



Transcribed from the 1893 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays


Contents

The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised
A Remembrance
The Sun
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos
The Point of Honour
Composure
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Domus Angusta
Rejection
The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes
Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature




THE RHYTHM OF LIFE


If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods
towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards
recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be
intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not
passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to
leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not
remain--it returns.  Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise.  If we had made
a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and
would have had an expectation instead of a discovery.  No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there
have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.  But
Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In
his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst thou more than these? for
out of these were all things made'--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the
soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight.  And 'rarely, rarely
comest thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight.  Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus
compelled.  _That_ flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or
hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the _Imitation_ should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess
at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls were in close touch with
the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no
infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from
them the knowledge of recurrences.  _Eppur si muove_.  They knew that
presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon
its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.  They knew
that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards
departure.  'O wind,' cried Shelley, in autumn,

   'O wind,
   If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and
retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To live in constant efforts
after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production,
or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live
without either rest or full activity.  The souls of certain of the
saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the most
complete subjection to the law of periodicity.  Ecstasy and desolation
visited them by seasons.  They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the
interior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world.  They
rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their
hearts.  Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the
course of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.
And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour.  Few
poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse.  For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon.  For the periodicity of the sun
is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,
perpetually influential.  On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,
mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands
where rain is rare.  More than any other companion of earth is she the
Measurer.  Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name.  Her
metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence.  Constancy in
approach and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies.  Juliet
will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did
not live to know that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which
are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover
vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.
For man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of
periodicity.  The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns
it late.  And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative
experience upon which cumulative evidence is lacking.  It is in the after-
part of each life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away with
the hope or fear of continuance.  That young sorrow comes so near to
despair is a result of this young ignorance.  So is the early hope of
great achievement.  Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one
who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals
between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses
of sleep.  And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of
the inevitable and unfailing refreshment.  It would be for their peace to
learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more
subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than
the phrase was meant to contain.  Their joy is flying away from them on
its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise,
they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the
law that commands all things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs
of maternity.




DECIVILISED


The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparing
him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of
barbarism.  Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he faces
you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his
own youthfulness of race.  He writes, and recites, poems about ranches
and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature
and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society.
He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own
artless slang.  But his colonialism is only provincialism very
articulate.  The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale;
the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the
uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising.  American fancy
played long this pattering part of youth.  The New-Englander hastened to
assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and
feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you
had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat.  And
when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American was ill-
content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some delicate
successes in continuing something of the literature of England, something
of the art of France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulated
him to write romances and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief
training in academies of native inspiration.  Even now English voices,
with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin--to
begin, for the world is expectant.  Whereas there is no beginning for
her, but instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide into
sustained refinement and can save from decivilisation.

But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil.  The English town, too,
knows him in all his dailiness.  In England, too, he has a literature, an
art, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price.
Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity and cheapness, is impossible
without a beautiful past.  Its chief characteristic--which is futility,
not failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory
reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art,
especially the utterance by words.  Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic
quality, purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the
antecedents of trash.  It is after them; it is also, alas, because of
them.  And nothing can be much sadder than such a proof of what may
possibly be the failure of derivation.

Evidently we cannot choose our posterity.  Reversing the steps of time,
we may, indeed, choose backwards.  We may give our thoughts noble
forefathers.  Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be
also well derived.  We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and not
our inheritance only, but our heredity.  Our minds may trace upwards and
follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts.  The very habit of
our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatal
history.  Their companions must be lovely, but need be no lovelier than
their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may
be intrusted to keep the counsels of literature.

Such is our confidence in a descent we know.  But, of a sequel which of
us is sure?  Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent
depreciation?  And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary
tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour?  Or who
shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when
and how the bastardy befalls?  The decivilised have every grace as the
antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of
their mediocrities.  No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or
laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by
some living sweetness once.  Nor are the decivilised to blame as having
in their own persons possessed civilisation and marred it.  They did not
possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
inclination for things mentally inexpensive.  And the tendency can hardly
do other than continue.  Nothing can look duller than the future of this
second-hand and multiplying world.  Men need not be common merely because
they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many,
what dulness in their future!  To the eye that has reluctantly discovered
this truth--that the vulgarised are not _un_civilised, and that there is
no growth for them--it does not look like a future at all.  More ballad-
concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more
piecemeal pictures, more anxious decoration, more colonial poetry, more
young nations with withered traditions.  Yet it is before this prospect
that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise
common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.
He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his
forest is untracked and his town just built.  But what the newness is to
be he cannot tell.  Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of
desperate old age.  Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent
king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent
people?  'I will do such things: what they are yet I know not.'




A REMEMBRANCE


When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be rolled
up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better
worth interpreting than the speech of many another.  Of himself he has
left no vestiges.  It was a common reproach against him that he never
acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness.  The kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure.  The
delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic
degree.  Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough to define and limit
and enforce so many significant negatives?  Words seem to offend by too
much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve.  That
reserve was life-long.  Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except
to write a letter.  He was not inarticulate, he was only silent.  He had
an exquisite style from which to refrain.  The things he abstained from
were all exquisite.  They were brought from far to undergo his judgment,
if haply he might have selected them.  Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion.  If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.

It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
taught, rather than by precepts.  Few were these in his speech, but his
personality made laws for me.  It was a subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own.  How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment?  I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging.  Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love.  Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of
every character.  There was no tyranny in such a method.  His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste.  Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits.  Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.

Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life.  They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid.  Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living.  So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands.  So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life.  How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable?  How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere?  An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness.  He had
always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes.  His
sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised.  When he had
joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general
sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure.  It was his finest
distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the
innumerable forgotten.  And when he suffered, it was with so quick a
nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in
him.  He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for
pain he was then feelingly persuaded.  His darkening eyes said in the
extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'




THE SUN


Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a
plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky.  The curious have an
insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the
sunrise.  The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a sun past the dew
of his birth; he has walked some way towards the common fires of noon.
But on the flat country the uprising is early and fresh, the arc is wide,
the career is long.  The most distant clouds, converging in the beautiful
and little-studied order of cloud-perspective (for most painters treat
clouds as though they formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery),
are those that gather at the central point of sunrise.  On the plain, and
there only, can the construction--but that is too little vital a word; I
should rather say the organism--the unity, the design, of a sky be
understood.  The light wind that has been moving all night is seen to
have not worked at random.  It has shepherded some small flocks of cloud
afield and folded others.  There's husbandry in Heaven.  And the order
has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst.  Not a line, not a curve,
but confesses its membership in a design declared from horizon to
horizon.

