Essays by Alice Meynell

Contents:

WINDS AND WATERS

Ceres' RunawayWellsRainThe Tow PathThe Tethered ConstellationsRushes and Reeds

IN A BOOK ROOM

A Northern FancyPathosAnima Pellegrina!A Point of BiographyThe Honours of MortalityComposureThe Little LanguageA CounterchangeHarlequin Mercutio

COMMENTARIES

LaughterThe Rhythm of LifeDomus AngustaInnocence and ExperienceThe Hours of SleepSolitudeDecivilized

WAYFARING

The Spirit of PlacePopular BurlesqueHave Patience, Little SaintAt Monastery GatesThe Sea Wall

ARTS

TithonusSymmetry and IncidentThe PlaidThe FlowerUnstable EquilibriumVictorian CaricatureThe Point of Honour

"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"

The Colour of LifeThe HorizonIn JulyCloudShadows

WOMEN AND BOOKS

The Seventeenth CenturyMrs. DingleyPrueMrs. JohnsonMadame Roland

"THE DARLING YOUNG"

Fellow Travellers with a BirdThe Child of TumultThe Child of Subsiding TumultThe UnreadyThat Pretty PersonUnder the Early StarsThe Illusion of Historic Time

CERES' RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of aMunicipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the charmingquarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does not exist thatwould be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the highplaces of the city. It is true that there have been the famouscaptures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreovera less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, insome miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed inweeding the roadside. They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on theancient stones--rows of little corpses--for sweeping up, as at UpperTooting; one wonders why. The governors of the city will not succeed inmaking the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of athriving commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn andshattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing ofbuttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread, "says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But acouple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring--notthat the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, butbecause flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance. 

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessibleplaces, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success andvictory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun, swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and bloomsaloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, of the seventeenth, andof the eighteenth. As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike. The flagrant flourishing statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment(and Rome is chiefly the city of the broken pediment) are theopportunities of this vagrant garden in the air. One certain church, that is full of attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragonof great stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthestsummit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fairmiddle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row ofaccidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, theRenaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds itsaccount in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco andstone. "A bird of the air carries the matter, " or the last sea-wind, sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in alittle fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot catch it. And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of theagile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the placeof the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a twelfth-century tower, andin any case inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet. It actually casts a flush of green over their city _piazza_--the widelight-grey pavements so vast that to keep them weeded would need an armyof workers. That army has not been employed; and grass grows in a smallway, but still beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramwaycircles. Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chieflyprompts the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the _piazza_into a square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of thepavement as of the importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--andthe weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takesits part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the "third" (whichis in truth the fourth) Rome. 

When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf; it isfull of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer scents throngeach other, close and warm, than these from a little hand-space of thegrass one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine orthe Alban hills. Moreover, under the name I will take leave to includelettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of theVatican. That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, asit were house upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but withnothing pretentious and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral windowon a ledge to the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but onecannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on anyparapet it may have round a corner. 

Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness, asuggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the tilling. Wildish peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which seems to havedisappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in hismanifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than half-wayfrom the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulentof the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost--these areall Italian things of savage savour and simplicity. The most cultivatedof all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, butsomething better, as her city is yet not a town but something better, andher wilderness something better than a desert. In all the three there isa trace of the little flying heels of the runaway. 

WELLS

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractivesecrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means oflife. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumbersets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, theyare carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when theirvoices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly besaid that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whetherearthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of thiscapture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that isnot a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. Forstyle implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, asit were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secretways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to besecured by a system of little shufflings and surprises. 

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;they form its very construction. Style does not exist in modernarrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all thesuccesses--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happylittle swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumphand success of the present art of raiment--"fit" itself--is but theresult of a masked and lurking labour and device. 

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of thebeauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighteractions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way. In a word, the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterousprovider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, anddecorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas theartist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means. Thefirst hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes whichwe all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the secondlifted up the arches of the aqueduct. 

The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way tougliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way. Inall countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden meansmust needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity. Thisis easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain the ill-fortunethat presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, allthe ill-favoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes themserviceable and effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and interthem, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the dailyworld. It is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy toexplain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which are, after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy conditions, neither from the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from theworkman looking askance at his unhandsome material, comes a firstproposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight. But fate spares not that suggestion to the able and the unlucky at theirtask of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the traffick oflife. 

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the meansof our lives those which we should wish to see open to the sun, withtheir waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they arelapped in lead. 

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals. 

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-placethat nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, attheir deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is sovisited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine tothink of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all chargedwith shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carryingthat remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness. Not apool without this visitant, or without passages of stars. As for thewells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as thedaily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatterfitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within thosedeeps. 

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun isshattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall throughchestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves. Toall these waters the agile air has perpetual access. Not so can greattowns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely theill-luck of great towns. 

Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have thegrace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every _campo_ has itscircle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the pavement, itssoft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the water below, andthe cheerful work of the cable. 

Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their plainwith the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the watershedsin the hills to the and city; and having the waters captive, they knewhow to compel them to take part, by fountains, in this Roman triumph. They had the wit to boast thus of their brilliant prisoner. 

None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a moreinvincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the leap of theheart of the waters have outlived their captors. They have remained inRome, and have remained alone. Over them the victory was longer thanempire, and their thousands of loud voices have never ceased to confessthe conquest of the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the head and front of the world. 

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact ofRome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to thedistance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetualwaters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services. This, then, was the style of a master, who does not lapse from "incidentalgreatness, " has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish ofhis phrases, and does not think the means and the approaches are to beplotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without haste, and withoutmisgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption inthe doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray. There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the workbroken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour ofMichelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure longexposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and theRoman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise. 

RAIN

Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there isnothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiarrain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from theclouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey withthem by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, aninnumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricatepoints. 

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once, being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impressionis the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. Whatwe are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things thatflash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyesof man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexperteyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzlesthem, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowlyfrom the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments arenot theirs. There seems to be such a difference of instants as investsall swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, amoment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies. 

The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records ofour halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman'sstroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in theimpressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and thestroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded. Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; andtheir perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied bythe shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that isall our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery andbeauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that natureflashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionistto make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles uponhim, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility. 

Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, theministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that thehusbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed inthe arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the showerwithal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His senseof property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as heshoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knowsapproximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is therain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found away, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud"outweeps its rain, " and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat andto enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable. The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun'swaste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-upstreet. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, fallingunfruitfully. 

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubledbreast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as theend of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warningaway the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threatand a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alpsare hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights andbattlements of heaven. 

THE TOW PATH

A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided musthave some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird yourshoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the evenpath of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side of meadows. 

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain, " onlytoo slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of theriverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, areswept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The linedrums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows taut; itmakes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easypower. 

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of"feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a verse ofMoore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys ofsensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy labourers with theoar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, onthe long tow-path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, youneed but to walk in your swinging harness, and so take your friends up-stream. 

You work merely as the mill-stream works--by simple movement. At lockafter lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to the wheelthat turns by no greater stress, and you and the river have the same mereforce of progress. 

There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the brightThames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing by so manycurves of low shore on the level of the world. 

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as thewheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings the lightedclouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying high formountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You willnot envy them for so brief a success. Did not Wordsworth want a "littleboat" for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing. 

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Eventhe athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than you, walkingyour effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps. Yourmoderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you thesufficient mastery of the tow-path. 

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give itlife, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyantburden--the yielding check--than ever before. An unharnessed walk mustbegin to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It iseasier than towing? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to thearms than drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart. 

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings ofmetre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and theline. 

No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it dependsupon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show ofhelplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naughtor charge you with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almostanticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so much as to give yourbriskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to stillmore nimble heels. All your haste, moreover, does but waken a morebrilliantly-sounding ripple. 

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems tocarry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure, enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free. Nowatching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path. What littleoutlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothly towed. Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch thebirds, or listen to them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem toturn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver for amoment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, asmountains are blue, and horizons. The days are so still that you do notmerely hear the cawing of the rooks--you overhear their hundred privatecroakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept bywings. 

As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an end. This year's robins are in full voice; and the only song that is not forlove or nesting--the childish song of boy-birds, the freshest andyoungest note--is, by a happy paradox, that of an autumnal voice. 

Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist'swheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding note. Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent, stealthy soles ofthe barefooted in the south. 

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS

It is no small thing--no light discovery--to find a river Andromeda andArcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer nightaround a pole-star in the waters. One star or two--delicate visitants ofstreams--we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fineand so fleeting is that apparition. Or the southern waves may show thelight--not the image--of the evening or the morning planet. But this, ina pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; itis the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in theflood. 

These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and morevacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or theBear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play apainter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movementsshake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing ofconstellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vaguebats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes andreturns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, thoseconstellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness ofgleaming life. You imagine that some unexampled gale might make themseem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing butdeep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, couldreally show such altered stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, asJuliet's "wanton" with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. Atmoments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then onebroken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourthflit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else at once so keen and soelusive. 

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no suchvanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft night arereserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large andvague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the Pleiades. 

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in theriver Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on allthe winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer. It isa most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever thewind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is notflying. The streets of London are among its many highways, for it isfragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather. But it gets disabledif a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feetare wet. On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking thewaters. 

All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations. It isfar adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It offers thistle plants(or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops ofmany thousand hills. Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet itin battalions than in these invincible units astray. But if the farmerowes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid riverside garden whereinit would be a great pleasure to sow the thistles of the nearest pasture. 

RUSHES AND REEDS

Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growththat feels the implicit spring. It had been more abandoned to winterthan even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more thanthe dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reedswere the appropriate lyre of the cold. On them the nimble winds playedtheir dry music. They were part of the winter. It looked through themand spoke through them. They were spears and javelins in array to thesound of the drums of the north. 

The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those thatstand solid. The sedges whistle his tune. They let the colour of hislight look through--low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day. 

The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds. They belongto the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the river, beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilousfooting for the cattle. They are the fringe of the low lands, the signof streams. They grow tall between you and the near horizon of flatlands. They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them growflowers of stature, including the lofty yellow lily. 

Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness ofthe sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction ofits points, its needles, and its resolute right lines. 

Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need thesound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, andbetray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along amile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of theirsombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning inthe pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tossesmany ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have athousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal ofthe storm. 

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds inEngland seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has infact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are notconspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsypeople, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather agross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man ofsensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, hesays, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of awedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, andobviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction ofincrease. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and theircargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon hisneighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend hisshowers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well-appointedcountry-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. Buthe who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainlydisturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes shouldhappen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had thepond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But thebulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, buta sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing nolonger, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed todeath. 

They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and uponmargins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. Nowild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primrosesare good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has akind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees. Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those offuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, withwhich the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimesseemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it. They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them. 

And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not sayso, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are inspirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes. In proof of this hevery often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view isbetter, as a view, without them. Though their roots are in his groundright enough, there is a something about their heads--. But the reasonhe gives for wishing them away is merely that they are "thin. " A mandoes not always say everything. 

A NORTHERN FANCY

"I remember, " said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answerto a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like amadman. ' 'No, ' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like amadman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool. '" Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, inEnglish poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poetlately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again. 

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against thecrime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had madethe poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy--mayhave caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, andthis carol of liberty, to be held so dear. "I heard a maid in Bedlam, "runs the old song. High and low the poets tried for that note, and thesinger was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love. Except forthe temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the nowdeceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French storyplays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits bywoe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author mayhave found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not metelsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the treblenote astray. 

At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfastCordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that highnote, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of wordsmight yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughedat gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in thestrange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out

 Packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon. 

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry andstrange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid calledBarbara. 

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemonaremembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs ofthe distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there isnothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some havedied for love. " To one who has always recognized the greatness of thispoem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in _Modern Painters_, where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. Itis the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbaradied") who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world ofthe insane. 

Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam entreatsthe expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could endure tolose "the bliss, but not the place. " (And although this dramatic"Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except to bescorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought. ) It isnevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy ofEnglish poets with such a wild recurrence. The Englishman of the farpast, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and theintricate life and customs of the little town, must have been generally ahome-keeper. No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his walletand his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as thestorm, free to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and thechill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journeythat had no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made theswinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it wasone who wrote like a madman and not like a fool. 

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the EnglishMiddle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they had aname for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow, Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came the "Abrammen, " who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to the fairs andwakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed like amaypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap. " But after the Civil Wars theyvanished, and no man knew how. In time old men remembered them only toremember that they had not seen any such companies or solitary wanderersof late years. 

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and notsinging within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring. " Wordsworth, who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth, " makes the crazed one awanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by chance, rare as anOread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-

 I too have passed her in the hills Setting her little water-mills. 

His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall insuch a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization, _bourgeois_ inthe humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after death to thecompany of man, to the "holy bell, " which Shakespeare's Duke rememberedin banishment, and to the congregation and their "Christian psalm. "

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, thanWordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the maidcrazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and she might bedrenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her. Shemight have her hair torn by the bramble, but her heart was light aftertrouble. "Many light hearts and wings"--she had at least the bird'sheart, and the poet lent to her voice the wings of his verses. 

There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant womanof later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer Elliott's finelines in "The Excursion"--

 Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried! Wife of my bosom, wedded to my soul!

Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She had nochild, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had long forgottenhow it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she, witha song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "good-morrow" rings fromHerrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow. She knows that her love is dead, andher perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of flowers than to theold story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows. 

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as thetragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange wasthe charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The world hasbecome once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious andmore sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps willnever recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more starry madness. Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to thelegend of the mad maid, but his "crazed maiden" is sane enough, sorrowfulbut dull, and sings of her own "burning brow, " as Herrick's wild onenever sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks offlowers, or, rather, "the herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is thesurest of all signs that the strange inspiration of the past centurieswas lost, vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been whollyEnglish, whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English. 

It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever haveplayed in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example, couldso have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligiblesentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into themomentary balance of the human will, cold would be his disregard of thisnorthern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was an alien upon earth, what were she in the Inferno? What word can express her strangenessthere, her vagrancy there? And with what eyes would they see this dewyface glancing in at the windows of that City?

PATHOS

A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine:"For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most realpersonage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that isworked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio. "Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz ortheir yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of theFrench Byronic age was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be nolaughter 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 inhis 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 isof little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it isprecisely Snug who stirs their emotions so painfully. Not the lion; theycan make shift to see through that: but the Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is themore appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of oldDouble; and Harpagon is the tragic figure of Monomania; and as to Argan, ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de Monsieur" must have been wrought bythose prescriptions! _Et patati, et patata_. 

It may be only too true that the actual world is "with pathos delicatelyedged. " For Malvolio living we should have had living sympathies; somuch aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed acredulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of achambermaid. By an actual Bottom the weaver our pity might be reachedfor the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resourcecondemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not theprivilege of literature to treat things singly, without theafter-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 maylaugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, withoutremorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumedfor herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet theright of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, oftaking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day. Art andNature are complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with oneanother. And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat--(theborrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let thispass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general lack of a senseof the separation between Nature and her sentient mirror in the mind. Insome of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he isimpressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is light-heartedly capricious. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he givesus--or used to give us, for even the word is obsolete--the pleasure of_oubliance_. 

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

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger'sfresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a phrase that is itsown essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of othertongues. Easily--shall I say cheaply?--spiritual, for example, was thenation that devised the name _anima pellegrina_, wherewith to crown acreature admired. "Pilgrim soul" is a phrase for any language, but"pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of alover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visiblysurpassed them--this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into anItalian heaven. 

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of lifepassed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor hadthought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note. It was, hesaid, poetical. 

_Anima pellegrina_ seems to be Italian of no later date thanPergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the moremodern love-song suited the day of Bellini. But it is only Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other Europeannation, but only of this. 

To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm ofthose buoyant words:-

 Felice chi vi mira, Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would bebut a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the profounderadvantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the verylanguage keeps in store. In another tongue you may sing, "happy wholooks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the littlemeaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak anantithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram? Yet it is notworthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather beglad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase _is_intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for theoccasion translate himself, and not the poetry. 

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charmmay still be unknown to Englishmen--"_piuttosto bruttini_. " See whatan all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, buttolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of pictures, or works of artof several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should theybe condemned. _Brutto_--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for anylanguage, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchangedinternationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of theEuropean concert. But _bruttino_ is a soothing diminutive, a diminutivethat forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in therear--"rather than not. " "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little waythat we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, thisparaphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printedand condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go nofurther. After the sound of it, the European concert seems to becomposed of brass instruments. 

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into whicha traveller hither has to enter! Do we possess anything here moreessentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than ourparticle "un"? Poor are those living languages that have not our use ofso rich a negative. The French equivalent in adjectives reaches nofurther than the adjective itself--or hardly; it does not attain theparticiple; so that no French or Italian poet has the words "unloved", "unforgiven. " None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravestand the most majestic of all ironies. In our English, the words that aredenied are still there--"loved, " "forgiven": excluded angels, who standerect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not bedone. 

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain ofloss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in sight. All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-foretelling is theword, and it has a plenitude of knowledge. 

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper tocharacter and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferablespeech. And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languagesfor their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper totheir own garden enclosed, without recognition. Never may they bedisregarded or confounded with the universal stock. If I would not soneglect _piuttosto bruttini_, how much less a word dominatingliterature! And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no greatEnglish author but has abundant possession. No need to recall them. Buteven writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their fullconsciousness of their birthright. Thus does a man who was hardly anauthor, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He hasincomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at thattime he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and thehead he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief. "

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a localrhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectualplace--_Felice chi vi mira_--or the art-critic's phrase--_piuttostobruttini_--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt. 

As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--whowould not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has givenus, but that has kept for its own--_ensoleille_? Nowhere else is the sunserved with such a word. It is not to be said or written without aconvincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light andradiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor theaccustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; thereforeneither England nor Italy can rival it. But there needed also the sensesof the French--those senses of which they say far too much in everysecond-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, butwhich they have matched in their time with some inimitable words. Perhapsthat matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousnessof the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830. For I do not think_ensoleille_ to be a much older word--I make no assertion. Whatever itsorigin, may it have no end! They cannot weary us with it; for it seemsas new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side, vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the airis light, and white things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, whitecattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense ofsight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the paraphrase isbut a picture. For _ensoleille_ I would claim the consent of allreaders--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit of that French. Butperhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes _le jours'annonce_ also sacred. 

If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa, " was written in Latin, this could beonly that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phraseat last--that it might await the day of life in its proper German. Ifound it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at oncefor what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of hervoice. 

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY

There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--whohas not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; notone who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference tothe manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, themosses are said to be full. 

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice ofthe curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of thedead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they--all thedying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide theirlittle last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violenceconcealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it istrue, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking asnail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with akind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly somelittle solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which ameaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, youtwinkle back at the bird. 

But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey andplunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes violentlyinto other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all. Amid all the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and manythousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But iftheir killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Shortlives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks ofthem always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yetthey keep the millions of the dead out of sight. 

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a coldwinter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete, that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired thatFebruary to make known all the secrets; everything was published. Deathwas manifest. Editors, when a great man dies, are not more resolute thanwas the frost of '95. 

The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and forcedto do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the art andimagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford. 

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and inexhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier--_passeencore_. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death ofthe birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just beensaid, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in thecase of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die withobservation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is nodisplay of the battlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum. You maypass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here andthere where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods. 

