The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

Contents

The Rhythm of LifeDecivilisedA RemembranceThe SunThe FlowerUnstable EquilibriumThe Unit of the WorldBy the Railway SidePocket VocabulariesPathosThe Point of HonourComposureDr. Oliver Wendell HolmesJames Russell LowellDomus AngustaRejectionThe Lesson of LandscapeMr. Coventry Patmore's OdesInnocence and ExperiencePenultimate Caricature

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

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

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the _Imitation_ should bothhave been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guessat the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch withthe spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, noinfractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept fromthem the knowledge of recurrences. _Eppur si muove_. They knew thatpresence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just uponits flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They knewthat what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towardsdeparture. 'O wind, ' cried Shelley, in autumn, 'O wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt withunlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset andretreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant effortsafter an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to livewithout either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of thesaints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the mostcomplete subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolationvisited them by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, theinterior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world. Theyrejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in theirhearts. Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in thecourse of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly preparedfor the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Fewpoets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse. For fullrecognition is expressed in one only way--silence. 

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

DECIVILISED

The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--withdecivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparinghim no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge ofbarbarism. Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he facesyou, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of hisown youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranchesand canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his natureand to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his ownartless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism veryarticulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale;the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, theuncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancyplayed long this pattering part of youth. The New-Englander hastened toassure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint andfeathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that youhad suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat. Andwhen it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American was ill-content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some delicatesuccesses in continuing something of the literature of England, somethingof the art of France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulatedhim to write romances and to paint panoramic landscape, after brieftraining in academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin--tobegin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning forher, but instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide intosustained refinement and can save from decivilisation. 

But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too, knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a literature, anart, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price. Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity and cheapness, is impossiblewithout a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic--which is futility, not failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatoryreproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organicquality, purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among theantecedents of trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because ofthem. And nothing can be much sadder than such a proof of what maypossibly be the failure of derivation. 

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

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

A REMEMBRANCE

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

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

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

THE SUN

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

To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to lookfor in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unityand life. It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorianpicture--(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongsto that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum of things put together, inconcourse, not in relation; but the true picture is _one_, howevermultitudinous it may be, for it is composed of relations gatheredtogether in the unity of perception, of intention, and of light. It isorganic. Moreover, how truly relation is the condition of life may beunderstood from the extinct state of the English stage, which resemblesnothing so much as a Royal Academy picture. Even though the actors maybe added together with something like vivacity (though that is rare), they have no vitality in common. They are not members one of another. Ifthe Church and Stage Guild be still in existence, it would do much forthe art by teaching that Scriptural maxim. I think, furthermore, thatthe life of our bodies has never been defined so suggestively as by onewho named it a living relation of lifeless atoms. Could the value ofrelation be more curiously set forth? And one might penetrate some waytowards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary stylein which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word. And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of thepyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and theflight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the wayof such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules me to simplicity. 

He reigns as centrally in the blue sky as in the clouds. One October oflate had days absolutely cloudless. I should not have certainly known ithad there been a hill in sight. The gradations of the blue areincalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the central fire. As to theearthly scenery, there are but two 'views' on the plain; for the aspectof the light is the whole landscape. To look with the sun or against thesun--this is the alternative splendour. To look with the sun is to facea golden country, shadowless, serene, noble and strong in light, with acertain lack of relief that suggests--to those who dream of landscape--thecountry of a dream. The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and thegolden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with acolour. Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than itsluminosity. For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is thatwhich is full of shadows--the landscape before you when you turn and facethe sun. Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, everyuncertain aspen-leaf of the few trees, but every particle of the Octoberair shows a shadow and makes a mystery of the light. There is nothingbut shadow and sun; colour is absorbed and the landscape is reduced to ashining simplicity. Thus is the dominant sun sufficient for his day. Hispassage kindles to unconsuming fires and quenches into living ashes. Noincidents save of his causing, no delight save of his giving: from thesunrise, when the larks, not for pairing, but for play, sing the onlyvirginal song of the year--a heart younger than Spring's in the season ofdecline--even to the sunset, when the herons scream together in theshallows. And the sun dominates by his absence, compelling the lowcountry to sadness in the melancholy night. 

