARICATURE
There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of
a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim the
vulgarizing of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas
Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that
humourist's serial, "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," which were
presumably considered good comic reading in the "Punch" of that
time, and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the
grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which
others consider or have considered humorous is to put oneself at a
disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the
superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought
it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least
tolerable of modern reproaches--that he lacks humour; but he need
not always care. Now to turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is
to find that people in the mid-century took their mirth principally
from the life of the arriere boutique. On that shabby stage was
enacted the comedy of literature. Therefore we must take something
of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks
wherein he delighted. But the essential vulgarity is that of the
woman. There is in some old "Punch" volume a drawing by Leech--whom
one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the refined--where the
work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the letterpress.
Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays.
They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And page
by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her
foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that
time there was, moreover, one great humourist, one whom I infinitely
admire; he, too, I am grieved to remember, bore his part willingly
in vulgarizing the woman; and the part that fell to him was the
vulgarizing of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing
man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman
incoherent, woman abandoned without restraint to violence and
temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of these ignominies is
woman so common and so foolish for Dickens as she is in child-
bearing.
I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are
humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is
moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is
that her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of
her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him
that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the
annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire
to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases
him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its
hat--a burlesque baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for
that too makes subtly for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--
another contemporary, though he lived into a later and different
time. He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy--
indignities of civic physique, of stupid prosperity, of dress, of
bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he
found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of
inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not sure which
is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a
completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness
of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced
that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through
almost a whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of years
ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to
even the invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual
broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and
his umbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when
she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a night-cap. Every one
who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was
drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the
bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched
by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married
life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against
the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom
with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she
is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all these things
there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the
figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really
fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or
from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand,
is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we
acknowledge that there is humour. It is also in some of his
clerical figures when they are not caricatures, and certainly in
"Robert," the City waiter of "Punch." But so irresistible is the
derision of the woman that all Charles Keene's persistent sense of
vulgarity is intent centrally upon her. Never for any grace gone
astray is she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for
prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for her jealousy, and for
the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she
vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper the
possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?
This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular
form of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the
habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex,
whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex. But the
vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English--
the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of
many another--and it was not able to survive an increased commerce
of manners and letters with France. It was the chief immorality
destroyed by the French novel.
THE POINT OF HONOUR
Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez.
In Spain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the first
Impressionist. As an Impressionist he claimed, implicitly if not
explicitly, a whole series of delicate trusts in his
trustworthiness; he made an appeal to the confidence of his peers;
he relied on his own candour, and asked that the candid should rely
upon him; he kept the chastity of art when other masters were
content with its honesty, and when others saved artistic conscience
he safeguarded the point of honour. Contemporary masters more or
less proved their position, and convinced the world by something of
demonstration; the first Impressionist simply asked that his word
should be accepted. To those who would not take his word he offers
no bond. To those who will, he grants the distinction of a share in
his responsibility.
Somewhat unrefined, in comparison with his lofty and simple claim to
be believed on a suggestion, is the commoner painter's production of
his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions of ordinary experience,
his self-defence against the suspicion of making irresponsible
mysteries in art. "You can see for yourself," the lesser man seems
to say to the world, "thus things are, and I render them in such
manner that your intelligence may be satisfied." This is an appeal
to average experience--at the best the cumulative experience; and
with the average, or with the sum, art cannot deal without
derogation. The Spaniard seems to say: "Thus things are in my
pictorial sight. Trust me, I apprehend them so." We are not
excluded from his counsels, but we are asked to attribute a certain
authority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of that art
of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and not far from the
end--not far short of the whole--of the art of painting. So little
indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a great Impressionist's
impression that Velasquez requires us to be in some degree his
colleagues. Thus may each of us to whom he appeals take praise from
the praised: he leaves my educated eyes to do a little of the work.
He respects my responsibility no less--though he respects it less
explicitly--than I do his. What he allows me would not be granted
by a meaner master. If he does not hold himself bound to prove his
own truth, he returns thanks for my trust. It is as though he used
his countrymen's courteous hyperbole and called his house my own.
In a sense of the most noble hostship he does me the honours of his
picture.
Because Impressionism with all its extreme--let us hope its
ultimate--derivatives is so free, therefore is it doubly bound.
Because there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times
responsible. To undertake this art for the sake of its privileges
without confessing its obligations--or at least without confessing
them up to the point of honour--is to take a vulgar freedom: to see
immunities precisely where there are duties, and an advantage where
there is a bond. A very mob of men have taken Impressionism upon
themselves, in several forms and under a succession of names, in
this our later day. It is against all probabilities that more than
a few among these have within them the point of honour. In their
galleries we are beset with a dim distrust. And to distrust is more
humiliating than to be distrusted. How many of these landscape-
painters, deliberately rash, are painting the truth of their own
impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered;
truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of
the common conscience, not hard to divide. But when the dubium
concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that
their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate
equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are
enough? Now Impressionists have told us things as to their
impressions--as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this
man and upon the mood of that--which should not be asserted except
on the artistic point of honour. The majority can tell ordinary
truth, but should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary.
They can face the general judgement, but they should hesitate to
produce work that appeals to the last judgement, which is the
judgement within. There is too much reason to divine that a certain
number of those who aspire to differ from the greatest of masters
have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point of view worth
seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth waylaying. And
to be, de parti pris, an Impressionist without these! O Velasquez!
Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach in her own things.
An author, here and there, will make as though he had a word worth
hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word that seeks to withdraw even
while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all too
probably a platitude. But obviously, literature is not--as is the
craft and mystery of painting--so at the mercy of a half-imposture,
so guarded by unprovable honour. For the art of painting is
reserved that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation. If the
artistic temperament--tedious word!--with all its grotesque
privileges, becomes yet more common than it is, there will be yet
less responsibility; for the point of honour is the simple secret of
the few.
THE COLOUR OF LIFE
Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But
the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence,
or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed
the colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen.
Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the
act of betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not
the manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of
which is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a
napkin. The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the
colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the
living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the
unpublished blood.
So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life
is outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that
it is white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than
earth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less
lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in
all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive.
Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under
the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the
London horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses,
out to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of
June.
For months together London does not see the colour of life in any
mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features,
and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melon of man,
and of the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is
subject to a thousand injuries and accidents. The popular face of
the Londoner has soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of
its red and brown. We miss little beauty by the fact that it is
never seen freely in great numbers out-of-doors. You get it in some
quantity when all the heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at
once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open air, needless to
say, that the colour of life is in perfection, in the open air,
"clothed with the sun," whether the sunshine be golden and direct,
or dazzlingly diffused in grey.
The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the
landscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of
all his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer
north-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke
of eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the
hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has
chosen for its boys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and
delicate flush between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky.
Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars
as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under
his feet.
So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature.
They are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but
only a little thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse.
The last and most finished action of her intellect, passion, and
knowledge is, as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant
thing mistaken for art by other actors, some little obstacle to the
way and liberty of Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second
boot, and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the
lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even
undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect
pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring,
his slenderness, his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild
rose in the deepening midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his
world again.
It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where
Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the
happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to
grow in the streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming
finish than your green grass. The gasometer even must fall to
pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is
nothing so remediable as the work of modern man--"a thought which is
also," as Mr Pecksniff said, "very soothing." And by remediable I
mean, of course, destructible. As the bathing child shuffles off
his garments--they are few, and one brace suffices him--so the land
might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and
purple slate, and all the things that collect about railway
stations. A single night almost clears the air of London.
But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery
of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-
coast. To have once seen it there should be enough to make a
colourist. O memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour
as it neared setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the
land. The sea had the dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of
that aspect--the dark and not the opal tints. The sky was also
deep. Everything was very definite, without mystery, and
exceedingly simple. The most luminous thing was the shining white
of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because it was a
little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the
whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous thing was the
little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of life.
In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that
the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the
curious history of the political rights of woman under the
Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the
fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that
seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted
political death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the
obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was
granted a part in the largest interests, social, national,
international. The blood wherewith she should, according to
Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was
exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.
Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and
the innermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put
obstacles in the way of public action for a public cause. Women
might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de
Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of
representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person,
too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to
the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus
made her public and complete amends.
THE HORIZON
To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter
than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you
raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.
It is like the scene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his
dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does
more than bid them. He lifts them, he gathers them up, far and
near, with the upward gesture of both arms; he takes them to their
feet with the compulsion of his expressive force. Or it is as when
a conductor takes his players to successive heights of music. You
summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the distances unfold
unlooked-for wings and take an even flight. You are but a man
lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb the circle
of the world goes up to face you.
Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen
unfolds. This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are
on the wing, and the plain raises its verge. All things follow and
wait upon your eyes. You lift these up, not by the raising of your
eyelids, but by the pilgrimage of your body. "Lift thine eyes to
the mountains." It is then that other mountains lift themselves to
your human eyes.
It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another
that makes the way up a hill so full of universal movement. All the
landscape is on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its
inner harbours literally come to light; the headlands repeat
themselves; little cups within the treeless hills open and show
their farms. In the sea are many regions. A breeze is at play for
a mile or two, and the surface is turned. There are roads and
curves in the blue and in the white. Not a step of your journey up
the height that has not its replies in the steady motion of land and
sea. Things rise together like a flock of many-feathered birds.
But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search
of. That is your chief companion on your way. It is to uplift the
horizon to the equality of your sight that you go high. You give it
a distance worthy of the skies. There is no distance, except the
distance in the sky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the
height is to be seen the distance of this world. The line is sent
back into the remoteness of light, the verge is removed beyond
verge, into a distance that is enormous and minute.
So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less
near than Queen Mab and her chariot can equal its fineness. Here on
the edges of the eyelids, or there on the edges of the world--we
know no other place for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so
small and tender. The touches of her passing, as close as dreams,
or the utmost vanishing of the forest or the ocean in the white
light between the earth and the air; nothing else is quite so
intimate and fine. The extremities of a mountain view have just
such tiny touches as the closeness of closed eyes shuts in.
On the horizon is the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars the
simplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface
it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky
disappears on that shining edge; there is not substance enough for
colour. The rim of the hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land,
of the sea--let it only be far enough--has the same absorption of
colour; and even the dark things drawn upon the bright edges of the
sky are lucid, the light is among them, and they are mingled with
it. The horizon has its own way of making bright the pencilled
figures of forests, which are black but luminous.
On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky.
There you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder
sky--is not a wall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds
that repeat each other grow smaller by distance; and you find a new
unity in the sky and earth that gather alike the great lines of
their designs to the same distant close. There is no longer an
alien sky, tossed up in unintelligible heights above a world that is
subject to intelligible perspective.
Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted
is the horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not
the spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from
the parks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of
soot; but rather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a
beautiful thing of the London smoke at times, and in some places of
the sky; but not there, not where the soft sharp distance ought to
shine. To be dull there is to put all relations and comparisons in
the wrong, and to make the sky lawless.
A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the
line and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly
dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the
sky. The stormy horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high
enough, and you can raise the light from beyond the shower, and the
shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke
disobeys and defeats the summer of the eyes.
Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some
compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their
sea. A child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes
that they cannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world.
Never in the solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of
Good Hope and Cape Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has
the seaman seen anything but a little circle of sea. The Ancient
Mariner, when he was alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow
solitudes. The sailor has nothing but his mast, indeed. And but
for his mast he would be isolated in as small a world as that of a
traveller through the plains.
Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them
so perpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying
to flight with flight.
A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offing
hardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might think
something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the
centre of it.
As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so
steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further
sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding
world, with its looks serene and alert, its distant replies, its
signals of many miles, its signs and communications of light,
gathers down and pauses. This flock of birds which is the mobile
landscape wheels and goes to earth. The Cardinal weighs down the
audience with his downward hands. Farewell to the most delicate
horizon.
IN JULY
One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of
the green of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of
maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and
stand in their differences of character and not of mere date.
Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull. It has a
darkened and a daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony
with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as prosaic
after spring as eleven o'clock looks after the dawn.
Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as
at night. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty,
common freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and
day. In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and
summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also
a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings--a heartache
for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably
consoled.
But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find
daily things tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has
no great delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness
of the summer that has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere
day and of late summer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have
long ceased to be sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot
now find anything in nature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed,
lost sight of the further awe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer
see so much of the past in April twilight as they saw when they had
no past; but which look freshly at the dailiness of green summer, of
early afternoon, of every sky of any form that comes to pass, and of
the darkened elms.
Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting
close, unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it
looks alone to a late sun. But if one could go by all the woods,
across all the old forests that are now meadowlands set with trees,
and could walk a county gathering trees of a single kind in the
mind, as one walks a garden collecting flowers of a single kind in
the hand, would not the harvest be a harvest of poplars? A
veritable passion for poplars is a most intelligible passion. The
eyes do gather them, far and near, on a whole day's journey. Not
one is unperceived, even though great timber should be passed, and
hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes a poplar day
of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for the
poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be all
various, but the poplars are separate.
All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with
them) shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest.
It is easy to gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay
them a flash of recognition of their gentle flashes; and as you
journey you are suddenly aware of them close by. Light and the
breezes are as quick as the eyes of a poplar-lover to find the
willing tree that dances to be seen.
No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for
oneself an oak day so well. The oaks would wait to be found, and
many would be missed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert
enough for a traveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do
not sleep. From within some little grove of other trees a single
poplar makes a slight sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep
the wind. They are salient everywhere, and full of replies. They
are as fresh as streams.
It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars.
And yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much
mingled with a cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes
to recognize their unfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and
keep still, the poplar and the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and
the deepest summer will not find a day in which they do not keep
awake. No waters are so vigilant, even where a lake is bare to the
wind.
When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with
fingers cool as aspen leaves," he knew the coolest thing in the
world. It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the
breeze takes on both sides--the greenish and the greyish. The
poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as
little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs.
The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine between. Poplars and
aspens let the sun through with the wind. You may have the sky
sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the woods are
close.
Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,
beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes,
nor did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more
vibrating Pleiades.
CLOUD
During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to
see the clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by
the rest of England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not
to see the clear sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in
London. You may go for a week or two at a time, even though you
hold your head up as you walk, and even though you have windows that
really open, and yet you shall see no cloud, or but a single edge,
the fragment of a form.
Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled
glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They
are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other
windows were used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or
even knew so much as whether there were a sky.
But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world
knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in
search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes
its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness,
it knows no bonds. The terrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a
prisoner compared with this. The tourist's scenery moves indeed,
but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's diurnal course; it
is made as fast as its own graves. And for its changes it depends
upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green flushing of its own
sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the greater it must
wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are
inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a
cloud.
The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or
fade according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to
foot, the luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud
permits, that their own local colour and their own local season are
lost and cease, effaced before the all-important mood of the cloud.
The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is
the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a
handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge
with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and
makes the foreground shine.
Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and
partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the
mountain slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out
part of the view by the rough method of standing in front of it.
But its greatest things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence
does it distribute the sun.
Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more
mysteries than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception.
Thence it writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or
lets the pencils of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and
yet making dark, it sheds deep colour upon the forest land of
Sussex, so that, seen from the hills, all the country is divided
between grave blue and graver sunlight.
And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the
world. Its own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to
improve. It is always great: above the street, above the suburbs,
above the gas-works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white
houses--the painted surfaces that have been devised as the only
things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it
grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to be well seen
on a sunny evening in Regent Street.
Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above
some little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional
river heavy with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks,
and shrubberies; and thick trees impervious to the light, touched,
as the novelists always have it, with "autumn tints." High over
these rises, in the enormous scale of the scenery of clouds, what no
man expected--an heroic sky. Few of the things that were ever done
upon earth are great enough to be done under such a heaven. It was
surely designed for other days. It is for an epic world. Your eyes
sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the distances of earth to
these, and what are the distances of the clear and cloudless sky?
The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the round world
dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are
unmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the
star itself is immeasurable.
But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther,
with conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise.
Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds.
There are mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of
the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not
overpowering by disproportion, like some futile building fatuously
made too big for the human measure. The cloud in its majestic place
composes with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the
futile building, while the cloud is no mansion for man, and out of
reach of his limitations.
The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the
custody of his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper.
The cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry
ray, suddenly bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a
background. Or when anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals
him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before
sunset.
It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours.
There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds
are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and
brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is
a frolic and haphazard sky.
All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed
about it. As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the
clouds in turn are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes
aloft are swept at once by a single ray, warmed with a single
colour. Promontory after league-long promontory of a stiller
Mediterranean in the sky is called out of mist and grey by the same
finger. The cloudland is very great, but a sunbeam makes all its
nations and continents sudden with light.
All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this
scenery. It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of
the winter, that the unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for
many and many a day no London eye can see the horizon, or the first
threat of the cloud like a man's hand. There never was a great
painter who had not exquisite horizons, and if Corot and Crome were
right, the Londoner loses a great thing.
He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he
loses its shape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and
rosy head piling into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the
base and the altitude. The perspective of a cloud is a great part
of its design--whether it lies so that you can look along the
immense horizontal distances of its floor, or whether it rears so
upright a pillar that you look up its mountain steeps in the sky as
you look at the rising heights of a mountain that stands, with you,
on the earth.
The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not
merely the guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the
sun's treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We
talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet
one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of
the most majestic of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon
is the bride, this is the friend of the bridegroom.
Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most
beautiful of all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no
name, and no other cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such
heights of blue air. The shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges,
comes across the sky with so influential a flight that no ship going
out to sea can be better worth watching. The dullest thing perhaps
in the London streets is that people take their rain there without
knowing anything of the cloud that drops it. It is merely rain, and
means wetness. The shower-cloud there has limits of time, but no
limits of form, and no history whatever. It has not come from the
clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not shoulder anon the
hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardly comes or goes;
it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on the path of
its retreat.
SHADOWS
Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and
unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple
house is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs
of shadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought
oftener to be offered to the light and to yonder handful of long
sedges and rushes in a vase. Their slender grey design of shadows
upon white walls is better than a tedious, trivial, or anxious
device from the shop.
The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into
line and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes,
not to the mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs.
It is single; it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and
will never be seen again, and that, untouched, varies with the
journey of the sun, shifts the interrelation of a score of delicate
lines at the mere passing of time, though all the room be
motionless. Why will design insist upon its importunate
immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that do not
pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure,
while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours
wheel.
Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing
southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the
sudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is
shed by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it
betrays the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that
takes the midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a
sally-porte, and is about to alight on an unused horizon. So does
the grey drawing, with which you have allowed the sun and your pot
of rushes to adorn your room, play the stealthy game of the year.
You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs
but four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most
buoyant jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a
symmetrical countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches
close with one another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and
their paler greys darkening. It is hard to believe that there are
many to prefer a "repeating pattern."
It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration
the walls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a
plaque or a picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To
dress a room once for all, and to give it no more heed, is to
neglect the units of the days.
Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of
shadows which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you
see little except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--
be the day bright enough--compose the very air through which you see
the light. The trees show you a shadow for every leaf, and the
poplars are sprinkled upon the shining sky with little shadows that
look translucent. The liveliness of every shadow is that some light
is reflected into it; shade and shine have been entangled as though
by some wild wind through their million molecules.
The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the
unclouded sun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to
life, and are themselves the life, the action, and the transparence
of their day.
To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light
looks still and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for
so many hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are
extinguished. Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less
by this long sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow.
Although there may be no tree to stand between his window and the
south, and although no noonday wind may blow a branch of roses
across the blind, shadows and their life will be carried across by a
brilliant bird.
To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot
see its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but
darken his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does
not see it pluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him
wings. What flash of light could be more bright for him than such a
flash of darkness?
It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed.
If he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's
shadow was a message from the sun.
There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight
of the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This
goes across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray
for a while in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer
and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker
on the soft and dry grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird
swoops to a branch and clings.
In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England,
about Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high
birds are the movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there
are no woods to make a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse
of flocks of pearl-white sea birds, or of the solitary creature
driving on the wind. Theirs is always a surprise of flight. The
clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways: in from the sea or
out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the
crops are late by a month. They fly so high that though they have
the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the
earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and
they fly between lights.
Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift
as dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms,
and ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They
subside by degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings
and cries until there comes the general shadow of night wherewith
the little shadows close, complete.
The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have
traced wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their
shadows have fled all day faster than her streams, and have
overtaken all the movement of her wingless creatures. But now it is
the flight of the very earth that carries her clasped shadow from
the sun.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling
and election to the most wifely of all wifehoods--that of a
soldier's wife--history has made her countrymen aware. Inasmuch as
Colonel Hutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is
something more than his biographer--his historian. And she
convinces her reader that her Puritan principles kept abreast of her
affections. There is no self-abandonment; she is not precipitate;
keeps her own footing; wife of a soldier as she is, would not have
armed him without her own previous indignation against the enemy.
She is a soldier at his orders, but she had warily and freely chosen
her captain.
Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept
unmarred for her use, she relates her own childhood and youth. She
was a child such as those serious times desired that a child should
be; that is, she was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time,
as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be
delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of
inability was not to be exposed except when precocity distinguished
it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy Apsley, at four years
old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to sermons, and could
remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had eight tutors
in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in Latin,
albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except her
father's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow."
She was not companionable. Her many friends were indulged with
"babies" (that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces. She
exhorted the maids, she owned, "much." But she also heard much of
their love stories, and acquired a taste for sonnets.
It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought
about her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to
him, and discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the
authorship; for a young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet
without a feint of hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a
woman had made it. Another said, if so, there were but two women
capable of making it; but he owned, later, that he said "two" out of
civility (very good civility of a kind that is not now practised) to
a lady who chanced to be present; but that he knew well there was
but one; and he named her. From her future husband Lucy Apsley
received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and
always will be, praised: "Mr. Hutchinson, she says, "fancying
something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of
a she-wit, could scarcely believe it was a woman's."
He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasured
conscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her young
friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer
jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or
precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered
up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's
splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his "fine,
thick-set head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many
of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for
herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent of
dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor
first saw her, she was "not ugly in a careless riding-habit." As
for him, "in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she
writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this
gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to
beget love in any one." He married her as soon as she could leave
her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that "the priest
and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God
recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her."
The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy
Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our
own time uses. One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of
gesture of language; this is where she praises her husband's
"handsome management of love." {1} She thus prefaces her description
of her honoured lord: "If my treacherous memory have not lost the
dearest treasure that ever I committed to its trust -." She boasts
of her country in lofty phrase: "God hath, as it were, enclosed a
people here, out of the waste common of the world." And again of
her husband: "It will be as hard to say which was the predominant
virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He had made up
his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain
both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him to
the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of
love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but
continued governor and moderator of his soul."
She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a
kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness,
their "admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent good-nature
as would have thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less
beautifully, "It was not his time to love." In her widowhood she
remembered that she had been commanded "not to grieve at the common
rate of women"; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief: "As his
shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that
region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into
nothing."
She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and
of the cause. The fevers, "little less than plagues," that were
common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time.
An adversary is "the devil's exquisite solicitor." All Royalists
are of "the wicked faction." She suspected his warders of poisoning
Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died. The keeper had
given him, under pretence of kindness, a bottle of excellent wine,
and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months. A
poison of strange operation! "We must leave it to the great day,
when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest, whether
they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they
certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God." When he was near
death, she adds, "a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked him
how he did. He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith."
On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be
owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with
dignity. Her power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the
liberal and public interests of her life, her good breeding, her
education, her exquisite diction, are such as may well make a reader
ask how and why the literature of England declined upon the
vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became "feminine"
in the estimation of a later age; that is, in the character of women
succeeding her, and in the estimation of men succeeding her lord.
The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us marvel
at the downfall following--at Goldsmith's invention of the women of
"The Vicar or Wakefield" in one age, and at Thackeray's invention of
the women of "Esmond" in another.
Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural
beauty of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there
appears an abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world--in
her day an implicit feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness
of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the
use or delight of man's life." "He had an opportunity of conversing
with her in those pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the
spring, invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their
joys." And she describes a dream whereof the scene was in the green
fields of Southwark. What an England was hers! And what an
English! A memorable vintage of our literature and speech was
granted in her day; we owe much to those who--as she did--gathered
it in.
MRS. DINGLEY
We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} All we have to
call her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to
Stella, with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a
thousand times than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops,
Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing
it. "MD sometimes means Stella alone," says one of many editors.
"The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley,"
says another, "but it does not require to be said that it was really
for Stella's sake alone that they were penned." Not so. "MD" never
stands for Stella alone. And the editor does not yet live who shall
persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift
loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most
delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the
"she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper of
reparation to Mrs. Dingley.
No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her
honours. In love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says;
and Dingley's half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any
whole, and takes nothing from the whole of Stella's half. But the
sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He
has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her.
Sly sentimentalist--he finds her irksome. Through one of his most
modern representatives he has but lately called her a "chaperon." A
chaperon!
MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been
pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this
respect been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy
charming MD," "saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys
mine," "little mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls,"
"brats," "huzzies both," "impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses,"
"my dearest lives and delights," "dear little young women," "good
dallars, not crying dallars" (which means "girls"), "ten thousand
times dearest MD," and so forth in a hundred repetitions. They are,
every now and then, "poor MD," but obviously not because of their
own complaining. Swift called them so because they were mortal; and
he, like all great souls, lived and loved, conscious every day of
the price, which is death.
The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with
his summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately
put them asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than
foolishly play havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most
secluded thing in the world. "I am weary of friends, and
friendships are all monsters, except MD's;" "I ought to read these
letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle
little Dingley to read, for I think I mend: but methinks," he adds,
"when I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all
the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD."
Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you must know,
are not women." "God Almighty preserve you both and make us happy
together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may
never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives."
"Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has
not had one happy day since he left you, as hope saved."
With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the
bar of St. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-
day, and was "in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting." He
hid with them in the long labours of these exquisite letters every
night and morning. If no letter came, he comforted himself with
thinking that "he had it yet to be happy with." And the world has
agreed to hide under its own manifold and lachrymose blunders the
grace and singularity--the distinction--of this sweet romance.
"Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though "the many
could not miss it," but not even the few have found it.
It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella
should be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from
Swift. But day and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's
little letters; he waits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of
journal, and when it is full I will send it whether MD writes or
not; and so that will be pretty." "Naughty girls that will not
write to a body!" "I wish you were whipped for forgetting to send.
Go, be far enough, negligent baggages." "You, Mistress Stella,
shall write your share, and then comes Dingley altogether, and then
Stella a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with something
handsome and genteel, as 'your most humble cumdumble.'" But Scott
and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly sorry for Stella.
Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task:
"Here is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must
be writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle
things, and twittle twattle." "These saucy jades take up so much of
my time with writing to them in the morning." Is it not a stealthy
wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley that she should be stripped of all
these ornaments to her name and memory? When Swift tells a woman in
a letter that there he is "writing in bed, like a tiger," she should
go gay in the eyes of all generations.
They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will
not let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry
come up! Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages
(taken very seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes,
then? That would have been no ill share for Dingley. But no,
forsooth, Dingley is allowed nothing.
There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from
her. For now and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he
invariably drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the
one, and "D" or "Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to
this anywhere. He is anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and
about her health generally; whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he
thinks, will not catch the "new fever," because she is not well;
"but why should D escape it, pray?" And Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for
her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford. "I doubt, Madam
Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not so bad as
Stella; she tells thumpers." Stella is often reproved for her
spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is
a puzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourth
letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth,
goody Blunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent
slut to except a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No,
little Dingley, I am always in bed by twelve, and I take great care
of myself." "You are a pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth'
and 'fifth' in the margin, and your 'journal' and everything. O
Lord, never saw the like, we shall never have done." "I never saw
such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything." Swift is
insistently grateful for their inquiries for his health. He pauses
seriously to thank them in the midst of his prattle. Both women--
MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy that Ppt is a
Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."
But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in
his lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in
Ireland. "He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible
litter; but I say nothing; I am as tame as a clout."
Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the
ignominy, in a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to
Swift as an unclaimed wife; so far so good. But two hundred years
is long for her to have gone stripped of so radiant a glory as is
hers by right. "Better, thanks to MD's prayers," wrote the immortal
man who loved her, in a private fragment of a journal, never meant
for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor for any human eyes; and the
rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all the credit of those
prayers, and all the thanks of that pious benediction.
PRUE
Through the long history of human relations, which is the history of
the life of our race, there sounds at intervals the clamour of a
single voice which has not the tone of oratory, but asks, answers,
interrupts itself, interrupts--what else? Whatever else it
interrupts is silence; there are pauses, but no answers. There is
the jest without the laugh, and again the laugh without the jest.
And this is because the letters written by Madame de Sevigne were
all saved, and not many written to her; because Swift burnt the
letters that were the dearest things in life to him, while "MD" both
made a treasury of his; and because Prue kept all the letters which
Steele wrote to her from their marriage-day onwards, and Steele kept
none of hers.
In Swift's case the silence is full of echoes; that is to say, his
letters repeat the phrases of Stella's and Dingley's, to play with
them, flout them, and toss them back against the two silenced
voices. He never lets the word of these two women fall to the
ground; and when they have but blundered with it, and aimed it wide,
and sent it weakly, he will catch it, and play you twenty delicate
and expert juggling pranks with it as he sends it back into their
innocent faces. So we have something of MD's letters in the
"journal," and this in the only form in which we desire them, to
tell the truth; for when Swift gravely saves us some specimens of
Stella's wit, after her death, as she spoke them, and not as he
mimicked them, they make a sorry show.
In many correspondences, where one voice remains and the other is
gone, the retort is enough for two. It is as when, the other day,
the half of a pretty quarrel between nurse and child came down from
an upper floor to the ears of a mother who decided that she need not
interfere. The voice of the undaunted child it was that was audible
alone, and it replied, "I'm not; YOU are"; and anon, "I'll tell
YOURS." Nothing was really missing there.
But Steele's letters to Prue, his wife, are no such simple matter.
The turn we shall give them depends upon the unheard tone whereto
they reply. And there is room for conjecture. It has pleased the
more modern of the many spirits of banter to supply Prue's eternal
silence with the voice of a scold. It is painful to me to complain
of Thackeray; but see what a figure he makes of Prue in "Esmond."
It is, says the nineteenth-century humourist, in defence against the
pursuit of a jealous, exacting, neglected, or evaded wife that poor
Dick Steele sends those little notes of excuse: "Dearest Being on
earth, pardon me if you do not see me till eleven o'clock, having
met a schoolfellow from India"; "My dear, dear wife, I write to let
you know I do not come home to dinner, being obliged to attend some
business abroad, of which I shall give you an account (when I see
you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedient husband";
"Dear Prue, I cannot come home to dinner. I languish for your
welfare"; "I stay here in order to get Tonson to discount a bill for
me, and shall dine with him to that end"; and so forth. Once only
does Steele really afford the recent humourist the suggestion that
is apparently always so welcome. It is when he writes that he is
invited to supper to Mr. Boyle's, and adds: "Dear Prue, do not send
after me, for I shall be ridiculous." But even this is to be read
not ungracefully by a well-graced reader. Prue was young and unused
to the world. Her husband, by the way, had been already married;
and his greater age makes his constant deference all the more
charming.
But with this one exception, Steele's little notes, kept by his wife
while she lived, and treasured after her death by her daughter and
his, are no record of the watchings and dodgings of a London farce.
