HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY

Contents:

Some Thoughts of a Reader of TennysonDickens as a Man of LettersSwinburne's Lyrical PoetryCharlotte and Emily BronteCharmianThe Century of Moderation

SOME THOUGHTS OF A READER OF TENNYSON

Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by thatunanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years, and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimesdifficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of changefrom the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not, reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world. Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than thenovelty of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of opinionon Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as itwas in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but turned. Allthat was not worth having of admiration then has soured into detractionnow. It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What theherding of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take away to-day, thatand no more. 

But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the tendencyof educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of Tennyson'spoetry as though he could not be "parted from himself, " and now disposedto reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was a poet whoneeded to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is he who wrote bothnarrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who--this is themore important character of his poetry--had both a style and a manner: amasterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; anoble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. He is a subjectfor our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly anotherpoet. We may deeply admire and wonder, and, in another line orhemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the luminoussuns of dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights; waterstheir way with rushing streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionaryhills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those touchinglandscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, coolsombre summers, and meadows thronged with unnoticeable flowers; speedshis carpet knight--or is that hardly a just name for one whose sword"smites" so well?--upon a carpet of authentic wild flowers; pushes hisrovers, in costume, from off blossoming shores, on the keels of oldromance. The style and the manner, I have said, run side by side. If wemay take one poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damnedto poetry, " why, then, Tennyson is condemned by a couple of sentences, "to run concurrently. " We have the style and the manner locked togetherat times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should beno danger for the more judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiarTennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a sweep ofprotest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present andrecent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the lessjudicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation oflovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of thenation of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at oncemajestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities theyneglect in their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in thesixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in theeighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note--commonly calledCeltic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world--the wild woodnote of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, theliberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and lovingNature, shall that choice nation within England long disregard thesevirtues in the nineteenth-century master? How disregard him, for morethan the few years of reaction, for the insignificant reasons of hisbygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, or what not? Itis no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, todisparage a poet who wrote but the two--had he written no more of theirkind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur, " of which, before I quote them, Iwill permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporaryauthor's opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the high-water mark ofEnglish style in poetry and prose, cited those lines as topmost inpoetry:-

 On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but thesimplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on theyonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage isfrom Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and shouldthus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and otherblank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetryundoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; itcannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight;it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without thefriction of the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near toa fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day. That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that weshould hold it for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; andseveral of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit inthe manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closelyand tightly, in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, orthey would even prefer to pick you the lock. 

But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized shouldbe restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet Tennyson showsus that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the most dangerous. It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that thekey turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls, " butnot of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as thatof the close of "A Vision of Sin, " or of "Lucretius. " As to the questionof ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's sayingthat poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties. " Andwe could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of versethat not only confesses but brags of difficulties, and not only suffersfrom them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us the grimace ofthe pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article of arecent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" who manifestly has aninsuperable difficulty in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, andkeeping at the same time any show of respect for the national grammar, the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase "neath cliffs"(apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic. " Shall thereader indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has other things to do. This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of hiswork is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finishcomports with the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiarsecret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenlyways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncetbox. It is the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble ofmaking a place for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly_worked_, and the exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of thislittle paradox--that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of hisart. 

In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the littleunwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet whowithstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France since theRenaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet whodoes not own inheritance. ) It was some time about the date of theRestoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffleat the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a _tour dephrase_ from Mme. De Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later thegood example of French painting--rich interest paid for the loan of ourConstable's initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, Frenchcritical business, over all the shallow places of our literature--thesehave all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxiousfluttering or jostling to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essayon criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his alack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word_brutalite_, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. MatthewArnold, by the way, knew so little of the French character as to bealtogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, andFrench "convenience. " "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt, "practical sense" his next dearest, and he throws them a score of timesin the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For hebestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas"--as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practicalsense"--to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a momentdoes he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to bedisconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably Englishaccent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, ofMatthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he hasnot the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interestof strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in ourseventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenthcentury, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolutionin our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-centurystudios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still running--in ourlibraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in ourArnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever. Not theElizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelleywere (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in their time. France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson'scontemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in _Les Miserables_, that our peopleimitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us adelighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boyimitates the Parisian street-boy. There is, in fact, something of astreet-boy in some of our late more literary mimicries. 

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson ishardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery. He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficientto him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "Aclear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough--indeed Tennysonreigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change theirsky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and eveningbell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who livesin God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers";"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needingnot illustration. 

If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the _one_ that heis, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number thatare of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. Buthe added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by theadvent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets ofthe world. The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, itneed hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. Itmay have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, ofthis homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accountsfor Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is freshalso in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others haveoutworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that isconventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those, which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendourfalls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance, where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint"horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the lightdelirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, thecloser secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has beentaunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies, " ofthe exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter, " but he betook hisecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winterplaces of his familiar nightingale:-

 When first the liquid note beloved of men Comes flying over many a windy wave;

to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace ofArt"--the "clear-walled city by the sea, " the "pillared town, " the "full-fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale inIda"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin":-

 At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, Is there any hope? To which an answer pealed from that high land, But in a tongue no man could understand. 

The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra, but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world, she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one withShakespeare's queen:-

 We drank the Libyan sun to sleep. 

Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of stylerebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less thanthe lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls, " are matter for the trueTennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious thanvital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in "Harold, " is not onlymodern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years. But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, asharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a fewpassages of "Queen Mary, " and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in"Harold. " The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlierscenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionabletragedy:-

 Sanguelac--Sanguelac--the arrow--the arrow!--Away!

Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet. Those whom hepuzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to gowide of any road--"down all manner of streets, " as the desperate drovercries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to theways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely, individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, ornone--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction, " as usedto be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlyingpublic, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it hasheads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurateperceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process anduncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the studentof material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an agethat wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have nowtaken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so dividedand so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back tothe parting, or meeting, of eternal roads? The religious question thatarises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerityand attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind ofyesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true thatpessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblestform of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popularpen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little whichprevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followedthe other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot bewithin their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "InMemoriam. " To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no greatstruggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute bejudiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson hereproposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny. The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in thatmagnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius. " But so far as "In Memoriam"attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience ofhuman anguish and intellect. 

I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought asColeridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well. "Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, thesleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We seethem in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitelyand transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted tothink the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow morna sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man. 

As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" arefatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of anaspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because aninnocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from therocks above; grass would not grow there. 

 This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine. 

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to bethese woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the worldblossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable tous by such a fiction. 