THE FLOWER

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

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to thesmallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns isno more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitoryauthor by the phrase. But I had rather learn my decoration of theJapanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel, holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident ofgrowth. And I could wish abstention to exist, and even to be evident, inmy words. In literature as in all else man merits his subjection totrivialities by a kind of economical greed. A condition for using justlyand gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was inthe beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never tobe achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can theprodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature hassomething even more severe than moderation: she has an innumerablesingleness. Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal; they showmultitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgraceof decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or whohas ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes--theprayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate that manshould, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer everytime is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when sheshall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and make itperhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, fornovelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal thelast? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of yourmouth are all numbered. 

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

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

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

THE UNIT OF THE WORLD

The quarrel of Art with Nature goes on apace. The painters have longbeen talking of selecting, then of rejecting, or even, with Mr. Whistler, of supplanting. And then Mr. Oscar Wilde, in the witty and delicateseries of inversions which he headed 'The Decay of Lying, ' declared warwith all the irresponsibility naturally attending an act so serious. Heseems to affirm that Nature is less proportionate to man than isarchitecture; that the house is built and the sofa is made measurable bythe unit measure of the body; but that the landscape is set to some otherscale. 'I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of theproper proportions. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a propersense of human dignity, is absolutely the result of indoor life. 'Nevertheless, before it is too late, let me assert that though nature isnot always clearly and obviously made to man's measure, he is yet theunit by which she is measurable. The proportion may be far to seek attimes, but the proportion is there. Man's farms about the lower Alps, his summer pastures aloft, have their relation to the whole constructionof the range; and the range is great because it is great in regard to thevillage lodged in a steep valley in the foot hills. The relation offlower and fruit to his hands and mouth, to his capacity and senses (I amdealing with size, and nothing else), is a very commonplace of ourconditions in the world. The arm of man is sufficient to dig just asdeep as the harvest is to be sown. And if some of the cheerful littleevidences of the more popular forms of teleology are apt to be baffled, or indefinitely postponed, by the retorts that suggest themselves to themodern child, there remains the subtle and indisputable witness borne byart itself: the body of man composes with the mass and the detail of theworld. The picture is irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figureamongst its natural accessories in the landscape, and would not have themotherwise. 

But there is one conspicuous thing in the world to which man has notserved as a unit of proportion, and that one thing is a popularly reveredtriumph of that very art of architecture in which Mr. Oscar Wilde hasconfidence for keeping things in scale. Human ingenuity in designing St. Peter's on the Vatican, has achieved this one exception to the universalharmony--a harmony enriched by discords, but always on one certain scaleof notes--which the body makes with the details of the earth. It is notin the landscape, where Mr. Oscar Wilde has too rashly looked forcontempt and contumely, but in the art he holds precious as the ministerto man's egotism, that man's Ego is defied. St. Peter's is notnecessarily too large (though on other grounds its size might be liableto correction); it is simply out of relation to the most vital thing onthe earth--the thing which has supplied some secret rod to measure thewaves withal, and the whales, the sea-wall cliffs, the ears of wheat, thecedar-branches, pines and diamonds and apples. Now, Emerson wouldcertainly not have felt the soft shock and stimulus of delight to whichhe confesses himself to be liable at the first touch of certain phrases, had not the words in every case enclosed a promise of further truth andof a second pleasure. One of these swift and fruitful experiencesvisited him with the saying--grown popular through him--that an architectshould have a knowledge of anatomy. There is assuredly a germ and apromise in the phrase. It delights us, first, because it seems torecognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive, character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades usthat Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size--the unit that issometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measure of what isgreat and small among things animate and inanimate. And in spite ofthemselves the architects of St. Peter's were constrained to takesomething from man; they refused his height for their scale, but theytried to use his shape for their ornament. And so in the blankest dearthof fancy that ever befel architect or builder they imagined human beingsbigger than the human beings of experience; and by means of these, carvedin stone and inlaid in mosaic, they set up a relation of their own. Thebasilica was related to the colossal figure (as a church more wiselymeasured would have been to living man), and so ceased to be large; andnothing more important was finally achieved than transposal of the wholework into another scale of proportions--a scale in which the body of manwas not the unit. The pile of stones that make St. Peter's is a verylittle thing in comparison with Soracte; but man, and man's wife, and theunequal statures of his children, are in touch with the structure of themountain rather than with that of the church which has been conceivedwithout reference to the vital and fundamental rule of his inches. 