It is worth while to remember that Steele's dinner, which it was so
often difficult to eat at home, was a thing of midday, and therefore
of mid-business. But that is a detail. What is desirable is that a
reasonable degree of sweetness should be attributed to Prue; for it
is no more than just. To her Steele wrote in a dedication: "How
often has your tenderness removed pain from my aching head, how
often anguish from my afflicted heart. If there are such beings as
guardian angels, they are thus employed. I cannot believe one of
them to be more good in inclination, or more charming in form, than
my wife."
True, this was for the public; but not so were these daily notes;
and these carry to her his assurance that she is "the beautifullest
object in the world. I know no happiness in this life in any degree
comparable to the pleasure I have in your person and society." "But
indeed, though you have every perfection, you have an extravagant
fault, which almost frustrates the good in you to me; and that is,
that you do not love to dress, to appear, to shine out, even at my
request, and to make me proud of you, or rather to indulge the pride
I have that you are mine." The correction of the phrase is finely
considerate.
Prue cannot have been a dull wife, for this last compliment is a
reply, full of polite alacrity, to a letter from her asking for a
little flattery. How assiduously, and with what a civilized absence
of uncouthness, of shame-facedness, and of slang of the mind, with
what simplicity, alertness, and finish, does he step out at her
invitation, and perform! She wanted a compliment, though they had
been long married then, and he immediately turned it. This was no
dowdy Prue.
Her request, by the way, which he repeats in obeying it, is one of
the few instances of the other side of the correspondence--one of
the few direct echoes of that one of the two voices which is silent.
The ceremony of the letters and the deferent method of address and
signature are never dropped in this most intimate of letter-writing.
It is not a little depressing to think that in this very form and
state is supposed, by the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of
the husband of farce, the "rogue." One does not like the word. Is
it not clownish to apply it with intention to the husband of Prue?
He did not pay, he was always in difficulties, he hid from bailiffs,
he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and
things for which he had to beg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is
not a fit subject for the unhandsome incredulity which is proud to
be always at hand with an ironic commentary on such letters as his.
I have no wish to bowdlerize Sir Richard Steele, his ways and words.
He wrote to Prue at night when the burgundy had been too much for
him, and in the morning after. He announces that he is coming to
her "within a pint of wine." One of his gayest letters--a love-
letter before the marriage, addressed to "dear lovely Mrs.
Scurlock"--confesses candidly that he had been pledging her too
well: "I have been in very good company, where your health, under
the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk; so
that I may say that I am dead drunk for your sake, which is more
than I DIE FOR YOU."
Steele obviously drank burgundy wildly, as did his "good company";
as did also the admirable Addison, who was so solitary in character
and so serene in temperament. But no one has, for this fault, the
right to put a railing accusation into the mouth of Prue. Every
woman has a right to her own silence, whether her silence be hers of
set purpose or by accident. And every creature has a right to
security from the banterings peculiar to the humourists of a
succeeding age. To every century its own ironies, to every century
its own vulgarities. In Steele's time they had theirs. They might
have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would have been with a
different rallying. Writers of the nineteenth century went about to
rob her of her grace.
She kept some four hundred of these little letters of her lord's.
It was a loyal keeping. But what does Thackeray call it? His word
is "thrifty." He says: "There are four hundred letters of Dick
Steele's to his wife, which that thrifty woman preserved
accurately."
"Thrifty" is a hard word to apply to her whom Steele styled, in the
year before her death, his "charming little insolent." She was ill
in Wales, and he, at home, wept upon her pillow, and "took it to be
a sin to go to sleep." Thrifty they may call her, and accurate if
they will; but she lies in Westminster Abbey, and Steele called her
"your Prueship."
MRS. JOHNSON
This paper shall not be headed "Tetty." What may be a graceful
enough freedom with the wives of other men shall be prohibited in
the case of Johnson's, she with whose name no writer until now has
scrupled to take freedoms whereto all graces were lacking. "Tetty"
it should not be, if for no other reason, for this--that the chance
of writing "Tetty" as a title is a kind of facile literary
opportunity; it shall be denied. The Essay owes thus much amends of
deliberate care to Dr. Johnson's wife. But, indeed, the reason is
graver. What wish would he have had but that the language in the
making whereof he took no ignoble part should somewhere, at some
time, treat his only friend with ordinary honour?
Men who would trust Dr. Johnson with their orthodoxy, with their
vocabulary, and with the most intimate vanity of their human wishes,
refuse, with every mark of insolence, to trust him in regard to his
wife. On that one point no reverence is paid to him, no deference,
no respect, not so much as the credit due to our common sanity. Yet
he is not reviled on account of his Thrale--nor, indeed, is his
Thrale now seriously reproached for her Piozzi. It is true that
Macaulay, preparing himself and his reader "in his well-known way"
(as a rustic of Mr. Hardy's might have it) for the recital of her
second marriage, says that it would have been well if she had been
laid beside the kind and generous Thrale when, in the prime of her
life, he died. But Macaulay has not left us heirs to his
indignation. His well-known way was to exhaust those possibilities
of effect in which the commonplace is so rich. And he was permitted
to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by calling Mrs.
Thrale's attachment to her second husband "a degrading passion," but
by summoning a chorus of "all London" to the same purpose. She
fled, he tells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen
and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown. Thus when
Macaulay chastises Mrs. Elizabeth Porter for marrying Johnson, he is
not inconsistent, for he pursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for
her audacity in keeping gaiety and grace in her mind and manners
longer than Macaulay liked to see such ornaments added to the charm
of twice "married brows."
It is not so with succeeding essayists. One of these minor
biographers is so gentle as to call the attachment of Mrs. Thrale
and Piozzi "a mutual affection." He adds, "No one who has had some
experience of life will be inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale." But
there is no such courtesy, even from him, for Mrs. Johnson. Neither
to him nor to any other writer has it yet occurred that if England
loves her great Englishman's memory, she owes not only courtesy, but
gratitude, to the only woman who loved him while there was yet time.
Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which a
caricature has been acclaimed as the only possible portrait of Mrs.
Johnson. Garrick's school reminiscences would probably have made a
much more charming woman grotesque. Garrick is welcome to his
remembrances; we may even reserve for ourselves the liberty of
envying those who heard him. But honest laughter should not fall
into that tone of common antithesis which seems to say, "See what
are the absurdities of the great! Such is life! On this one point
we, even we, are wiser than Dr. Johnson--we know how grotesque was
his wife. We know something of the privacies of her toilet-table.
We are able to compare her figure with the figures we, unlike him in
his youth, have had the opportunity of admiring--the figures of the
well-bred and well-dressed." It is a sorry success to be able to
say so much.
But in fact such a triumph belongs to no man. When Samuel Johnson,
at twenty-six, married his wife, he gave the dull an advantage over
himself which none but the dullest will take. He chose, for love, a
woman who had the wit to admire him at first meeting, and in spite
of first sight. "That," she said to her daughter, "is the most
sensible man I ever met." He was penniless. She had what was no
mean portion for those times and those conditions; and, granted that
she was affected, and provincial, and short, and all the rest with
which she is charged, she was probably not without suitors; nor do
her defects or faults seem to have been those of an unadmired or
neglected woman. Next, let us remember what was the aspect of
Johnson's form and face, even in his twenties, and how little he
could have touched the senses of a widow fond of externals. This
one loved him, accepted him, made him happy, gave to one of the
noblest of all English hearts the one love of its sombre life. And
English literature has had no better phrase for her than Macaulay's-
-"She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour, the
addresses of a suitor who might have been her son."
Her readiness did her incalculable honour. But it is at last worth
remembering that Johnson had first done her incalculable honour. No
one has given to man or woman the right to judge as to the
worthiness of her who received it. The meanest man is generally
allowed his own counsel as to his own wife; one of the greatest of
men has been denied it. "The lover," says Macaulay, "continued to
be under the illusions of the wedding day till the lady died." What
is so graciously said is not enough. He was under those "illusions"
until he too died, when he had long passed her latest age, and was
therefore able to set right that balance of years which has so much
irritated the impertinent. Johnson passed from this life twelve
years older than she, and so for twelve years his constant eyes had
to turn backwards to dwell upon her. Time gave him a younger wife.
And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson's mouth, that mouth to which
no one else has ever attributed any beautiful sayings, the words of
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to the young husband she loved: "Older
than thou! Let me never see thou knowest it. Forget it! I will
remember it, to die before thy death."
Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson's short sight
for an added affront to Mrs. Johnson. The bridegroom was too weak
of eyesight "to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom."
Nevertheless, he saw well enough, when he was old, to distinguish
Mrs. Thrale's dresses. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it
was unsuitable, he said, for her size; a little creature should show
gay colours "like an insect." We are not called upon to admire his
wife; why, then, our taste being thus uncompromised, do we not
suffer him to admire her? It is the most gratuitous kind of
intrusion. Moreover, the biographers are eager to permit that touch
of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale, which they
officially deny in the case of Mrs. Johnson. But the difference is
all on the other side. He would not have bidden his wife dress like
an insect. Mrs. Thrale was to him "the first of womankind" only
because his wife was dead.
Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick's mimicry of Johnson's
love-making by repeating the words of Johnson himself in after-
years--"It was a love-match on both sides." And obviously he was as
strange a lover as they said. Who doubted it? Was there any other
woman in England to give such a suitor the opportunity of an eternal
love? "A life radically wretched," was the life of this master of
Letters; but she, who has received nothing in return except ignominy
from these unthankful Letters, had been alone to make it otherwise.
Well for him that he married so young as to earn the ridicule of all
the biographers in England; for by doing so he, most happily,
possessed his wife for nearly twenty years. I have called her his
only friend. So indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples,
rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of admirers, a
biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also the houseful of sad
old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection. But what
friend had he? He was "solitary" from the day she died.
Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal
phrase the word "solitary" stands. He wrote it, all Englishmen know
where. He wrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he
had been at last set free from the dependence upon hope. He hoped
no more, and he needed not to hope. The "notice" of Lord
Chesterfield had been too long deferred; it was granted at last,
when it was a flattery which Johnson's court of friends would
applaud. But not for their sake was it welcome. To no living ear
would he bring it and report it with delight.
He was indifferent, he was known. The sensitiveness to pleasure was
gone, and the sensitiveness to pain, slights, and neglect would
thenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that to
proof again. No man in England, did I say? But, indeed, that is
not so. No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have
had power to cause him pain more sensibly than the customary,
habitual, ready-made ridicule that has been cast by posterity upon
her whom he loved for twenty years, prayed for during thirty-two
years more, who satisfied one of the saddest human hearts, but to
whom the world, assiduous to admire him, hardly accords human
dignity. He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her
tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest
of English prose. What was favour to him? "I am indifferent . . .