 The Being that is in the clouds and air . . . Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves. 

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care, " the visiblealteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have todispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to askwhether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on suchgrounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no morethan a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack uponour reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth. 

_In Memoriam_, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here andthere a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light, sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell. He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and animmense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that mostsignificant modern question, French or not French? But he was, beforethe outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet oflandscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. Thiseternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet ahomeward ship with her "dewy decks, " and in the sudden island landscape, The clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God. 

It is poignant in the garden-night:-

 A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, . . . And gathering freshlier overhead, Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said "The dawn, the dawn, " and died away. 

His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I thinkthe sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been moregreatly exalted than by Tennyson:-

 As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry. 

As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn"does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in Tennyson'spage the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "Themountain lawn was dewy-dark. " It is not that he brings the mountains toonear or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the wordwithdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn isaloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with manyanother word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary, intosomething rich and strange. His own especially is the March month--his"roaring moon. " His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers andstorms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by thegale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with theenergy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase inthe number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions ofpoetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he whois insensible to the Tennyson note--the new note that we reaffirm evenwith the notes of Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well inour ears--the Tennyson note of splendour, all-distinct. He showed theperpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is thecaptain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit asun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic sunslong since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows uponus an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitzrises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain;through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to thesetting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam, denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of thatseaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, thetranscendent vision, of Tennyson's genius. 

Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "alittle wildly, or with the flower of the mind. " Tennyson, the clearest-headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that littlefoppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag; wild, notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish;notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhatmisses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, thanthe defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers arehis--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!

DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS

It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls thesayings of many years had happened to this also, that Thackeray was theunkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to bethat Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that hehad an eager faith in good ones. Nothing places him so entirely out ofdate as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, hisleap at it. He saw it in a woman's face first met, and drew it tohimself in a man's hand first grasped. He looked keenly for it. And ifhe associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mentalineptitude, he did not so relate sanctity; though he gave it, forcompanion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most tenderly. We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr. Johnson'sfamous sentence: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no joys. "Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no saints. HelenPendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not holy, for she is an egoist in love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, for she too iscruel; and even Lady Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor is ColonelNewcome holy, for he is haughty; nor Dobbin, for he turns with a tauntupon a plain sister; nor Esmond, for he squanders his best years in lovefor a material beauty; and these are the best of his good people. Andreaders have been taught to praise the work of him who makes noneperfect; one does not meet perfect people in trains or at dinner, andthis seemed good cause that the novelist should be praised for hismoderation; it seemed to imitate the usual measure and moderation ofnature. 

But Charles Dickens closed with a divine purpose divinely different. Heconsented to the counsels of perfection. And thus he made Joe Gargery, not a man one might easily find in a forge; and Esther Summerson, not agirl one may easily meet at a dance; and Little Dorrit, who does not cometo do a day's sewing; not that the man and the women are inconceivable, but that they are unfortunately improbable. They are creatures createdthrough a creating mind that worked its six days for the love of good, and never rested until the seventh, the final Sabbath. But granting thatthey are the counterpart, the heavenly side, of caricature, this is notto condemn them. Since when has caricature ceased to be an art good forman--an honest game between him and nature? It is a tenable opinion thatfrank caricature is a better incident of art than the mere exaggerationwhich is the more modern practice. The words mean the same thing intheir origin--an overloading. But, as we now generally delimit thewords, they differ. Caricature, when it has the grotesque inspiration, makes for laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration;in either case there is a good understanding between the author and thereader, or between the draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, forexample, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeatingpattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us mostexceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. MaxBeerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life withoutharbouring a thought of self, but it is very good for us all to know thatsuch a girl was thought of by Dickens, that he loved his thought, andthat she is ultimately to be traced, through Dickens, to God. 

But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader andthe author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right toresent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand--the worst manner ofviolence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is sofar, therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it wasalso the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to thegeneration that thought his tunings to be the finest "music. " Forinstance, in an early poem he intends to tell us how a man who loved awoman welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound, his impassioned breast against hers, abhorring. He might have convincedus of that welcome by one phrase of the profound exactitude of genius. But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatestimaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces thesentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One takes pleasure inrebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic. The poetintended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention, " asDr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish. In truth we domore, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language. Forexaggeration writes relaxed, and not elastic, words and verses; and it ispossible that the language suffers something, at least temporarily--duringthe life of a couple of generations, let us say--from the loss ofelasticity and rebound brought about by such strain. Moreover, exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively. There should havebeen a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of exaggerating, like that of boasting, "grows upon you. "

It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration inthe work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. His violence andvehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but ofpower; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that power should neverknow. This is where his Judith holds herself to be so smirched anddegraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to oneonly, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left toher entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes. To this, too, the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of governesses: "Mydear, you exaggerate. "

It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree ofimbecility in the reader, whereas caricature takes for granted a highdegree of intelligence. Dickens appeals to our intelligence in all hiscaricature, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, or impish, as in Mrs. Micawber. The word "caricature" that is used a thousand times toreproach him is the word that does him singular honour. 

If I may define my own devotion to Dickens, it may be stated as chiefly, though not wholly, admiration of his humour, his dramatic tragedy, andhis watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape. Passages of hisbooks that are ranged otherwise than under those characters often leaveme out of the range of their appeal or else definitely offend me. Andthis is not for the customary reason--that Dickens could not draw agentleman, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It matters little whetherhe could or not. But as a fact he did draw a gentleman, and drew himexcellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. Chesterton has decided. Thequestion of the lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove anegative, it is difficult also to present one; and to the making, orproducing, or liberating, or detaching, or exalting, of the character ofa lady there enter many negatives; and Dickens was an obvious and apositive man. Esther Summerson is a lady, but she is so much besidesthat her ladyhood does not detach itself from her sainthood and herangelhood, so as to be conspicuous--if, indeed, conspicuousness may beproperly predicated of the quality of a lady. It is a conventionalsaying that sainthood and angelhood include the quality of a lady, butthat saying is not true; a lady has a great number of negatives all herown, and also some things positive that are not at all included ingoodness. However this may be--and it is not important--Dickens, thegenial Dickens, makes savage sport of women. Such a company of enviousdames and damsels cannot be found among the persons of the satiristThackeray. Kate Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at first sight theenmity of her workshop companions; in the innocent pages of "Pickwick"the aunt is jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by wounding thevanity of the aunt as keenly as she may; and so forth through early booksand late. He takes for granted that the women, old and young, who arenot his heroines, wage this war within the sex, being disappointed bydefect of nature and fortune. Dickens is master of wit, humour, andderision; and it must be confessed that his derision is abundant, and iscast upon an artificially exposed and helpless people; that is, he, aman, derides the women who miss what a man declared to be their "wholeexistence. "