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wildworld. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned overscores of "Lives, " not to read them, but to see whether now and againthere might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. Butthere never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature. Oneand all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out ofall scale. 

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortalillness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightlyhis own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be newsfor the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of anyphysical suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed anddescribed? This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no oneis authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story ofpain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly notbe told. 

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively, and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a longdelirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should bemade for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as ispossible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself, "and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he couldhardly have even resented it. 

The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door ofRossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His mortalillness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affectedobjection is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts(others being already well known) in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless, these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is not biography isthe detail of the accident of the manner of his death, the detail of hiscremation. Or if it was to be told--told briefly--it was certainly notfor marble. Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as hedied young. It was a detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that wasa frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing with aninsignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality. Those are ill-named biographers who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of deathis a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a lastchapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, ofall survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon adeath with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely, this is, for a time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year, disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night. Theyhave, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have tomourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling ofdistress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known even todreams save in that first year of separation. But they are notbiographers. 

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secretbecause it is their only privacy. You may watch or may surpriseeverything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes oneverywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause noperpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is undefended, careless, nimble and noisy. 

It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, topaint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually in that BritishSchool of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, itwas agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him, for he is not to be caught dead. A bird is more easily caught alive thandead. 

A poet, on the contrary, is easily--too easily--caught dead. Minorartists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor anda University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentiallydrowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti. 

THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY

The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, todevote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustratedpapers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly aconfession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for. Fiftyyears ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were thecommonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty ofthings of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and theylooked forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures; so thatwhat to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become theproblem of the nation and of the householder alike. To-day men havebegan to learn that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests. Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that aredoomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows amost dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process, " and foroblivion. 

Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap coststhe artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the inevitablethat is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in the singularand manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so shorta life. Fittingly indeed does life reward the acceptance of death, inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There is a real circulation ofblood-quick use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. The honour of theday is for ever the honour of that day. It goes into the treasury ofthings that are honestly and--completely ended and done with. And whencan so happy a thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting? Who of the wisewould hesitate? To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day, separate from all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited timetedious?

COMPOSURE

Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure dothese words bring for their own great disquiet! Without the remotenessof 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 analoofness of language is needful. Johnson feared death. Did his nobleEnglish control and postpone the terror? Did it keep the fear at somecourteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in thevery act of the leap and lapse of mortality? Doubtless there is inlanguage such an educative power. Speech is a school. Every language isa persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the noteindeed but gives the tone. Every language imposes a quality, teaches atemper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tone--thevoice--of the instrument. Every language, by counterchange, returns tothe writer's touch or breath his own intention, articulate: this is hisnote. Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have beenthought, of the power and the responsibility of the note. Of thelegislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think bycomparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning withthe stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writerswho have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English. 

For if every language be a school, more significantly and moreeducatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses thatpart. Few languages offer the choice. The fact that a choice is madeimplies the results and fruits of a decision. The French author iswithout these. They are of all the heritages of the English writer themost important. He receives a language of dual derivation. He maysubmit himself to either University, whither he will take his impulse andhis character, where he will leave their influence, and whence he willaccept their re-education. The Frenchman has certainly a style todevelop within definite limits; but he does not subject himself tosuggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents ofvarious race within one literature. Such a choice of subjection is thesingular opportunity of the Englishman. I do not mean to ignore thenecessary mingling. Happily that mingling has been done once for all forus all. Nay, one of the most charming things that a master of Englishcan achieve is the repayment of the united teaching by linking theirresults so exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schoolsare made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall provethem at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world knewthey were. Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to whichschool of words shall have the place of honour in the great and sensitivemoments of an author's style: which school shall be used forconspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service. And the choicebeing open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses of so many heartsquickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a deliberatereturn to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language. "Doubtlessthere is a place of peace. "

A place of peace, not of indifference. It is impossible not to chargesome of the moralists of the eighteenth century with an indifference intowhich they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudeseducated them. Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapableof coming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion. There isno knowing to what distance the removal of the "appropriate sentiment"from the central soul might have attained but for the change and renewalin language, which came when it was needed. Addison had assuredlyremoved eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Catohailed the "pleasing hope, " the "fond desire"; and the touch of war wasdistant from him who conceived his "repulsed battalions" and his"doubtful battle. " What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearnesswere restored once more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times. Menwere too eager to go into the workshop of language. There wereunreasonable raptures over the mere making of common words. "Ahand-shoe! a finger-hat! a foreword! Beautiful!" they cried; and for thelove of German the youngest daughter of Chrysale herself might haveconsented to be kissed by a grammarian. It seemed to be forgotten that alanguage with all its construction visible is a language little fittedfor the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; andthat, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effectof alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable--thatto possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurkand Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and securityof a dead tongue, without the death. 

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various inorigin, divided in race, within a master's phrase. The most beautifuland the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare. "Superfluous kings, " "A lass unparalleled, " "Multitudinous seas": weneeded not to wait for the eighteenth century or for the nineteenth orfor the twentieth to learn the splendour of such encounters, of suchdifferences, of such nuptial unlikeness and union. But it is well thatwe should learn them afresh. And it is well, too, that we should notresist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of theLatin. Such a reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day. Wewant to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want thepoise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrongmovement expresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of versemight render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay witha touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning forhis son. But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention ofsubmission on the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against, trespassed upon, used loosely, is like a law outstripped, defied--to thedignity neither of the rebel nor of the rule. 

To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the verycloseness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes necessary. Shallnot the Thing more and more, as we compose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the leisure, the reconciliation of theWord?

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish masterof the magic of local things. 

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes;inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallinaand Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use nodialect at all. 

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with somuch literature as to take from the people the shelter of their almostunwritten tongue. Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into the homes ofdialect, does but show us how the language staggers under such a stress, how it breaks down, and resigns that office. One of the finest of thecharacters in the ranks of his admirable fiction is that old manageressof the narrow things of the house whose daughter is dying insane. I havecalled the dialect a shelter. This it is; but the poor lady does notcower within; her resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homelyrefuge, suffering and inarticulate. The two dramatists in their severalcenturies also recognized the inability of the dialect. They laid nonebut light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in their homelyplays than it carries in homely life. Their work leaves it what itwas--the talk of a people talking much about few things; a people likeour own and any other in their lack of literature, but local and allItalian in their lack of silence. 

Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people than toone less pleased with chatter or more pleased with books. I am writingof men, women, and children (and children are not forgotten, since weshare a patois with children on terms of more than common equality) whopossess, for all occasions of ceremony and opportunities of dignity, ageneral, national, liberal, able, and illustrious tongue, charged withall its history and all its achievements; for the speakers of dialect, ofa certain rank, speak Italian, too. But to tamper with their dialect, orto take it from them, would be to leave them houseless and exposed intheir daily business. So much does their patois seem to be their refugefrom the heavy and multitudinous experiences of a literary tongue, thatthe stopping of a fox's earth might be taken as the image of any act thatshould spoil or stop the talk of the associated seclusion of their town, and leave them in the bleakness of a larger patriotism. 

The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languagesthat might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante, Petrarch andBoccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard thingsin their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, andevidently can die, therein. The hands and feet that have served thevillager and the citizen at homely tasks have all the lowliness of hispatois, to his mind; and when he must perforce yield up their employment, we may believe that it is a simple thing to die in so simple and sonarrow a language, one so comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, andcompassionate; so confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling, inapt to wing any wearied thought upon difficult flight or to spur itupon hard travelling. 

Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be undergone;but the words that have done no more than order the things of the narrowstreet are not words to put a fine edge or a piercing point to any humanpang. It may even well be that to die in dialect is easier than to diein the eloquence of Manfred, though that declaimed language, too, isdoubtless a defence, if one of a different manner. 

These writers in Venetian--they are named because in no other Italiandialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so excellent asSignor Fogazzaro's--have left the unlettered local language in which theyloved to deal, to its proper limitations. They have not given weightythings into its charge, nor made it heavily responsible. They have addednothing to it; nay, by writing it they might even be said to have made itduller, had it not been for the reader and the actor. Insomuch as theintense expressiveness of a dialect--of a small vocabulary in the mouthof a dramatic people--lies in the various accent wherewith a southerncitizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to restoreits life to the written phrase. In dialect the author is forbidden tosearch for the word, for there is none lurking for his choice; but oftones, allusions, and of references and inferences of the voice, thespeaker of dialect is a master. No range of phrases can be his, but hehas the more or the less confidential inflection, until at times theclose communication of the narrow street becomes a very conspiracy. 

Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is something allunlike, for instance, the mere jargon of London streets. The differencemay be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have a highly organizedand orderly grammar. The Londoner cannot keep the small and loose orderof the grammar of good English; the Genoese conjugates his patois verbs, with subjunctives and all things of that handsome kind, lacked by theEnglish of Universities. 

The middle class--the _piccolo mondo_--that shares Italian dialect withthe poor are more strictly local in their manners than either the opulentor the indigent of the same city. They have moreover the busyintelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its keenest. Theirspeech keeps them a sequestered place which is Italian, Italian beyondthe ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration. And--whatis pretty to observe--the speakers are well conscious of the charactersof this intimate language. An Italian countryman who has known no otherclimate will vaunt, in fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in likemanner he is conscious of the local character of his language, and tuckshimself within it at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad. Aproperly spelt letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and MrsDingley and Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill-written, was "snug. "

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the noblerlanguage insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller?discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despairthus prattle and gibber and stammer? Rather perhaps this departure fromEnglish is but an excursion after gaiety. The ideal lovers, no doubt, would be so simple as to be grave. That is a tenable opinion. Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and age by age they haveexchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless neverstudied, and perhaps never loved. Why so? They might have chosen brokenEnglish of other sorts--that, for example, which was once thought amusingin farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman--acomplication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to pleaseanyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams;or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English devised by MrsPlornish in her intercourse with the Italian. But none of these foundfavour. The choice has always been of the language of children. Let ussuppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in the Titianpicture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a backgroundof Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the inspirers of those prattlings. "Seethen thy selfe likewise art lyttle made, " says Spenser's Venus to herchild. 

Swift was the best prattler. He had caught the language, surprised it inStella when she was veritably a child. He did not push her clumsily backinto a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged in her a childhoodhe had loved. He is "seepy. " "Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue. "It is a real good-night. It breathes tenderness from that moody anduneasy bed of projects. 

A COUNTERCHANGE

"Il s'est trompe de defunte. " The writer of this phrase had his sense ofthat portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine; but--the paradoxmust be risked--because he was French he was not able to possess all itsgrotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the Englishreader. The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching hiswife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur. " "Monsieur, " again; theFrench reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place;it says little or nothing to him, whereas the Englishman, who has no wordof the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but whomust use one of two English words of different allusion--man or Igentleman--knows the exact value of its commonplace. The seriousParisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there hadbeen a divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is notyet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte. "

The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with nationalcharacter is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking author whowas debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his owncomedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishmandoes possess it. Your official, your professional Parisian has avocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelistperceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words arethe only words in use. Take an author at his serious moments, when he isnot at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and thentouches a word that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English. "L'Histoire d'un Crime, " of Victor Hugo, has so many of these touches asto be, by a kind of reflex action, a very school of English. The wholeincident of the omnibus in that grave work has unconscious internationalcomedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus had been, itwill be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of theCoup d'Etat, but each had his official scarf. Scarf--pish!--"l'echarpe!""Ceindre l'echarpe"--there is no real English equivalent. Civicresponsibility never was otherwise adequately expressed. An indignantdeputy passed his scarf through the window of the omnibus, as an appealto the public, "et l'agita. " It is a pity that the French reader, havingno simpler word, is not in a position to understand the slight burlesque. Nay, the mere word "public, " spoken with this peculiar French good faith, has for us I know not what untransferable gravity. 

There is, in short, a general international counterchange. It isaltogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with itsextremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make aphrase, and another should have and enjoy it. And, in fact, there arecertain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literaryGerman whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with allseverity to be deprived. For Germans often tell you of words in theirown tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not betranslated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into saferhands. There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, abetter order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with thethought it secures, would find also their advantage. 

So with French humour. It is expressly and signally for English ears. Itis so even in the commonest farce. The unfortunate householder, forexample, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory "pourretablir la circulation, " and the other who describes himself "sous-chefde bureau dans l'enregistrement, " and he who proposes to "faire hommage"of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"--these andall their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their owncountry the perfection of their dulness. We only, who have thealternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it. It is not theleast of the advantages of our own dual English that we become sensibleof the mockery of certain phrases that in France have lost half theirridicule, uncontrasted. 

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation inall Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, eithermajestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers afrequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, nolonger detects. A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellersto take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter" fora whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to theless practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist. 

One of the phrases always used in the business of charities andsubscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the farce-writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitorsin the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouonscinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses integralement a lasouscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notremaison d'ecole. "

"Fletrir, " again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectlycommon word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well aware of thespent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman willreply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comicdramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word ofthis kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's"fossil poetry, " would seem to be the right name for human language assome of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it. 

The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman. They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il s'est trompe dedefunte. " In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there isenough humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; forthe author who perceives the comedy as well as custom will permit, andfor the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if notso keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same qualityof language. When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor, for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces:"Il s'est empetre dans les futurs. " But for a reader who has a fullsense of the several languages that exist in English at the service ofthe several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology ofofficial France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and uncovenantedsmile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French literaturehas not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circumstance makes it so. A very little ofthe mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the"sixieme et septieme arron-dissements, " in the twinkling of an eye. Sois it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of theburlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal"becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "a domicile"merely--the word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of thespeakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only anEnglishman hears it; so is the advice of the police that you shall"circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you shallnot, in the churches. 

So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale, " "maisonmortuaire, " and the still more serious "repos dominical, " "oraisondominicale. " There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspiciousgravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at, the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to thecredit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, throughthis general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors ofcomedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar thing, and compelsthat most elaborate dulness to amuse us. _Us_, above all, by virtue ofthe custom of counterchange here set forth. 

Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the Englishpoets that so persist in France may not reveal something within theEnglish language--one would be somewhat loth to think so--reserved to theFrench reader peculiarly? Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to theselect? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English beexplained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hithertosatisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed toaccount for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste forpoetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, _patatras_! Who cansay?

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO

The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell withhim a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for Englishdrama. That manner of man--Arlecchino, or Harlequin--had outlived hisplaymates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little ofPantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranioin the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than thesmouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedyand comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, hisbrightest, his most vital shape. 

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurialone, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officiousand efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but hetends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latincomedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memorysurvives differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, hisfriend. " What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio ischiefly this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fullycapable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he livedindeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the close of a careerof ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who ever heard ofArlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his sword-play, overtaken bytragedy? His time had surely come. The gay companion was to bleed;Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas not so deep as a well nor so wideas a church-door, but it served. 

Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the primitiveItalian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional little stage of thepast, has a hero's place, whereas when he interferes in human affairs heis only the auxiliary. He might be lover and bridegroom on the primitivestage, in the comedy of these few and unaltered types; but whenPantaloon, Clown, and Harlequin play with really human beings, thenHarlequin can be no more than a friend of the hero, the friend of thebridegroom. The five figures of the old stage dance attendance; theyplay around the business of those who have the dignity of mortality;they, poor immortals--a clown who does not die, a pantaloon never farfrom death, who yet does not die, a Columbine who never attainsDesdemona's death of innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude andpassion--flit in the backward places of the stage. 

Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he serves. Isthere a memory of Harlequin in that delicate figure? Something of thesubservient immortality, of the light indignity, proper to Pantaleone, Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the Clown, hovers away from thestage when Ariel is released from the trouble of human things. 

Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell. And ifsome claim be made to it still because Harlequin has transformed so manyscenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, since Mercutiodied, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a_marionnette_; he has returned whence he came. A man may play him, buthe is--as he was first of all--a doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino tooklife, and, so promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to beagain what he first was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so nowa man plays the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our childrensee, a poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life. 

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the seriousages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten burden ofresponsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, madedramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and no heartnow is quite light, even for an hour. 

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certainnevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not forthe paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere the joke"emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to catch theattention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humourwanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal. 

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the violentpersonification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance, and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the vagrantencounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game. Itstands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and isearly at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with thecompliant jest. 

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constantsignalling, an endless recognition. Forms of approach are remitted. Andthe joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or nogaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up anddown the pages of the paper and the book. See, again, the theatre. Asomewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon ourpresent stage that little else can claim--paradox again apart--to betaken seriously. 

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away fromthe Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittestfor children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is everywhere and atevery moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and insome degree distinctive of men, and no mean part of their prerogative andprivilege. The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are notmen are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation. They will notrefuse explanation. And there is little upon which a man will so valuehimself as upon that sense, "in England, now. "

Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, likerhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in some sort a habit when itis not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must confessthat we laugh oftenest because--being amused--we intend to show that weare amused. We are right to make the sign, but a smile would be as surea signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but be changing theconvention; and the change would restore laughter itself to its ownplace. We have fallen into the way of using it to prove something--oursense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but laughter should not thusbe used, it should go free. It is not a demonstration, whether in logic, or--as the word demonstration is now generally used--in emotion; and wedo ill to charge it with that office. 

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among such apeople as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who laughwithout cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who perhapsfirst fell into the habit in the intention of proving that they were notgloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not that excuse; andmany women who laugh in their uncertainty as to what is humorous and whatis not. This last is the most harmless of all kinds of superfluouslaughter. When it carries an apology, a confession of natural and genialignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs a laugh of hazard andexperiment, she is to be more than forgiven. What she must not do is tolaugh a laugh of instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that wasnever worth the taking. 

There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to asense of humour, but who laugh from a sense of happiness. Childish isthat trick, and sweet. For children, who always laugh because they must, and never by way of proof or sign, laugh only half their laughs out oftheir sense of humour; they laugh the rest under a mere stimulation:because of abounding breath and blood; because some one runs behind them, for example, and movement does so jog their spirits that their legs failthem, for laughter, without a jest. 

If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to signaltheir perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall keep the laughfor its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply, and notthrice at the same thing--once for foolish surprise, and twice for tardyintelligence, and thrice to let it be known that they are amused--then itmay be time to persuade this laughing nation not to laugh so loud as itis wont in public. The theatre audiences of louder-speaking nationslaugh lower than ours. The laugh that is chiefly a signal of thelaugher's sense of the ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has thedisadvantage of covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from theactors. It is a public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon fora public laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with privatelaughter there. 

Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times ofdispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour in aplace better guarded, as something worth a measure of seclusion. Itshould not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in adventurous places. For the sense of humour has other things to do than to make itselfconspicuous in the act of laughter. It has negative tasks of validvirtue; for example, the standing and waiting within call of tragedyitself, where, excluded, it may keep guard. 

No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best. Thiswould be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where the wit "out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine, " and to deny Ben Jonson's "tartAristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus, " and the rest. DoubtlessGreece determined the custom for all our Occident; but none the lessmight the modern world grow more sensible of the value of composure. 

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein as tothis of humour, and none other do we indulge with so littlefastidiousness. It is as though there were honour in governing the othersenses, and honour in refusing to govern this. It is as though we wereashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that whichloses nothing by seclusion. 