I am known . . . I am solitary, and cannot impart it."
MADAME ROLAND
The articulate heroine has her reward of appreciation and her dues
of praise; it is her appropriate fortune to have it definitely
measured, and generally on equal terms. She takes pains to explain
herself, and is understood, and pitied, when need is, on the right
occasions. For instance, Madame Roland, a woman of merit, who knew
her "merit's name and place," addressed her memoirs, her studies in
contemporary history, her autobiography, her many speeches, and her
last phrase at the foot of the undaunting scaffold, to a great
audience of her equals (more or less) then living and to live in the
ages then to come--her equals and those she raises to her own level,
as the heroic example has authority to do.
Another woman--the Queen--suffered at that time, and suffered
without the command of language, the exactitude of phrase, the
precision of judgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense
of Innocence and Moderation oppressed in her person. These were
Madame Roland's; but the other woman, without eloquence, without
literature, and without any judicial sense of history, addresses no
mere congregation of readers. Marie Antoinette's unrecorded pangs
pass into the treasuries of the experience of the whole human
family. All that are human have some part there; genius itself may
lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe; the great poets
themselves may look into its distances and solitudes. Compassion
here has no measure and no language. Madame Roland speaks neither
to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds her
peace in the presence of each, dumb in her presence.
Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by
her own musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do
her justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice
here, justice in the world--the world that even when universal
philosophy should reign would be inevitably the world of mediocrity;
justice that would come of enlightened views; justice that would be
the lesson learnt by the nations widely educated up to some point
generally accessible; justice well within earthly sight and
competence. This confidence was also her reward. For what justice
did the Queen look? Here it is the "abyss that appeals to the
abyss."
Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into
silence, and for the record of these two poor failures of that long,
indomitable, reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which
expressed her life and mind we are debtors to her friends. She
herself has not confessed them. Nowhere else, whether in her candid
history of herself, or in her wise history of her country, or in her
judicial history of her contemporaries, whose spirit she discerned,
whose powers she appraised, whose errors she foresaw; hardly in her
thought, and never in her word, is a break to be perceived; she is
not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tells us of her
tears--the tears of youth only--her record is voluble and all
complete. For the dignity of her style, of her force, and of her
balanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the
two imperfections which, to us who would be glad to admire in
silence her heroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to
talk, are finer and more noble than her well-placed language and the
high successes of her decision and her endurance. More than this,
the two failures of this unfailing woman are two little doors opened
suddenly into those wider spaces and into that dominion of solitude
which, after all, do doubtless exist even in the most garrulous
soul. By these two outlets Manon Roland also reaches the region of
Marie Antoinette. But they befell her at the close of her life, and
they shall be named at the end of this brief study.
Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she
seeks in all times and nations because of the fact that she
manifestly suppresses in her self-descriptions any signs of a
natural gaiety. Her memoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is
only in her letters, not intended for the world, that we are aware
of the inadvertence of moments. We may overhear a laugh at times,
but not in those consciously sprightly hours that she spent with her
convent-school friend gathering fruit and counting eggs at the farm.
She pursued these country tasks not without offering herself the
cultivated congratulation of one whom cities had failed to allure,
and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity. She did not forget
the death of Socrates. Or, rather, she finds an occasion to
reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with having
omitted what another might have considered the tedious recollection
of the condemnation of Phocion. She never wearied of these
examples. But it is her inexhaustible freshness in these things
that has helped other writers of her time to weary us.
In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of all
exaggeration, which gives the reader a constant sense of security.
That virtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and
attained with exact consciousness of success. It would be almost
enough (in the perfection of her practice) to make a great writer;
even a measure of it goes far to make a fair one. Her moderation of
statement is never shaken; and if she now and then glances aside
from her direct narrative road to hazard a conjecture, the error she
may make is on the generous side of hope and faith. For instance,
she is too sure that her Friends (so she always calls the Girondins,
using no nicknames) are safe, whereas they were then all doomed; a
young man who had carried a harmless message for her--a mere
notification to her family of her arrest--receives her cheerful
commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn that for
this action he suffered on the scaffold and that his father soon
thereafter died of grief. But Madame Roland never matched such a
delirious event as this by any delirium of her own imagination. The
delirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was never
hurried from its sane self-possession, when the facts raved.
It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she
stooped to verbal violence; et encore! References to the banishment
of Aristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and
bending swords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to
be accused of violence in brandishing those weapons. Sometimes,
refuse rhetoric being all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in
honest haste, as though it were honest speech, and stands committed
to such a phrase as this: "The dregs of the nation placed such a
one at the helm of affairs."
But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear and
efficient French language. She never wrote for the love of art, but
without some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity is
somewhat altered by that importunate love of the Antique. In "Bleak
House" there is an old lady who insisted that the name "Mr.
Turveydrop," as it appeared polished on the door-plate of the
dancing master, was the name of the pretentious father and not of
the industrious son--albeit, needless to say, one name was common to
them. With equal severity I aver that when Madame Roland wrote to
her husband in the second person singular she was using the TU of
Rome and not the TU of Paris. French was indeed the language; but
had it been French in spirit she would (in spite of the growing
Republican fashion) have said VOUS to this "homme eclaire, de moeurs
pures, e qui l'on ne peut reprocher que sa grande admiration pour
les anciens aux depens des modernes qu'il meprise, et le faible de
trop aimer e parler de lui." There was no French TU in her
relations with this husband, gravely esteemed and appraised,
discreetly rebuked, the best passages of whose Ministerial reports
she wrote, and whom she observed as he slowly began to think he
himself had composed them. She loved him with a loyal, obedient,
and discriminating affection, and when she had been put to death,
he, still at liberty, fell upon his sword.
This last letter was written at a moment when, in order to prevent
the exposure of a public death, Madame Roland had intended to take
opium in the end of her cruel imprisonment. A little later she
chose that those who oppressed her country should have their way
with her to the last. But, while still intending self-destruction,
she had written to her husband: "Forgive me, respectable man, for
disposing of a life that I had consecrated to thee." In quoting
this I mean to make no too-easy effect with the word "respectable,"
grown grotesque by the tedious gibe of our own present fashion of
speech.
Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two
spaces of silence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had
heard her condemnation to death. Passing out of the court she
beckoned to her friends, and signified to them her sentence "by a
gesture." And again there was a pause, in the course of her last
days, during which her speeches had not been few, and had been
spoken with her beautiful voice unmarred; "she leant," says Riouffe,
"alone against her window, and wept there three hours."
FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD
To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour,
disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the
preoccupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard
year by year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs
alike. Not the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenanted
ways of a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place,
after failing you where you tarried; your former experiences, your
documents are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird.
The bird alights and escapes out of time to your footing.
No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of
four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the
sweet and unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with
your loving dolls." A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to
come down from the heights and play with him on the floor, but
sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none the
less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a lady frog." None ever said
their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own
kind--children--have not preceded them. No child in the past ever
found the same replies as the girl of five whose father made that
appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and
unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a
mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.
"Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy
things for you." "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely
puddin's?" Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to
her to be worth pursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't
like fat."
The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be
soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been
drowned in the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that
she should forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay
subject--her wishes. "Do you know," she said, without loss of time,
"what I should like best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a
whistle!" Her mother was so overcome by this tremendous numeral,
that she could make no offer as to the dolls. But the whistle
seemed practicable. "It is for me to whistle for cabs," said the
child, with a sudden moderation, "when I go to parties." Another
morning she came down radiant. "Did you hear a great noise in the
miggle of the night? That was me crying. I cried because I dreamt
that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his nose."
The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no,
nothing feminine--in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than
you," is the word of a very young egotist. An older child says,
"I'd better go, bettern't I, mother?" He calls a little space at
the back of a London house, "the backy-garden." A little creature
proffers almost daily the reminder at luncheon--at tart-time:
"Father, I hope you will remember that I am the favourite of the
crust." Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the naif
things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he
would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having
no footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of candle-shades.
"It's JOLLY dull without you, mother," says a little girl who--
gentlest of the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she
makes no secret. But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her
feats of metathesis, about which she has doubts and which are
involuntary: the "stand-wash," the "sweeping-crosser," the "sewing
chamine." Genoese peasants have the same prank when they try to
speak Italian.
Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they
should by any means have an impression of the country or the sea
annually. A London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows
it with her pointing finger, and names it "bird." Her brother, who
wants to play with a bronze Japanese lobster, asks "Will you please
let me have that tiger?"
At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the
most touching kind of newness. Thus, a child of three asks you to
save him. How moving a word, and how freshly said! He had heard of
the "saving" of other things of interest--especially chocolate
creams taken for safe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me
to-day? Nurse is going out, will you save me, mother?" The same
little variant upon common use is in another child's courteous reply
to a summons to help in the arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite
at your ease."
A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record,
was taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different
standing from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a
Saturday Reviewer. As he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the
town unknown to her, she noted with interest the shops of the
neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the
fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and that is
his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, with even
heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of
confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I
suppose, is where he buys his sugar pigs."
In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is
intent upon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector. We
have all heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs,
of collecting cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a
joy that costs her nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper
names over all shop-windows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers.
"I began three weeks ago next Monday, mother," she says with
precision, "and I have got thirty-nine." "Thirty-nine what?"
"Smiths."
The mere gathering of children's language would be much like
collecting together a handful of flowers that should be all unique,
single of their kind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and
that is the rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who
have reported them. They do not, for example, say "me is"; their
natural reply to "are you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing
sweetly and neatly, will have nothing but the nominative pronoun.
"Lift I up and let I see it raining," she bids; and told that it
does not rain resumes, "Lift I up and let I see it not raining."
An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered
for her by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest,
and with some resentment. At the same time it was evident that she
took no pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her
friend. He had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of
Heaven, and the decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes,
and of her hair--"a brown tress." She had gravely heard the words
as "a brown dress," and she silently bore the poet a grudge for
having been the accessory of Providence in the mandate that she
should wear the loathed corduroy. The unpractised ear played
another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase for snubbing any
anecdote that sounded improbable. "That," she said, more or less
after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."
The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the
years of mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a
current word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one,
so as to save the interruption of a pause for search. I have
certainly detected, in children old enough to show their motives, a
conviction that a word of their own making is as good a
communication as another, and as intelligible. There is even a
general implicit conviction among them that the grown-up people,
too, make words by the wayside as occasion befalls. How otherwise
should words be so numerous that every day brings forward some
hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know how
irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he
thinks to belong to the common world.
There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out
of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so
much confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple
adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent
anything strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The
child trusts genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by
his first sight of sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and
called them, without allowing himself to be checked for the trifle
of a name, "summersets." This was simple and unexpected; so was the
comment of a sister a very little older. "Why does he call those
flowers summersets?" their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly
brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, "because they
are so big." There seemed to be no further question possible after
an explanation that was presented thus charged with meaning.