The advice which M. Rodin received in his youth from Constant--"Learn tosee the other side; never look at forms only in extent; learn to see themalways in relief"--is the contrary of the counsel proper for a reader ofDickens. That counsel should be, "Do not insist upon seeing the immortalfigures of comedy 'in the round. ' You are to be satisfied with theirface value, the face of two dimensions. It is not necessary that youshould seize Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and grasp the whole man and hisdestinies. " The hypocrite is a figure dreadful and tragic, a shape ofhorror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite, and a bright image of heart-easing comedy. For comic fiction cannot exist without some such paradox. Without it, where would our laugh be in response to the generous geniuswhich gives us Mr. Pecksniff's parenthesis to the mention of sirens("Pagan, I regret to say"); and the scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after astormy domestic scene within, goes as it were accidentally to the door toadmit the rich kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened the street door, as if he thought he had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain. " The visitor hadthundered at the door while outcries of family strife had been rising inthe house. "'It is an ancient pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my dearsir; for, if I am not mistaken, Adam was the first of the calling. MyEve, I grieve to say, is no more, sir; but' (and here he pointed to hisspade, and shook his head, as if he were not cheerful without an effort)'but I do a little bit of Adam still. ' He had by this time got them intothe best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller and the bust by Spokerwere. " And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper table:"'This, ' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a Minglingthat repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry. 'Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that neverrejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants tomerriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table. "Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should beas mad as Mr. Dick. None the less is it a happy thing for any reader towatch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dickwas to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could not bekept out of the manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime looking verydeferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb. " And theamours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable-marrows overthe garden wall. Mr. F. 's aunt, again! And Augustus Moddle, our ownModdle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately broodedover. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac, " says Taine, "makes us shudder. " Agood medical diagnosis. Long live the logical French intellect!

Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereasPassion and Pity speak the universal tongue. 

It is strange--it seems to me deplorable--that Dickens himself was notcontent to leave his wonderful hypocrite--one who should standimperishable in comedy--in the two dimensions of his own admirable art. After he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, tasting him with the "strenuoustongue" of Keats's voluptuary bursting "joy's grapes against his palatefine, " Dickens most unfairly gives himself the other and incompatible joyof grasping his Pecksniff in the third dimension, seizes him "in theround, " horsewhips him out of all keeping, and finally kicks him out of asplendid art of fiction into a sorry art of "poetical justice, " aPecksniff not only defeated but undone. 

And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners is a less fault than hisreforming them. It is truly an act denoting excessive simplicity of mindin him. He never veritably allows his responsibility as a man to lapse. Men ought to be good, or else to become good, and he does violence to hisown excellent art, and yields it up to his sense of morality. Ah, can wemeasure by years the time between that day and this? Is the fastidious, the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild, and not theremote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge to his egoism, or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombeyto his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally to prosper? Truly, themost unpardonable thing Dickens did in those deplorable last chapters ofhis was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, in difficulties"--theperfect Micawber nature is respected as to his origin, and then pervertedas to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty ever came back to Englandwith such tidings. And our last glimpse of the emigrants had been madejoyous by the sight of the young Micawbers on the eve of emigration;"every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its body by a strongline, " in preparation for Colonial life. And then Dickens must needs gobehind the gay scenes, and tell us that the long and untiring delight ofthe book was over. Mr. Micawber, in the Colonies, was never again tomake punch with lemons, in a crisis of his fortunes, and "resume hispeeling with a desperate air"; nor to observe the expression of hisfriends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's masterly exposition of thefinancial situation or of the possibilities of the coal trade; nor to eatwalnuts out of a paper bag what time the die was cast and all was over. Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary liabilities wereover, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyousimpossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold improbability. 

There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cutaway: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos, for example; that of Mr. Dombey'sinstallation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us as to Mr. Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it wasthat urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we venture to complain?The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right tobelabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us?And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he must do what he will withthat finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in thefact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate forwhom we care little either way; it is nothing to us, whom Carker neverconvinced, that the train should catch him, nor that the man with themoustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should be crushed by thefalling house. Here the end holds good in art, but the art was not goodfrom the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes experience achange of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of each is mostexcellently told. 

George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fictionwas dialogue. But there is surely one thing at least as difficult--athing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be moredifficult than dialogue; and that is the telling _what happened_. Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath allthe violence of our stage--our national undramatic character--isperceptible in the narrative of our literature. The things the usualmodern author says are proportionately more energetically produced thanthose he tells. But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable ofone thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with aperfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him actfound him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in_Oliver Twist_, the murder in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, the coming of thetrain upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees hisguest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swiftspirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in_David Copperfield_ through the poorest part of the book--Steerforth'sstory. There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from thefirst words, "'Don't you think that, ' I said to the coachman, 'a veryremarkable sky?'" to the end of a magnificent chapter. "Flying cloudstossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in theclouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind allday; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Longbefore we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was outover the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, andhad its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . Thepeople came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair. " Daviddreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down aprecipice--into the depths of sleep. " In the morning, "the wind mighthave lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading Ihad dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen gunsout of hundreds. " "It went from me with a shock, like a ball from arifle, " says David in another place, after the visit of a deliriousimpulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishingmore perceptibly than it came. 

The tempest in _David Copperfield_ combines Dickens's dramatic tragedyof narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here arelandscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and awintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary withinthe low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, andcast them out with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but neverfast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness. " Again, "Nowthe woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree. "And yet again, "I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers;and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemedto be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace. " Yet, with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no _body_ ofstyle. 

Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also thesimple eyes of a free intelligence, and the light heart. He gave hissenses their way, and well did they serve him. Thus his eyes--and nomore modern man in anxious search of "impressions" was ever so simple andso masterly: "Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed hisfunereal gloves. " "'I thank you, ' said Mr. Vholes, putting out his longblack sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, 'not any. '" Mr. And Mrs. Tope "are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconcesof the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the button-holes of the Dean & Chapter. " The two young Eurasians, brother andsister, "had a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal acertain air of being the objects of the chase rather than the followers. "This phrase lacks elegance--and Dickens is not often inelegant, as thosewho do not read him may be surprised to learn--but the impression isadmirable; so is that which follows: "An indefinable kind of pause comingand going on their whole expression, both of face and form. " Here ispure, mere impression again: "Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, gave me her cold finger-nails. " Lady Tippins's hand is "rich inknuckles. " And here is vision with great dignity: "All beyond his figurewas a vast dark curtain, in solemn movement towards one quarter of theheavens. "

With that singleness of sight--and his whole body was full of the lightof it--he had also the single hearing; the scene is in the Court ofChancery on a London November day: "Leaving this address ringing in therafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows himno more. " "Mr. Vholes emerged into the silence he could scarcely be saidto have broken, so stifled was his tone. " "Within the grill-gate of thechancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and fallingin a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . . Until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea ofmusic. Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feebleeffort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed theroof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the greattower; and then the sea was dry and all was still. " And this is how alistener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: "The word'confidence, ' shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being piecedtogether, is uttered. "

Wit, humour, derision--to each of these words we assign by custom a partin the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not readDickens--perhaps even those who read him a little--may acclaim him as ahumourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whateverhis humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who hadheld a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawnsalary in his hand. " But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist isforemost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of witjust quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stoodup), as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost. " Orrather than this:-

 He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might be expected--if his development received no untimely check--to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months. 

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gentlypresses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. "'For meat, ' hesaid with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove. '"

A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to bevulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people inshops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of thenovelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now givenplace to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr. Brown, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, thought that Dickenscommitted vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is rightenough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we mustown that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases asit were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words thatDickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of themprecisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. Butfor these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knowswhat is not. A little representative collection of the bad or foolishEnglish of his day might be made by gathering up what Dickens forbore andwhat he derided; for instance, Mr. Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifyingemotions of no common description, " and Littimer's report that "the youngwoman was partial to the sea. " This was the polite language of thattime, as we conclude when we find it to be the language that CharlotteBronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it. Dickens, too, had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is aninflation--rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikeshimself--but he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They are chargedupon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits byto hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' prison "fromHis Most Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects. " Mr. Micawberlistened, we read, "with a little of an author's vanity, contemplating(not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall. " It should beremembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything thathampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded aswhen he gave to his cordial readers matter for facile sentiment and forhumour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved and tolaugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to pleasethem, and it is evident that he pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and LittleNell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerfulghost. 

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding ofsomething strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity, an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion--whatever theinterest may be--in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eyeat the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularlyhappy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen orstrangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even hisheroes--those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at onceconventional and improbable--with whimsically ugly names; while hisinvented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatorysilent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger. Asuggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors, something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the loveof lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of hisdiscoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has itspart in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especiallythose that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example, of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by theCanterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and ofMaster Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at MasterMicawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if hisvoice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "ascarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the LifeGuards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow ofsomebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anythingelse I can think of. " But there is no reader who has not a thousand suchexhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gentlygrotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp andMiss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and aspontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind. 

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable andsentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimentalexcitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence ofmind. Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions arewild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no verylong separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls intohis boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men andwomen everywhere in his books--distractions of laughter as well. Allthis seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is thesimplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was aspresent to him as an actor's audience is to the actor, and I cannot thinkthat this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is notsolitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we maywish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, hehad appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within hisinner mind. 

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely goon to accuse Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that his grammar isnot only good but strong; it is far better in construction thanThackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack. Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens"might not always be parsed, " but that we loved him for his, etc. , etc. Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apartfrom the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his littleeducation, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that recordshis reluctance to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to meperfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk. " In hisexquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, wefind his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in thesecond quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education. "Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succouredhis convict with his brother-in-law's provisions) "I pondered whether theChurch would be powerful enough to shield me . . If I divulged to thatestablishment. " And this is the phrase that may remind us of theeighteenth-century writers of prose, and among those writers of none soreadily as of Bolingbroke: it occurs in that passage of Esther's life inwhich, having lost her beauty, she resolves to forego a love unavowed. "There was nothing to be undone; no chain for him to drag or for me tobreak. "

If Dickens had had the education which he had not, his English could nothave been better; but if he had had the _usage du monde_ which as ayoung man he had not, there would have been a difference. He would not, for instance, have given us the preposterous scenes in _Nicholas__Nickleby_ in which parts are played by Lord Frederick Verisopht, SirMulberry Hawke, and their friends; the scene of the hero's luncheon at arestaurant and the dreadful description of the mirrors and othersplendours would not have been written. It is a very little thing toforgive to him whom we have to thank for--well, not perhaps for the"housefull of friends" for the gift of whom a stranger, often quoted, once blessed him in the street; we may not wish for Mr. Feeder, or MajorBagstock, or Mrs. Chick, or Mrs. Pipchin, or Mr. Augustus Moddle, or Mr. F. 's aunt, or Mr. Wopsle, or Mr. Pumblechook, as an inmate of our homes. Lack of knowledge of the polite world is, I say, a very little thing toforgive to him whom we thank most chiefly for showing us theseinteresting people just named as inmates of the comedy homes that are notours. We thank him because they are comedy homes, and could not be oursor any man's; that is, we thank him for his admirable art. 

SWINBURNE'S LYRICAL POETRY

The makers of epigrams, of phrases, of pages--of all more or less briefjudgements--assuredly waste their time when they sum up any one of allmankind; and how do they squander it when their matter is a poet! Theymay hardly describe him; nor shall any student's care, or psychologist'sformula, or man-of-letters' summary, or wit's sentence define him. Definitions, because they must not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweeptoo wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the meredescriber's range and capture he may escape by as many doors as there areoutlets from a forest. But much ready-made platitude brings about theworld's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind itsepigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assignedmelancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, itwas said, are unhappy, and this was one exceptionally real. How unhappymust he, then, certainly have been! And the blessed Blake himself wasincidentally cited as one of the company of depression and despair! Itis, perhaps, a liking for symmetry that prompts these futile syllogisms;perhaps, also, it is the fear of human mystery. The biographer used tosee "the finger of God" pat in the history of a man; he insists now thathe shall at any rate see the finger of a law, or rather of a rule, acustom, a generality. Law I will not call it; there is no intelligiblelaw that, for example, a true poet should be an unhappy man; but theobserver thinks he has noticed a custom or habit to that effect, andBlake, who lived and died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, ratherthan that an example of the custom should be lost. 

But it is not only such a platitude of observation, such a cheapgenerality, that is silenced in the presence of the poet whose name is atthe head of these pages. For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom ourphrases, and the judgements they record, should be denied, defeated, andconfused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of a poet a great sincerity, agreat imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are themaster qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here--if we would notwilfully be blind or blindfold--a poet, yes, a true poet, with aperfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, apoet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirmsoul, a poet with small intellect--and thrice a poet. 