To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to look
for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unity
and life.  It is the unity and life of painting.  The Early Victorian
picture--(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongs
to that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum of things put together, in
concourse, not in relation; but the true picture is _one_, however
multitudinous it may be, for it is composed of relations gathered
together in the unity of perception, of intention, and of light.  It is
organic.  Moreover, how truly relation is the condition of life may be
understood from the extinct state of the English stage, which resembles
nothing so much as a Royal Academy picture.  Even though the actors may
be added together with something like vivacity (though that is rare),
they have no vitality in common.  They are not members one of another.  If
the Church and Stage Guild be still in existence, it would do much for
the art by teaching that Scriptural maxim.  I think, furthermore, that
the life of our bodies has never been defined so suggestively as by one
who named it a living relation of lifeless atoms.  Could the value of
relation be more curiously set forth?  And one might penetrate some way
towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style
in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word.
And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the
pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the
flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation?  But the way
of such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules me to simplicity.

He reigns as centrally in the blue sky as in the clouds.  One October of
late had days absolutely cloudless.  I should not have certainly known it
had there been a hill in sight.  The gradations of the blue are
incalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the central fire.  As to the
earthly scenery, there are but two 'views' on the plain; for the aspect
of the light is the whole landscape.  To look with the sun or against the
sun--this is the alternative splendour.  To look with the sun is to face
a golden country, shadowless, serene, noble and strong in light, with a
certain lack of relief that suggests--to those who dream of landscape--the
country of a dream.  The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and the
golden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with a
colour.  Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than its
luminosity.  For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is that
which is full of shadows--the landscape before you when you turn and face
the sun.  Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, every
uncertain aspen-leaf of the few trees, but every particle of the October
air shows a shadow and makes a mystery of the light.  There is nothing
but shadow and sun; colour is absorbed and the landscape is reduced to a
shining simplicity.  Thus is the dominant sun sufficient for his day.  His
passage kindles to unconsuming fires and quenches into living ashes.  No
incidents save of his causing, no delight save of his giving: from the
sunrise, when the larks, not for pairing, but for play, sing the only
virginal song of the year--a heart younger than Spring's in the season of
decline--even to the sunset, when the herons scream together in the
shallows.  And the sun dominates by his absence, compelling the low
country to sadness in the melancholy night.




THE FLOWER


There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by
those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in
its tyranny.  It is the obsession of man by the flower.  In the shape of
the flower his own paltriness revisits him--his triviality, his sloth,
his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation.
These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges.  What the
tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country
lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have
sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a
cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness.  Stem and petal
and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and
insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces.  The most ugly of all
imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayed
for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers.  It
blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden.  The floor flourishes
with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the
table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper
is set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and
lilies in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
is scattered.  In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster
picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment
of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the
finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-plates of the 'grained'
door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale
inspiration of the flower.  And what is this bossiness around the grate
but some blunt, black-leaded garland?  The recital is wearisome, but the
retribution of the flower is precisely weariness.  It is the persecution
of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused.  The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase.  But I had rather learn my decoration of the
Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel,
holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident of
growth.  And I could wish abstention to exist, and even to be evident, in
my words.  In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to
trivialities by a kind of economical greed.  A condition for using justly
and gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance.
Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was in
the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to
be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty.  Nor can the
prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute.  For Nature has
something even more severe than moderation: she has an innumerable
singleness.  Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal; they show
multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace
of decoration.  Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or who
has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes--the
prayer for reiteration?  It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man
should, like a child, ask for one thing many times.  Her answer every
time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she
shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and make it
perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate.  What, for
novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last?  Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.




UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM


It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of
man is so much to be desired.  The leg, completing as it does the form of
man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is at least as
important as the scenery of geological structure, or the scenery of
architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the lovers of
mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have consented to
ignore.  The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has the
finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms which, coming
at the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life by its
unstable equilibrium.  A lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the
body, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never
stands without implying and expressing life.  It is the leg that first
suggested the phantasy of flight.  We imagine wings to the figure that is
erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,
because of his station, looks new-lighted.  All this is true of the best
leg, and the best leg is the man's.  That of the young child, in which
the Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither movement nor
supporting strength.  In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot,
with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious
instability, the spring and balance that are so organic.  But man should
no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of
piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.  Inexpressive
of what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they
are neither implicitly nor explicitly good raiment.  It is hardly
possible to err by violence in denouncing them.  Why, when a bad writer
is praised for 'clothing his thought,' it is to modern raiment that one's
nimble fancy flies--fain of completing the beautiful metaphor!

The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other than
the mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the multiplication of
undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and strike, and
listen to the democrat.  For the undistinguished are very important by
their numbers.  These are they who make the look of the artificial world.
They are man generalised; as units they inevitably lack something of
interest; all the more have they cumulative effect.  It would be well if
we could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in
the clothing of his average body.  Unfortunately he will be slow to be
changed.  And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their
national customs--and the wretchedest of them all the wearing of other
men's old raiment--that they must wait for reform until the reformed
dress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have turned second-
hand.




THE UNIT OF THE WORLD


The quarrel of Art with Nature goes on apace.  The painters have long
been talking of selecting, then of rejecting, or even, with Mr. Whistler,
of supplanting.  And then Mr. Oscar Wilde, in the witty and delicate
series of inversions which he headed 'The Decay of Lying,' declared war
with all the irresponsibility naturally attending an act so serious.  He
seems to affirm that Nature is less proportionate to man than is
architecture; that the house is built and the sofa is made measurable by
the unit measure of the body; but that the landscape is set to some other
scale.  'I prefer houses to the open air.  In a house we all feel of the
proper proportions.  Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper
sense of human dignity, is absolutely the result of indoor life.'
Nevertheless, before it is too late, let me assert that though nature is
not always clearly and obviously made to man's measure, he is yet the
unit by which she is measurable.  The proportion may be far to seek at
times, but the proportion is there.  Man's farms about the lower Alps,
his summer pastures aloft, have their relation to the whole construction
of the range; and the range is great because it is great in regard to the
village lodged in a steep valley in the foot hills.  The relation of
flower and fruit to his hands and mouth, to his capacity and senses (I am
dealing with size, and nothing else), is a very commonplace of our
conditions in the world.  The arm of man is sufficient to dig just as
deep as the harvest is to be sown.  And if some of the cheerful little
evidences of the more popular forms of teleology are apt to be baffled,
or indefinitely postponed, by the retorts that suggest themselves to the
modern child, there remains the subtle and indisputable witness borne by
art itself: the body of man composes with the mass and the detail of the
world.  The picture is irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figure
amongst its natural accessories in the landscape, and would not have them
otherwise.