Is there no egotism, ministering to his dignity, that man, having the lawof the organism of the world written in his members, can take with him, out of the room that has been built to accord with him, into thelandscape that stands only a little further away? He has deliberatelymade the smoking chair and the table; there is nothing to surprise him intheir ministrations. But what profounder homage is rendered by themultitudinous Nature going about the interests and the business of whichhe knows so little, and yet throughout confessing him! His eyes haveseen her and his ears have heard, but it would never have entered intohis heart to conceive her. His is not the fancy that could have achievedthese woods, this little flush of summer from the innumerable floweringof grasses, the cyclic recreation of seasons. And yet he knows that heis imposed upon all he sees. His stature gives laws. His labour only isneedful--not a greater strength. And the sun and the showers are madesufficient for him. His furniture must surely be adjudged to pay him buta coarse flattery in comparison with the subjection, yet the aloofness, of all this wild world. This is no flattery. The grass is lumpy, as Mr. Oscar Wilde remarks with truth: Nature is not man's lacquey, and has nopreoccupation about his more commonplace comforts. These he giveshimself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the thingscarefully provided by self-love? But when that _farouche_ Nature, whohas never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity ofhinting his wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of hisform and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes letshim surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him suspectfurther harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand--then manbecomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness, and afavour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewith histailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool. 

BY THE RAILWAY SIDE

My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of theharvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were asombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his firesbrooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods. Ihad come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steepcountry with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey witholive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; thecountry through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, athin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and muchFrench. I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorousin its vowels set in emphatic _l's_ and _m's_ and the vigorous softspring of the double consonants. But as the train arrived its noiseswere drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear againfor months--good Italian. The voice was so loud that one looked for theaudience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done toevery syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity? Thetones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most oftenpassion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough tomake good judges think it a mere counterfeit. Hamlet, being a littlemad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form. Thuseven before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they werespoken by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what isconvincing in elocution. 

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

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

POCKET VOCABULARIES

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

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

PATHOS

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

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

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

THE POINT OF HONOUR

Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez. InSpain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the firstImpressionist. As an Impressionist he claimed, implicity if notexplicity, a whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness; hemade an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he relied on his owncandour and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept thechastity of art when other masters were content with its honesty, andwhen others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded the point of honour. Contemporary masters more or less proved their position, and convincedthe world by something of demonstration; the first Impressionist simplyasked that his word should be accepted. To those who would not take hisword he offers no bond. To those who will, he grants the distinction ofa share in his responsibility. Somewhat unrefined, in comparison to hislofty and simple claim to be believed on a suggestion, is the commonerpainter's production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions ofordinary experience, his self-defence against the suspicion of makingirresponsible mysteries in art. 'You can see for yourself, ' the lesserman seems to say to the world, 'thus things are, and I render them insuch manner that your intelligence may be satisfied. ' This is an appealto average experience--at the best the cumulative experience; and withthe average, or with the sum, art cannot deal without derogation. TheSpaniard seems to say: 'Thus things are in my pictorial sight. Trust me, I apprehend them so. ' We are not excluded from his counsels, but we areasked to attribute a certain authority to him, master of the craft as heis, master of that art of seeing pictorially which is the beginning andnot far from the end--not far short of the whole--of the art of painting. So little indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a greatImpressionist's impression that Velasquez requires us to be in somedegree his colleagues. Thus may each of us to whom he appeals takepraise from the praised: He leaves my educated eyes to do a little of thework. He respects my responsibility no less--though he respects it lessexplicitly--than I do his. What he allows me would not be granted by ameaner master. If he does not hold himself bound to prove his own truth, he returns thanks for my trust. It is as though he used his countrymen'scourteous hyperbole and called his house my own. In a sense of the mostnoble hostship he does me the honours of his picture. 