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicityrules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of theorbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, therecurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, itdoes 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 themind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periodstowards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towardsrecovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will beintolerable to-morrow; to-day it is easy to bear, but the cause has notpassed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound toleave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does notremain--it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had madea course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, andwould have had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes suchobservations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, therehave never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. ButThomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them. Inhis cell alone with the elements--"What wouldst thou more than these? forout of these were all things made"--he learnt the stay to be found in thedepth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains thesoul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more consciouswelcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And "rarely, rarelycomest thou, " sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit ofDelight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained toour service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificialviolence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thuscompelled. _That_ flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically orhyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time. 

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the "Imitation" should bothhave been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guessat the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch withthe spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, noinfractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept fromthem the knowledge of recurrences. _Eppur si muove_. They knew thatpresence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just uponits flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They knewthat what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towardsdeparture. "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 withunlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset andretreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant effortsafter an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to livewithout either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of thesaints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the mostcomplete subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolationvisited them by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, theinterior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world. Theyrejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in theirhearts. Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in thecourse of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly preparedfor the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Fewpoets have fully recognized the metrical absence of their muse. For fullrecognition is expressed in one only way--silence. 

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worshipthe moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes areknown to adore the sun, and not the moon. On her depend the tides; andshe is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrentlyirrigate lands where rain is rare. More than any other companion ofearth is she the Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her bythat name. Her metrical phases are the symbol of the order ofrecurrence. Constancy in approach and in departure is the reason of herinconstancies. Juliet will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of themoon; but Juliet did not live to know that love itself has tidaltimes--lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interiorheart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outwardalteration in the beloved. For man--except those elect already named--ishardly aware of periodicity. The individual man either never learns itfully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is amatter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is longlacking. It is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt sodefinitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. Thatyoung sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this youngignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems solong, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all theintervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations, betweenactions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looksimpossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable andunfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that thereis a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not tooaudacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant tocontain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their lifewill wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest inits phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands allthings--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity. 

DOMUS ANGUSTA

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large humandestiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for itsslight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but theircomplaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the humanlot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destinyis one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequentand so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to thetrouble 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 braveEmilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house. Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, littleargument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vaincapacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for everyliberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the widehouse we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. Thenarrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well movepity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to thatinadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movementmakes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeksthat timorous heart. 

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by itsinarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but itsinadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right languageenlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do. Who, forinstance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of hisconfidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimatesyllable of his tenderness? There is a "pledging of the word, " inanother sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poetpledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiarsanction. And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when itnot only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and theword are almost as closely united as thought and the word. Almost--notquite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware andsensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power. 

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we knowit to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love isgreat that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; andto the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in theindocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in thefamiliar. It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradictslife. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the oneimprobable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little naturethat is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a truedestruction, 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 manifestlyinappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it toan end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was theaudacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise thegrotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something moresignificant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings ofrhetoric; he is perdurable because he is not completed. His humours arestrangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die;for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to bemortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I thankmy fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that theFrench so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at. Butthe gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in abook, in fiction, or on the stage in a play. 

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows. Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyesthat are apt to express none but common things. There are allusionsunawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me andfrom my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to painof our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolishand the stolid--"wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?"

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words inunion or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union in theart of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for eachpoet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take thecumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of thevirginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take themfor ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forgoInnocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience canbe nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularlysolitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men'shistories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of othermen's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence andExperience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and nobleisolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind toforgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things ofothers, 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 mustborrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustifiedambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memorywith an unjustifiable history. 

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetryconsider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance inadopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not evenbeen introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life--supposing it to be a liberal lifeconcerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so muchexperience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_. To achieve thattone in its fullness it is necessary to take for one's own the_praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--notto live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more thanany man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with allkinds of poets. 

As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one friar goes aboutdarned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order growscynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will theresultant verse succeed in implying so much--or rather so many, in thefeminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitateat the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousnessand to overcome it. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather tomake use of one's fellow men's old shoes than put their old secrets touse, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, toutilize the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verseand phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry arefamiliar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise andpledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love:which is the vow. "Till death!" "For ever!" are cries too simple andtoo natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the leasttolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions. 

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature adelicate 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 werethus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neitherlove nor remember in common. 

THE HOURS OF SLEEP

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less arethey his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically andpunctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, withoutlanguor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his daymind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest indreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind indreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because themind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of atide's, and they do return. 

In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper herinfluence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of thesleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real daypersuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to thenight, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length. 

The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and theirdominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts offhis troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state, by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftenerin a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think of it in the day-time. " By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, notto be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope. 

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is tomiss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine therhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, andtempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance andexpectancy. 

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium, would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the lossof him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence ofthe hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night, or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the morenatural, he would be rash who should make too sure. 

In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to losethe solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleepare too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; andNature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when thelarks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and singdaybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easilydeceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to thehour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise andamong so many people that you shall not be aware of them; you may thusmerely force and prolong the day. But to do so is not to live well bothlives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and tobe cradled in the swing of change. 

There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such acradle of alternate hours. "It cannot be, " says Herbert, "that I am heon whom Thy tempests fell all night. "

It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, hasthe extremest sense of light. Almost the most shining lines in Englishpoetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake, writtenconfessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, andthose dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is as dark as hecan make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the greenplain and the river is too bright for day. So, indeed, is anotherbrightness of Blake's, which is also, in his poem, a child's dream, andwas certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in which he woke towrite the Songs of Innocence:-

 O what land is the land of dreams? What are its mountains, and what are its streams? O father, I saw my mother there, Among the lilies by waters fair. Among the lambs clothed in white, She walk'd with her Thomas in sweet delight. 

To none but the hours claimed and inspired by sleep, held awake bysufferance of sleep, belongs such a vision. 

Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep. In somelandscapes of his early manner he has the very light of dreams, and itwas surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and dreamsclaimed his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an illumination. Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because in summer so many ofthe hours of sleep are also hours of light. He carries the mood of man'snight out into the sunshine--Corot did so--and lives the life of night, in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun. In the only time whenthe heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmicpower of night at its dark noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring ofthe actual sun. 

He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To thatlife belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds ofbeauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extremeperception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the explanation ofall the memories of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done inearlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of allthe world. Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meetswith one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not ofwelcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by thespirit of the hours of sleep. 

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilizationhas been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization hasgiven little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, itsshavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a rightforegone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in thecase of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of thenearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged togetherinto some blind by-way. 

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, andvirtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they areignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they ownfor every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of noobscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closedcorners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they commandso much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not howto wish. 

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods, and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured bymiles; they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely thedominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is lonelinessfor innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of theearth; no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened or the silencemarred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone therebefore. Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to benumbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the living andevery man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light. "

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and athicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get fora time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, itis still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes, " and aspace of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place. But the best solitude does not hide at all. 

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live wholelives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation of even thesolitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never have a whole houralone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as peoplemay in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one anotherand not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to avagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps theunconscious loss which is futile and barren. 

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all theirsolitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or thehospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice ofaction and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, andthey have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitudedeferred. 

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone andinaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many adrawing of J. F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girlstands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for theclosing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out ofsight. 

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaboratepossession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude ofa woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about, handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so muchimportunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone longenough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood movesseparately, beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses. All iscommonplace until the doors are closed upon the two. This uniqueintimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more thansingle solitude; it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains, safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea. 

That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is thePoint of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a betrayalof that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of allcrimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between awoman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as achild's foot runs. But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is thatof a woman against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers, are held to excuse her. She gains the mostslovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the vulgargrounds that her crime was easy. 

Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by theway, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from commonopinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation. Hewas master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was his secret, and thepublic was not privy to his artistic conscience. He does violence to theobligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know veryexplicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he is lawless in a more literalsense, but only hopes the world will believe that he has a whole code ofhis own making. It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to breakobvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public, and to abidethe common rebuke. 

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for thepreparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and wideand long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of theaccessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside, is enough to lead thither. 

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. Inorder to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the publishedpromise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusionor of a very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state ofsolitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other. Thetraveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost life-longsolitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures hehas seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is broken by hispassage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but theyare not aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at him as thoughthey were invisible. Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is inthe wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they arecurious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone. Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that lookin any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a life-long solitary. He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He never had theimpersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even havetaken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvansolitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wildsolitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude. 

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, sothere is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. Itis the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It isthe quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but readyglance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who haveneither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, noflight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in thestreet, no hope of news from solitary counsels. 

DECIVILIZED

The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--withdecivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparinghim no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge ofbarbarism. Especially from new soil--remote, colonial--he faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his ownyouthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches andcanyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature andto reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. Heis there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artlessslang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. Thenew air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil doesbut set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refusefeeling of a race decivilizing. He who played long this pattering partof youth, hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did notwear war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult tocommunicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than asecond-hand (figurative) dress coat. And when it was a question not ofrebuke, but of praise, even the American was ill-content with the word ofthe judicious who lauded him for some delicate successes in continuingsomething of the literature of England, something of the art of France;he was more eager for the applause that stimulated him to write poems inprose form and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief training inacademies of native inspiration. Even now English voices are constantlycalling upon America to begin--to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a fine and admirablecontinuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained advance. 

But decivilized man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too, knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a literature, anart, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price. Trash, in the fullness of its insimplicity and cheapness, is impossiblewithout a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic--which is futility, not failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatoryreproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organicquality, purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among theantecedents of trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because ofthem. And nothing can be much sadder that such a proof of what maypossibly 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 nobleforefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall bealso well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and notour inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace upwards andfollow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The very habit ofour thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatalhistory. Their companions must be lovely, but need be no lovelier thantheir ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts maybe intrusted to keep the counsels of literature. 

Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which ofus is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequentdepreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporarytendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or whoshall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and whenand how the bastardy befalls? The decivilized have every grace as theantecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent oftheir mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, orlaugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, bysome living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilized to blame as havingin their own persons possessed civilization and marred it. They did notpossess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into aninclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardlydo other than continue. 

Nothing can look duller than the future of this second-hand andmultiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they are many;but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dullness intheir future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth--thatthe vulgarized are not _un_-civilized, and that there is no growth forthem--it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, morequaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yetit is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up hisvoice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility. He promises the world a literature, anart, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town justbuilt. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words weredreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiableas the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them when they arethe promise of an impotent people? "I will do such things: what they areyet I know not. "

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets haveall but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too muchinterpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessibleutterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature. 

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake togethera nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can youmake a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereaswedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling. Ihave known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the wholepeal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness madelight of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dancein his boots by a merry highwayman. 

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild prisoners--by twosor threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives--one or twelve takingwing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are deliveredfrom the close hands of this actual present. Not in vain is the suddenupper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past. 

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surelyafter but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France when onehas arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in"Parsifal. " They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, theyare the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields andthe manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in thebreath of the earth, overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle ofsome black-smith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaksits local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, andgreatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you knowhow familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of thepeople. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be. Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect. 

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; andwhere it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abidesentire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. Theuntravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, butalways to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by-ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet andnimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Longwhite roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they givepromise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular andunforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to bemade. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such avisit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, thespirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and theconceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor isthere a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child. He is wellused to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is acondition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loudin the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies. 

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gaymeasures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in awedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile marchwith a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies. If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curiouslocal immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights. Their way isfor the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are nothymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells. Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in thesub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strengththat lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a littleart, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means. Ifit were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, forthose melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how somevillage musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for thebells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and whateffect of liberty. 

These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in theworld. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively. Thebelfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the timewhen Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But, needless to say, this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy. At that time they musthave had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, andgolden throats, precisely tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a morejust scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in theorder of the game of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made byman this is by far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from thegreat churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries thebells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does notring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, anddignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly fills the country. 

The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimblebells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can thereforehear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no other bells inearshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set open to the cloud, on a _festa_ morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but thenearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune isuninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequesteredart of composing melodies for bells--charming division of an art, havingits own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding bylaw--dwells in these solitary places. No tunes in a town would get thishearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such awide and lofty silence. 

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; thecustom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous touristcomplain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hearan honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal tohim to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one byone, the belfries stand and play their tunes. Variable are those lonelymelodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful airis played for the burial of a villager. 

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells thatseems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten whenthe mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought toearth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that sways acrossone of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered. "

POPULAR BURLESQUE

The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is themotive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets withthe sound of processionals and of recessionals--a certain popular versionof "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries ofderision raised by the makers of this likeness of something unworshipfulon the earth beneath, so much the more am I convinced that the nationalhumour is that of banter, and that no other kind of mirth so gains asdoes this upon the public taste. 

Here, for example, is the popular idea of a street festival; that day isas the people will actually have it, with their own invention, their ownmaterial, their own means, and their own spirit. They owe nothing onthis occasion to the promptings or the subscriptions of the classes thatare apt to take upon themselves the direction and tutelage of the peoplein relation to any form of art. Here on every fifth of November thepeople have their own way with their own art; and their way is to offerthe service of the image-maker, reversed in hissing and irony, to somecreature of their hands. 

It is a wanton fancy; and perhaps no really barbarous people is capableof so overturning the innocent plan of original portraiture. To make amental image of all things that are named to the ear, or conceived in themind, being an industrious custom of children and childish people whichlapses in the age of much idle reading, the making of a material image isthe still more diligent and more sedulous act, whereby the primitive mancontrols and caresses his own fancy. He may take arms anon, disappointed, against his own work; but did he ever do that work inmalice from the outset?

From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the person of theguy. If it were but an antithesis to the citizen's idea of somethingadmirable which he might carry in procession on some other day, thecarrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot at asuspicion that he might admire anything so much as to make a good-lookingdoll in its praise. There is absolutely no image-making art in thepractice of our people, except only this art of rags and contumely. Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of anger for a certaincause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual maliceand of so heartless a rancour. 

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily--or so itseems--more and more the holiday temper of the majority. Mockery is theonly animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only intelligence. They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it. Say that the guy is the effigy of an agitator in the cause of somethingto be desired; the street man and boy have then two motives of mocking:they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing tosuspect the reformer of some kind of hypocrisy. Perhaps the guy of thisoccasion is most characteristic of all guys in London. The people, having him or her to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity oftheir annual procession. They anticipate time, and make an image when itis not November, and sell it at the market of the kerb. 

Hear, moreover, the songs which some nameless one makes for the citizens, perhaps in thoughtful renunciation of the making of their laws. These, too, seem to have for their inspiration the universal taunt. They are, indeed, most in vogue when they have no meaning at all--this it is thatmakes the _succes fou_ (and here Paris is of one mind with London) ofthe street; but short of such a triumph, and when a meaning isdiscernible, it is an irony. 

Bank Holiday courtship (if the inappropriate word can be pardoned) seemsto be done, in real life, entirely by banter. And it is the strangestthing to find that the banter of women by men is the most mocking in theexchange. If the burlesque of the maid's tongue is provocative, that ofthe man's is derisive. Somewhat of the order of things as they stoodbefore they were inverted seems to remain, nevertheless, as a memory;nay, to give the inversion a kind of lagging interest. Irony is mademore complete by the remembrance, and by an implicit allusion to thestate of courtship in other classes, countries, or times. Such anallusion no doubt gives all its peculiar twang to the burlesque of love. 

With the most strange submission these Englishwomen in their millionsundergo all degrees of derision from the tongues of men who are theirmates, equals, contemporaries, perhaps in some obscure sense theirsuitors, and in a strolling manner, with one knows not what ungainlymotive of reserve, even their admirers. Nor from their tongues only;for, to pass the time, the holiday swain annoys the girl; and if he wearsher hat, it is ten to one that he has plucked it off with a humorousdisregard of her dreadful pins. 

We have to believe that unmocked love has existence in the streets, because of the proof that is published when a man shoots a woman who hasrejected him; and from this also do we learn to believe that a woman ofthe burlesque classes is able to reject. But for that sign we shouldfind little or nothing intelligible in what we see or overhear of thedrama of love in popular life. 

In its easy moments, in its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles alltradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy clowning after a fashionthat is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same twang in countryplaces; and whether the English maid, having, like the antique, thrownher apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets of Hampstead Heath oramong sylvan trees, it seems that the most humorous thing to be done bythe swain would be, in the opinion in vogue, to stroll another way. Insular I have said, because I have not seen the like of this fashionwhether in America or elsewhere in Europe. 

But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual inversionof the worship of images on the fifth of November, is that of a sentenceof Wordsworth's--"We live by admiration. "

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesyceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communicationwith a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; areluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for apurse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word orsign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, ora calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face andbreathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes toyou on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it. Butthe beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, norecognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid inhis direction, and never a word to excuse you. 

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used tonothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to thebeggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning. " Whencomplaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit butwhat is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy withmore lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit ofmanner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To thesimply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is astriking thing; it is significant of so much. 

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligibleact of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the casteanswering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. Anelderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certainnumber of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literallytranslated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil, " and the last wordshe naturally puts into the feminine. 

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the localdialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms asnothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase toEnglish readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent womanwho uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannotrecall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrastit is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of correspondingstation in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we havenothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currentlyby rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of allspeakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect"familiar, but by no means vulgar. " Besides, even if our Englishwomancould by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil, " she would still not have the opportunityof putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does socomplete the character of the sentence. 

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase ofexcuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere inthe South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins tobeg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter, " you canhardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly wellknown, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in therich; but about the byways and remoter places there must still be somedismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensivehaughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received bytravellers. 

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphaticallyas we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly putthemselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appealsvaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does notseem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, ascruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty andthe thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicatingthat dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of asimply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. Itis not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal ofintercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress thoseconditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny thepresence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, becausefortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it inthe indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint, " is a phrasethat might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligiblefortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among themost barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among thestones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. Thepeople, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, andbeg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwontedfigure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some formof refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth whileto remember--is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to theportent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds thatof ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is madeto understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent tothe violence of the rich. 

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar isstill merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort usto see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardlyintended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of the road. He no longer truststhe world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholeheartedmendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance wherebyan unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind. Themerry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touchesof chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptibleto the seated and stable social world. 

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled ourliterature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, bytradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has beenstopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, ledunderground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song ofthe distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, haveceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seemsthat the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still thesubject of a Spanish song. 

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it isnot a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling note of a manwho owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takesit by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand ofunreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems, therefore, the song of anindomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyrchance. 

AT MONASTERY GATES

No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it, unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege. Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of themonastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more thanbeautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-houseand garden. 

The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of thedynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, andbacked by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in acleft high up among the hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, andthese are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, andloftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky. Just such aVia Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its finalcrucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while theencircled lake below is cool with the last of the night. The same orderof friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set theKreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteenchapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine. 

Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green overthe blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing ofsmoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidlycultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines;the breath of pit and factory, out of sight, thickens the lower sky, andlies heavily over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper blue clear andthe head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steadyray of the evening star. The people scattered about are not miningpeople, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottagesare rather cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slateshave taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upontheir edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasureto see. How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over morethan half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--with whichthe buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshineand the bright grey of an English sky. 

The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it ismodern; and the friars look young in another--they are like theirbrothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists ofyesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint, " or "oldworld. " No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by theexcursionists. 

With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers workupon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hangingthe washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine whichslices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby isguarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of theobscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-consciousremorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to makedoggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and onmonastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of hiseditions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got amongthe cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from othervalleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth. 