But there is one conspicuous thing in the world to which man has not
served as a unit of proportion, and that one thing is a popularly revered
triumph of that very art of architecture in which Mr. Oscar Wilde has
confidence for keeping things in scale.  Human ingenuity in designing St.
Peter's on the Vatican, has achieved this one exception to the universal
harmony--a harmony enriched by discords, but always on one certain scale
of notes--which the body makes with the details of the earth.  It is not
in the landscape, where Mr. Oscar Wilde has too rashly looked for
contempt and contumely, but in the art he holds precious as the minister
to man's egotism, that man's Ego is defied.  St. Peter's is not
necessarily too large (though on other grounds its size might be liable
to correction); it is simply out of relation to the most vital thing on
the earth--the thing which has supplied some secret rod to measure the
waves withal, and the whales, the sea-wall cliffs, the ears of wheat, the
cedar-branches, pines and diamonds and apples.  Now, Emerson would
certainly not have felt the soft shock and stimulus of delight to which
he confesses himself to be liable at the first touch of certain phrases,
had not the words in every case enclosed a promise of further truth and
of a second pleasure.  One of these swift and fruitful experiences
visited him with the saying--grown popular through him--that an architect
should have a knowledge of anatomy.  There is assuredly a germ and a
promise in the phrase.  It delights us, first, because it seems to
recognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive,
character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades us
that Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size--the unit that is
sometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measure of what is
great and small among things animate and inanimate.  And in spite of
themselves the architects of St. Peter's were constrained to take
something from man; they refused his height for their scale, but they
tried to use his shape for their ornament.  And so in the blankest dearth
of fancy that ever befel architect or builder they imagined human beings
bigger than the human beings of experience; and by means of these, carved
in stone and inlaid in mosaic, they set up a relation of their own.  The
basilica was related to the colossal figure (as a church more wisely
measured would have been to living man), and so ceased to be large; and
nothing more important was finally achieved than transposal of the whole
work into another scale of proportions--a scale in which the body of man
was not the unit.  The pile of stones that make St. Peter's is a very
little thing in comparison with Soracte; but man, and man's wife, and the
unequal statures of his children, are in touch with the structure of the
mountain rather than with that of the church which has been conceived
without reference to the vital and fundamental rule of his inches.

Is there no egotism, ministering to his dignity, that man, having the law
of the organism of the world written in his members, can take with him,
out of the room that has been built to accord with him, into the
landscape that stands only a little further away?  He has deliberately
made the smoking chair and the table; there is nothing to surprise him in
their ministrations.  But what profounder homage is rendered by the
multitudinous Nature going about the interests and the business of which
he knows so little, and yet throughout confessing him!  His eyes have
seen her and his ears have heard, but it would never have entered into
his heart to conceive her.  His is not the fancy that could have achieved
these woods, this little flush of summer from the innumerable flowering
of grasses, the cyclic recreation of seasons.  And yet he knows that he
is imposed upon all he sees.  His stature gives laws.  His labour only is
needful--not a greater strength.  And the sun and the showers are made
sufficient for him.  His furniture must surely be adjudged to pay him but
a coarse flattery in comparison with the subjection, yet the aloofness,
of all this wild world.  This is no flattery.  The grass is lumpy, as Mr.
Oscar Wilde remarks with truth: Nature is not man's lacquey, and has no
preoccupation about his more commonplace comforts.  These he gives
himself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things
carefully provided by self-love?  But when that _farouche_ Nature, who
has never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of
hinting his wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of his
form and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes lets
him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him suspect
further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand--then man
becomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness, and a
favour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewith his
tailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool.




BY THE RAILWAY SIDE


My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires
brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods.  I
had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep
country with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with
olive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the
country through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, a
thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much
French.  I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous
in its vowels set in emphatic _l's_ and _m's_ and the vigorous soft
spring of the double consonants.  But as the train arrived its noises
were drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear again
for months--good Italian.  The voice was so loud that one looked for the
audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done to
every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity?  The
tones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often
passion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to
make good judges think it a mere counterfeit.  Hamlet, being a little
mad, feigned madness.  It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry,
so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form.  Thus
even before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they were
spoken by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is
convincing in elocution.

When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting
blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of the
type that grows stout and wears whiskers.  The man was in _bourgeois_
dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small station
building, shaking his thick fist at the sky.  No one was on the platform
with him except the railway officials, who seemed in doubt as to their
duties in the matter, and two women.  Of one of these there was nothing
to remark except her distress.  She wept as she stood at the door of the
waiting-room.  Like the second woman, she wore the dress of the
shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with the local black lace veil in
place of a bonnet over her hair.  It is of the second woman--O
unfortunate creature!--that this record is made--a record without sequel,
without consequence; but there is nothing to be done in her regard except
so to remember her.  And thus much I think I owe after having looked,
from the midst of the negative happiness that is given to so many for a
space of years, at some minutes of her despair.  She was hanging on the
man's arm in her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting.
She had wept so hard that her face was disfigured.  Across her nose was
the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear.  Haydon saw it on the
face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London street.  I
remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it.  She was
afraid that the man would throw himself under the train.  She was afraid
that he would be damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was
mortal fear.  It was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour.
No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror.  But
has any one who saw it forgotten her face?  To me for the rest of the day
it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image.  Constantly a red
blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the
dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil.  And
at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep!  Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
giving Offenbach.  The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the
little town was placarded with announcements of _La Bella Elena_.  The
peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot
night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its pauses.  But
the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of
those three figures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of
the day.