To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was,
somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases
hazarded to express a meaning well realized--a personal matter.
Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just
before lunch, the child averred, "I took them just to appetize my
hunger." As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an
attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters
had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school.
"I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed; "but I generally
speculate outside."
Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with
something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation.
Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer
passages. But sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite
intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to
a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was
inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. The
child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony.
There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at
home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen: --"My
dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article,
if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a
unletterary article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will
not write any more such unconventionan trash."
This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger
sister, and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew
just how old she is, mother, then they would know she is onward.
They can see she is pretty, but they can't know she is such a onward
baby."
Thus speak the naturally unreluclant; but there are other children
who in time betray a little consciousness and a slight mefiance as
to where the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them,
obscure. These children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-
checking in their talk, but they are now and then to be heard
slurring a word of which they do not feel too sure. A little girl
whose sensitiveness was barely enough to cause her to stop to choose
between two words, was wont to bring a cup of tea to the writing-
table of her mother, who had often feigned indignation at the
weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the infusion." "I'm
afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and then, in a
half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was not told,
and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cup
left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"
thenceforward.
THE CHILD OF TUMULT
A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute a
hand that the petals of the flower never afterwards lose the
creases, is a type of the child. Nothing but the unfolding, which
is as yet in the non-existing future, can explain the manner of the
close folding of character. In both flower and child it looks much
as though the process had been the reverse of what it was--as though
a finished and open thing had been folded up into the bud--so
plainly and certainly is the future implied, and the intention of
compressing and folding-close made manifest.
With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of
impulses called "naughtiness" is perfectly perceptible--it would
seem heartless to say how soon. The naughty child (who is often an
angel of tenderness and charm, affectionate beyond the capacity of
his fellows, and a very ascetic of penitence when the time comes)
opens early his brief campaigns and raises the standard of revolt as
soon as he is capable of the desperate joys of disobedience.
But even the naughty child is an individual, and must not be treated
in the mass. He is numerous indeed, but not general, and to
describe him you must take the unit, with all his incidents and his
organic qualities as they are. Take then, for instance, one naughty
child in the reality of his life. He is but six years old, slender
and masculine, and not wronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate
dress. His face is delicate and too often haggard with tears of
penitence that Justice herself would be glad to spare him. Some
beauty he has, and his mouth especially is so lovely as to seem not
only angelic but itself an angel. He has absolutely no self-control
and his passions find him without defence. They come upon him in
the midst of his usual brilliant gaiety and cut short the frolic
comedy of his fine spirits.
Then for a wild hour he is the enemy of the laws. If you imprison
him, you may hear his resounding voice as he takes a running kick at
the door, shouting his justification in unconquerable rage. "I'm
good now!" is made as emphatic as a shot by the blow of his heel
upon the panel. But if the moment of forgiveness is deferred, in
the hope of a more promising repentance, it is only too likely that
he will betake himself to a hostile silence and use all the revenge
yet known to his imagination. "Darling mother, open the door!"
cries his touching voice at last; but if the answer should be "I
must leave you for a short time, for punishment," the storm suddenly
thunders again. "There (crash!) I have broken a plate, and I'm glad
it is broken into such little pieces that you can't mend it. I'm
going to break the 'lectric light." When things are at this pass
there is one way, and only one, to bring the child to an
overwhelming change of mind; but it is a way that would be cruel,
used more than twice or thrice in his whole career of tempest and
defiance. This is to let him see that his mother is troubled. "Oh,
don't cry! Oh, don't be sad!" he roars, unable still to deal with
his own passionate anger, which is still dealing with him. With his
kicks of rage he suddenly mingles a dance of apprehension lest his
mother should have tears in her eyes. Even while he is still
explicitly impenitent and defiant he tries to pull her round to the
light that he may see her face. It is but a moment before the other
passion of remorse comes to make havoc of the helpless child, and
the first passion of anger is quelled outright.
Only to a trivial eye is there nothing tragic in the sight of these
great passions within the small frame, the small will, and, in a
word, the small nature. When a large and sombre fate befalls a
little nature, and the stage is too narrow for the action of a
tragedy, the disproportion has sometimes made a mute and unexpressed
history of actual life or sometimes a famous book; it is the
manifest core of George Eliot's story of Adam Bede, where the
suffering of Hetty is, as it were, the eye of the storm. All is
expressive around her, but she is hardly articulate; the book is
full of words--preachings, speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, but a
space of silence remains about her in the midst of the story. And
the disproportion of passion--the inner disproportion--is at least
as tragic as that disproportion of fate and action; it is less
intelligible, and leads into the intricacies of nature which are
more difficult than the turn of events.
It seems, then, that this passionate play is acted within the narrow
limits of a child's nature far oftener than in those of an adult and
finally formed nature. And this, evidently, because there is
unequal force at work within a child, unequal growth and a jostling
of powers and energies that are hurrying to their development and
pressing for exercise and life. It is this helpless inequality--
this untimeliness--that makes the guileless comedy mingling with the
tragedies of a poor child's day. He knows thus much--that life is
troubled around him and that the fates are strong. He implicitly
confesses "the strong hours" of antique song. This same boy--the
tempestuous child of passion and revolt--went out with quiet
cheerfulness for a walk lately, saying as his cap was put on, "Now,
mother, you are going to have a little peace." This way of
accepting his own conditions is shared by a sister, a very little
older, who, being of an equal and gentle temper, indisposed to
violence of every kind and tender to all without disquiet, observes
the boy's brief frenzies as a citizen observes the climate. She
knows the signs quite well and can at any time give the explanation
of some particular outburst, but without any attempt to go in search
of further or more original causes. Still less is she moved by the
virtuous indignation that is the least charming of the ways of some
little girls. Elle ne fait que constater. Her equanimity has never
been overset by the wildest of his moments, and she has witnessed
them all. It is needless to say that she is not frightened by his
drama, for Nature takes care that her young creatures shall not be
injured by sympathies. Nature encloses them in the innocent
indifference that preserves their brains from the more harassing
kinds of distress.
Even the very frenzy of rage does not long dim or depress the boy.
It is his repentance that makes him pale, and Nature here has been
rather forced, perhaps--with no very good result. Often must a
mother wish that she might for a few years govern her child (as far
as he is governable) by the lowest motives--trivial punishments and
paltry rewards--rather than by any kind of appeal to his
sensibilities. She would wish to keep the words "right" and "wrong"
away from his childish ears, but in this she is not seconded by her
lieutenants. The child himself is quite willing to close with her
plans, in so far as he is able, and is reasonably interested in the
results of her experiments. He wishes her attempts in his regard to
have a fair chance. "Let's hope I'll be good all to-morrow," he
says with the peculiar cheerfulness of his ordinary voice. "I do
hope so, old man." "Then I'll get my penny. Mother, I was only
naughty once yesterday; if I have only one naughtiness to-morrow,
will you give me a halfpenny?" "No reward except for real goodness
all day long." "All right."
It is only too probable that this system (adopted only after the
failure of other ways of reform) will be greatly disapproved as one
of bribery. It may, however, be curiously inquired whether all
kinds of reward might not equally be burlesqued by that word, and
whether any government, spiritual or civil, has ever even professed
to deny rewards. Moreover, those who would not give a child a penny
for being good will not hesitate to fine him a penny for being
naughty, and rewards and punishments must stand or fall together.
The more logical objection will be that goodness is ideally the
normal condition, and that it should have, therefore, no explicit
extraordinary result, whereas naughtiness, being abnormal, should
have a visible and unusual sequel. To this the rewarding mother may
reply that it is not reasonable to take "goodness" in a little child
of strong passions as the normal condition. The natural thing for
him is to give full sway to impulses that are so violent as to
overbear his powers.
But, after all, the controversy returns to the point of practice.
What is the thought, or threat, or promise that will stimulate the
weak will of the child, in the moment of rage and anger, to make a
sufficient resistance? If the will were naturally as well developed
as the passions, the stand would be soon made and soon successful;
but as it is there must needs be a bracing by the suggestion of joy
or fear. Let, then, the stimulus be of a mild and strong kind at
once, and mingled with the thought of distant pleasure. To meet the
suffering of rage and frenzy by the suffering of fear is assuredly
to make of the little unquiet mind a battle-place of feelings too
hurtfully tragic. The penny is mild and strong at once, with its
still distant but certain joys of purchase; the promise and hope
break the mood of misery, and the will takes heart to resist and
conquer.
It is only in the lesser naughtiness that he is master of himself.
The lesser the evil fit the more deliberate. So that his mother,
knowing herself to be not greatly feared, once tried to mimic the
father's voice with a menacing, "What's that noise?" The child was
persistently crying and roaring on an upper floor, in contumacy
against his French nurse, when the baritone and threatening question
was sent pealing up the stairs. The child was heard to pause and
listen and then to say to his nurse, "Ce n'est pas Monsieur; c'est
Madame," and then, without further loss of time, to resume the
interrupted clamours.
Obviously, with a little creature of six years, there are two things
mainly to be done--to keep the delicate brain from the evil of the
present excitement, especially the excitement of painful feeling,
and to break the habit of passion. Now that we know how certainly
the special cells of the brain which are locally affected by pain
and anger become hypertrophied by so much use, and all too ready for
use in the future at the slightest stimulus, we can no longer slight
the importance of habit. Any means, then, that can succeed in
separating a little child from the habit of anger does fruitful work
for him in the helpless time of his childhood. The work is not
easy, but a little thought should make it easy for the elders to
avoid the provocation which they--who should ward off provocations--
are apt to bring about by sheer carelessness. It is only in
childhood that our race knows such physical abandonment to sorrow
and tears, as a child's despair; and the theatre with us must needs
copy childhood if it would catch the note and action of a creature
without hope.
THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT
There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the
flight of time; it does so move, and yet withstands time's movement.
It is full of pauses that are due to the energy of change, has
bounds and rebounds, and when it is most active then it is longest.
It is not long with languor. It has room for remoteness, and
leisure for oblivion. It takes great excursions against time, and
travels so as to enlarge its hours. This certain year is any one of
the early years of fully conscious life, and therefore it is of all
the dates. The child of Tumult has been living amply and
changefully through such a year--his eighth. It is difficult to
believe that his is a year of the self-same date as that of the
adult, the men who do not breast their days.