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people havebecome well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack ofintelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look atthem without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girlthat you heard the brutal word of contempt. She had come to the placewith some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcometo do, within the monastery grounds. She stood, a figure for Bournemouthpier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbriansaint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi andbetween the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuriescontinually since the coming of the friars. One might have asked of herthe kindness of a fellow-feeling. She and he alike were so habited as toshow the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business. " Bysome such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted toinclude her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might haveasked of her the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy, " said theSalvation Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy makingsuch a fool of one's self!"

The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran'secstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy. As a pocketit relieves the over-burdened hands. A bottle of the local white winemade by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, iscarried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates. Thefriars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, andnot only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in theroom stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that wasthe last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in _LaLegende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creatureis able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished byquite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there wasan end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancakefrom the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by thespectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down tomeditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident wasexplained. 

Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get upgaily to this difficult service. Of all duties this one never grows easyor familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is something to have foundbut one act aloof from habit. It is not merely that the friars overcomethe habit of sleep. The subtler point is that they can never acquire thehabit of sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life butwould gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness andperpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without awill that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done, and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's. 

The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of theFrench fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which ringswith so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriaticlittoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for thedead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. "

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to thesound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work ofthe monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it isprincipally a place of studies. So much elect intellect and strength ofheart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True, the friars are notdoing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair. These"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing, hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--uponthe Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, orreluctantly jostling other men for places. They might be among theinvoluntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof isa discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the superfluousactivities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by thedwellers within such walls as these. The output--again a beautifulword--of the age is lessened by this abstention. None the less hopes thestranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monasterygates. 

THE SEA WALL

A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childishassociation with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright shadows ofgrey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick aboveinto the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, withits too many windows and too few walls, the city which of all capitalstakes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some otherattraction or aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at thebase, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the inexpressive peeringof windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area, "and by the helpless hollows of shop-fronts. 

I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wrought-iron. A wall is the safeguard of simplicity. It lays a long level lineamong the indefinite chances of the landscape. But never more majesticthan in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot uponthe rock, builds in the serried ilex-wood and builds out the wave. Thesea-wall is the wall at its best. And fine as it is on the strong coast, it is beautiful on the weak littoral and the imperilled levels of anorthern beach. 

That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass thatpasses away into shingle at its foot. It is at close quarters with thewinter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the sky-lineof sea is jagged. Never from any height does the ocean-horizon show thusbroken and battered at its very verge, but from the flat coast and thenarrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; andthe stormy light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shiftingwith the buoyant hillocks and their restless line. 

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as securesmany a mile of gentle English coast to the east. The Dutch dyke has notthat aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look ofhaste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumberedDutch fields to look at the sea, there is nothing in the least likeEngland; and even the Englishman of to-day is apt to share something ofthe old perversity that was minded to cast derision upon the Dutch intheir encounters with the tides. 

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slightderision of the nations who hold themselves to be more romantic, and, asit were, more slender. We English, once upon a time, did especiallyflout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth thewriting. It may be no more than a brief perversity that has set a numberof our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it isno more than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense ofthe bourgeois. The bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he iswere he to stand up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image ofhis dismay is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wantonart. And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginaryaudience? Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are notthe least of the makings of an author. A few men and women he achieveswithin his books; but others does he create without, and to those figuresof all illusion makes the appeal of his art. More candid is the authorwho has no world, but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart. He hasat least a living hearer. 

This is by the way. Charles II has been cheered; the feat is done, thedismay is imagined with joy. And yet the Merry Monarch's was a dismaltime. Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from the French Kingremembered and claimed by the restored throne of England, and the Dutchin the Medway--all this was disaster. None the less, having the vanityof new clothes and a pretty figure, did we--especially by the mouth ofAndrew Marvell--deride our victors, making sport of the Philistines witha proper national sense of enjoyment of such physical disabilities, orsuch natural difficulties, or such misfavour of fortune, as may beset thealien. 

Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment. They are sostill; or they were so certainly in the day when a great novelist foundthe smallness of some South German States to be the subject of unsatingbanter. The German scenes at the end of "Vanity Fair, " for example, mayprove how much the ridicule of mere smallness, fewness, poverty (and noteven real poverty, privation, but the poverty that shows in comparisonwith the gold of great States, and is properly in proportion) rejoicedthe sense of humour in a writer and moralist who intended to teachmankind to be less worldly. In Andrew Marvell's day they were even morecandid. The poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincerelaughter of the inmost man, the true, infrequent laughter of the heart. Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughter--at leanness, at hunger, cold, and solitude--in the face of the world, and in the name ofliterature, in one memorable satire. I speak of "Flecno, an EnglishPriest in Rome, " wherein nothing is spared--not the smallness of thelodging, nor the lack of a bed, nor the scantiness of clothing, nor thefast. 

 "This basso-rilievo of a man--"

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last. 

It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallness of thecountry of Holland matter for a cordial jest. But, besides thesmallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage in regardto the sea. In the Venetians, commerce with the sea, conflict with thesea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing peace--albeit a less instantbattle and a more languid victory--were confessed to be noble; in theDutch they were grotesque. "With mad labour, " says Andrew Marvell, withthe spirited consciousness of the citizen of a country well above groundand free to watch the labour at leisure, "with mad labour" did the Dutch"fish the land to shore. "

 How did they rivet with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre, their new-catched miles, And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their watery Babel far more high To reach the sea than those to scale the sky!

It is done with a jolly wit, and in what admirable couplets!

 The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed, And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest. 

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-nymphsshould find themselves provided with a capital _cabillau_ of shoals ofpickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and it must beallowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony. There is not a smilefor us in "Flecno, " but it is more than possible to smile over this"Character of Holland"; at the excluded ocean returning to play at leap-frog over the steeples; at the rise of government and authority inHolland, which belonged of right to the man who could best invent ashovel or a pump, the country being so leaky:-

 Not who first sees the rising sun commands, But who could first discern the rising lands. 

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell, morethan his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light in soburly a frame--we have lost with these the wild humour that wore so wellthe bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality--in a word, theCouplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot stand firm within twolines, but must slip beyond and between the boundaries, who tolerate thecouplets of Keats and imitate them, should praise the day of Charles IIbecause of Marvell's art, and not for love of the sorry reign. We hadplague, fire, and the Dutch in the Medway, but we had the couplet; andthere were also the measures of those more poetic poets, hitherto calledsomewhat slightingly the Cavalier poets, who matched the wit of thePuritan with a spirit simpler and less mocking. 

It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that someremembered winter storms lately turned their great artillery. It was atime of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and so close, up inthe towers of the seaside stronghold, that one seemed to be indeedadmitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds. The gale came with anindescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemed to break itself uponthe heights, yet passed unbroken out to sea; in the voice of the seathere were pauses, but none in that of the urgent gale with its hoo-hoo-hoo all night, that clamoured down the calling of the waves. That lackof pauses was the strangest thing in the tempest, because the increase ofsound seemed to imply a lull before. The lull was never perceptible, butthe lift was always an alarm. The onslaught was instant, where would itstop? What was the secret extreme to which this hurry and force weretending? You asked less what thing was driving the flocks of the stormthan what was drawing them. The attraction seemed the greater violence, the more irresistible, and the more unknown. And there were moments whenthe end seemed about to be attained. 

The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but the fierce galeis soft. Along the short grass, trembling and cowering flat on thescarped hill-side, against the staggering horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the battery of the tempest is a quick andenormous softness. What down, what sand, what deep moss, what elasticwave could match the bed and cushion of the gale?

This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up together. The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling whiteness offoam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such narrow waters youdo not see the distances, the wide levels of fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and long wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and transitory brightness so far out that all thewaves, near and far, seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyondthe other, and league beyond league, into foam. But the Channel has itsown strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with thefreshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon thewhite sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the light of ashining cloud. 

TITHONUS

"It was resolved, " said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of thepanels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and otherpatterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewingfrom time to time. The colours, therefore, "--and here is the passage tobe noted--"are all mixed with wax liquefied with petroleum; and the waxsurface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax is left time to form animperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of thestone with a chisel if it was desired to remove it. " Not, apparently, that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" isdriven in and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there isnothing possible to cut away by any industry. In this humorous form ofornament we are beforehand with Posterity. Posterity is baffled. 

Will this victory over our sons' sons be the last resolute tyrannyprepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of thefuture? To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the strongestof human desires. It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by the humanrace; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this success in thestencilling of St Paul's teach us, to our confusion. There is evidentlya man--a group of men--happy at this moment because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our posterity to have their cupola of StPaul's with the stone mouldings stencilled and "picked out" with nigglingcolours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not. And this is asurvival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history. 

It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and notto recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternallegislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this formerhuman wish. If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, whichyet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers' who arrested themoving man, and inhibited the moving God. The sixteenth century and acertain part of the age immediately following seem to be times when thedesire had conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of thesixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth inEngland--for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. _There_ is theobstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure uponpower. _Then_ was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign andstyle. Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate ofthe unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to come were to beas the day then present would have them, if the dead hand--the livinghand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death--could byany means make them fast. 

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may bemore than willing to build for itself. The day may soon come when no manwill do even so much without some impulse of apology. Posterity is notcompelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read norto look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone buildingin view for an age or two. We can hardly avoid some of the forms oftyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who wouldconsent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleumand this wax. 

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future. How thefrescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be madesecure against all mischances--smoke, damp, "the risk of bulging, " evenaccidents attending the washing of upper floors--all was discussed inconfidence with the public. It was impossible for anyone who read thepapers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities oftechnical knowledge. From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, allkinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order todefeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient andeffacing time. 

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date, decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order ofarchitecture. Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place withunparalleled obstinacy. They had not the malice of the petroleum thatdoes violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an indomitable patience. Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all hiswork--refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgences--bya perseverance that nothing could discourage. Who has not known somewhatindifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes?Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and inthe case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years, with frequent stirrings. This was in order that the whole fresco, whenat last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality. Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those mechanical means thatshould avert the risk of bulging already mentioned. He neglected nodetail. He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of thelaws of nature, to frustrate them. Gravitation found him prepared, andso did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents. Againstbulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possibletrickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of thehuman conspiracy. In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to standwell. It would have been more just--so the present age thinks of thesepreserved walls--if the day that admired them had had them exclusively, and our day had been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ageshave undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?

In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder toshoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and art. They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came from Munichto London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heart ofconfidence into the breast of the Commission. The situation, he averred, need not be too damp for immortality, with due care. What he had done inthe Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek might be done with the best resultsin England, in defiance of the weather, of the river, of the mere days, of the divine order of alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth. 

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime thathad not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its mission; theywould have none of it. They evaded it, studied its ways, and put it tothe rout. "Many failures that might have been hastily attributed to dampwere really owing to the use of lime in too fresh a state. Of theexperimental works painted at Munich, those only have faded which areknown to have been done without due attention to the materials. _Thus, a figure of Bavaria, painted by Kaulbach, which has faded considerably, is known to have been executed with lime that was too fresh_. " Onecannot refrain from italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take alittle less of this important care about the lime, to have a betterconfidence, to be more impatient and eager, and all had been well:_not_ to do--a virtue of omission. 

This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical questionhitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged toface it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and inpart for that future whereof the present needs to be assured--that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person orproperty. Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim, and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the reflex effect upon ourown affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come. Every maker of a will does at least this. 

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They foundthe present all too narrow for the imposition of their will. It did notsatisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to effacethe records of a past that offended them. It did not satisfy them tobind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instantcompulsion. When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments andpursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to itthat none living should evade them, then they outraged the future. 

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to theeffectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run intime as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed theirsubjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigidcounsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, theysilenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They wrote in statutebooks; they would have written their will across the skies. Their heartswould have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonialsthat mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did everdoubt lest posterity might try their lock. Perhaps they did never somuch as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom theirprohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history. 

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of theseour more diffident times! They, who would have written their present andactual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleumand wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in withholding from theirhands this means of finality and violence. Into our hands it has beengiven at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that wehad been proved in the school of forbearance. Something, indeed, we mayhave learnt therein, but not enough, as we now find. 

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and theprobable wisdom of our successors. A certain reverend official document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to theveneration of the present times "those past ages with their store ofexperience. " Doubtless, as the posterity of their predecessors ourpredecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, none--none. Therefore, if they were a little reverend our own posterity is rightreverend. It is a flippant and novelty-loving humour that so flattersthe unproved past and refuses the deference due to the burden of yearswhich is ours, which--grown still graver--will be our children's. 

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT

The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the artof nations. Being in its own methods and attitude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of accidental value, and not of integral necessity. The virtual discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe torelearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may lookwhen Symmetry has grown vulgar. The lesson was most welcome. Japan hashad her full influence. European art has learnt the value of positionand the tact of the unique. But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all hercharacteristic art) content with her own conventions; she is local, provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a worldthat has Greek art in its own history--Pericles "to its father. "

Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched byJapanese example of Incident and the Unique. Music had attained thenoblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phaseand of fragment, succeeded. The sense of symmetry is strong in acomplete melody--of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and leaststationary form--balance; whereas the _leit-motif_ is isolated. Indomestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiarantithesis--the very commonplace of rival methods of art. But the sameantithesis exists in less obvious forms. The poets have sought"irregular" metres. Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing itsright place, in the most modern of modern portraits. In these we have, if not the Japanese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japaneseexaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy. The smile, the figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arrangingtouch of a hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationaryfoot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a singlebreeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life ofJapanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident. In passing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspectof an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or inmotion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness andexpectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks andelms are gathered in their station. All this is not Japanese, but fromsuch accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck ofperceptiveness. 

What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament. Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counterchangefor their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw the distinctionbetween this motive and that of the Japanese. The Japanese motives maybe defined as uniqueness and position. And these were not known asmotives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration. Repetitionand counterchange, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, asin the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular aninvention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principalinspiration. And it is quite worth while, and much to the presentpurpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanesediaper patterns, which is _interruption_. Repetition there mustnecessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption whichis, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected. Theplace of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and theavoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design ofthis class inimitable. Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have acuriously successful effect of impulse. It is as though a separateintention had been formed by the designer at every angle. Such renewedconsciousness does not make for greatness. Greatness in design has morepeace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in theircurious brevity. It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in allother schools of art, is long or short according to its place andpurpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns thatthe line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirelycomposed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankishavoidance of the goal. Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in theunit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device--that ofnumbers. They make a small difference in the number of curves and oflines. A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; itwould look too much like a contrast. For example, three rods on one sideand six on another would be something else than a mere variation, andvariety would be lost by the use of them. The Japanese decorator willvary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat ofsymmetry is immediately produced. With more violent means the idea ofsymmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted. 

Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanesecompositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry. Itis a balance of suspension and of antithesis. There is no sense of lackof equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect ofgiving or of subtracting value. A small thing is arranged to reply to alarge one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance thatmakes it a (Japanese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in othercountries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a singleweight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide itnearer or farther upon a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so manyounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when ithangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays somesuch part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a Japanesecomposition. Its place is its significance and its value. Such an artof position implies a great art of intervals. The Japanese chooses a fewthings and leaves the space between them free, as free as the pauses orsilences in music. But as time, not silence, is the subject, ormaterial, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement ofspace--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals. Thespace between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuablebecause it is just so wide and no more. And this, again, is only anotherway of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilfulart. 

Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped tojustify the more stenographic school of etching. Greatly transcendingJapanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moralsupport from the islands of the Japanese. He too etches a kind ofshorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the spectator'sknowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but thespectator's simple vision. Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have written his signs sofreely had not the Japanese so freely drawn his own. Furthermore still, the transitory and destructible material of Japanese art has done as muchas the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, toreconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to workingfor the day, the day of publication. Japan lives much of its daily lifeby means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of paper, printed. But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper withus means short life, quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, avery circulation of life. This is our present way of survivingourselves--the new version of that feat of life. Time was when tosurvive yourself meant to secure, for a time indefinitely longer than thelife of man, such dull form as you had given to your work; to intrudeupon posterity. To survive yourself, to-day, is to let your work go intodaily oblivion. 

Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper doesnot last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to them adifferent condition of ornament from that with which they adorned oldlacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For the transitorymaterial they keep the more purely pictorial art of landscape. What ofJapanese landscape? Assuredly it is too far reduced to a monotonousconvention to merit the serious study of races that have produced Cotmanand Corot. Japanese landscape-drawing reduces things seen to suchfewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people lessfresh-spirited and more inclined to take themselves seriously than theseOrientals. A preoccupied people would never endure it. But a littlecloser attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasiveattitude towards landscape--it is an attitude almost traitorouslyevasive--a more significant reason. It is that the distances, thegreatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and theflight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a peopleintent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to define by thatphrase the curious Japanese search for accidents? Upon such search thesepeople are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable ofexquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit ofgrowth of a normal flower. They are not in search of the perpetualslight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("alittle wildly, or with the flower of the mind, " says Emerson of the wayof a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse ofthe pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese areintent upon is perpetual slight disorder. In Japan the man in the fieldshas eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone inthe path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure infortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque strangenesshe will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden. Theart of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and notthe art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this peopleconventionally signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an attitudewhich is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of ahuman body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly orniggling labour. Why these curves should be so charming it would be hardto say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place wherethe upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicatelyunexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--issensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, whilethe lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take bynature. 

A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no otherart has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The Japanese havegenerally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake ofperpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy andadmiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorialpresentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beautywhere we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it iscertainly not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generallyaware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity, even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, andis represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior ormousme. But even with this exception the habit of Japanesefigure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It iscurious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant asto make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspectiveforeshortening. With us it is to the youngest child only that therewould appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violentlyforward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders. " TheEuropean child would not see fun in the living man so presented, but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiouslyhumorous in a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The Japanesekeeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, butnot perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortenedfigure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted anddislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it thanthe simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion ofignominy. And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not preciselyscorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models. Hemakes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar with them. 

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need toinsist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentionalcaricatures. 

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises ofsymmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, andwould be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that artafresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may bethe phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in thebody of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance isequal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological factwhere there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres of life andmovement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man isGreek without and Japanese within. But the absolute symmetry of theskeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately aprinciple. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of humanaction. Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infiniteincidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities ofsleep--the symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is thatsymmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and thebattle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because thishand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that thesword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequalheads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength areinflections thereof. All human movement is a variation upon symmetry, and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art. The order ofinflection that is not infraction has been explained in a mostauthoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that shouldsave the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weakexperiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity, " says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has beenthe subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse'swill and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not frominfraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so thegreatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been mostvariously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings andpassions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law putsa strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is acontinual _slight_ novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, allchime together in praise of the truer order of life. "

And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order mostbeautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof. That perpetualproof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life. Symmetry isa profound, if disregarded because perpetually inflected, condition ofhuman life. 

The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle orbe fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obviouslife, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law andthe less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the formof man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be thenobler and the more perdurable relation. 

THE PLAID

It is disconcerting to hear of the plaid in India. Our dyes, we know, they use in the silk mills of Bombay, with the deplorable result thattheir old clothes are dull and unintentionally falsified withinfelicitous decay. The Hindus are a washing people; and the sun andwater that do but dim, soften, and warm the native vegetable dyes to thelast, do but burlesque the aniline. Magenta is bad enough when it isitself; but the worst of magenta is that it spoils but poorly. No badmodern forms and no bad modern colours spoil well. And spoiling is animportant process. It is a test--one of the ironical tests that come toolate with their proofs. London portico-houses will make some such ruinsas do chemical dyes, which undergo no use but derides them, no accidentsbut caricature them. This is an old enough grievance. But the plaid!