And, assuredly, if the creative arts are duly humbled in the universalcontemplation of Nature, if they are accused, if they are weighed, ifthey are found wanting; if they are excused by nothing but our intimatehuman sympathy with dear and interesting imperfection; if poetry standsoutdone by the passion and experience of an inarticulate soul, andpainting by the splendour of the day, and building by the forest and thecloud, there is another art also that has to be humiliated, and this isthe art and science of criticism, confounded by its contemplation of sucha poet. Poor little art of examination and formula! The miracle of dayand night and immortality are needed to rebuke the nobler arts; but ourart, the critic's, mine to-day, is brought to book, and its heart isbroken, and its sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Notin the heavens nor in the sub-celestial landscape does this minor artfind its refutation, but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; and inpart the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels usto a reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the criticalspirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it hasto ask what literary sincerity--what value for art and letters--lived inSwinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet andpainter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster anddauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiographyoffended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself calledupon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses heart aswell as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air of greaterarts, and, with them, take exterior Nature's nobler reprobation. 

I have to cite this instance of a change of mind, or of terms and titles, in Swinburne's estimate of art and letters, because it is all-importantto my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and, therefore, no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moralfault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a most significantliterary insensibility--insensibility, whether to the quality of apoetaster when he wrote "poet, " or to that of a poet when he wrote"poetaster, " is of no matter. 

Rather than justify the things I have ventured to affirm as toSwinburne's little intellect, and paltry degree of sincerity, andrachitic passion, and tumid fancy--judgement-confounding things topredicate of a poet--I turn to the happier task of praise. A vividwriter of English was he, and would have been one of the recurringrenewers of our often-renewed and incomparable language, had his wordsnot become habitual to himself, so that they quickly lost the light, thebreeze, the breath; one whose fondness for beauty deserved the seriousname of love; one whom beauty at times favoured and filled so visibly, bysuch obvious visits and possessions, favours so manifest, that inevitablywe forget we are speaking fictions and allegories, and imagine her avisiting power exterior to her poet; a man, moreover, of a less, notmore, than manly receptiveness and appreciation, so that he was entirelyand easily possessed by admirations. Less than manly we must call hisextraordinary recklessness of appreciation; it is, as it were, ideallyfeminine; it is possible, however, that no woman has yet been capable ofso entire an emotional impulse and impetus; more than manly it might havebeen but for the lack of a responsible intellect in that impulse; had itpossessed such an intellectual sanction, Swinburne's admiration of VictorHugo, Mazzini, Dickens, Baudelaire, and Theophile Gautier might haveadded one to the great generosities of the world. 

We are inclined to complain of such an objection to Swinburne's poetry aswas prevalent at his earlier appearance and may be found in criticisms ofthe time, before the later fashion of praise set in--the obviousobjection that it was as indigent in thought as affluent in words; for, though a truth, it is an inadequate truth. It might be affirmed of manya verse-writer of not unusual talent and insignificance, whose affluenceof words was inselective and merely abundant, and whose poverty ofthought was something less than a national disaster. Swinburne's failureof intellect was, in the fullest and most serious sense, a nationaldisaster, and his instinct for words was a national surprise. It is intheir beauty that Swinburne's art finds its absolution from theobligations of meaning, according to the vulgar judgement; and we canhardly wonder. 

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because theworld has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear"musical, " that it has not supplied us with another and more specialisedand appropriate word. Swinburne is a complete master of the rhythm andrhyme, the time and accent, the pause, the balance, the flow of vowel andclash of consonant, that make the "music" for which verse is popular andprized. We need not complain that it is for the tune rather than for themelody--if we must use those alien terms--that he is chiefly admired, andeven for the jingle rather than for the tune: he gave his readers allthree, and all three in perfection. Nineteen out of twenty who takepleasure in this art of his will quote you first

 When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces The Mother of months, in meadow and plain, and the rest of the buoyant familiar lines. I confess there is somethingtoo obvious, insistent, emphatic, too dapper, to give me more than aslight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike ofEnglish anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not reallyapplicable to our English metres, but the reader will underhand that Imean the metre of the lines just quoted. ) I do not find these anapaestsin the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth-century poets, or most rarely. They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the heroiccouplet, are the distinctive metre of that age. They swagger--or, worse, they strut--in its lighter verse, from its first year to its last. Swinburne's anapaests are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but forall their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they _perform_. I love tosee English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chieflywith the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two areenough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of ourpoetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metresthat Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and mostlovely. _There_ is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty. Foreven beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us oroffer herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of thoseflying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of herself. "He layshimself out, " wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "todelight and seduce. The great poets entice by a glorious accident . . . But allurement, in Mr. Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and omega. " Thisis true of all that he has written, but it is true, in a more fatalsense, of these famous tunes of his "music. " Nay, delicate as they are, we are convinced that it is the less delicate ear that most surely takesmuch pleasure in them, the dull ear that chiefly they delight. 

Compare with such luxurious canterings the graver movement of this"Vision of Spring in Winter":

 Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star, Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune, Nor strong sweet shape of the full-breasted noon; But where the silver-sandalled shadows are, Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar, Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon. 

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank versewhich Swinburne released into new energies, new liberties, and newmovements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those whoknow how to place and displace the stress and accent of the Englishheroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanicalbonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of hisgenius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feelsthe strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if thepractice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigidand tame again, Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes, when he ought, with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the lovely line on the forestglades

 That fear the faun's and know the dryad's foot, in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five steppingfrom the unaccented place to the accented without a tremor. (I mustagain protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to beadapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers onEnglish metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think"stress" the better word. ) But having written this perfectEnglish-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of thewoods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines--heroic lineswith a difference--as report the short-breathed messenger's reply toAlthea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died:

 A maiden's and a prophet's and thy son's. 

It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should havemade a trick and a manner of that most energetic device of his by whichhe leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and onto the first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, asthough a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It is in the same boarhunt:

 And fiery with invasive eyes, And bristling with intolerable hair, Plunged;--

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's finenarrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has acounterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers. It iseven too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to out-run theprovince of words, somewhat as that did the province of notes. But, though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre maybe to strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand isthe straining accomplished! The spear, the arrow, the attack, thecharge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, thewalk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like toprogramme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had everjustified this slight perversion of aim, this excess--almostcorruption--of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well. 