POCKET VOCABULARIES


A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a
collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable
vocabulary.  It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-
dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.
Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and
'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-
painting' (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn.
Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of
language.  It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature
that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the
energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,
fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century.  Literature doubtless
is made of words.  What then is needful, he seems to ask, besides a knack
of beautiful words?  Unluckily for him, he has achieved, not style, but
slang.  Unluckily for him, words are not style, phrases are not style.
'The man is style.'  O good French language, cunning and good, that lets
me read the sentence in obverse or converse as I will!  And I read it as
declaring that the whole man, the very whole of him, is his style.  The
literature of a man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his
qualities, with little fibres running invisibly into the smallest
qualities he has.  He who is not a man of letters, simply is not one; it
is not too audacious a paradox to affirm that doing will not avail him
who fails in being.  'Lay your deadly doing down,' sang once some old
hymn known to Calvinists.  Certain poets, a certain time ago, ransacked
the language for words full of life and beauty, made a vocabulary of
them, and out of wantonness wrote them to death.  To change somewhat the
simile, they scented out a word--an earlyish word, by preference--ran it
to earth, unearthed it, dug it out, and killed it.  And then their
followers bagged it.  The very word that lives, 'new every morning,'
miraculously new, in the literature of a man of letters, they killed and
put into their bag.  And, in like manner, the emotion that should have
caused the word is dead for those, and for those only, who abuse its
expression.  For the maker of a portable vocabulary is not content to
turn his words up there: he turns up his feelings also, alphabetically or
otherwise.  Wonderful how much sensibility is at hand in such round words
as the New Literature loves.  Do you want a generous emotion?  Pull forth
the little language.  Find out moonshine, find out moonshine!

Take, as an instance, Mr. Swinburne's 'hell.'  There is, I fear, no doubt
whatever that Mr. Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a vocabulary, with
the inevitable consequences to the word.  And when the minor men of his
school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may very well happen to any
young man practising authorship), I must not be accused of phantasy if I
say that they put their hands into Mr. Swinburne's vocabulary and pick
it.  These vocabularies are made out of vigorous and blunt language.
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?'  Alas, they are
homespuns from the factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities.
Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage.  The property of
power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it
created them.  But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the
cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of
commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is
moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!'  Lack of a sense
of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to
make amends for a currency debased.  No more than any other can a witty
writer dispense with a sense of humour.  In his moments of sentiment the
lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at least perceptible.  A
sense of humour cannot be always present, it may be urged.  Why, no; it
is the lack of it that is--importunate.  Other absences, such as the
absence of passion, the absence of delicacy, are, if grievous negatives,
still mere negatives.  These qualities may or may not be there at call,
ready for a summons; we are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily
aware, unless they ought to be in action, whether their action is
possible.  But want of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these
are lacks wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are
all-influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying; what
other paradoxes can I adventure?  Without power--no style.  Without a
possible humour,--no style.  The weakling has no confidence in himself to
keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true
passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism.  And with a sense
of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the
language and put it in his pocket.




PATHOS


A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
magazine: 'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most
real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos
that is worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and
Malvolio.'  Has it indeed come to this?  Have the Zeitgeist and the
Weltschmerz and the other things compared to which 'le spleen' was gay,
done so much for us?  Is there to be no laughter left in literature free
from the preoccupation of a sham real-life?  So it would seem.  Even what
the great master has not shown us in his work, that your critic convinced
of pathos is resolved to see in it.  By the penetration of his intrusive
sympathy he will come at it.  It is of little use now to explain Snug the
joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug who stirs their
emotions so painfully.  Not the lion; they can see through that: but the
Snug within, the human Snug.  And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in
that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions
arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the
tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction
of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt.  _Et patati, et patata_.

It may be only too true that the actual world is 'with pathos delicately
edged.'  For Malvolio living we should have had living sympathies: so
much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a
credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a
chambermaid.  By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity might be reached
for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource
condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance.
But is not life one thing and is not art another?  Is it not the
privilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly,
without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of
the many-sided world?  Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge?
Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may
laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without
remorse, without reluctance.  If great creating Nature has not assumed
for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the
right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, of
taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day.  Art and
Nature are separate, complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with
one another.  And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the
corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat--(the
borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this
pass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general lack of a sense
of the separation between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind.  In
some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself,
all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he is
impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is an
artist.  And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us--or used to
give us, for even the world is obsolete--the pleasure of _oubliance_.

Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caught him
a clout as he went.  Yet he will do it again; and those like-minded will
assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human, how much
more sensitive, how much more responsible, is the art of the critic than
the world has ever dreamt till now.  And, superior in so much, they will
still count their superior weeping as the choicest of their gifts.  And
Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his
admiration than the pathos of the time.  It is bred now of your mud by
the operation of your sun.  'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it
are wet.




THE POINT OF HONOUR


Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez.  In
Spain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the first
Impressionist.  As an Impressionist he claimed, implicity if not
explicity, a whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness; he
made an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he relied on his own
candour and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept the
chastity of art when other masters were content with its honesty, and
when others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded the point of honour.
Contemporary masters more or less proved their position, and convinced
the world by something of demonstration; the first Impressionist simply
asked that his word should be accepted.  To those who would not take his
word he offers no bond.  To those who will, he grants the distinction of
a share in his responsibility.  Somewhat unrefined, in comparison to his
lofty and simple claim to be believed on a suggestion, is the commoner
painter's production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions of
ordinary experience, his self-defence against the suspicion of making
irresponsible mysteries in art.  'You can see for yourself,' the lesser
man seems to say to the world, 'thus things are, and I render them in
such manner that your intelligence may be satisfied.'  This is an appeal
to average experience--at the best the cumulative experience; and with
the average, or with the sum, art cannot deal without derogation.  The
Spaniard seems to say: 'Thus things are in my pictorial sight.  Trust me,
I apprehend them so.'  We are not excluded from his counsels, but we are
asked to attribute a certain authority to him, master of the craft as he
is, master of that art of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and
not far from the end--not far short of the whole--of the art of painting.
So little indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a great
Impressionist's impression that Velasquez requires us to be in some
degree his colleagues.  Thus may each of us to whom he appeals take
praise from the praised: He leaves my educated eyes to do a little of the
work.  He respects my responsibility no less--though he respects it less
explicitly--than I do his.  What he allows me would not be granted by a
meaner master.  If he does not hold himself bound to prove his own truth,
he returns thanks for my trust.  It is as though he used his countrymen's
courteous hyperbole and called his house my own.  In a sense of the most
noble hostship he does me the honours of his picture.