The plaid is the Scotchman's contribution to the decorative art of theworld. Scotland has no other indigenous decoration. In his mostadmirable lecture on "The Two Paths, " Ruskin acknowledged, with a passingmisgiving, that his Highlanders had little art. And the misgiving wasbut passing, because he considered how fatally wrong was the art ofIndia--"it never represents a natural fact. It forms its compositionsout of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line . . . It willnot draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zig-zag. " Because of this aversion from Naturethe Hindu and his art tended to evil, we read. But of the Scot we aretold, "You will find upon reflection that all the highest points of theScottish character are connected with impressions derived straight fromthe natural scenery of their country. "

What, then, about the plaid? Where is the natural fact there? If theIndian, by practising a non-natural art of spirals and zig-zags, cutshimself off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or naturaldelight, " to what did the good and healthy Highlander condemn himself bypractising the art of the plaid? A spiral may be found in the vine, anda zig-zag in the lightning, but where in nature is the plaid to be found?There is surely no curve or curl that can be drawn by a designing handbut is a play upon some infinitely various natural fact. The smoke ofthe cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has itswaves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights andsuch delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence andimpulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curlsever drawn by the finest Oriental hand--and that is not a Hindu hand, norany hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of thesection of a sea-wave--its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is asingle movement, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still roomfluctuates in twenty delicate directions. No, it is impossible to acceptthe saying that the poor spiral or scroll of a human design is anythingbut a participation in the innumerable curves and curls of nature. 

Now the plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin saysof Oriental design--the plaid is not only cut off from nature, and cutoff from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in inorganicquantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradiction of allnatural or vital forms. And it is equally defiant of vital tone and ofvital colour. Everywhere in nature tone is gradual, and between thefainting of a tone and the failing of a curve there is a charminganalogy. But the tartan insists that its tone shall be invariable, andsharply defined by contrasts of dark and light. As to colour, it hascolours, not colour. 

But that plaid should now go so far afield as to decorate the noblegarment of the Indies is ill news. True, Ruskin saw nothing but crueltyand corruption in Indian life or art; but let us hear an Indian maxim inregard to those who, in cruel places, are ready sufferers: "There, " saysthe _Mahabharata_, "where women are treated with respect, the very godsare said to be filled with joy. Women deserve to be honoured. Serve yethem. Bend your will before them. By honouring women ye are sure toattain to the fruition of all things. " And the rash teachers of ouryouth would have persuaded us that this generous lesson was first learntin Teutonic forests!

Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably besuffered to reply, to this Hindu profession of reverence. Accordinglythe woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil to the souls ofher mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and great-grandmother-in-law, ingratitude for their giving her a good husband. And to go back for amoment to Ruskin's contrast of the two races, it was assuredly under thestress of some too rash reasoning that he judged the lovely art of theEast as a ministrant to superstition, cruelty, and pleasure, whetherwrought upon the temple, the sword, or the girdle. The innocent art ofinnocent Hindu women for centuries decked their most modest heads, theirdedicated and sequestered beauty, their child-loving breasts, andconsecrated chambers. 

THE FLOWER

There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed bythose who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, inits tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape ofthe 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 thetyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in countrylodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration havesifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains acumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petaland leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly byrote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness andinsimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of allimaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayedfor those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers. Itblooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourisheswith blossoms adust, poorly conventionalized into a kind of order; thetable-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paperis set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses andlilies in its very construction; over the muslin blinds an impotent sprigis scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plasterpicture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pedimentof the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in thefinials 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 staleinspiration of the flower. And what is this bossiness around the gratebut some blunt, black-leaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but theretribution of the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecutionof man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of hisinconsiderable brain. 

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to thesmallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns isno more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitoryauthor by the phrase. In literature as in all else man merits hissubjection to trivialities by his economical greed. A condition forusing justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a measure ofreluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a worlddecivilized--was in the beginning intended to be something jocund; andjocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, andmodesty. Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted indispute. For Nature has something even more severe than modertion: shehas an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal;they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactlythe disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated hisdelights? or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of hiswishes--the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generousFate that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Heranswer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the daywhen she shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--andmake it perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, fornovelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal thelast? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of yourmouth are all numbered. 

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress ofman is so much to be desired. The leg, completing as it does the form ofman, should make a great part of that human scenery which is at least asimportant as the scenery of geological structure, or the scenery ofarchitecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the lovers ofmountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have consented toignore. The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has thefinest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms which, comingat the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life by itsunstable equilibrium. A lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; thebody, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, neverstands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that firstsuggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that iserect 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 bestleg, and the best leg is the man's. That of the young child, in whichthe Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither movement norsupporting strength. In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the preciousinstability, the spring and balance that are so organic. But man shouldno longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths ofpiping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid. Inexpressiveof what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be, theyare neither implicitly nor explicitly good raiment. It is hardlypossible to err by violence in denouncing them. Why, when an indifferentwriter is praised for "clothing his thought, " it is to modern raimentthat one's agile fancy flies--fain of completing the metaphor!

The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other thanthe mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the multiplication ofundignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and meet, andlisten to the speaker. For the undistinguished are very important bytheir numbers. These are they who make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalized; as units they inevitably lack something ofinterest; all the more they have cumulative effect. It would be well ifwe could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity inthe clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to bechanged. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are theirnational customs--and the wretchedest of them all the wearing of othermen's old raiment--that they must wait for reform until the reformeddress, which the reformers have not yet put on, shall have turned second-hand. 

VICTORIAN CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of acertain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century andearlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim thevulgarizing of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerroldfor pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial, "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, " which were presumably considered goodcomic reading in the "Punch" of that time, and to make acquaintance witha certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment onanything which others consider or have considered humorous is to putoneself at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhatthe superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought itworth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least tolerable ofmodern reproaches--that he lacks humour; but he need not always care. Nowto turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in themid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriereboutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature. Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as acircumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essentialvulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old "Punch" volume adrawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, therefined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of theletterpress. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech ofher stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. Andpage by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of herfoolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that timethere was, moreover, one great humourist, one whom I infinitely admire;he, too, I am grieved to remember, bore his part willingly in vulgarizingthe woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarizing of the actof maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for evading herfatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned withoutrestraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none ofthese ignominies is woman so common and so foolish for Dickens as she isin child-bearing. 

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens'scontemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child arehumiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she ismoderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is thather husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, findsthe time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she shouldfurtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of herhusband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, andthat her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesquebaby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtlyfor her abasement. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though helived into a later and different time. He saw little else than commonforms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupidprosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greaterproportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, orby a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is notsure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is renderedwith a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certainsensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we getconvinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not haveinsisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almosta whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of years ago, inwhich Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even theinvention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, hasgone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, andthe joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleepat his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imaginehow the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled acrossthe back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscenedrawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the oldcommon jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in onedrawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if sheis nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was. " In allthese things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun wasin the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in reallyfine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or fromhis touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, isabsolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge thatthere is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when theyare not caricatures, and certainly in "Robert, " the City waiter of"Punch. " But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that allCharles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally uponher. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for thesocial extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always forher jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spiesand in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeperthe possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of theExhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular formof human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by whichsome men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man isnot reproached through his sex. But the vulgarity of which I havewritten here was distinctively English--the most English thing thatEngland had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not ableto survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. Itwas the chief immorality destroyed by the French novel. 

THE POINT OF HONOUR

Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez. InSpain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the firstImpressionist. As an Impressionist he claimed, implicitly if notexplicitly, a whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness; hemade an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he relied on his owncandour, and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept thechastity of art when other masters were content with its honesty, andwhen others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded the point of honour. Contemporary masters more or less proved their position, and convincedthe world by something of demonstration; the first Impressionist simplyasked that his word should be accepted. To those who would not take hisword he offers no bond. To those who will, he grants the distinction ofa share in his responsibility. 

Somewhat unrefined, in comparison with his lofty and simple claim to bebelieved on a suggestion, is the commoner painter's production of hiscredentials, 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 intelligencemay be satisfied. " This is an appeal to average experience--at the bestthe cumulative experience; and with the average, or with the sum, artcannot deal without derogation. The Spaniard seems to say: "Thus thingsare in my pictorial sight. Trust me, I apprehend them so. " We are notexcluded from his counsels, but we are asked to attribute a certainauthority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of that art ofseeing pictorially which is the beginning and not far from the end--notfar short of the whole--of the art of painting. So little indeed are weshut out from the mysteries of a great Impressionist's impression thatVelasquez requires us to be in some degree his colleagues. Thus may eachof us to whom he appeals take praise from the praised: he leaves myeducated eyes to do a little of the work. He respects my responsibilityno less--though he respects it less explicitly--than I do his. What heallows me would not be granted by a meaner master. If he does not holdhimself bound to prove his own truth, he returns thanks for my trust. Itis as though he used his countrymen's courteous hyperbole and called hishouse my own. In a sense of the most noble hostship he does me thehonours of his picture. 

Because Impressionism with all its extreme--let us hope itsultimate--derivatives is so free, therefore is it doubly bound. Becausethere is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible. Toundertake this art for the sake of its privileges without confessing itsobligations--or at least without confessing them up to the point ofhonour--is to take a vulgar freedom: to see immunities precisely wherethere are duties, and an advantage where there is a bond. A very mob ofmen have taken Impressionism upon themselves, in several forms and undera succession of names, in this our later day. It is against allprobabilities that more than a few among these have within them the pointof honour. In their galleries we are beset with a dim distrust. And todistrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted. How many of theselandscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the truth of theirown impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered;truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of thecommon conscience, not hard to divide. But when the _dubium_ concernsnot fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that theirsensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate equipoise ofperceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are enough? NowImpressionists have told us things as to their impressions--as to theeffect of things upon the temperament of this man and upon the mood ofthat--which should not be asserted except on the artistic point ofhonour. The majority can tell ordinary truth, but should not trustthemselves for truth extraordinary. They can face the general judgement, but they should hesitate to produce work that appeals to the lastjudgement, which is the judgement within. There is too much reason todivine that a certain number of those who aspire to differ from thegreatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point ofview worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth waylaying. And to be, _de parti pris_, an Impressionist without these! OVelasquez! Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach in her ownthings. An author, here and there, will make as though he had a wordworth hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word that seeks to withdraweven while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all tooprobably a platitude. But obviously, literature is not--as is the craftand mystery of painting--so at the mercy of a half-imposture, so guardedby unprovable honour. For the art of painting is reserved that shadowyrisk, that undefined salvation. If the artistic temperament--tediousword!--with all its grotesque privileges, becomes yet more common than itis, there will be yet less responsibility; for the point of honour is thesimple secret of the few. 

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But thetrue colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or oflife broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colourof life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fullyvisible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayaland of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the manifestationthereof. It is one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one ofthe talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of lifeis the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicitand not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is themodest colour of the unpublished blood. 

So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life isoutdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that it iswhite, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid than thecolour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine colour;but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the misty blue of theEnglish zenith, and the warm grey of the London horizon, it is asdelicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat asstars, in the hedges of the end of June. 

For months together London does not see the colour of life in any mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and _chapeau melon_ of man, and of theveils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousandinjuries and accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has soon lostits gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown. We misslittle beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbersout-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all the heads of a greatindoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in theopen air, needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, inthe open air, "clothed with the sun, " whether the sunshine be golden anddirect, or dazzlingly diffused in grey. 

The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to thelandscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of all hisignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer north-westevening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of eight hesheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for itsboys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush betweenthe grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, heis crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and thereflection of an early moon is under his feet. 

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. Theyare so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only alittle thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last andmost finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as itwere, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art byother actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature. 

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, andthe child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colourof life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he stillshouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elasticsyllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, hisbrightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepeningmidsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again. 

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Naturehas lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the happily easyway of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in thestreets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than yourgreen grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it isrenewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so remediable asthe work of modern man--"a thought which is also, " as Mr Pecksniff said, "very soothing. " And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible. Asthe bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one bracesuffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle offits yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect aboutrailway stations. A single night almost clears the air of London. 

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery ofHyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. Tohave once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. Omemorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it nearedsetting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had thedark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark andnot the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was verydefinite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminousthing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to bewhite because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminousthing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour oflife. 

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that theviolent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curioushistory of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On thescaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when youconsider how generously she was permitted political death. She was tospin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; butto the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in thetribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins. 

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and theinnermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles inthe way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation ofthe laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bearpolitical responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges wasguillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends. 

THE HORIZON

To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter thanyourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise thehorizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up. It is like thescene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more than bid them. He liftsthem, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of botharms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressiveforce. Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successiveheights of music. You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, thedistances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight. You are buta man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb thecircle of the world goes up to face you. 

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds. This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing, and the plain raises its verge. All things follow and wait upon youreyes. You lift these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by thepilgrimage of your body. "Lift thine eyes to the mountains. " It is thenthat other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes. 

It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another thatmakes the way up a hill so full of universal movement. All the landscapeis on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harboursliterally come to light; the headlands repeat themselves; little cupswithin the treeless hills open and show their farms. In the sea are manyregions. A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface isturned. There are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. Not astep of your journey up the height that has not its replies in the steadymotion of land and sea. Things rise together like a flock ofmany-feathered birds. 

But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search of. That is your chief companion on your way. It is to uplift the horizon tothe equality of your sight that you go high. You give it a distanceworthy of the skies. There is no distance, except the distance in thesky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the height is to be seenthe distance of this world. The line is sent back into the remoteness oflight, the verge is removed beyond verge, into a distance that isenormous and minute. 

So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less nearthan Queen Mab and her chariot can equal its fineness. Here on the edgesof the eyelids, or there on the edges of the world--we know no otherplace for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender. Thetouches of her passing, as close as dreams, or the utmost vanishing ofthe forest or the ocean in the white light between the earth and the air;nothing else is quite so intimate and fine. The extremities of amountain view have just such tiny touches as the closeness of closed eyesshuts in. 

On the horizon is the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars thesimplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears onthat shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour. The rim ofthe hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea--let it only befar enough--has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark thingsdrawn upon the bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is amongthem, and they are mingled with it. The horizon has its own way ofmaking bright the pencilled figures of forests, which are black butluminous. 

On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. Thereyou perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder sky--is not awall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat eachother grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky andearth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the samedistant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up inunintelligible heights above a world that is subject to intelligibleperspective. 

Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted isthe horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not thespirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from theparks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; butrather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of theLondon smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, notwhere the soft sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to putall relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless. 

A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the lineand defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormyhorizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raisethe light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer ofthe eyes. 

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of somecompassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. Achild on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that theycannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world. Never in thesolitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and CapeHorn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seenanything but a little circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he wasalone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes. The sailor hasnothing but his mast, indeed. And but for his mast he would be isolatedin as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains. 

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them soperpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flightwith flight. 

A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offinghardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might thinksomething of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in thecentre of it. 

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding world, with its looksserene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, itssigns and communications of light, gathers down and pauses. This flockof birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth. TheCardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands. Farewell tothe most delicate horizon. 

IN JULY

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of thegreen of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in theirdifferences of character and not of mere date. Almost all the green isgrave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, inmajestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, toinconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks afterthe dawn. 

Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as atnight. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty, commonfreshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day. Inchildhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrisethan we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far highersensibility for April and April evenings--a heartache for them, which inriper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled. 

But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find dailythings tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has no greatdelight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness of the summerthat has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere day and of latesummer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have long ceased to besated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot now find anything innature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed, lost sight of the furtherawe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer see so much of the past in Apriltwilight as they saw when they had no past; but which look freshly at thedailiness of green summer, of early afternoon, of every sky of any formthat comes to pass, and of the darkened elms. 

Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting close, unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it looks alone toa late sun. But if one could go by all the woods, across all the oldforests that are now meadowlands set with trees, and could walk a countygathering trees of a single kind in the mind, as one walks a gardencollecting flowers of a single kind in the hand, would not the harvest bea harvest of poplars? A veritable passion for poplars is a mostintelligible passion. The eyes do gather them, far and near, on a wholeday's journey. Not one is unperceived, even though great timber shouldbe passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes apoplar day of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; forthe poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be allvarious, but the poplars are separate. 

All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with them)shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest. It is easyto gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay them a flash ofrecognition of their gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenlyaware of them close by. Light and the breezes are as quick as the eyesof a poplar-lover to find the willing tree that dances to be seen. 

No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for oneself anoak day so well. The oaks would wait to be found, and many would bemissed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert enough for atraveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do not sleep. Fromwithin some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes a slightsign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind. They are salienteverywhere, and full of replies. They are as fresh as streams. 

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars. Andyet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled witha cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize theirunfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplarand the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will notfind a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant, even where a lake is bare to the wind. 

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingerscool as aspen leaves, " he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is acoolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on bothsides--the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, nogold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he canshine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. Youmay have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all thewoods are close. 

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees, beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nordid the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibratingPleiades. 

CLOUD

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see theclear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest ofEngland, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clearsky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may gofor a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as youwalk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet youshall see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form. 

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glasstowards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows wereused in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so muchas whether there were a sky. 

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it;but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round theworld. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. Theterrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a prisoner compared with this. Thetourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, withearth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And forits changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere greenflushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for thegreater it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn areinconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of acloud. 

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fadeaccording to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, theluminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that theirown local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effacedbefore the all-important mood of the cloud. 

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is thecloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handfulof spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicaterevelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foregroundshine. 

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends andpartakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountainslope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of theview by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatestthings are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute thesun. 

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteriesthan a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence itwrites out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencilsof the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, itsheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from thehills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight. 

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Itsown beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It isalways great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-worksand the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the paintedsurfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgariselight, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunategloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street. 

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above somelittle landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavywith water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists alwayshave it, with "autumn tints. " High over these rises, in the enormousscale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky. Fewof the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be doneunder such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is foran epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are thedistances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear andcloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for theround world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky areunmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the staritself is immeasurable. 

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, withconscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man wouldnot have known distance veritably without the clouds. There aremountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth arepigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering bydisproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for thehuman measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a littlePerugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while thecloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations. 

The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the custodyof his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper. The cloudveils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenlybright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a background. Orwhen anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset. 

It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There isa heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by abreeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and comeleaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazardsky. 

All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed aboutit. As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the clouds inturn are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are sweptat once by a single ray, warmed with a single colour. Promontory afterleague-long promontory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is calledout of mist and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very great, but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light. 

All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery. It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, thatthe unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many a day noLondon eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like aman's hand. There never was a great painter who had not exquisitehorizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a greatthing. 

He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses itsshape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head pilinginto the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude. The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design--whether it liesso that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor, or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountainsteeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain thatstands, with you, on the earth. 

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merelythe guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the sun'streasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk ofsunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of theilluminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majesticof all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this isthe friend of the bridegroom. 

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautifulof all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no othercloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. Theshower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with soinfluential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worthwatching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that peopletake their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that dropsit. It is merely rain, and means wetness. The shower-cloud there haslimits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It hasnot come from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will notshoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardlycomes or goes; it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on thepath of its retreat. 