Now, if Swinburne's exceptional faculty of diction led him to immoderateexpressiveness, to immodest sweetness, to a jugglery, andprestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations andtransmutations of sound--if, I say, his extraordinary gift of dictionbrought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a part does it notplay in the matter of his poetry! So overweening a place does it take inthis man's art that I believe the words to hold and use his meaning, rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the word. I believethat Swinburne's thoughts have their source, their home, their origin, their authority and mission in those two places--his own vocabulary andthe passion of other men. This is a grave charge. 

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to hisown emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler namefor his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions;political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these hefed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, heenriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectualsupplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. Wecease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think aquestion as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity hehas is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed, he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, allthe surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his subservient andimpetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. Hereceived too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance ofthe Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Biblelittle more than a tone;--this poet of eager, open capacity, this poetwho is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacantcapacity, for those three august seventies has not room enough. 

Charged, then, with other men's purposes--this man's Italian patriotism;this man's love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as afiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to loveit); this man's despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man'scry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago--a cry grown vain;this man's contempt for the Boers--nay, was it so much as a man, with aman's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather thatless guilty judge, the crowd?--this man's--nay, this boy's--eroticsickness, or his cruelty--charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry isprimed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhattoo familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies theFranciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having noproperty in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but ina paradox of pride, boast of the past of others. And yet one mightrather choose to make use of one's fellow-men's old shoes than to puttheir old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shedpassions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope wasaccused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminatemalignity; and here is another promiscuity--that of memories, and of alicence partaken. 

But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies, by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this, indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of thatheavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrityhere, his quick fellowship, his agile adoption, and his filialtenderness--nay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist'sadmiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy--andSwinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner ofenthusiasm--prompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with thesupreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, theseventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. Happyis he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderfulvoice to sing their raptures. Here is no humiliation in ready-madelendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with them, and wecan imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together thesons she embraces, and making her poets--the primary and the secondary, the greater and the lesser--all equals in her arms. Let us see him inthat company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look uponhim in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, beingservile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, withVaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire andGautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those ofthe alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imaginethem thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages, could yet join them in such a song as this:

 And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew With all her spirit and life the sunrise through, And through her lips the keen triumphant air Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were, And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth Of wind and light that moved upon the earth, Making the spring, and all the fruitful might And strong regeneration of delight That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man. 

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea withsuch fine verse, was not ashamed, in low company, to sing the famousabsurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses andraptures of vice, " with many and many a passage of like character. Ithink it more generous, seeing I have differed so much from theNineteenth Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from thevacant, the paltry, the silly--no word is so fit as that last littleword--among his pages. Therefore, I have justified my praise, but not myblame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Songof Italy, " "Les Noyades, " "Hermaphroditus, " "Satia te Sanguine, " "Kissingher Hair, " "An Interlude, " "In a Garden, " or such a stanza as the onebeginning

 O thought illimitable and infinite heart Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute That all keep heartless thine invisible part And inextirpable thy viewless root Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot. 

It is for the reader who has preserved rectitude of intellect, sincerityof heart, dignity of nerves, unhurried thoughts, an unexcited heart, andan ardour for poetry, to judge between such poems and an authenticpassion, between such poems and truth, I will add between such poems andbeauty. 

Imagery is a great part of poetry; but out, alas! vocabulary has here toothe upper hand. For in what is still sometimes called the magnificentchorus in "Atalanta" the words have swallowed not the thought only butthe imagery. The poet's grievance is that the pleasant streams flow intothe sea. What would he have? The streams turned loose all over theunfortunate country? There is, it is true, the river Mole in Surrey. ButI am not sure that some foolish imagery against the peace of theburrowing river might not be due from a poet of facility. I am notcensuring any insincerity of thought; I am complaining of the insincerityof a paltry, shaky, and unvisionary image. 

Having had recourse to the passion of stronger minds for his provision ofemotions, Swinburne had direct recourse to his own vocabulary as a kindof "safe" wherein he stored what he needed for a song. Claudius stolethe precious diadem of the kingdom from a shelf and put it in his pocket;Swinburne took from the shelf of literature--took with what art, whattouch, what cunning, what complete skill!--the treasure of the language, and put it in his pocket. 

He is urgent with his booty of words, for he has no other treasure. Intohis pocket he thrusts a hand groping for hatred, and draws forth "blood"or "Hell"--generally "Hell, " for I have counted many "Hells" in a quiteshort poem. In search of wrath he takes hold of "fire"; anxious forwildness he takes "foam, " for sweetness he brings out "flower, " muchlinked, so that "flower-soft" has almost become his, and notShakespeare's. For in that compound he labours to exaggerateShakespeare, and by his insistence and iteration goes about to spoil forus the "flower-soft hands" of Cleopatra's rudder-maiden; but he shall notspoil Shakespeare's phrase for us. And behold, in all this fundamentalfumbling Swinburne's critics saw only a "mannerism, " if they saw eventhus much offence. 

One of the chief pocket-words was "Liberty. " O Liberty! what verse iscommitted in thy name! Or, to cite Madame Roland more accurately, OLiberty, how have they "run" thee!

Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, isthoroughly free except a fish? _Et encore_--even the "silent andfootless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. Butin the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word isthis, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant here of anexcitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. Thispoet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth thepoet of penury and defect. 

And here is a pocket-word which might have astonished us had we not knownhow little anyway it signified. It occurs in something customary aboutItaly:

 Hearest thou, Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears, The world has heard thy children--and God hears. 

Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, asthe last thought of this verse?

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? Atemporary laying-waste, undoubtedly. That is, the contemporary use ofhis vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent, squandered, _gaspilles_. The contemporary use--I will not say the futureuse, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he has not been able toviolate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenth-century flower, the seventeenth-century fruit, or by his violence toshake from either a drop of their dews. 

At the outset I warned the judges and the pronouncers of sentences howthis poet, with other poets of quite different character, would escapetheir summaries, and he has indeed refuted that maxim which I had learnedat illustrious knees, "You may not dissociate the matter and manner ofany of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire, whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering isthe vainest task of criticism. " But I cannot read Swinburne and not becompelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter fromthe successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has saidagain, "It imposes a law on the sense. " Therefore, he too perceived thatfatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or isSwinburne's a "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a thousand degreesof talent from any generality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but, possibly, also excepted by an essential inferiority from this great maximfitting only the greatest?

CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE

The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughouther career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner ofEnglish that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyondrecovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within hera sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and seriouselder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. Shepractised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. Shewrote "communicating instruction" for teaching; "an extensive andeligible connexion"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on theContinent"; "It operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of achild (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the toys hepossesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting toaffection. " I have been already reproached for a word on Gibbon writtenby way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some otherauthor. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corruptfollowing of that apostle and not of his own style. Gibbon's grammar isfrequently weak, but the corrupt followers have something worse than poorgrammar. Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and "the former. " Ourliterature was for at least half a century strewn with the wreckage ofGibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple atMentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of therebellious city, " writes the great historian. When Mr. Micawberconfesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to alofty and a distant Gibbon. So does Mr. Pecksniff when he says of thecopper-founder's daughter that she "has shed a vision on my pathrefulgent in its nature. " And when an author, in a work on "The DivineComedy, " recently told us that Paolo and Francesca were to receive fromDante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow, " that also is ashattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less thanGibbon inflated the English our fathers inherited; because Johnson didnot habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitualimagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, andleaves it either rigid or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by thisdrift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle ofher vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared outof such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such alanguage. 

A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turnsback to review the harvest of her English. It must have been withrapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation, how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last shehas an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire andair. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the littlecolourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building withher mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith hewould joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was aclergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to herparsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My littleplans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr. --is coming onMonday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me fora full week. "

In alternate pages _Villette_ is a book of spirit and fire, and a novelof illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble. In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author'sfavour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, butrather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. To read of that sorrow againis to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly mostwomen, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life ofCharlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into thehands of a child, to whom _Jane Eyre_ is allowed only in passages. Weare young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"--thetwo sisters and the brother--and in what a bed of living insufferablememories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death--alonein the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. Therich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, butCharlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held hermelancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terribleand reluctant death. 

But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind. Locked withintricate wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of thislonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable. It is well for the perpetualfellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not taketherefrom a perdurable scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towardschildhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born. 

Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte wassubject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she sufferedwhat in Italian is called _soggezione_ in their presence. When she hadmet six minor contemporary writers--by-products of literature--at dinner, she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend thatthese contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literaryLondon, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. Andwhat nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting?Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time andoblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? Theothers, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in stillfurther hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And beforeHarriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeita woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear hercontemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely inand out of two or three negatives, but wrote--about this very CharlotteBronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could notanswer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurelyreading, I might not dislike. " Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with noconsciousness of anything amiss. 

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it servedone only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, butCharlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of herincomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by theaddition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us byMr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What seeskeenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but whatthrobs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what isthe unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--that MissAusten ignores. "

When the author of _Jane Eyre_ faltered before six authors, more orless, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class Englishwho was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?--andtherefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? Therecan be little doubt. The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of aworld long corrupted by "one good custom"--the good custom of Gibbon'sLatinity grown fatally popular--could at any time hold up her headamongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitudein that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochesterrecall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she whowrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a sufferingchild in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowlylifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would havethought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods. " This new geniuswas solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voiceof judges. In her worse style there was no "quick. " Latin-English, whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarlyLatin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-Englishwherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, adefence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In thestrength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows--holdparley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at lastlodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty. 

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world wasdoubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "Thechild contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear anyauthors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows herworse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrasesfall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to theheart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as shesuffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached. Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look backon, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life hadshe lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not lingernow. She made haste to leave us. " "I remembered where the three werelaid--in what narrow, dark dwellings. " "Do you know this place? No, younever saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, thisfoliage--the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these arenot unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place. " "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels atonce that the insufferable moment draws nigh. " In the same passage comesanother single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength. "And, fine as "wastes, " is the "wronged" of another sentence--"somewronged and fettered wild beast or bird. "

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best fromsuch a mingled page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, softer andbetter than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste";and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange";and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, andshe came with comfort; 'Sleep, ' she said, 'sleep sweetly--I gild thydreams. '" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet. "

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss thefriction--friction of water to the oar, friction of air to thepinion--friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act oflanguage. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of thedaughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid andrelaxed. 

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages oflandscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later inthe day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zonesighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast. " "Not till thedestroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he foldthe wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm. ""The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. Thewild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears androlls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, buttossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlighttempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there areno flocks on the mountains. " See, too, this ocean: "The sway of thewhole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid andliquid thunder down from the frozen zone. " And this promise of thevisionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late ofan August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon:something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which thatmoon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with anarticulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging fromthe dim wave. "

Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to haveundergone the inevitable dream of mourners--the human dream of theLabyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search ofthe waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the"Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, inexile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by somevague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray. 

In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "Anameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very toneof a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal orcalculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted. " Finally, isthere any need to cite the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that contains theavowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten. Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene andnot of the recording words that are the author's means. And others againwould have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in _Jane__Eyre_, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase isan experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past. "Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved. ""Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft ofwind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughsof the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . Thenightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening Iagain wept. "

* * * * *

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon theroad of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emilyseldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practisedimagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seemsto leave imagery behind in the way of approaches--the apparelled andarrayed approaches and ritual of literature--and so to go further and tobe admitted among simple realities and antitypes. 

Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery. In the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that tells of the return to ThornfieldHall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention toan image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the otherhand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke ofbut now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritualrealities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling whathappened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear thatnightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us. " Buther characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and templesoracular, and to the vision of symbols. 

You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not doso in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a fullvision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear inventionof similitudes. 

 Of many thousand kisses the poor last, and

 Now with his love, now in the colde grave

are lines on the yonder side of imagery. So is this line also:

 Sad with the promise of a different sun, and

 Piteous passion keen at having found, After exceeding ill, a little good. 

Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imageryis for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which mustneeds pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:

 Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled, Even as a nest with birds, After the old ones by the hawk are killed. 

I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem thatwithout them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and becauseit seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realitiesholds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and aminor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery(which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery(which is the moment of his most beautiful lines). 

The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, fromthe outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and fromdecoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for thegreater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the lastthreshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, andin its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky. 

Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of thedelays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strengthdoes not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant ofthose rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and hergreater work is no more. On the hither side--the daily side--of imageryshe is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she haswritten some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. Andwith what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let me alone, let me alone, 'said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too. . . I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to lookat those eyes and feel those wasted hands, ' he answered. 'Kiss me again, and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. Ilove my murderer--but _yours_! How can I?' They were silent, theirfaces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears. " "Somuch the worse for me that I am strong, " cries Heathcliff in the samescene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you--OhGod, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech ofone like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas ofemotion that she had kept from her girlhood--the unavowed custom of theordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprisedthe world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived--butthe word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothingof stealth--to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen-portrait, so her "I" is not heard here. She lends her voice in disguiseto her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a youngman, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takesup the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It isthen that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediatepresence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhattrivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but EmilyBronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)--to IsabellaLinton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which hasthe rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amidterrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes raineddown tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for amoment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed anddrowned. " But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil orcircumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul'sbliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself. " "I have to remindmyself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat. " "Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, Isaid to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again. ' If she be cold, I'llthink it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, itis sleep. " What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for theclash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I wassleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and mycheek frozen against hers. "

Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruitsof any other author's labour that she gathered these eminent words. ButI think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's--thedisinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has beensuggested, did Emily Bronte find her incident; she found it (but shemade, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of BulwerLytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emilyshowed no sign at all of admiration when she did him so much honour as toborrow the action of his studio-bravo. 

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profoundsurprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost--theghost of the little girl--when she has been a dead adult woman twentyyears that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on theHeights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for. Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is thetempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has acounterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, thewaters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem sosweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the"heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the birdwhose feathers she--delirious creature--plucks from the pillow of herdeathbed ("This--I should know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wantedto get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it feltrain coming"); the only two white spots of snow left on all the moors, and the brooks brim-full; the old apple-trees, the smell of stocks andwallflowers in the brief summer, the few fir-trees by Catherine's window-bars, the early moon--I know not where are landscapes more exquisite andnatural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than thewindow seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, whenHeathcliff lay within, dead and drenched with rain?

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passagewherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it hereagain. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of ourliterature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prosestands for appeal: "I lingered . . . Under that benign sky; watched themoths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft windbreathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagineunquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. "

Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviouslyunskilled reflection, and of her aspect no record worth having. Wildfugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by theneglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed bytheir contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was sheas might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed byCoriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the worldfrom before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemnedhis Romans: "_I_ banish you. "

CHARMIAN

"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian, " wrote Keats, conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the pageant ofladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was notCleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay, in which she mimicked, the Queen. 

In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of ourappreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waitinggentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did notboast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty, who shall discern her. 

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects, " in the"lurid, " the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us takethe natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightlyport, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "OEastern star!"

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these--exceptthe dog when he bays the moon--look skyward not at all. The events ofthe sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach andwithdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sunso condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (sayfrom the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out theeyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowinglids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the carefulwrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to suddensunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would ratherlook into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds. 

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. Sothat I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for aquality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise, or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral, rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls hisfellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotionshows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouringchimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that thehumourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that thechimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than awhole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulteratedlight of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers, and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulterationanything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in thesecondary thing. 

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It isa strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is amodern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in itsgreater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled, disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities. 

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art. So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of artare better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain, natural twilight before night, or natural twilight--Corot's--before day, than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, whopraise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than amystery; and must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Lightis all mystery when you face the sun, and every particle of theinnumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal shadow. 

Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask foreven natural veils. In California we may, not because the light is tooluminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender inCalifornia, tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greeceis both tender and clear. 

When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympatheticlistener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electriclight as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is theone success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with naturalthings--villages, ancient streets of cities, where it makes the mostbeautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house to opposite house inGenoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does thejudicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine hamlet, find theelectric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree overthe little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop, and solitaryand clear over the church portal. 

Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, youdenounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, callingup a "mumping visnomy, " thinks he echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah, yes--the electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, sodisenchanting. " It is, on the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural aslightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be"harnessed, " as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives uselectric light. For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovelylamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitation--thepowerful fall of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" criedthe tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it?" Herecognised the simplicity of that power. It is a second-ratepassion--that for the waterfall, and often exacting in regard to visitorsfrom town. "I trudged unwillingly, " says Dr. Johnson, "and was not sorryto find it dry. " It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer ofscenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the nameto-day) the "Bridal Veil. " His Indian predecessor had called it, becauseit was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind. " Infact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the wholefurther sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murkof smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water putto use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's waybetween cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. Thehorizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky ofMilan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; andso does now and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so foundhis exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me aclean moonrise, and heavenly heavens. 

There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the ladywhom you serve. " She has outlived her in every city in Europe; but onlyfor the time of setting straight her crown--the last servility. Shecould not live but by comparison with the Queen. 

THE CENTURY OF MODERATION

After a long literary revolt--one of the recurrences of imperishableRomance--against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, andit has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of themeasure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeedit is well enough that we should compare--not necessarily check--some ofour habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfectpropriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all!But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certaingenius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage. " It is notto the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look forextreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to thefaultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. Therewere straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth-century men stuck straws in their periwigs. 

That time--surpassing and correcting the century then just past in"taste"--was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, inthe chapter of the passions--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle, " "whereto rage. " And in the later years of the same literary century Johnsonhimself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such aword as "madded"--"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created forthe noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you, Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

 And dubious title shakes the madded land. 

There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does notthus more or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to go to the badpoets; we need go no lower than the good. 

 And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain, says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader). Also

 There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires. 

In the only passage of the _Dunciad_ meant to be poetic and not ironicand spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Matchme such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!

A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but leftanonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, neverfine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had avision of that deceased poet:

 Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes Beheld the poet's awful form arise. 

Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write uponsome graver themes, Envy to black Cocytus shall retire And howl with furies in tormenting fire. 

"Genius, " says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by afurious joy and pride of soul. "

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry, " things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

 In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls, Whose livid waves involve despairing souls; The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew, Some deeply red, and others faintly blue. 

And a war-horse!

 His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain, And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane. 

And a demon!

 Provoking demons all restraint remove. 

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

 The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight. The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind, And leave the heavy, panting hills behind. 

Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_:

 When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood; When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore, And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore. 

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they"contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery thatpoetry could conceive or paint. " And here are lines from a tragedy, forme anonymous:

 Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds, And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot, Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures. 

Again:

 Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll, Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul. 

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common-sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious, common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. Ifind this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poetwould have "skies" or "heavens. " Pope has "sky" more than once, andalways with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs inthat masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an UnfortunateLady":

 Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so, " is the reader's implicit mental aside, ifthe reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespecttowards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have aninimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle ofEloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yethow could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century incloser--in slighter yet more significant--comparison with the eighteenththan thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

 What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

 What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely andnobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

 'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a greatmelody, not of a tune. 

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with alike craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, somagnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious inFrance, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why?Because it was "artificial, " and the eighteenth century must have"nature"--nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope'sgrotto, stuck with spar and little shells. 

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age ofgreat wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think noother century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity. As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have keptuncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks havecome to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merryBarnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.