Because Impressionism is so free, therefore is it doubly bound.  Because
there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible.  To
undertake this art for the sake of its privileges without confessing its
obligations--or at least without confessing them up to the point of
honour--is to take a vulgar freedom: to see immunities precisely where
there are duties, and an advantage where there is a bond.  A very mob of
men have taken Impressionism upon themselves in this our later day.  It
is against all probabilities that more than a few among these have within
them the point of honour.  In their galleries we are beset with a dim
distrust.  And to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted.  How
many of these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the
truth of their own impressions?  An ethical question as to loyalty is
easily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the
intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide.  But when the
_dubium_ concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that
their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate
equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are
enough?  Now Impressionists of late have told us things as to their
impressions--as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this man
and upon the mood of that--which should not be asserted except on the
artistic point of honour.  The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they
should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary.  They can face the
general judgment, but they should hesitate to produce work that appeals
to the last judgment, which is the judgment within.  There is too much
reason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to derive from
the greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point
of view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth
waylaying.  And to be, _de parti pris_, an Impressionist without
these!  O Velasquez!  Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach
in her own things.  An author, here and there, will make as though he had
a word worth hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word that seeks to
withdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is
all too probably a platitude.  But obviously, literature is not--as is
the craft and mystery of painting--so at the mercy of a half-imposture,
so guarded by unprovable honour.  For the art of painting is reserved
that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation.  May the gods guard us from
the further popularising of Impressionism; for the point of honour is the
simple secret of the few.




COMPOSURE


Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure do
these words bring for their own great disquiet!  Without the remoteness
of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly.
In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an
aloofness of language is needful.  Johnson feared death.  Did his noble
English control and postpone the terror?  Did it keep the fear at some
courteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the
very act of the leap and lapse of mortality?  Doubtless there is in
language such an educative power.  Speech is a school.  Every language is
a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note
indeed but gives the tone.  Every language imposes a quality, teaches a
temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tone--the
voice--of the instrument.  Every language, by counter-change, replies to
the writer's touch or breath his own intention, articulate: this is his
note.  Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been
thought, of the power and the responsibility of the note.  Of the
legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by
comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with
the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers
who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more
educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that
part.  Few languages offer the choice.  The fact that a choice is made
implies the results and fruits of a decision.  The French author is
without these.  They are of all the heritages of the English writer the
most important.  He receives a language of dual derivation.  He may
submit himself to either University, whither he will take his impulse and
his character, where he will leave their influence, and whence he will
accept their education.  The Frenchman has certainly a style to develop
within definite limits; but he does not subject himself to suggestions
tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of various race
within one literature.  Such a choice of subjection is the singular
opportunity of the Englishman.  I do not mean to ignore the necessary
mingling.  Happily that mingling has been done once for all for us all.
Nay, one of the most charming things that a master of English can achieve
is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their results so
exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools are made
to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove them at
once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world knew they
were.  Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to which
school of words shall have the place of honour in the great and sensitive
moments of an author's style: which school shall be used for
conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service.  And the choice
being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses of so many hearts
quickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a deliberate
return to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language.  'Doubtless
there is a place of peace.'

A place of peace, not of indifference.  It is impossible not to charge
some of the moralists of the last century with an indifference into which
they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes educated
them.  Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable of
coming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion.  There is no
knowing to what distance the removal of the 'appropriate sentiment' from
the central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal in
language, which came when it was needed.  Addison had assuredly removed
eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the
'pleasing hope,' the 'fond desire;' and the touch of war was distant from
him who conceived his 'repulsed battalions' and his 'doubtful battle.'
What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored once
more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times.  Men were too eager to go
into the workshop of language.  There were unreasonable raptures over the
mere making of common words.  'A hand-shoe! a finger-hat! a foreword!
Beautiful!' they cried; and for the love of German the youngest daughter
of Chrysale herself might have consented to be kissed by a grammarian.  It
seemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visible
is a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that
its images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain
spiritualising and subtilising effect of alien derivations is a privilege
and an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half of the language
within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at play
is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, without the death.

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in
origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase.  The most beautiful
and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare.
'Superfluous kings,' 'A lass unparalleled,' 'Multitudinous seas:' we
needed not to wait for the eighteenth century or for the nineteenth to
learn the splendour of such encounters, of such differences, of such
nuptial unlikeness and union.  But it is well that we should learn them
afresh.  And it is well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmic
reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the Latin.  Such a
reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day.  We want to quell
the exaggerated decision of monosyllables.  We want the poise and the
pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement
expresses it.  And not the phrase only but the form of verse might render
us timely service.  The controlling couplet might stay with a touch a
modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son.
But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of submission
on the part of the writer.  The couplet transgressed against, trespassed
upon, shaken off, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the dignity
neither of the rebel nor of the rule.  To Letters do we look now for the
guidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion taking us
by the heart makes necessary.  Shall not the Thing more and more, as we
compose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the
leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?




DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES


It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be
permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries.  We never desired them
as coevals.  We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothing
else with them.  And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, in
literature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time,
and yet is familiarly modern.  To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then,
is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time before he was, or his
Humour.  Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but the
funny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to him
our act has a special significance.  We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a
reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent.  It may be objected that
such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous
incident, to a man of letters.  So it is.  But the triviality has wide
allusions.  It is often a question which of several significant
trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who
does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him.  And, by the
way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few
years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few
years?  A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues.  To go to Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to
himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its
unprophetic source.  And we love such authors as Dickens and this
American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt
following.  We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure
them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy.

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain why
the little humour in _Elsie Venner_ and the _Breakfast Table_ series
is not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby he
relates this author to his following and to the world.  The young man
John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and
her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic
personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good
enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off.  But
that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that
temperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour
of it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth.  Like
Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor <DW64>, but
American; and it made New England aware of her comedy.  Until then she
had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at.  'Nature is
in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritual
woman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel.
And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose,
with mortuary frivolities, with long views, with energetic provincialism.