SHADOWS

Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, andunencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple houseis that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs ofshadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to beoffered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in avase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is betterthan a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop. 

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into lineand intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to themind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single;it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seenagain, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shiftsthe interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing oftime, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon itsimportunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, thatdo not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure, while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel. 

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowingsouthward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in thesudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shedby a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betraysthe flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes themidsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and isabout to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, withwhich you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room, play the stealthy game of the year. 

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs butfour candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyantjugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetricalcountercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with oneanother in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greysdarkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a"repeating pattern. "

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration thewalls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or apicture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room oncefor all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of thedays. 

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadowswhich is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see littleexcept an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day brightenough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The treesshow you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon theshining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness ofevery shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shinehave been entangled as though by some wild wind through their millionmolecules. 

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the uncloudedsun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and arethemselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day. 

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looksstill and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so manyhours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished. Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this longsunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there maybe no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although nonoonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows andtheir life will be carried across by a brilliant bird. 

To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot seeits shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darkenhis window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see itpluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. Whatflash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash ofdarkness?

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. Ifhe had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadowwas a message from the sun. 

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight ofthe bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goesacross the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a whilein the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and drygrass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch andclings. 

In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, aboutHoly Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are themovement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to makea shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-whitesea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs isalways a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go allways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northernfields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high thatthough they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have thelight of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights. 

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift asdreams, " at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, andledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside bydegrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries untilthere comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadowsclose, complete. 

The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have tracedwild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows havefled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movementof her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earththat carries her clasped shadow from the sun. 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling andelection to the most wifely of all wifehoods--that of a soldier'swife--history has made her countrymen aware. Inasmuch as ColonelHutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is something more thanhis biographer--his historian. And she convinces her reader that herPuritan principles kept abreast of her affections. There is noself-abandonment; she is not precipitate; keeps her own footing; wife ofa soldier as she is, would not have armed him without her own previousindignation against the enemy. She is a soldier at his orders, but shehad warily and freely chosen her captain. 

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarredfor her use, she relates her own childhood and youth. She was a childsuch as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, shewas as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfectionwas to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed exceptwhen precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. LucyApsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried tosermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly. " "At seven she hadeight tutors in several qualities. " She outstripped her brothers inLatin, albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except herfather's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow. " Shewas not companionable. Her many friends were indulged with "babies"(that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces. She exhorted the maids, she owned, "much. " But she also heard much of their love stories, andacquired a taste for sonnets. 

It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought abouther acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to him, anddiscussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for ayoung woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint ofhiding its origin. One gentleman believed a woman had made it. Anothersaid, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned, later, that he said "two" out of civility (very good civility of a kindthat is not now practised) to a lady who chanced to be present; but thathe knew well there was but one; and he named her. From her futurehusband Lucy Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith womenare now, and always will be, praised: "Mr. Hutchinson, " she says, "fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customaryreach of a she-wit, could scarcely believe it was a woman's. "

He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasuredconscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her youngfriends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousythan be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise insetting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy ofher companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austeritydid not hinder him from wearing his "fine, thick-set head of hair" inlong locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him. " But for herself she has some dissimulatedvanities. She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting andmany devices, her suitor first saw her, she was "not ugly in a carelessriding-habit. " As for him, "in spite of all her indifference, she wassurprised (she writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she sawthis gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough tobeget love in any one. " He married her as soon as she could leave herchamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that "the priest and allthat saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed hisjustice and constancy by restoring her. "

The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove LucyHutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our owntime uses. One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of gestureof language; this is where she praises her husband's "handsome managementof love. " {1} She thus prefaces her description of her honoured lord: "Ifmy treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever Icommitted to its trust--. " She boasts of her country in lofty phrase:"God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common ofthe world. " And again of her husband: "It will be as hard to say whichwas the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature. " "Hehad made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose toentertain both honourably. " "The heat of his youth a little inclined himto the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of loveand grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governorand moderator of his soul. "

She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived akindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their"admirable tempting beauty, " and "such excellent good-nature as wouldhave thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was nothis time to love. " In her widowhood she remembered that she had beencommanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is thelovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and thenshe vanished into nothing. "

She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of thecause. The fevers, "little less than plagues, " that were common in thatage carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is"the devil's exquisite solicitor. " All Royalists are of "the wickedfaction. " She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson inthe prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence ofkindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank ofit died within four months. A poison of strange operation! "We mustleave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will bemade manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God. " When hewas near death, she adds, "a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and askedhim how he did. He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith. "

On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with dignity. Herpower, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and publicinterests of her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisitediction, are such as may well make a reader ask how and why theliterature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became "feminine" in the estimation of a later age;that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the estimationof men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us marvel at the downfall following--at Goldsmith'sinvention of the women of "The Vicar or Wakefield" in one age, and atThackeray's invention of the women of "Esmond" in another. 

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beautyof sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears anabiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world--in her day animplicit feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness of the soil andair contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight ofman's life. " "He had an opportunity of conversing with her in thosepleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all theneighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys. " And she describes a dreamwhereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an Englandwas hers! And what an English! A memorable vintage of our literatureand speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who--as shedid--gathered it in. 

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} All we have to callher by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, withwhom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand timesthan life, as hope saved. " MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eighttimes in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes meansStella alone, " says one of many editors. "The letters were writtennominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley, " says another, "but it does notrequire to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that theywere penned. " Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And theeditor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, againstthe word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined thatthey make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paperof reparation to Mrs. Dingley. 

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. Inlove "to divide is not to take away, " as Shelley says; and Dingley's halfof the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothingfrom the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has foughtagainst Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist--he finds herirksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has butlately called her a "chaperon. " A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has beenpressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respectbeen spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD, ""saucy little, pretty, dear rogues, " "little monkeys mine, " "littlemischievous girls, " "nautinautinautidear girls, " "brats, " "huzzies both, ""impudence and saucy-face, " "saucy noses, " "my dearest lives anddelights, " "dear little young women, " "good dallars, not crying dallars"(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD, " and so forth in ahundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD, " butobviously not because of their own complaining. Swift called them sobecause they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved, conscious every day of the price, which is death. 

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with hissummary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put themasunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly playhavoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing inthe world. "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters, except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:but methinks, " he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but weare not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; itlooks like PMD. " Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, youmust know, are not women. " "God Almighty preserve you both and make ushappy together. " "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we maynever be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives. " "Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happyday since he left you, as hope saved. "

With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar ofSt. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was"in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting. " He hid with them in thelong labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning. If noletter came, he comforted himself with thinking that "he had it yet to behappy with. " And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold andlachrymose blunders the grace and singularity--the distinction--of thissweet romance. "Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though"the many could not miss it, " but not even the few have found it. 

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella shouldbe the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift. But dayand night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; hewaits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it isfull I will send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will bepretty. " "Naughty girls that will not write to a body!" "I wish youwere whipped for forgetting to send. Go, be far enough, negligentbaggages. " "You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comesDingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and thenconclude with something handsome and genteel, as 'your most humblecumdumble. '" But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedinglysorry for Stella. 

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task: "Hereis such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be writingevery night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle things, and twittletwattle. " "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing tothem in the morning. " Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingleythat she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name andmemory? When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is "writingin bed, like a tiger, " she should go gay in the eyes of all generations. 

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will notlet Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry come up!Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken veryseriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That wouldhave been no ill share for Dingley. But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowednothing. 

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her. Fornow and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he invariablydrops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or"Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere. He isanxious about Stella's "little eyes, " and about her health generally;whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "newfever, " because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" AndMrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford. "I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though notso bad as Stella; she tells thumpers. " Stella is often reproved for herspelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is apuzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourthletter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goodyBlunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to excepta letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley, I amalways in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself. " "You are apretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin, and your 'journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shallnever have done. " "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything. " Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries forhis health. He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of hisprattle. Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancythat Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer. "

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in hislodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland. "He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I saynothing; I am as tame as a clout. "

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, ina hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimedwife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gonestripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks toMD's prayers, " wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a privatefragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, norfor any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen allthe credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that piousbenediction. 

PRUE

Through the long history of human relations, which is the history of thelife of our race, there sounds at intervals the clamour of a single voicewhich has not the tone of oratory, but asks, answers, interrupts itself, interrupts--what else? Whatever else it interrupts is silence; there arepauses, but no answers. There is the jest without the laugh, and againthe laugh without the jest. And this is because the letters written byMadame de Sevigne were all saved, and not many written to her; becauseSwift burnt the letters that were the dearest things in life to him, while "MD" both made a treasury of his; and because Prue kept all theletters which Steele wrote to her from their marriage-day onwards, andSteele kept none of hers. 

In Swift's case the silence is full of echoes; that is to say, hisletters repeat the phrases of Stella's and Dingley's, to play with them, flout them, and toss them back against the two silenced voices. He neverlets the word of these two women fall to the ground; and when they havebut blundered with it, and aimed it wide, and sent it weakly, he willcatch it, and play you twenty delicate and expert juggling pranks with itas he sends it back into their innocent faces. So we have something ofMD's letters in the "journal, " and this in the only form in which wedesire them, to tell the truth; for when Swift gravely saves us somespecimens of Stella's wit, after her death, as she spoke them, and not ashe mimicked them, they make a sorry show. 

In many correspondences, where one voice remains and the other is gone, the retort is enough for two. It is as when, the other day, the half ofa pretty quarrel between nurse and child came down from an upper floor tothe ears of a mother who decided that she need not interfere. The voiceof the undaunted child it was that was audible alone, and it replied, "I'm not; _you_ are"; and anon, "I'll tell _yours_. " Nothing was reallymissing there. 

But Steele's letters to Prue, his wife, are no such simple matter. Theturn we shall give them depends upon the unheard tone whereto they reply. And there is room for conjecture. It has pleased the more modern of themany spirits of banter to supply Prue's eternal silence with the voice ofa scold. It is painful to me to complain of Thackeray; but see what afigure he makes of Prue in "Esmond. " It is, says the nineteenth-centuryhumourist, in defence against the pursuit of a jealous, exacting, neglected, or evaded wife that poor Dick Steele sends those little notesof excuse: "Dearest Being on earth, pardon me if you do not see me tilleleven o'clock, having met a schoolfellow from India"; "My dear, dearwife, I write to let you know I do not come home to dinner, being obligedto attend some business abroad, of which I shall give you an account(when I see you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedienthusband"; "Dear Prue, I cannot come home to dinner. I languish for yourwelfare"; "I stay here in order to get Tonson to discount a bill for me, and shall dine with him to that end"; and so forth. Once only doesSteele really afford the recent humourist the suggestion that isapparently always so welcome. It is when he writes that he is invited tosupper to Mr. Boyle's, and adds: "Dear Prue, do not send after me, for Ishall be ridiculous. " But even this is to be read not ungracefully by awell-graced reader. Prue was young and unused to the world. Herhusband, by the way, had been already married; and his greater age makeshis constant deference all the more charming. 

But with this one exception, Steele's little notes, kept by his wifewhile she lived, and treasured after her death by her daughter and his, are no record of the watchings and dodgings of a London farce. It isworth while to remember that Steele's dinner, which it was so oftendifficult to eat at home, was a thing of midday, and therefore of mid-business. But that is a detail. What is desirable is that a reasonabledegree of sweetness should be attributed to Prue; for it is no more thanjust. To her Steele wrote in a dedication: "How often has yourtenderness removed pain from my aching head, how often anguish from myafflicted heart. If there are such beings as guardian angels, they arethus employed. I cannot believe one of them to be more good ininclination, or more charming in form, than my wife. "

True, this was for the public; but not so were these daily notes; andthese carry to her his assurance that she is "the beautifullest object inthe world. I know no happiness in this life in any degree comparable tothe pleasure I have in your person and society. " "But indeed, though youhave every perfection, you have an extravagant fault, which almostfrustrates the good in you to me; and that is, that you do not love todress, to appear, to shine out, even at my request, and to make me proudof you, or rather to indulge the pride I have that you are mine. " Thecorrection of the phrase is finely considerate. 

Prue cannot have been a dull wife, for this last compliment is a reply, full of polite alacrity, to a letter from her asking for a littleflattery. How assiduously, and with what a civilized absence ofuncouthness, of shame-facedness, and of slang of the mind, with whatsimplicity, alertness, and finish, does he step out at her invitation, and perform! She wanted a compliment, though they had been long marriedthen, and he immediately turned it. This was no dowdy Prue. 

Her request, by the way, which he repeats in obeying it, is one of thefew instances of the other side of the correspondence--one of the fewdirect echoes of that one of the two voices which is silent. 

The ceremony of the letters and the deferent method of address andsignature are never dropped in this most intimate of letter-writing. Itis not a little depressing to think that in this very form and state issupposed, by the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of the husbandof farce, the "rogue. " One does not like the word. Is it not clownishto apply it with intention to the husband of Prue? He did not pay, hewas always in difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many otherthings that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had tobeg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for theunhandsome incredulity which is proud to be always at hand with an ironiccommentary on such letters as his. 

I have no wish to bowdlerize Sir Richard Steele, his ways and words. Hewrote to Prue at night when the burgundy had been too much for him, andin the morning after. He announces that he is coming to her "within apint of wine. " One of his gayest letters--a love-letter before themarriage, addressed to "dear lovely Mrs. Scurlock"--confesses candidlythat he had been pledging her too well: "I have been in very goodcompany, where your health, under the character of the woman I lovedbest, has been often drunk; so that I may say that I am dead drunk foryour sake, which is more than _I die for you_. "

Steele obviously drank burgundy wildly, as did his "good company"; as didalso the admirable Addison, who was so solitary in character and soserene in temperament. But no one has, for this fault, the right to puta railing accusation into the mouth of Prue. Every woman has a right toher own silence, whether her silence be hers of set purpose or byaccident. And every creature has a right to security from the banteringspeculiar to the humourists of a succeeding age. To every century its ownironies, to every century its own vulgarities. In Steele's time they hadtheirs. They might have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would havebeen with a different rallying. Writers of the nineteenth century wentabout to rob her of her grace. 

She kept some four hundred of these little letters of her lord's. It wasa loyal keeping. But what does Thackeray call it? His word is"thrifty. " He says: "There are four hundred letters of Dick Steele's tohis wife, which that thrifty woman preserved accurately. "

"Thrifty" is a hard word to apply to her whom Steele styled, in the yearbefore her death, his "charming little insolent. " She was ill in Wales, and he, at home, wept upon her pillow, and "took it to be a sin to go tosleep. " Thrifty they may call her, and accurate if they will; but shelies in Westminster Abbey, and Steele called her "your Prueship. "

MRS. JOHNSON

This paper shall not be headed "Tetty. " What may be a graceful enoughfreedom with the wives of other men shall be prohibited in the case ofJohnson's, she with whose name no writer until now has scrupled to takefreedoms whereto all graces were lacking. "Tetty" it should not be, iffor no other reason, for this--that the chance of writing "Tetty" as atitle is a kind of facile literary opportunity; it shall be denied. TheEssay owes thus much amends of deliberate care to Dr. Johnson's wife. But, indeed, the reason is graver. What wish would he have had but thatthe language in the making whereof he took no ignoble part shouldsomewhere, at some time, treat his only friend with ordinary honour?

Men who would trust Dr. Johnson with their orthodoxy, with theirvocabulary, and with the most intimate vanity of their human wishes, refuse, with every mark of insolence, to trust him in regard to his wife. On that one point no reverence is paid to him, no deference, no respect, not so much as the credit due to our common sanity. Yet he is notreviled on account of his Thrale--nor, indeed, is his Thrale nowseriously reproached for her Piozzi. It is true that Macaulay, preparinghimself and his reader "in his well-known way" (as a rustic of Mr. Hardy's might have it) for the recital of her second marriage, says thatit would have been well if she had been laid beside the kind and generousThrale when, in the prime of her life, he died. But Macaulay has notleft us heirs to his indignation. His well-known way was to exhaustthose possibilities of effect in which the commonplace is so rich. Andhe was permitted to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by callingMrs. Thrale's attachment to her second husband "a degrading passion, " butby summoning a chorus of "all London" to the same purpose. She fled, hetells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomento a land where she was unknown. Thus when Macaulay chastises Mrs. Elizabeth Porter for marrying Johnson, he is not inconsistent, for hepursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for her audacity in keeping gaietyand grace in her mind and manners longer than Macaulay liked to see suchornaments added to the charm of twice "married brows. "

It is not so with succeeding essayists. One of these minor biographersis so gentle as to call the attachment of Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi "amutual affection. " He adds, "No one who has had some experience of lifewill be inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale. " But there is no such courtesy, even from him, for Mrs. Johnson. Neither to him nor to any other writerhas it yet occurred that if England loves her great Englishman's memory, she owes not only courtesy, but gratitude, to the only woman who lovedhim while there was yet time. 

Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which acaricature has been acclaimed as the only possible portrait of Mrs. Johnson. Garrick's school reminiscences would probably have made a muchmore charming woman grotesque. Garrick is welcome to his remembrances;we may even reserve for ourselves the liberty of envying those who heardhim. But honest laughter should not fall into that tone of commonantithesis which seems to say, "See what are the absurdities of thegreat! Such is life! On this one point we, even we, are wiser than Dr. Johnson--we know how grotesque was his wife. We know something of theprivacies of her toilet-table. We are able to compare her figure withthe figures we, unlike him in his youth, have had the opportunity ofadmiring--the figures of the well-bred and well-dressed. " It is a sorrysuccess to be able to say so much. 

But in fact such a triumph belongs to no man. When Samuel Johnson, attwenty-six, married his wife, he gave the dull an advantage over himselfwhich none but the dullest will take. He chose, for love, a woman whohad the wit to admire him at first meeting, and in spite of first sight. "That, " she said to her daughter, "is the most sensible man I ever met. "He was penniless. She had what was no mean portion for those times andthose conditions; and, granted that she was affected, and provincial, andshort, and all the rest with which she is charged, she was probably notwithout suitors; nor do her defects or faults seem to have been those ofan unadmired or neglected woman. Next, let us remember what was theaspect of Johnson's form and face, even in his twenties, and how littlehe could have touched the senses of a widow fond of externals. This oneloved him, accepted him, made him happy, gave to one of the noblest ofall English hearts the one love of its sombre life. And Englishliterature has had no better phrase for her than Macaulay's--"Sheaccepted, with a readiness which did her little honour, the addresses ofa suitor who might have been her son. "

Her readiness did her incalculable honour. But it is at last worthremembering that Johnson had first done her incalculable honour. No onehas given to man or woman the right to judge as to the worthiness of herwho received it. The meanest man is generally allowed his own counsel asto his own wife; one of the greatest of men has been denied it. "Thelover, " says Macaulay, "continued to be under the illusions of thewedding day till the lady died. " What is so graciously said is notenough. He was under those "illusions" until he too died, when he hadlong passed her latest age, and was therefore able to set right thatbalance of years which has so much irritated the impertinent. Johnsonpassed from this life twelve years older than she, and so for twelveyears his constant eyes had to turn backwards to dwell upon her. Timegave him a younger wife. 