Because Impressionism is so free, therefore is it doubly bound. Becausethere is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible. Toundertake this art for the sake of its privileges without confessing itsobligations--or at least without confessing them up to the point ofhonour--is to take a vulgar freedom: to see immunities precisely wherethere are duties, and an advantage where there is a bond. A very mob ofmen have taken Impressionism upon themselves in this our later day. Itis against all probabilities that more than a few among these have withinthem the point of honour. In their galleries we are beset with a dimdistrust. And to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted. Howmany of these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting thetruth of their own impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty iseasily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for theintelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide. But when the_dubium_ concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure thattheir sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicateequipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, areenough? Now Impressionists of late have told us things as to theirimpressions--as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this manand upon the mood of that--which should not be asserted except on theartistic point of honour. The majority can tell ordinary truth, but theyshould not trust themselves for truth extraordinary. They can face thegeneral judgment, but they should hesitate to produce work that appealsto the last judgment, which is the judgment within. There is too muchreason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to derive fromthe greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no pointof view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worthwaylaying. And to be, _de parti pris_, an Impressionist withoutthese! O Velasquez! Nor is literature quite free from a like reproachin her own things. An author, here and there, will make as though he hada word worth hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word that seeks towithdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble isall too probably a platitude. But obviously, literature is not--as isthe craft and mystery of painting--so at the mercy of a half-imposture, so guarded by unprovable honour. For the art of painting is reservedthat shadowy risk, that undefined salvation. May the gods guard us fromthe further popularising of Impressionism; for the point of honour is thesimple secret of the few. 

COMPOSURE

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

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

A place of peace, not of indifference. It is impossible not to chargesome of the moralists of the last century with an indifference into whichthey educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes educatedthem. Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable ofcoming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion. There is noknowing to what distance the removal of the 'appropriate sentiment' fromthe central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal inlanguage, which came when it was needed. Addison had assuredly removedeternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the'pleasing hope, ' the 'fond desire;' and the touch of war was distant fromhim who conceived his 'repulsed battalions' and his 'doubtful battle. 'What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored oncemore, was doubtless journeyman's work at times. Men were too eager to gointo the workshop of language. There were unreasonable raptures over themere making of common words. 'A hand-shoe! a finger-hat! a foreword!Beautiful!' they cried; and for the love of German the youngest daughterof Chrysale herself might have consented to be kissed by a grammarian. Itseemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visibleis a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; thatits images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certainspiritualising and subtilising effect of alien derivations is a privilegeand an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half of the languagewithin which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at playis to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, without the death. 

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various inorigin, divided in race, within a master's phrase. The most beautifuland the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare. 'Superfluous kings, ' 'A lass unparalleled, ' 'Multitudinous seas:' weneeded not to wait for the eighteenth century or for the nineteenth tolearn the splendour of such encounters, of such differences, of suchnuptial unlikeness and union. But it is well that we should learn themafresh. And it is well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmicreaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the Latin. Such areaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day. We want to quellthe exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want the poise and thepause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movementexpresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of verse might renderus timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a touch amodern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son. But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of submissionon the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against, trespassedupon, shaken off, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the dignityneither of the rebel nor of the rule. To Letters do we look now for theguidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion taking usby the heart makes necessary. Shall not the Thing more and more, as wecompose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, theleisure, the reconciliation of the Word?

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase bepermitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired themas coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothingelse with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, inliterature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time, and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time before he was, or hisHumour. Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but thefunny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to himour act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by areluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected thatsuch a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuousincident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wideallusions. It is often a question which of several significanttrivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader whodoes not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by theway, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last fewyears have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last fewyears? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go tohimself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at itsunprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and thisAmerican for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corruptfollowing. We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assurethem that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy. 