If we remember best _The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay_, we do so in
spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr.
Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuous
as his humour.  It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is more
perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, which
is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and adult.  No grown man
makes quite so definite mental images as does a child; when the mind ages
it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer pictures.  The young mind of Dr.
Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy.  For
example: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get
an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.  The bird in sable
plumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the other
sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again,
tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of
him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow
does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length, with
explanations.  Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things
without opening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the door
and driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic
Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic _poses_.'  And
this, of the Landlady: 'She told me her story once; it was as if a grain
that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualise itself by a
special narrative.'  'The riotous tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is
the mob-law of the features.'  'Think of the Old World--that part of it
which is the seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help
marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.'  'Young
folk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given
little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.'  And that
exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and the
inward tranquillity of the woods.  Such things are the best this good
author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts
shapely with their own truth.

Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase
wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance.  He has
unpreoccupied and alert eyes.  Strangely enough, by the way, this
watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly
observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop,
'skimming along within a yard of the ground.'  Who shall trust a man's
nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him?  Not an
inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk.
But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his
studies of New England inland life.  Much careful literature besides has
been spent, after the example of _Elsie Venner_ and the _Autocrat_,
upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts
achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest,
the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the
country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by
undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by
demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion by
candour.

As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility which
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in _Elsie Venner_, it is strange
that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in its
own insolubility but--in caricature.  As though the secrets of the
inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesque
physiology!  It is in spite of our protest against the invention of
Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent-
maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night,' and by the gentle phrase
that tells us 'Elsie wept.'  But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in
proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every
civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change
wrought thereby in the discipline of the world.  For Dr. Holmes
incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of
intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the
self-loving, and the false.  Negation of separate moral responsibility,
when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and
destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the
manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientific
though it may be.  And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose.  His
books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.




JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL


The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not
the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names
of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man
of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy,
temperate, delighted.  The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who
brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of
ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil
and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature
that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none
of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man
of letters.  And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and
though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through
the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the
war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of
national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the
seventies and onwards.  He represented the little-recognised fact that in
ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--an
excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations,
however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding
ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in
words.  Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can
never be American enough.  He ranked with the students and the critics
among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,
perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem
so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes
his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed
carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their
number and their erudition will produce upon the reader.  The American
sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style
confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national
vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think
of my country?'

Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the
thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly
know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its
antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I
recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a
delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this critical
century.  Those small volumes, _Among My Books_ and _My Study
Windows_, are all pure literature.  A fault in criticism is the rarest
thing in them.  I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr.
Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one.
. . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance.  The Saxon, as it appears to me, has
never shown any capacity for art,' and so forth.  One wonders how Lowell
read the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the
Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English
writer's supreme art--art that declares itself and would not be hidden.
But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a
writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they
prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in
sentencing.  His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is
famous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A Good
Word for Winter.'  His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one
wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich.  The
birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but
his parishioners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does
he become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile.  And
all the while it is the word that he is intent upon.  You may trace his
reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered
for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of
commonplace.  He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages.  You
wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme
in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief
verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante
has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil
somewhat noble in Homer.  In his own use, and within his own English, he
has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word
new for the day's work.  He gave to the language, and did not take from
it; it gained by him, and lost not.  There are writers of English now at
work who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them on
that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they are
glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them.

Nevertheless Lowell was no poet.  To accept his verse as a poet's would
be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in a
lover of poetry.  Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of his
poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for having
trusted to reason and to criticism.  His trust was justified--if such
justification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people who
apparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the second
place, and an essayist incidentally.  It is hard to believe that he
failed in instinct about himself.  More probably he was content to forego
it when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so
willing.  They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we
reluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the
evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded?  Such
reluctance justifies itself.  Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap
sanctions of prophecy.  Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may
live; I have no commands for futurity.  Enough that he enriched the
present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of
literature, with a studiousness full of heart.




DOMUS ANGUSTA


The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities.  Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot.  A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well explained has it ever been.

   'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
   That I have to be hurt,'

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia.  But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet.  Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness.  And yet for every vain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates.  It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires.  The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity.  On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement
makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks
that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
inadequacy and imprecision of speech.  For, doubtless, right language
enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.  Who, for
instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his
confidence?  Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate
syllable of his tenderness?  There is a 'pledging of the word,' in
another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise.  The poet
pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar
sanction.  And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it
not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase.  Consciousness and the
word are almost as closely united as thought and the word.  Almost--not
quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and
sensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power.

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know
it to be general.  Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is
great that is vulgarly experienced.  Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and
to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the
indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the
familiar.  It is destructive because it not only closes but contradicts
life.  Unlikely people die.  The one certain thing, it is also the one
improbable.  A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature
that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die.  That is a true
destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.
It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion.  Mrs.
Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.  Considering her mental powers,
by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly
inappropriate.  Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to
an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies.  More than Promethean was the
audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark.  But otherwise the
grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more
significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of
rhetoric; he is predurable because he is not completed.  His humours are
strangely matched with perpetuity.  But, indeed, he is not worthy to die;
for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal.  I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world.  I thank
my fellow-mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the
French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at.  But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the book.

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes
that are apt to express none but common things.  There are allusions
unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances.  Far from me and
from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting.  To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?  Not I, by
this heavenly light.




REJECTION


Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world.  She has a penitential or
a vidual singleness.  We can conceive an antique world in which life,
art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; for
us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things.
We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not let even a master's
work pass unfanned and unpurged.  Even among his phrases one shall be
taken and the other left.  For he may unawares have allowed the
habitualness that besets this multitudinous life to take the pen from his
hand and to write for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our
refusals.  Or he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to
force a sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully
pausing, would well have become.  Exaggeration has played a part of its
own in human history.  By depreciating our language it has stimulated
change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise.  Our rejection
must be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it.  It
makes us shrewder than we wish to be.  And, indeed, the whole endless
action of refusal shortens the life we could desire to live.  Much of our
resolution is used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision.
Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say with what
loss to our treasury of quietness?  We are defrauded of our interior
ignorance, which should be a place of peace.  We are forced to confess
more articulately than befits our convention with ourselves.  We are
hurried out of our reluctances.  We are made too much aware.  Nay, more:
we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes
almost inevitable.  As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of
refusal!  O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear!  'We
live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in the
iteration of rejection and repulse.  And in the very touch of joy there
hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other.
If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves to
joy.  We withhold, we close.  Having denied many things that have
approached us, we deny ourselves to many things.  Thus does _il gran
rifiuto_ divide and rule our world.

Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice.  Rejection
has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured.  When we garnish
a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more various, than might
haunt the dreams of decorators.  There is no limit to our rejections.  And
the unconsciousness of the decorators is in itself a cause of pleasure to
a mind generous, forbearing, and delicate.  When we dress, no fancy may
count the things we will none of.  When we write, what hinders that we
should refrain from Style past reckoning?  When we marry--.  Moreover, if
simplicity is no longer set in a world having the great and beautiful
quality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality
of refinement.  And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection.
One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative has
offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness.  Refinement is
not negative, because it must be compassed by many negations.  It is a
thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exacts
experience.  No slight or easy charge, then, is committed to such of us
as, having apprehension of these things, fulfil the office of exclusion.
Never before was a time when derogation was always so near, a daily
danger, or when the reward of resisting it was so great.  The simplicity
of literature, more sensitive, more threatened, and more important than
other simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax the
good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.




THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE


The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itself
formed under too luxurious ideals.  This is the evil work of that
_little more_ which makes its insensible but persistent additions to
styles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when unluckily
man becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and too deliberate in
his arrangement of it.  The landscape has need of moderation, of that
fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and, in short, of a return
towards the ascetic temper.  The English way of landowning, above all,
has made for luxury.  Naturally the country is fat.  The trees are thick
and round--a world of leaves; the hills are round; the forms are all
blunt; and the grass is so deep as to have almost the effect of snow in
smoothing off all points and curving away all abruptness.  England is
almost as blunt as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victorian
cast-iron work.  And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by our
invention of the country park.  There all is curves and masses.  A little
more is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest glade, and
for increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to idleness.  Not a tree
that is not impenetrable, inarticulate.  Thick soil below and thick
growth above cover up all the bones of the land, which in more delicate
countries show brows and hollows resembling those of a fine face after
mental experience.  By a very intelligible paradox, it is only in a
landscape made up for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved.  Much beauty
there must needs be where there are vegetation and the seasons.  But even
the seasons, in park scenery, are marred by the _little too much_:
too complete a winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, an
autumn too demonstrative.

'Seek to have less rather than more.'  It is a counsel of perfection in
_The Imitation of Christ_.  And here, undoubtedly, is the secret of
all that is virile and classic in the art of man, and of all in nature
that is most harmonious with that art.  Moreover, this is the secret of
Italy.  How little do the tourists and the poets grasp this latter truth,
by the way--and the artists!  The legend of Italy is to be gorgeous, and
they have her legend by rote.  But Italy is slim and all articulate; her
most characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished,
with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded with
paint.  Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness
of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side,
and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf--these make keen lines
of slender vegetation.  And they own the seasons by a gentle confession.
Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous proclamation of summer in the
English woods, we would follow June to this subtler South: even to the
Campagna, where the cycle of the seasons passes within such narrow
limitations that insensitive eyes scarcely recognise it.  In early spring
there is a fresher touch of green on all the spaces of grass, the
distance grows less mellow and more radiant; by the coming of May the
green has been imperceptibly dimmed again; it blushes with the mingled
colours of minute and numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lines
longer than those of ocean billows.  This is the desert blossoming like a
rose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various
flower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the
wilderness.  When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of
harmonious seed,  with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is
gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter.  All this fine
chromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that it is accused
as a monotony.  But those who find its modesty delightful may have a
still more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea.
The passing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour
to the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the
sapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, so
far from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary
senses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all
fulfilled.  And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that
is lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions.  He would
find adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search
for words for the white.  A white Mediterranean is not in the legend.
Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea is
the flower of the breathless midsummer.  And in its clear, silent waters,
a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucent
living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish,  like mother-of-pearl.

But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in
agricultural Italy that the _little less_ makes so undesignedly, and as
it were so inevitably, for beauty.  The country that is formed for use
and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest.  What a lesson in
literature!  How feelingly it persuades us that all except a very little
of the ornament of letters and of life makes the dulness of the world.
The tenderness of colour, the beauty of series and perspective, and the
variety of surface, produced by the small culture of vegetables, are
among the charms that come unsought, and that are not to be found by
seeking--are never to be achieved if they are sought for their own sake.
And another of the delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality.
The soil may be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own.  He has
embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat in the
light shadows of olive leaves.  Thanks to the metayer land-tenure, man's
heart, as well as his strength, is given to the ground, with his hope and
his honour.  Louis Blanc's 'point of honour of industry' is a conscious
impulse--it is not too much to say--with most of the Tuscan contadini;
but as each effort they make for their master they make also for the
bread of their children, it is no wonder that the land they cultivate has
a look of life.  But in all colour, in all luxury, and in all that gives
material for picturesque English, this lovely scenery for food and wine
and raiment has that _little less_ to which we desire to recall a
rhetorical world.




MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES


To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than praise of
their imagery.  Imagery is the natural language of their poetry.  Without
a parable she hardly speaks.  But undoubtedly there is now and then a
poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too vitally, too
sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes for love of the
beautiful image.  Those rare moments are simple, and their simplicity
makes one of the reader's keenest experiences.  Other simplicities may be
achieved by lesser art, but this is transcendent simplicity.  There is
nothing in the world more costly.  It vouches for the beauty which it
transcends; it answer for the riches it forbears; it implies the art
which it fulfils.  All abundance ministers to it, though it is so single.
And here we get the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of
art at this perfection.  All the faculties of the poet are used for
preparing this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed.
The loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr.
Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, only
to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be impossible were
they less glorious--are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice
and waste.