And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson's mouth, that mouth to which no oneelse has ever attributed any beautiful sayings, the words of MarcelineDesbordes-Valmore to the young husband she loved: "Older than thou! Letme never see thou knowest it. Forget it! I will remember it, to diebefore thy death. "

Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson's short sight foran added affront to Mrs. Johnson. The bridegroom was too weak ofeyesight "to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom. " Nevertheless, hesaw well enough, when he was old, to distinguish Mrs. Thrale's dresses. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it was unsuitable, he said, forher size; a little creature should show gay colours "like an insect. " Weare not called upon to admire his wife; why, then, our taste being thusuncompromised, do we not suffer him to admire her? It is the mostgratuitous kind of intrusion. Moreover, the biographers are eager topermit that touch of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale, which they officially deny in the case of Mrs. Johnson. But thedifference is all on the other side. He would not have bidden his wifedress like an insect. Mrs. Thrale was to him "the first of womankind"only because his wife was dead. 

Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick's mimicry of Johnson's love-making by repeating the words of Johnson himself in after-years--"It wasa love-match on both sides. " And obviously he was as strange a lover asthey said. Who doubted it? Was there any other woman in England to givesuch a suitor the opportunity of an eternal love? "A life radicallywretched, " was the life of this master of Letters; but she, who hasreceived nothing in return except ignominy from these unthankful Letters, had been alone to make it otherwise. Well for him that he married soyoung as to earn the ridicule of all the biographers in England; for bydoing so he, most happily, possessed his wife for nearly twenty years. Ihave called her his only friend. So indeed she was, though he hadfollowers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degreesof admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also thehouseful of sad old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection. But what friend had he? He was "solitary" from the day she died. 

Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal phrasethe word "solitary" stands. He wrote it, all Englishmen know where. Hewrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he had been at lastset free from the dependence upon hope. He hoped no more, and he needednot to hope. The "notice" of Lord Chesterfield had been too longdeferred; it was granted at last, when it was a flattery which Johnson'scourt of friends would applaud. But not for their sake was it welcome. To no living ear would he bring it and report it with delight. 

He was indifferent, he was known. The sensitiveness to pleasure wasgone, and the sensitiveness to pain, slights, and neglect wouldthenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that toproof again. No man in England, did I say? But, indeed, that is not so. No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have had power tocause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, ready-maderidicule that has been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved fortwenty years, prayed for during thirty-two years more, who satisfied oneof the saddest human hearts, but to whom the world, assiduous to admirehim, hardly accords human dignity. He wrote praises of her manners andof her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, isin the greatest of English prose. What was favour to him? "I amindifferent . . . I am known . . . I am solitary, and cannot impart it. "

MADAME ROLAND

The articulate heroine has her reward of appreciation and her dues ofpraise; it is her appropriate fortune to have it definitely measured, andgenerally on equal terms. She takes pains to explain herself, and isunderstood, and pitied, when need is, on the right occasions. Forinstance, Madame Roland, a woman of merit, who knew her "merit's name andplace, " addressed her memoirs, her studies in contemporary history, herautobiography, her many speeches, and her last phrase at the foot of theundaunting scaffold, to a great audience of her equals (more or less)then living and to live in the ages then to come--her equals and thoseshe raises to her own level, as the heroic example has authority to do. 

Another woman--the Queen--suffered at that time, and suffered without thecommand of language, the exactitude of phrase, the precision ofjudgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense of Innocence andModeration oppressed in her person. These were Madame Roland's; but theother woman, without eloquence, without literature, and without anyjudicial sense of history, addresses no mere congregation of readers. Marie Antoinette's unrecorded pangs pass into the treasuries of theexperience of the whole human family. All that are human have some partthere; genius itself may lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe;the great poets themselves may look into its distances and solitudes. Compassion here has no measure and no language. Madame Roland speaksneither to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds herpeace in the presence of each, dumb in her presence. 

Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by herown musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do herjustice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justicein the world--the world that even when universal philosophy should reignwould be inevitably the world of mediocrity; justice that would come ofenlightened views; justice that would be the lesson learnt by the nationswidely educated up to some point generally accessible; justice wellwithin earthly sight and competence. This confidence was also herreward. For what justice did the Queen look? Here it is the "abyss thatappeals to the abyss. "

Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into silence, and for the record of these two poor failures of that long, indomitable, reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which expressed her life andmind we are debtors to her friends. She herself has not confessed them. Nowhere else, whether in her candid history of herself, or in her wisehistory of her country, or in her judicial history of her contemporaries, whose spirit she discerned, whose powers she appraised, whose errors sheforesaw; hardly in her thought, and never in her word, is a break to beperceived; she is not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tellsus of her tears--the tears of youth only--her record is voluble and allcomplete. For the dignity of her style, of her force, and of herbalanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the twoimperfections which, to us who would be glad to admire in silence herheroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to talk, are finerand more noble than her well-placed language and the high successes ofher decision and her endurance. More than this, the two failures of thisunfailing woman are two little doors opened suddenly into those widerspaces and into that dominion of solitude which, after all, do doubtlessexist even in the most garrulous soul. By these two outlets Manon Rolandalso reaches the region of Marie Antoinette. But they befell her at theclose of her life, and they shall be named at the end of this briefstudy. 

Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she seeksin all times and nations because of the fact that she manifestlysuppresses in her self-descriptions any signs of a natural gaiety. Hermemoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is only in her letters, notintended for the world, that we are aware of the inadvertence of moments. We may overhear a laugh at times, but not in those consciously sprightlyhours that she spent with her convent-school friend gathering fruit andcounting eggs at the farm. She pursued these country tasks not withoutoffering herself the cultivated congratulation of one whom cities hadfailed to allure, and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity. Shedid not forget the death of Socrates. Or, rather, she finds an occasionto reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with havingomitted what another might have considered the tedious recollection ofthe condemnation of Phocion. She never wearied of these examples. Butit is her inexhaustible freshness in these things that has helped otherwriters of her time to weary us. 

In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of allexaggeration, which gives the reader a constant sense of security. Thatvirtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and attainedwith exact consciousness of success. It would be almost enough (in theperfection of her practice) to make a great writer; even a measure of itgoes far to make a fair one. Her moderation of statement is nevershaken; and if she now and then glances aside from her direct narrativeroad to hazard a conjecture, the error she may make is on the generousside of hope and faith. For instance, she is too sure that her Friends(so she always calls the _Girondins_, using no nicknames) are safe, whereas they were then all doomed; a young man who had carried a harmlessmessage for her--a mere notification to her family of her arrest--receivesher cheerful commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn thatfor this action he suffered on the scaffold and that his father soonthereafter died of grief. But Madame Roland never matched such adelirious event as this by any delirium of her own imagination. Thedelirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was never hurriedfrom its sane self-possession, when the facts raved. 

It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she stoopedto verbal violence; _et encore_! References to the banishment ofAristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and bendingswords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to be accusedof violence in brandishing those weapons. Sometimes, refuse rhetoricbeing all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in honest haste, as thoughit were honest speech, and stands committed to such a phrase as this:"The dregs of the nation placed such a one at the helm of affairs. "

But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear andefficient French language. She never wrote for the love of art, butwithout some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity issomewhat altered by that importunate love of the Antique. In "BleakHouse" there is an old lady who insisted that the name "Mr. Turveydrop, "as it appeared polished on the door-plate of the dancing master, was thename of the pretentious father and not of the industrious son--albeit, needless to say, one name was common to them. With equal severity I averthat when Madame Roland wrote to her husband in the second personsingular she was using the _tu_ of Rome and not the _tu_ of Paris. Frenchwas indeed the language; but had it been French in spirit she would (inspite of the growing Republican fashion) have said _vous_ to this "hommeeclaire, de moeurs pures, a qui l'on ne peut reprocher que sa grandeadmiration pour les anciens aux depens des modernes qu'il meprise, et lefaible de trop aimer a parler de lui. " There was no French _tu_ in herrelations with this husband, gravely esteemed and appraised, discreetlyrebuked, the best passages of whose Ministerial reports she wrote, andwhom she observed as he slowly began to think he himself had composedthem. She loved him with a loyal, obedient, and discriminatingaffection, and when she had been put to death, he, still at liberty, fellupon his sword. 

This last letter was written at a moment when, in order to prevent theexposure of a public death, Madame Roland had intended to take opium inthe end of her cruel imprisonment. A little later she chose that thosewho oppressed her country should have their way with her to the last. But, while still intending self-destruction, she had written to herhusband: "Forgive me, respectable man, for disposing of a life that I hadconsecrated to thee. " In quoting this I mean to make no too-easy effectwith the word "respectable, " grown grotesque by the tedious gibe of ourown present fashion of speech. 

Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces ofsilence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had heard hercondemnation to death. Passing out of the court she beckoned to herfriends, and signified to them her sentence "by a gesture. " And againthere was a pause, in the course of her last days, during which herspeeches had not been few, and had been spoken with her beautiful voiceunmarred; "she leant, " says Riouffe, "alone against her window, and weptthere three hours. "

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD

To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointedof your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. Youcannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do notcompose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, butthe note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep notryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where youtarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You arethe fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of timeto your footing. 

No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of fouryears old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet andunimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls. "A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heightsand play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was adignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be alady frog. " None ever said their good things before these indeliberateauthors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them. Nochild in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whosefather made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, andhad a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. "Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy thingsfor you. " "Do you work, " she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin's?" Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worthpursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't like fat. "

The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to besoothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned inthe Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she shouldforget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--herwishes. "Do you know, " she said, without loss of time, "what I shouldlike best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her motherwas so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offeras to the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. "It is for me towhistle for cabs, " said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I goto parties. " Another morning she came down radiant. "Did you hear agreat noise in the miggle of the night? That was me crying. I criedbecause I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into hisnose. "

The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothingfeminine--in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than you, " is the wordof a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern'tI, mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "thebacky-garden. " A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder atluncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am thefavourite of the crust. " Moreover, if an author set himself to inventthe naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly light upon the device of the little _troupe_ who, havingno footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of candle-shades. 

"It's _jolly_ dull without you, mother, " says a little girl who--gentlestof the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes nosecret. But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats ofmetathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the"stand-wash, " the "sweeping-crosser, " the "sewing chamine. " Genoesepeasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian. 

Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they shouldby any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually. ALondon little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with herpointing finger, and names it "bird. " Her brother, who wants to playwith a bronze Japanese lobster, asks "Will you please let me have thattiger?"

At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the mosttouching kind of newness. Thus, a child of three asks you to save him. How moving a word, and how freshly said! He had heard of the "saving" ofother things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken forsafe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day? Nurse isgoing out, will you save me, mother?" The same little variant uponcommon use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help inthe arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease. "

A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, wastaken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing fromher own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. Ashe dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, shenoted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for theymight be those of the _fournisseurs_ of her friend. "That is his breadshop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother, " she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming _parterre_ ofconfectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he buys his sugar pigs. "

In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intentupon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector. We have allheard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collectingcocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs hernothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over allshop-windows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers. "I began three weeksago next Monday, mother, " she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-nine. " "Thirty-nine what?" "Smiths. "

The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collectingtogether a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of theirkind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is therejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reportedthem. They do not, for example, say "me is"; their natural reply to "areyou?" is "I are. " One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will havenothing but the nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see itraining, " she bids; and told that it does not rain resumes, "Lift I upand let I see it not raining. "

An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered forher by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest, and withsome resentment. At the same time it was evident that she took nopleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend. Hehad imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and thedecreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"abrown tress. " She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress, " andshe silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory ofProvidence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. Theunpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrasefor snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That, " she said, more or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story. "

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the yearsof mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current word intouse, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save theinterruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, inchildren old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word oftheir own making is as good a communication as another, and asintelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among themthat the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasionbefalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day bringsforward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know howirritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks tobelong to the common world. 

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of achild on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so muchconfidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simpleadventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anythingstrange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trustsgenially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight ofsunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowinghimself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets. " This wassimple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very littleolder. "Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said;and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, "because they are so big. " There seemed to be no furtherquestion possible after an explanation that was presented thus chargedwith meaning. 

To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhatat random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to expressa meaning well realized--a personal matter. Questioned as to the eatingof an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "Itook them just to appetize my hunger. " As she betrayed a familiarknowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was askedwhether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables ontheir way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother, " she confessed;"but I generally speculate outside. "

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny withsomething so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Drydendoes the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. Butsometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied withsomething of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of thesweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and hermother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthyof a pen:--"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of thatarticle, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such aunletterary article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will notwrite any more such unconventionan trash. "

This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister, and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew just how old sheis, mother, then they would know she is onward. They can see she ispretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby. "

Thus speak the naturally unreluclant; but there are other children who intime betray a little consciousness and a slight _mefiance_ as to wherethe adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure. Thesechildren may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking in their talk, but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they donot feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enoughto cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cupof tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feignedindignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "theinfusion. " "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother, " said the child; andthen, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was nottold, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cupleft the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"thenceforward. 

THE CHILD OF TUMULT

A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute a handthat the petals of the flower never afterwards lose the creases, is atype of the child. Nothing but the unfolding, which is as yet in the non-existing future, can explain the manner of the close folding ofcharacter. In both flower and child it looks much as though the processhad been the reverse of what it was--as though a finished and open thinghad been folded up into the bud--so plainly and certainly is the futureimplied, and the intention of compressing and folding-close mademanifest. 

With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of impulsescalled "naughtiness" is perfectly perceptible--it would seem heartless tosay how soon. The naughty child (who is often an angel of tenderness andcharm, affectionate beyond the capacity of his fellows, and a veryascetic of penitence when the time comes) opens early his brief campaignsand raises the standard of revolt as soon as he is capable of thedesperate joys of disobedience. 

But even the naughty child is an individual, and must not be treated inthe mass. He is numerous indeed, but not general, and to describe himyou must take the unit, with all his incidents and his organic qualitiesas they are. Take then, for instance, one naughty child in the realityof his life. He is but six years old, slender and masculine, and notwronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate dress. His face is delicateand too often haggard with tears of penitence that Justice herself wouldbe glad to spare him. Some beauty he has, and his mouth especially is solovely as to seem not only angelic but itself an angel. He hasabsolutely no self-control and his passions find him without defence. They come upon him in the midst of his usual brilliant gaiety and cutshort the frolic comedy of his fine spirits. 

Then for a wild hour he is the enemy of the laws. If you imprison him, you may hear his resounding voice as he takes a running kick at the door, shouting his justification in unconquerable rage. "I'm good now!" ismade as emphatic as a shot by the blow of his heel upon the panel. Butif the moment of forgiveness is deferred, in the hope of a more promisingrepentance, it is only too likely that he will betake himself to ahostile silence and use all the revenge yet known to his imagination. "Darling mother, open the door!" cries his touching voice at last; but ifthe answer should be "I must leave you for a short time, for punishment, "the storm suddenly thunders again. "There (crash!) I have broken aplate, and I'm glad it is broken into such little pieces that you can'tmend it. I'm going to break the 'lectric light. " When things are atthis pass there is one way, and only one, to bring the child to anoverwhelming change of mind; but it is a way that would be cruel, usedmore than twice or thrice in his whole career of tempest and defiance. This is to let him see that his mother is troubled. "Oh, don't cry! Oh, don't be sad!" he roars, unable still to deal with his own passionateanger, which is still dealing with him. With his kicks of rage hesuddenly mingles a dance of apprehension lest his mother should havetears in her eyes. Even while he is still explicitly impenitent anddefiant he tries to pull her round to the light that he may see her face. It is but a moment before the other passion of remorse comes to makehavoc of the helpless child, and the first passion of anger is quelledoutright. 

Only to a trivial eye is there nothing tragic in the sight of these greatpassions within the small frame, the small will, and, in a word, thesmall nature. When a large and sombre fate befalls a little nature, andthe stage is too narrow for the action of a tragedy, the disproportionhas sometimes made a mute and unexpressed history of actual life orsometimes a famous book; it is the manifest core of George Eliot's storyof _Adam Bede_, where the suffering of Hetty is, as it were, the eye ofthe storm. All is expressive around her, but she is hardly articulate;the book is full of words--preachings, speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, but a space of silence remains about her in the midst of the story. Andthe disproportion of passion--the inner disproportion--is at least astragic as that disproportion of fate and action; it is less intelligible, and leads into the intricacies of nature which are more difficult thanthe turn of events. 

It seems, then, that this passionate play is acted within the narrowlimits of a child's nature far oftener than in those of an adult andfinally formed nature. And this, evidently, because there is unequalforce at work within a child, unequal growth and a jostling of powers andenergies that are hurrying to their development and pressing for exerciseand life. It is this helpless inequality--this untimeliness--that makesthe guileless comedy mingling with the tragedies of a poor child's day. He knows thus much--that life is troubled around him and that the fatesare strong. He implicitly confesses "the strong hours" of antique song. This same boy--the tempestuous child of passion and revolt--went out withquiet cheerfulness for a walk lately, saying as his cap was put on, "Now, mother, you are going to have a little peace. " This way of accepting hisown conditions is shared by a sister, a very little older, who, being ofan equal and gentle temper, indisposed to violence of every kind andtender to all without disquiet, observes the boy's brief frenzies as acitizen observes the climate. She knows the signs quite well and can atany time give the explanation of some particular outburst, but withoutany attempt to go in search of further or more original causes. Stillless is she moved by the virtuous indignation that is the least charmingof the ways of some little girls. _Elle ne fait que constater_. Her equanimity has never been overset by the wildest of his moments, andshe has witnessed them all. It is needless to say that she is notfrightened by his drama, for Nature takes care that her young creaturesshall not be injured by sympathies. Nature encloses them in the innocentindifference that preserves their brains from the more harassing kinds ofdistress. 

Even the very frenzy of rage does not long dim or depress the boy. It ishis repentance that makes him pale, and Nature here has been ratherforced, perhaps--with no very good result. Often must a mother wish thatshe might for a few years govern her child (as far as he is governable)by the lowest motives--trivial punishments and paltry rewards--ratherthan by any kind of appeal to his sensibilities. She would wish to keepthe words "right" and "wrong" away from his childish ears, but in thisshe is not seconded by her lieutenants. The child himself is quitewilling to close with her plans, in so far as he is able, and isreasonably interested in the results of her experiments. He wishes herattempts in his regard to have a fair chance. "Let's hope I'll be goodall to-morrow, " he says with the peculiar cheerfulness of his ordinaryvoice. "I do hope so, old man. " "Then I'll get my penny. Mother, I wasonly naughty once yesterday; if I have only one naughtiness to-morrow, will you give me a halfpenny?" "No reward except for real goodness allday long. " "All right. "

It is only too probable that this system (adopted only after the failureof other ways of reform) will be greatly disapproved as one of bribery. It may, however, be curiously inquired whether all kinds of reward mightnot equally be burlesqued by that word, and whether any government, spiritual or civil, has ever even professed to deny rewards. Moreover, those who would not give a child a penny for being good will not hesitateto fine him a penny for being naughty, and rewards and punishments muststand or fall together. The more logical objection will be that goodnessis ideally the normal condition, and that it should have, therefore, noexplicit extraordinary result, whereas naughtiness, being abnormal, should have a visible and unusual sequel. To this the rewarding mothermay reply that it is not reasonable to take "goodness" in a little childof strong passions as the normal condition. The natural thing for him isto give full sway to impulses that are so violent as to overbear hispowers. 