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain whythe little humour in _Elsie Venner_ and the _Breakfast Table_ seriesis not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby herelates this author to his following and to the world. The young manJohn, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment, ' the Landlady andher daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comicpersonages, and fifty per cent. Of the things they say--no more--are goodenough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. Butthat half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of thattemperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humourof it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth. LikeMr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro, butAmerican; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until then shehad felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at. 'Nature isin earnest when she makes a woman, ' says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritualwoman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel. And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities, with long views, with energetic provincialism. 

If we remember best _The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay_, we do so inspite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr. Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuousas his humour. It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is moreperfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, whichis apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and adult. No grown manmakes quite so definite mental images as does a child; when the mind agesit thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer pictures. The young mind of Dr. Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy. Forexample: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will getan image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sableplumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the othersails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight ofhim, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crowdoes;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length, withexplanations. Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees into thingswithout opening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the doorand driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls upon Truth, majesticVirgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic _poses_. ' Andthis, of the Landlady: 'She told me her story once; it was as if a grainthat had been ground and bolted had tried to individualise itself by aspecial narrative. ' 'The riotous tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, isthe mob-law of the features. ' 'Think of the Old World--that part of itwhich is the seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot helpmarching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. ' 'Youngfolk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any givenlittle John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation. ' And thatexquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and theinward tranquillity of the woods. Such things are the best this goodauthor gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughtsshapely with their own truth. 

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

As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility whichDr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in _Elsie Venner_, it is strangethat a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in itsown insolubility but--in caricature. As though the secrets of theinherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesquephysiology! It is in spite of our protest against the invention ofElsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr. OliverWendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent-maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night, ' and by the gentle phrasethat tells us 'Elsie wept. ' But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed inproposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince everycivilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little changewrought thereby in the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmesincidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct ofintolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, theself-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance anddestructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in themanner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientificthough it may be. And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver WendellHolmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose. Hisbooks are justified by something quite apart from his purpose. 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names notthe most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three namesof their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one manof letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy, temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines whobrought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period ofambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soiland much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literaturethat matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--noneof these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a manof letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the'transcendentalists, ' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, andthough indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned throughthe smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of thewar, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child ofnational leisure, of moderation and education, an American of theseventies and onwards. He represented the little-recognised fact that inripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--anexcellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what boundingambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing inwords. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American cannever be American enough. He ranked with the students and the criticsamong all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seemso; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makeshis allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumedcarelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect theirnumber and their erudition will produce upon the reader. The Americansensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his styleconfesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of nationalvanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you thinkof my country?'

Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in thethought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardlyknow that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in itsantenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--Irecognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and adelicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this criticalcentury. Those small volumes, _Among My Books_ and _My StudyWindows_, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism is the rarestthing in them. I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr. Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one.. . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, as it appears to me, hasnever shown any capacity for art, ' and so forth. One wonders how Lowellread the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and thePreface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great Englishwriter's supreme art--art that declares itself and would not be hidden. But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, awriter of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and theyprove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite insentencing. His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' isfamous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A GoodWord for Winter. ' His talk about the weather is so full of wit that onewonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich. Thebirds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, buthis parishioners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle doeshe become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile. Andall the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace hisreading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garneredfor use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff ofcommonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. Youwonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhymein the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the briefverse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dantehas transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgilsomewhat noble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, hehas the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every wordnew for the day's work. He gave to the language, and did not take fromit; it gained by him, and lost not. There are writers of English now atwork who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them onthat charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they areglorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them. 

Nevertheless Lowell was no poet. To accept his verse as a poet's wouldbe to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in alover of poetry. Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of hispoems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for havingtrusted to reason and to criticism. His trust was justified--if suchjustification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people whoapparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the secondplace, and an essayist incidentally. It is hard to believe that hefailed in instinct about himself. More probably he was content to foregoit when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all sowilling. They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are wereluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and theevident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded? Suchreluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheapsanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems maylive; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched thepresent with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love ofliterature, with a studiousness full of heart. 