But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's work
with praise of an infrequent mood?  Infrequent such a mood must needs be,
yet it is in a profound sense characteristic.  To have attained it once
or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of
literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure
of rarity.  Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual.  Man
lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making
mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent
asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human
emotion has been in action.  Thus _Departure_, _If I were Dead_,
_A Farewell_, _Eurydice_, _The Toys_, _St. Valentine's
Day_--though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a
mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group themselves apart as the
innermost of the poet's achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images,
and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray--the
beauties of poetic art.  Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes,
never frantic when almost intolerable.  It is mortal pathos.  If any
other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know
it.  Love and sorrow are pure in _The Unknown Eros_; and its author
has not refused even the cup of terror.  Against love often, against
sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility
instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts.  It is only the approach
of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul
and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion
defends himself in the twinkling of an eye.  But through nearly the whole
of Coventry Patmore's poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch.
Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch.  That is, his
capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is more
than the capacity of other men.  He endures therefore what they could but
will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they cannot apprehend.
Thus, to have studied _The Unknown Eros_ is to have had a certain
experience--at least the impassioned experience of a compassion; but it
is also to have recognised a soul beyond our compassion.

What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon
our knowing.  He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader's
error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading.  That the
general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable.  It has the
obscurity of profound clear waters.  What the poet chiefly secures to us
is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception,
does but rehearse the action of the union of God with humanity--that
there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the
soul of mankind.  When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the
phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the
truths of the love of God.  The thought grows gay in the three _Psyche_
odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being somewhat reluctant.
How is it?  Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to
but a slow participation.  Perhaps because some thrust of his has left
you still tremulous.

But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine
allusion, is a most familiar truth.  Love that is passionate has much of
the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there is
no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies.  The love of the
great for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates and
is fugitive.  St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might
be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the
child is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses.'  It might be
drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.

The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so
authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise
than consummate.  Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives
the reader a shock of appreciation.  This is always so in those simplest
odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work.  Without such
wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible.  Nor is that
beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the
landscape lines in _Amelia_ and elsewhere.  The words are used to the
uttermost yet with composure.  And a certain justness of utterance
increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in
the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social,
literary.  The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their
subjects--we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using
the most modern of adjectives--and call them topical.  Here assuredly
there is no composure.  Never before did superiority bear itself with so
little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--reluctance.

If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or
crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are
free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws
of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-marking verse (we are, of
course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the
musical time).  Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can
surely be bound by no time measures--if for no other reason, for this:
that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed.
Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the
irregular metre of _The Unknown Eros_ is happily used except for the
large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called.  _Lycidas_,
the _Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, the _Intimations_, and Emerson's
_Threnody_, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws
so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste.  So
with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr. Coventry Patmore's
series.  A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more
touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse
and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his
versification.  And what movement of words has ever expressed flight,
distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a
celestial line--the eighth in the ode _To the Unknown Eros_?  When
we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear
the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various
length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be
separated with something of a jerk.  And this adding--as, for instance,
of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now
and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as _A Farewell_.
It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a
boat.  In _The Angel in the House_, and other earlier poems, Mr.
Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he
never left it either heavily or thinly packed.  Moreover those first
poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes.  And
even in his slightest work he proves himself the master--that is, the
owner--of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they
had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that
it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.




INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE


I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in
union or in antithesis.  They assuredly have an inseverable union in the
art of literature.  The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each
poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the
cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the
virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them
for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forego
Innocence and Experience at once and together.  Obviously, Experience can
be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly
solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's
histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other
men's summaries and conclusions.  Therefore I bind Innocence and
Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble
isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness.  But if I had a mind to
forego that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of
others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.
Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
borrow.  Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory
with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry
consider this matter.  These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in
adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even
been introduced.  Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various,
numerous, and cruel.  No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life
concerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so much
experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_.  To achieve that
tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the
_praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not
to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than
any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all
kinds of poets.

As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one Friar goes about
darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows
cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves.  Not otherwise will the
resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or rather so many, in the
feminine plural.  The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate
at the adoption.  The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness
and to overcome it.  But these poets so triumph over their repugnance
that it does not appear.  And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather
to make use of one's fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to
use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions.  Moreover, to
utilise the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse
and phrase.  For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are
familiar enough.  One of them is the absence of the word of promise and
pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love:
which is the vow.  'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too simple and too
natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least
tolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence.  Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption,
of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were
thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.
This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither
love nor remember in public.




PENULTIMATE CARICATURE


There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a
certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier.  Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the
vulgarising of the married woman.  No one now would read Douglas Jerrold
for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial,
_Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably considered
good comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintance
with a certain ideal of the grotesque.  Obviously to make a serious
comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is
to put one's-self at a disadvantage.  He who sees the joke holds himself
somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he
thought it worth his eyesight.  The last-named has to bear the least
tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care.  Now to turn
over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere
boutique_.  On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.
Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a
circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted.  But the essential
vulgarity is that of the woman.  There is in some old _Punch_ volume a
drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the
refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the
letter-press.  Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of
her stays.  They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross.  And
page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her
foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language.  In that time
there was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in
vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarising
of the act of maternity.  Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for
evading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned
without restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in
none of these ignominies is woman so common, foul, and foolish for
Dickens as she is in child-bearing.

I named Leech but now.  He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary.  And accordingly the married woman and her child are
humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly.  For him she is
moderately and dully ridiculous.  What delights him as humorous is that
her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds
the time long, and tries to escape her.  It amuses him that she should
furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her
husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and
that her mother should be intolerable.  It pleases him that her baby,
with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque
baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly
for her abasement.  Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he
lived into a later and different time.  He saw little else than common
forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid
prosperity, of dress, of bearing.  He transmits these things in greater
proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or
by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not
sure which is the impulse.  The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered
with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain
sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get
convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost
a whole career.  There is one drawing in the _Punch_ of years ago, in
which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the
invention of that day.  A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has
gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and
the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep
at his side in a nightcap.  Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine
how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across
the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated.  This obscene
drawing is matched by many equally odious.  Abject domesticity,
ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old
common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill-
dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised;
abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling sidelong
legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers,
'No, never was.'  In all these things there is very little humour.  Where
Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys.  The hint of
tenderness which in really fine work could never be absent from a man's
thought of a child or from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the
subject in hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless,
we acknowledge that here is humour.  It is also in some of his clerical
figures when they are not caricatures, and certainly in 'Robert,' the
City waiter of _Punch_.  But so irresistible is the derision of the woman
that all Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent
centrally upon her.  Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered,
never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress;
but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon
whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights.  If this is
the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form
of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which
some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is
not reproached through his sex.  But the vulgarity of which I have
written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that
England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able
to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France.  It
was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.



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