But, after all, the controversy returns to the point of practice. Whatis the thought, or threat, or promise that will stimulate the weak willof the child, in the moment of rage and anger, to make a sufficientresistance? If the will were naturally as well developed as thepassions, the stand would be soon made and soon successful; but as it isthere must needs be a bracing by the suggestion of joy or fear. Let, then, the stimulus be of a mild and strong kind at once, and mingled withthe thought of distant pleasure. To meet the suffering of rage andfrenzy by the suffering of fear is assuredly to make of the littleunquiet mind a battle-place of feelings too hurtfully tragic. The pennyis mild and strong at once, with its still distant but certain joys ofpurchase; the promise and hope break the mood of misery, and the willtakes heart to resist and conquer. 

It is only in the lesser naughtiness that he is master of himself. Thelesser the evil fit the more deliberate. So that his mother, knowingherself to be not greatly feared, once tried to mimic the father's voicewith a menacing, "What's that noise?" The child was persistently cryingand roaring on an upper floor, in contumacy against his French nurse, when the baritone and threatening question was sent pealing up thestairs. The child was heard to pause and listen and then to say to hisnurse, "Ce n'est pas Monsieur; c'est Madame, " and then, without furtherloss of time, to resume the interrupted clamours. 

Obviously, with a little creature of six years, there are two thingsmainly to be done--to keep the delicate brain from the evil of thepresent excitement, especially the excitement of painful feeling, and tobreak the habit of passion. Now that we know how certainly the specialcells of the brain which are locally affected by pain and anger becomehypertrophied by so much use, and all too ready for use in the future atthe slightest stimulus, we can no longer slight the importance of habit. Any means, then, that can succeed in separating a little child from thehabit of anger does fruitful work for him in the helpless time of hischildhood. The work is not easy, but a little thought should make iteasy for the elders to avoid the provocation which they--who should wardoff provocations--are apt to bring about by sheer carelessness. It isonly in childhood that our race knows such physical abandonment to sorrowand tears, as a child's despair; and the theatre with us must needs copychildhood if it would catch the note and action of a creature withouthope. 

THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT

There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the flight oftime; it does so move, and yet withstands time's movement. It is full ofpauses that are due to the energy of change, has bounds and rebounds, andwhen it is most active then it is longest. It is not long with languor. It has room for remoteness, and leisure for oblivion. It takes greatexcursions against time, and travels so as to enlarge its hours. Thiscertain year is any one of the early years of fully conscious life, andtherefore it is of all the dates. The child of Tumult has been livingamply and changefully through such a year--his eighth. It is difficultto believe that his is a year of the self-same date as that of the adult, the men who do not breast their days. 

For them is the inelastic, or but slightly elastic, movement of things. Month matched with month shows a fairly equal length. Men and womennever travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a distant light. There is recognition and familiarity between their seasons. But theChild of Tumult has infinite prospects in his year. Forgetfulness andsurprise set his east and his west at immeasurable distance. His Letheruns in the cheerful sun. You look on your own little adult year, and inimagination enlarge it, because you know it to be the contemporary ofhis. Even she who is quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face astrange and great extent of a few years of her life still to come--hisyears, the years she is to live at his side. 

Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy's life, not somuch by slow degrees as by sudden and fitful accessions. His speech isyet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes of pleasure, "alittle duck what can walk"; but with a beautifully clear accent he greetshis mother with the colloquial question, "Well, darling, do you know thelatest?" "The _what_?" "The latest: do you know the latest?" And thenhe tells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference tohis own wrongs. On another occasion the unexpected little phrase wasvaried; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of theside he favoured had fallen. The child then came to his mother's roomwith the question: "Have you heard the saddest?" Moreover the "saddest"caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized himduring the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection. Fromsuch great causes arise such little things! Some of his grief was forthe nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whosesympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare hissensibilities. 

The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growingfewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in theirpainfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation ofall the childish powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger. This isnot temptation; the word is too weak for the assault of a child's passionupon his will. That little will is taken captive entirely, and beforethe child was seven he knew that it was so. Such a consciousness leavesall babyhood behind and condemns the child to suffer. For a certainpassage of his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, norstrong enough to resist it, as he will be. The time of the subsiding ofthe tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human life. Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so that thechild who had been abandoned to naughtiness with all his will in anentire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and who had laterundergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity suddenly turned again, "like rivers in the south. " "Forget it, " he had wept, in a kind ofextremity of remorse; "forget it, darling, and don't, don't be sad;" andit is he, happily, who forgets. The wasted look of his pale face iseffaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought, and five short minutescan restore the ruin, as though a broken little German town should in thetwinkling of an eye be restored as no architect could restore it--shouldbe made fresh, strong, and tight again, looking like a full box of toys, as a town was wont to look in the new days of old. 

When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows the growthof this tardy reason that--quickened--is hereafter to do so much for hispeace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration. Denied a secondhandful of strawberries, and seeing quite clearly that the denial wasenforced reluctantly, he makes haste to reply, "It doesn't matter, darling. " At any sudden noise in the house his beautiful voice, with allits little difficulties of pronunciation, is heard with the sedulousreassurance: "It's all right, mother, nobody hurted ourselves!" He isnot surprised so as to forget this gentle little duty, which was neverrequired of him, but is of his own devising. 

According to the opinion of his dear and admired American friend, he saysall these things, good and evil, with an English accent; and at theAmerican play his English accent was irrepressible. "It's too comic; no, it's too comic, " he called in his enjoyment; being the only perfectlyfearless child in the world, he will not consent to the conventionalshyness in public, whether he be the member of an audience or of acongregation, but makes himself perceptible. And even when he has adesperate thing to say, in the moment of absolute revolt--such a thing as"I _can't_ like you, mother, " which anon he will recant with convulsionsof distress--he has to "speak the thing he will, " and when he recants itis not for fear. 

If such a child could be ruled (or approximately ruled, for inquisitorialgovernment could hardly be so much as attempted) by some small meansadapted to his size and to his physical aspect, it would be well for hishealth, but that seems at times impossible. By no effort can his eldersaltogether succeed in keeping tragedy out of the life that is so unreadyfor it. Against great emotions no one can defend him by any forethought. He is their subject; and to see him thus devoted and thus wrung, thuswrecked by tempests inwardly, so that you feel grief has him actually bythe heart, recalls the reluctance--the question--wherewith you perceivethe interior grief of poetry or of a devout life. Cannot the Muse, cannot the Saint, you ask, live with something less than this? If thisis the truer life, it seems hardly supportable. In like manner it shouldbe possible for a child of seven to come through his childhood withgriefs that should not so closely involve him, but should deal with theeasier sentiments. 

Despite all his simplicity, the child has (by way of inheritance, for hehas never heard them) the self-excusing fictions of our race. Accused ofcertain acts of violence, and unable to rebut the charge with any effect, he flies to the old convention: "I didn't know what I was doing, " heavers, using a great deal of gesticulation to express the temporarydistraction of his mind. "Darling, after nurse slapped me as hard as shecould, I didn't know what I was doing, so I suppose I pushed her with myfoot. " His mother knows as well as does Tolstoi that men and childrenknow what they are doing, and are the more intently aware as the stressof feeling makes the moments more tense; and she will not admit a pleawhich her child might have learned from the undramatic authors he hasnever read. 

Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from takingfright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult has onlyto wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to give theshock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and change hispassion at its height. 

THE UNREADY

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are, onthe contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until advancingage teaches them agility. This is not lack of sensitiveness, but merelength of process. For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruellystartled by a sudden crash in the room--a child who has never learnt tofear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, thatshock of sound does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves butafter some moments, nor before some moments more is the sense of theshock expressed. The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion ofthe child's consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners halfa mile away. 

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eagerwith us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches--directas the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered bytrivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain. But youcould count five between the prick of a surgeon's instrument upon ababy's arm and the little whimper that answers it. The child is then tooyoung, also, to refer the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it. Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bringlocal tidings thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degreetowards his arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination. Helooks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random. 

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older childtrudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer. It is the greatest failureto take these little _gobe-mouches_ to a good conjurer. His successesleave them cold, for they had not yet understood what it was the good manmeant to surprise them withal. The amateur it is who really astonishesthem. They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing atclose quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quiteaway at the outset from the lagging senses of his honest audience. 

You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under hisingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in its place andoff again ten times before the little breathless boy has begun toperceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched. 

Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habit ofawaiting, should surround themselves with pauses of patience. The simplelittle processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a common sentenceare too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot use two pronouns butthey must confuse them. I never found that a young child--one ofsomething under nine years--was able to say, "I send them my love" at thefirst attempt. It will be "I send me my love, " "I send them their love, ""They send me my love"; not, of course, through any confusion ofunderstanding, but because of the tardy setting of words in order withthe thoughts. The child visibly grapples with the difficulty, and isbeaten. 

It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to like twice-told tales and foregone conclusions in their games. They are not eager, for a year or two yet to come, for surprises. If you hide and theycannot see you hiding, their joy in finding you is comparatively small;but let them know perfectly well what cupboard you are in, and they willfind you with shouts of discovery. The better the hiding-place isunderstood between you the more lively the drama. They make a conventionof art for their play. The younger the children the more dramatic; andwhen the house is filled with outcries of laughter from the breathlessbreast of a child, it is that he is pretending to be surprised at findinghis mother where he bade her pretend to hide. This is the comedy thatnever tires. Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how hetries to put a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for, if not, he will find that children also have a manner of substitution, and that they will put half-hearted laughter in the place of theirnatural impetuous clamours. It is certain that very young children liketo play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short game. 

There is something so purely childlike in the delays of a child that anyexercise asking for the swift apprehension of later life, for the flashesof understanding and action, from the mind and members of childhood, isno pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as experts understand it, and even as the moderately-trained may play it, claims all the immediateaction, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to childhood. There maypossibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trainedwithout this specific violence directed upon the thing characteristic oftheir age--their unreadiness--but virtuosity at the piano cannot be oneof them. It is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children, oranything that is theirs, conquered and beaten; but their poor littleslowness is so distinctively their own, and must needs be physiologicallyso proper to their years, so much a natural condition of the age of theirbrain, that of all childishnesses it is the one that the world shouldhave the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and theintelligence to understand. 

It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but a verylittle attention would prove how many apparent disconnexions there arebetween the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not the brain thatis quick. If, on a voyage in space, electricity takes thus much time, and light thus much, and sound thus much, there is one little joggingtraveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey, and this is the perception of a child. Surely our own memories mightserve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed theprincipal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders tofurnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not ourmere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through theimportant moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate fromtheirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything elseof interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers fromour parents' eyes, left us stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Amongthe sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best wasan eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moonin the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress;we kept up with everything. 

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselvesto the world, practised and alert. But it would be more to the purposethat the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings withthem. Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of thetardiest. But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of thelittle pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It isnot a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creaturewho has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled. 

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of sensesand of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for receiving a greatshock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or threeappreciable moments--if we would know anything of the moments of a baby

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long forchildren, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is too shortfor them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnaturaleffort, have any perception of it. When children do not see the jokes ofthe elderly, and disappoint expectation in other ways, only lessintimate, the reason is almost always there. The child cannot turn inmid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus took place moments ago. 

THAT PRETTY PERSON

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, onesignificant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlivedcontroversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--aninteresting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. Thisis a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value ofprocess, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring ofprogress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more thanresignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for theirtransitoriness. 

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world, for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that forthe sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold, perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we shouldacknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions. 

But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but apatient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred yearsago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full statureof body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If hersong is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results oftime, and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time ofdanger; "Would it were done. " But, meanwhile, the right thing is to putit to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass. She sings propheciesto the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while shespins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn. She bids good speed. 

John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child--"thatpretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chieflyprecious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man henever lived to be. The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead, says of him: "At two and a half years of age he pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these threelanguages. " As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done atthat little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost theentire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could makecongruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and _vice versa_, construeand prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made aconsiderable progress in Comenius's 'Janua, ' and had a strong passion forGreek. "

Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is notto be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is thevery fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hastytimes. All being favourable, the child of Evelyn's studious home wouldhave done all these things in the course of nature within a few years. Itwas the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, toEvelyn, so exquisite. The course of nature had not any beauty in hiseyes. It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was notadmired for the majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mournswith him "the strangely hopeful child, " who--without Comenius's "Janua"and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, anappropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning andclosing a separate expectation every day of his five years. 

Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flatteringto the estate of man. They thought their little boy strangely hopefulbecause he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost thetimely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. Andyet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!

It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, mustrightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slightingit, or bidding it hasten its work, not yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay, thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and theworld has lately been converted to change. 

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in theact. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal, and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wearapparent wings. 

_Tout passe_. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for thefruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter andcontain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this questionmost arbitrarily as to the life of man. 

All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, thissuppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time offulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they hadthe illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausinglife. 

Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon asmight be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight yearsold they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to beproud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness byan "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth ofeight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, inafter years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood musthave been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everythingthat was proper to five years old was defect. A strange good conceit ofthemselves and of their own ages had those fathers. 

They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothingto say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice arechildren not his own mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the weddingof a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently, anoccasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a Frenchhospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes afrightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience. " "The use Imade of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not beensubject to this deplorable infirmitie. " This is what he says. 

See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed inliterature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there werein all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon beingchildren; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, forexample, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were theprosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up hislittle brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might becalled Tommy. But there were no "little radiant girls. " Now and then an"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always amatter of sewing and reading. As for the little girl saints, even whenthey were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slippedthrough their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunatesuitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaevalmind, but mars them for ours. 

So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhathamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his mostadmirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in theCourt of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "whopassed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the leaststain or tincture in her christall. " She held her state with men andmaids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as thatof never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instructionto the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might givethe least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there didusually assume, " refused the addresses of the "greatest persons, " and wasas famous for her beauty as for her wit. One would like to forget theage at which she did these things. When she began her service she waseleven. When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she wasnot thirteen. 

Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, andheroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April intoMay, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if theyshortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The particularyear they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say afine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, andellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would nothave patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimelyflowers. The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as hehas it. 

The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear oflosing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with thebloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen in the"Spectator" has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last sixyears. " The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, thestockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girlof thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can. " Sheadds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of. " Thiscorrespondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they havebought their wedding clothes. " There was no sense of childhood in an agethat could think this an opportune pleasantry. 

But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a latercentury--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and allthings complete in their day because it is their day, and has itsappointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than asentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem, at last, something else than a defect. 

UNDER THE EARLY STARS

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel insending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer dusk, especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent upon all kinds ofclose industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings. But whenlate twilight comes, there comes also the punctual wildness. Thechildren will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere movement--it does sojolt their spirits. 

What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatorydark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths andcrickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours. Thechildren lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the mimicry ofhunting. 

The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and arebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to gohome. But, with more or less of life and fire, the children strike someblow for liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectualchild, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is donefor freedom under the early stars. 

This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict withthe weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy of menshould be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at sometime of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of thepoor. 

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved bychildren. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile thetime. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another toplay. "Oh come, " she said, "and play with me at new maid. "

The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour. It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits. The habit ofprehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity ofsome customs in mankind. But if the inquirers who appeal to thatbeginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek nofurther. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in theirthralldom. Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction oftheir high antiquity weakens your hand. 

Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense ofmystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby. The French sleep-song is the most romantic. There is in it such a sound of history asmust inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of theincalculable; and the songs themselves are old. "Le Bon Roi Dagobert"has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurseknows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herselfslept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in "Le Pontd'Avignon, " is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the _tete a tete_of child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night. "Malbrook" would be comparatively modern, were not all things that aresung to a drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham. 

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some ofthem are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate racesthat are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the whitechild. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropicalnight. His closing eyes are filled with alien images. 

THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME

He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious ofsomething more than a change in his sense of the present and in hisapprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than thedestruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did, and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallentogether, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, isthe past itself--time--the fact of antiquity. 

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are nomore extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit ofmeasure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing ofpaltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He hadthought them to be wide. 

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states, the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure whichhe holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten yearshad given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It wasthen that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of tensuch little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--thatmen give the dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if lifeshows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?

In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a mostnoble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He attributes anoverwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, andhe alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more thanmortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of thepast. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples ofUpper Egypt to sidereal time. 

If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceivedold time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mindof the man. The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannotforget what was his conviction when he was a child. He had once apersuasion of Antiquity. And this is not for nothing. The enormousundeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind. 

But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive shocks. Itis as though one strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then werebidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor halfacre before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hithertoremote, remote youth of his own parents to have been something familiarlynear, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attilathat is displaced. Those ten last years of his have corrected the world. There needs no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all theimaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip. 

To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to holdthenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But, it may be said, themystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudgesthrough our own world--our contemporary world--is not very mysterious. Weperceive its pace; it is a jog-trot. Even so, we now consider, joltedthe changes of the past, with the same hurry. 

The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scansthrough a shortened avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels that hewas so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts, forinstance, had been children, it would have been well enough for the childto measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificentmeasure. But they were only men and demi-gods. Thus they belong to himas he is now--a man; and not to him as he was once--a child. It wasquite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years' rule along the pathfrom our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard inthe man's present possession. Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject forthe boy. 

What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of suchlittle times? Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the illusionof ages, does actually prove it true. Childhood is itself Antiquity--toevery man his only Antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot makeAbraham old again in the mind of a man of thirty-five; but the beginningof every life is older than Abraham. _There_ is the abyss of time. Leta man turn to his own childhood--no further--if he would renew his senseof remoteness, and of the mystery of change. 

For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes;but it has enormous space for its flight. The child has an apprehensionnot only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusiveapprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real apprehensionwhen he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If there is nohistorical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed andunnumbered Antiquity for all mankind. 

And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems topartake. Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that is whyit seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at that presentage, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would be nowhere. Buthe built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one was seven yearsold. It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the onlyancient days. So, for a time, the world is magical. 

Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learningsomething of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges thesense of time for all mankind. For even after the great illusion is overand history is re-measured, and all fancy and flight caught back andchastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged. The man remains capableof great spaces of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, buthe finds them within, he contains them, he is aware of them. History hasfallen together, but childhood surrounds and encompasses history, stretches beyond and passes on the road to eternity. 

He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years thatare the treasury of preceptions--the first. The great disillusion shallnever shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that madethem. "Far apart, " I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful. Thepast of childhood is not single, is not motionless, nor fixed in onepoint; it has summits a world away one from the other. Year from yeardiffers as the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea. Andthe man of thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is flight, eventhough he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by. 

There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood, which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy. Many othermoments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours ofweariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere lengthof protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by theelderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, thechildren. The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a spacenot of long, but of immeasurable, time. It is the moment of going tosleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he haslong ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enoughmargin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. Heknows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at thosehours, but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child whopasses with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing hemeets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitabletime. 

His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She singsabsolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean towaking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of thebeginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them allhis life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can wellexpress. 

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is besetwith long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mereadding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it furtherback--it is already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory ofa man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. What are a mere fortyyears of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!

Footnotes:

{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper, andthe ascription of a Stevenson-like character to the quoted phrase, aletter of Stevenson's was published, and proved that he had read LucyHutchinson's writings, and that he did not love her. "I have possessedmyself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of course, I admire, etc. . . Isometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in thebitterness of my spirit. . . The way in which she talks of herself makesone's blood run cold. " He was young at that time of writing, and perhapshardly aware of the lesson in English he had taken from her. We knowthat he never wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact thathe did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-centurydiction is established--it is not too bold to say so--by my recognitionof his style in her own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflexnote, heard first in his voice, recognized in hers. 

{2} I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.