For them is the inelastic, or but slightly elastic, movement of
things. Month matched with month shows a fairly equal length. Men
and women never travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a
distant light. There is recognition and familiarity between their
seasons. But the Child of Tumult has infinite prospects in his
year. Forgetfulness and surprise set his east and his west at
immeasurable distance. His Lethe runs in the cheerful sun. You
look on your own little adult year, and in imagination enlarge it,
because you know it to be the contemporary of his. Even she who is
quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face a strange and great
extent of a few years of her life still to come--his years, the
years she is to live at his side.
Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy's life,
not so much by slow degrees as by sudden and fitful accessions. His
speech is yet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes
of pleasure, "a little duck what can walk"; but with a beautifully
clear accent he greets his mother with the colloquial question,
"Well, darling, do you know the latest?" "The WHAT?" "The latest:
do you know the latest?" And then he tells his news, generally, it
must be owned, with some reference to his own wrongs. On another
occasion the unexpected little phrase was varied; the news of the
war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the side he favoured
had fallen. The child then came to his mother's room with the
question: "Have you heard the saddest?" Moreover the "saddest"
caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him
during the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection.
From such great causes arise such little things! Some of his grief
was for the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his
brother, whose sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps
did not spare his sensibilities.
The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growing
fewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in their
painfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete
capitulation of all the childish powers to the overwhelming
compulsion of anger. This is not temptation; the word is too weak
for the assault of a child's passion upon his will. That little
will is taken captive entirely, and before the child was seven he
knew that it was so. Such a consciousness leaves all babyhood
behind and condemns the child to suffer. For a certain passage of
his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, nor strong
enough to resist it, as he will be. The time of the subsiding of
the tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human
life. Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so
that the child who had been abandoned to naughtiness with all his
will in an entire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and
who had later undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity
suddenly turned again, "like rivers in the south." "Forget it," he
had wept, in a kind of extremity of remorse; "forget it, darling,
and don't, don't be sad;" and it is he, happily, who forgets. The
wasted look of his pale face is effaced by the touch of a single
cheerful thought, and five short minutes can restore the ruin, as
though a broken little German town should in the twinkling of an eye
be restored as no architect could restore it--should be made fresh,
strong, and tight again, looking like a full box of toys, as a town
was wont to look in the new days of old.
When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows the
growth of this tardy reason that--quickened--is hereafter to do so
much for his peace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration.
Denied a second handful of strawberries, and seeing quite clearly
that the denial was enforced reluctantly, he makes haste to reply,
"It doesn't matter, darling." At any sudden noise in the house his
beautiful voice, with all its little difficulties of pronunciation,
is heard with the sedulous reassurance: "It's all right, mother,
nobody hurted ourselves!" He is not surprised so as to forget this
gentle little duty, which was never required of him, but is of his
own devising.
According to the opinion of his dear and admired American friend, he
says all these things, good and evil, with an English accent; and at
the American play his English accent was irrepressible. "It's too
comic; no, it's too comic," he called in his enjoyment; being the
only perfectly fearless child in the world, he will not consent to
the conventional shyness in public, whether he be the member of an
audience or of a congregation, but makes himself perceptible. And
even when he has a desperate thing to say, in the moment of absolute
revolt--such a thing as "I CAN'T like you, mother," which anon he
will recant with convulsions of distress--he has to "speak the thing
he will," and when he recants it is not for fear.
If such a child could be ruled (or approximately ruled, for
inquisitorial government could hardly be so much as attempted) by
some small means adapted to his size and to his physical aspect, it
would be well for his health, but that seems at times impossible.
By no effort can his elders altogether succeed in keeping tragedy
out of the life that is so unready for it. Against great emotions
no one can defend him by any forethought. He is their subject; and
to see him thus devoted and thus wrung, thus wrecked by tempests
inwardly, so that you feel grief has him actually by the heart,
recalls the reluctance--the question--wherewith you perceive the
interior grief of poetry or of a devout life. Cannot the Muse,
cannot the Saint, you ask, live with something less than this? If
this is the truer life, it seems hardly supportable. In like manner
it should be possible for a child of seven to come through his
childhood with griefs that should not so closely involve him, but
should deal with the easier sentiments.
Despite all his simplicity, the child has (by way of inheritance,
for he has never heard them) the self-excusing fictions of our race.
Accused of certain acts of violence, and unable to rebut the charge
with any effect, he flies to the old convention: "I didn't know
what I was doing," he avers, using a great deal of gesticulation to
express the temporary distraction of his mind. "Darling, after
nurse slapped me as hard as she could, I didn't know what I was
doing, so I suppose I pushed her with my foot." His mother knows as
well as does Tolstoi that men and children know what they are doing,
and are the more intently aware as the stress of feeling makes the
moments more tense; and she will not admit a plea which her child
might have learned from the undramatic authors he has never read.
Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from taking
fright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult has
only to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to
give the shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy,
and change his passion at its height.
THE UNREADY
It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are,
on the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until
advancing age teaches them agility. This is not lack of
sensitiveness, but mere length of process. For instance, a child
nearly newly born is cruelly startled by a sudden crash in the room-
-a child who has never learnt to fear, and is merely overcome by the
shock of sound; nevertheless, that shock of sound does not reach the
conscious hearing or the nerves but after some moments, nor before
some moments more is the sense of the shock expressed. The sound
travels to the remoteness and seclusion of the child's
consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners half a mile
away.
So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and
eager with us of later age that no point of time is lost in its
touches--direct as the unintercepted message of great and candid
eyes, unhampered by trivialities; even so immediate is the
communication of pain. But you could count five between the prick
of a surgeon's instrument upon a baby's arm and the little whimper
that answers it. The child is then too young, also, to refer the
feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it. Even when pain has
groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bring local tidings
thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree towards his
arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination. He looks
in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.
See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older child
trudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer. It is the greatest
failure to take these little gobe-mouches to a good conjurer. His
successes leave them cold, for they had not yet understood what it
was the good man meant to surprise them withal. The amateur it is
who really astonishes them. They cannot come up even with your
amateur beginner, performing at close quarters; whereas the master
of his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the
lagging senses of his honest audience.
You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under
his ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in its
place and off again ten times before the little breathless boy has
begun to perceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched.
Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habit
of awaiting, should surround themselves with pauses of patience.
The simple little processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a
common sentence are too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot
use two pronouns but they must confuse them. I never found that a
young child--one of something under nine years--was able to say, "I
send them my love" at the first attempt. It will be "I send me my
love," "I send them their love," "They send me my love"; not, of
course, through any confusion of understanding, but because of the
tardy setting of words in order with the thoughts. The child
visibly grapples with the difficulty, and is beaten.
It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to like
twice-told tales and foregone conclusions in their games. They are
not eager, for a year or two yet to come, for surprises. If you
hide and they cannot see you hiding, their joy in finding you is
comparatively small; but let them know perfectly well what cupboard
you are in, and they will find you with shouts of discovery. The
better the hiding-place is understood between you the more lively
the drama. They make a convention of art for their play. The
younger the children the more dramatic; and when the house is filled
with outcries of laughter from the breathless breast of a child, it
is that he is pretending to be surprised at finding his mother where
he bade her pretend to hide. This is the comedy that never tires.
Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how he tries to
put a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for, if
not, he will find that children also have a manner of substitution,
and that they will put half-hearted laughter in the place of their
natural impetuous clamours. It is certain that very young children
like to play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short
game.
There is something so purely childlike in the delays of a child that
any exercise asking for the swift apprehension of later life, for
the flashes of understanding and action, from the mind and members
of childhood, is no pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as
experts understand it, and even as the moderately-trained may play
it, claims all the immediate action, the instantaneousness, most
unnatural to childhood. There may possibly be feats of skill to
which young children could be trained without this specific violence
directed upon the thing characteristic of their age--their
unreadiness--but virtuosity at the piano cannot be one of them. It
is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children, or anything
that is theirs, conquered and beaten; but their poor little slowness
is so distinctively their own, and must needs be physiologically so
proper to their years, so much a natural condition of the age of
their brain, that of all childishnesses it is the one that the world
should have the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and
the intelligence to understand.
It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but a
very little attention would prove how many apparent disconnexions
there are between the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not
the brain that is quick. If, on a voyage in space, electricity
takes thus much time, and light thus much, and sound thus much,
there is one little jogging traveller that would arrive after the
others had forgotten their journey, and this is the perception of a
child. Surely our own memories might serve to remind us how in our
childhood we inevitably missed the principal point in any procession
or pageant intended by our elders to furnish us with a historical
remembrance for the future. It was not our mere vagueness of
understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses, of our reply
to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the important
moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate from
theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything
else of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic
answers from our parents' eyes, left us stragglers. We fell out of
all ranks. Among the sights proposed for our instruction, that
which befitted us best was an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure.
In good time we found the moon in the sky, in good time the eclipse
set in and made reasonable progress; we kept up with everything.
It is too often required of children that they should adjust
themselves to the world, practised and alert. But it would be more
to the purpose that the world should adjust itself to children in
all its dealings with them. Those who run and keep together have to
run at the pace of the tardiest. But we are apt to command instant
obedience, stripped of the little pauses that a child, while very
young, cannot act without. It is not a child of ten or twelve that
needs them so; it is the young creature who has but lately ceased to
be a baby, slow to be startled.
We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of
senses and of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for
receiving a great shock from a noise and this perception of the
shock after two or three appreciable moments--if we would know
anything of the moments of a baby
Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long
for children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is
too short for them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot,
without an unnatural effort, have any perception of it. When
children do not see the jokes of the elderly, and disappoint
expectation in other ways, only less intimate, the reason is almost
always there. The child cannot turn in mid-career; he goes fast,
but the impetus took place moments ago.
THAT PRETTY PERSON
During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word,
one significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts.
This is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the
value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the
very wayfaring of progress. With this is a resignation to change,
and something more than resignation--a delight in those qualities
that could not be but for their transitoriness.
What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the
world, for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with,
and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now
hold, perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held
it high, we should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned
with its own conditions.
But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a
patient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred
years ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the
full stature of body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future
hunting. If her song is not restless, it is because she has a sense
of the results of time, and has submitted her heart to experience.
Childhood is a time of danger; "Would it were done." But,
meanwhile, the right thing is to put it to sleep and guard its
slumbers. It will pass. She sings prophecies to the child of his
hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she spins, and a
song about bread as she grinds corn. She bids good speed.
John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child--
"that pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was
chiefly precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of
the man he never lived to be. The father, writing with tears when
the boy was dead, says of him: "At two and a half years of age he
pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly
read in these three languages." As he lived precisely five years,
all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He
got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French
primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into
Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the
government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and
many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in
Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a strong passion for Greek."
Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man
is not to be too much believed when he is describing what he
admires; it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a
sign of those hasty times. All being favourable, the child of
Evelyn's studious home would have done all these things in the
course of nature within a few years. It was the fact that he did
them out of the course of nature that was, to Evelyn, so exquisite.
The course of nature had not any beauty in his eyes. It might be
borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not admired for the
majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mourns with him
"the strangely hopeful child," who--without Comenius's "Janua" and
without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, an
appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and
closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.
Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too
flattering to the estate of man. They thought their little boy
strangely hopeful because he was so quick on his way to be something
else. They lost the timely perfection the while they were so intent
upon their hopes. And yet it is our own modern age that is charged
with haste!
It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn,
must rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not
slighting it, or bidding it hasten its work, not yet hailing it,
with Faust, "Stay, thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made
gay and visible, and the world has lately been converted to change.
Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it
in the act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every
passage is a goal, and every goal a passage. The hours are equal;
but some of them wear apparent wings.
Tout passe. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the
fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and
contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this
question most arbitrarily as to the life of man.
All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste,
this suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time
of fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because
they had the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of
this unpausing life.
Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight
years old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause
to be proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in
idleness by an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated
into any rudiments" till he was four years of age. He seems even to
have been a youth of eight before Latin was seriously begun; but
this fact he is evidently, in after years, with a total lack of a
sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges. It is
difficult to imagine what childhood must have been when nobody,
looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything that was proper to
five years old was defect. A strange good conceit of themselves and
of their own ages had those fathers.
They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has
nothing to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in
it. Twice are children not his own mentioned in his diary. Once he
goes to the wedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing,
but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another time he
stands by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than nine
years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation "with
extraordinary patience." "The use I made of it was to give Almighty
God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this deplorable
infirmitie." This is what he says.
See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there
were in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon
being children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal.
Art, for example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and
there were the prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who
is hauling up his little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion
of St. Jerome" might be called Tommy. But there were no "little
radiant girls." Now and then an "Education of the Virgin" is the
exception, and then it is always a matter of sewing and reading. As
for the little girl saints, even when they were so young that their
hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped through their fetters, they
are always recorded as refusing importunate suitors, which seems
necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval mind, but mars
them for ours.
So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most
admirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in
the Court of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa
"who passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as
the least stain or tincture in her christall." She held her state
with men and maids for her servants, guided herself by most exact
rules, such as that of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent
example and instruction to the other maids of honour, was "severely
careful how she might give the least countenance to that liberty
which the gallants there did usually assume," refused the addresses
of the "greatest persons," and was as famous for her beauty as for
her wit. One would like to forget the age at which she did these
things. When she began her service she was eleven. When she was
making her rule never to speak to the King she was not thirteen.
Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
heroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April
into May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if
they shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The
particular year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as
who should say a fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at
two years old, and ellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as
Keats a poet would not have patience with the process of the
seasons, but boasted of untimely flowers. The "musk-rose" is never
in fact the child of mid-May, as he has it.
The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear
of losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper
with the bloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen
in the "Spectator" has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the
last six years." The famous letter describing the figure, the
dance, the wit, the stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is
supposed to be written by a girl of thirteen, "willing to settle in
the world as soon as she can." She adds, "I have a good portion
which they cannot hinder me of." This correspondent is one of "the
women who seldom ask advice before they have bought their wedding
clothes." There was no sense of childhood in an age that could
think this an opportune pleasantry.
But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a
later century--an age that has found all things to be on a journey,
and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and
has its appointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather
than a sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of
children to seem, at last, something else than a defect.
UNDER THE EARLY STARS
Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at
random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization
is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of
dusk. Summer dusk, especially, is the frolic moment for children,
baffle them how you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all
day, intent upon all kinds of close industries, breathing hard over
choppings and poundings. But when late twilight comes, there comes
also the punctual wildness. The children will run and pursue, and
laugh for the mere movement--it does so jolt their spirits.
What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory
dark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths
and crickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all
fours. The children lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the
mimicry of hunting.
The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and a
rebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to go
home. But, with more or less of life and fire, the children strike
some blow for liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the
ineffectual child, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something,
something is done for freedom under the early stars.
This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict
with the weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy
of men should be at odds with the weariness of children, which
happens at some time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in
the jaunts of the poor.
Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved
by children. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to
beguile the time. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was
persuading another to play. "Oh come," she said, "and play with me
at new maid."
The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable
hour. It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits. The
habit of prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of
the fixity of some customs in mankind. But if the inquirers who
appeal to that beginning remembered better their own infancy, they
would seek no further. See the habits in falling to sleep which
have children in their thralldom. Try to overcome them in any
child, and his own conviction of their high antiquity weakens your
hand.
Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of
mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby. The French
sleep-song is the most romantic. There is in it such a sound of
history as must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep,
with a sense of the incalculable; and the songs themselves are old.
"Le Bon Roi Dagobert" has been sung over French cradles since the
legend was fresh. The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune
and the verse that she herself slept to when a child. The gaiety of
the thirteenth century, in "Le Pont d'Avignon," is put mysteriously
to sleep, away in the tete e tete of child and nurse, in a thousand
little sequestered rooms at night. "Malbrook" would be
comparatively modern, were not all things that are sung to a
drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham.
If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some
of them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate
races that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to
the white child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep
in the tropical night. His closing eyes are filled with alien
images.
THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME
He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become
conscious of something more than a change in his sense of the
present and in his apprehension of the future. He must be aware of
no less a thing than the destruction of the past. Its events and
empires stand where they did, and the mere relation of time is as it
was. But that which has fallen together, has fallen in, has fallen
close, and lies in a little heap, is the past itself--time--the fact
of antiquity.
He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are
no more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit
of measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing
of paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He
had thought them to be wide.
For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the
states, the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the
measure which he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years.
His first ten years had given him the illusion of a most august
scale and measure. It was then that he conceived Antiquity. But
now! Is it to a decade of ten such little years as these now in his
hand--ten of his mature years--that men give the dignity of a
century? They call it an age; but what if life shows now so small
that the word age has lost its gravity?
In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a
most noble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He
attributes an overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers
distance. He, and he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his.
He creates more than mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting
into the extremities of the past. He assigns the Parthenon to a
hill of ages, and the temples of Upper Egypt to sidereal time.
If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having
conceived old time, communicates a remembrance at least of the
mystery to the mind of the man. The man perceives at last all the
illusion, but he cannot forget what was his conviction when he was a
child. He had once a persuasion of Antiquity. And this is not for
nothing. The enormous undeception that comes upon him still leaves
spaces in his mind.
But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive
shocks. It is as though one strained level eyes towards the
horizon, and then were bidden to shorten his sight and to close his
search within a poor half acre before his face. Now, it is that he
suddenly perceives the hitherto remote, remote youth of his own
parents to have been something familiarly near, so measured by his
new standard; again, it is the coming of Attila that is displaced.
Those ten last years of his have corrected the world. There needs
no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all the
imaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip.
To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to hold
thenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But, it may be said, the
mystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudges
through our own world--our contemporary world--is not very
mysterious. We perceive its pace; it is a jog-trot. Even so, we
now consider, jolted the changes of the past, with the same hurry.
The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scans
through a shortened avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels that
he was so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts,
for instance, had been children, it would have been well enough for
the child to measure their remoteness and their acts with his own
magnificent measure. But they were only men and demi-gods. Thus
they belong to him as he is now--a man; and not to him as he was
once--a child. It was quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten
years' rule along the path from our time to theirs; that path must
be skipped by the nimble yard in the man's present possession.
Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject for the boy.
What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of such
little times? Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the
illusion of ages, does actually prove it true. Childhood is itself
Antiquity--to every man his only Antiquity. The recollection of
childhood cannot make Abraham old again in the mind of a man of
thirty-five; but the beginning of every life is older than Abraham.
THERE is the abyss of time. Let a man turn to his own childhood--no
further--if he would renew his sense of remoteness, and of the
mystery of change.
For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it
rushes; but it has enormous space for its flight. The child has an
apprehension not only of things far off, but of things far apart; an
illusive apprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real
apprehension when he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If
there is no historical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the
renewed and unnumbered Antiquity for all mankind.
And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems to
partake. Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that is
why it seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at
that present age, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would
be nowhere. But he built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every
one was seven years old. It is by good fortune that "ancient"
history is taught in the only ancient days. So, for a time, the
world is magical.
Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learning
something of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges
the sense of time for all mankind. For even after the great
illusion is over and history is re-measured, and all fancy and
flight caught back and chastised, the enlarged sense remains
enlarged. The man remains capable of great spaces of time. He will
not find them in Egypt, it is true, but he finds them within, he
contains them, he is aware of them. History has fallen together,
but childhood surrounds and encompasses history, stretches beyond
and passes on the road to eternity.
He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years
that are the treasury of preceptions--the first. The great
disillusion shall never shorten those years, nor set nearer together
the days that made them. "Far apart," I have said, and that "far
apart" is wonderful. The past of childhood is not single, is not
motionless, nor fixed in one point; it has summits a world away one
from the other. Year from year differs as the antiquity of Mexico
from the antiquity of Chaldea. And the man of thirty-five knows for
ever afterwards what is flight, even though he finds no great
historic distances to prove his wings by.
There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious
childhood, which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy.
Many other moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten
years. Hours of weariness are long--not with a mysterious length,
but with a mere length of protraction, so that the things called
minutes and half-hours by the elderly may be something else to their
apparent contemporaries, the children. The ancient moment is not
merely one of these--it is a space not of long, but of immeasurable,
time. It is the moment of going to sleep. The man knows that
borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has long ceased to find
antiquity there. It has become a common enough margin of dreams to
him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. He knows that he has
a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at those hours, but he
is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child who passes
with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he meets
there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable time.
His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She
sings absolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may
mean to waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell
of the beginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of
them all his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech
can well express.
Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is
beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that
the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to
throw it further back--it is already so far. That is, it looks as
remote to the memory of a man of thirty as to that of a man of
seventy. What are a mere forty years of added later life in the
contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!
Footnotes:
{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper,
and the ascription of a Stevenson-like character to the quoted
phrase, a letter of Stevenson's was published, and proved that he
had read Lucy Hutchinson's writings, and that he did not love her.
"I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of course, I
admire, etc. . . I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and
beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. . . The way in which she
talks of herself makes one's blood run cold." He was young at that
time of writing, and perhaps hardly aware of the lesson in English
he had taken from her. We know that he never wasted the opportunity
for such a lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer
one to him in right seventeenth-century diction is established--it
is not too bold to say so--by my recognition of his style in her
own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first
in his voice, recognized in hers.
{2} I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.
End of the Project Gutenberg eText Essays by Alice Meynell