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