DOMUS ANGUSTA

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

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

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the braveEmilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house. Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, littleargument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vaincapacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for everyliberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the widehouse we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. Thenarrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well movepity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to thatinadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movementmakes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeksthat timorous heart. 

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

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

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

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

REJECTION

Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a penitential ora vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique world in which life, art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; forus now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things. We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not let even a master'swork pass unfanned and unpurged. Even among his phrases one shall betaken and the other left. For he may unawares have allowed thehabitualness that besets this multitudinous life to take the pen from hishand and to write for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels ourrefusals. Or he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration toforce a sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfullypausing, would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of itsown in human history. By depreciating our language it has stimulatedchange, and has kept the circulating word in exercise. Our rejectionmust be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it. Itmakes us shrewder than we wish to be. And, indeed, the whole endlessaction of refusal shortens the life we could desire to live. Much of ourresolution is used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision. Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say with whatloss to our treasury of quietness? We are defrauded of our interiorignorance, which should be a place of peace. We are forced to confessmore articulately than befits our convention with ourselves. We arehurried out of our reluctances. We are made too much aware. Nay, more:we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomesalmost inevitable. As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act ofrefusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear! 'Welive by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in theiteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy therehides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other. If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves tojoy. We withhold, we close. Having denied many things that haveapproached us, we deny ourselves to many things. Thus does _il granrifiuto_ divide and rule our world. 

Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice. Rejectionhas its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured. When we garnisha house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more various, than mighthaunt the dreams of decorators. There is no limit to our rejections. Andthe unconsciousness of the decorators is in itself a cause of pleasure toa mind generous, forbearing, and delicate. When we dress, no fancy maycount the things we will none of. When we write, what hinders that weshould refrain from Style past reckoning? When we marry--. Moreover, ifsimplicity is no longer set in a world having the great and beautifulquality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the qualityof refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection. One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative hasoffered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement isnot negative, because it must be compassed by many negations. It is athing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exactsexperience. No slight or easy charge, then, is committed to such of usas, having apprehension of these things, fulfil the office of exclusion. Never before was a time when derogation was always so near, a dailydanger, or when the reward of resisting it was so great. The simplicityof literature, more sensitive, more threatened, and more important thanother simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax thegood will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance. 

THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE

The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itselfformed under too luxurious ideals. This is the evil work of that_little more_ which makes its insensible but persistent additions tostyles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when unluckilyman becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and too deliberate inhis arrangement of it. The landscape has need of moderation, of thatfast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and, in short, of a returntowards the ascetic temper. The English way of landowning, above all, has made for luxury. Naturally the country is fat. The trees are thickand round--a world of leaves; the hills are round; the forms are allblunt; and the grass is so deep as to have almost the effect of snow insmoothing off all points and curving away all abruptness. England isalmost as blunt as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victoriancast-iron work. And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by ourinvention of the country park. There all is curves and masses. A littlemore is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest glade, andfor increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to idleness. Not a treethat is not impenetrable, inarticulate. Thick soil below and thickgrowth above cover up all the bones of the land, which in more delicatecountries show brows and hollows resembling those of a fine face aftermental experience. By a very intelligible paradox, it is only in alandscape made up for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved. Much beautythere must needs be where there are vegetation and the seasons. But eventhe seasons, in park scenery, are marred by the _little too much_:too complete a winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, anautumn too demonstrative. 

'Seek to have less rather than more. ' It is a counsel of perfection in_The Imitation of Christ_. And here, undoubtedly, is the secret ofall that is virile and classic in the art of man, and of all in naturethat is most harmonious with that art. Moreover, this is the secret ofItaly. How little do the tourists and the poets grasp this latter truth, by the way--and the artists! The legend of Italy is to be gorgeous, andthey have her legend by rote. But Italy is slim and all articulate; hermost characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded withpaint. Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatnessof their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf--these make keen linesof slender vegetation. And they own the seasons by a gentle confession. Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous proclamation of summer in theEnglish woods, we would follow June to this subtler South: even to theCampagna, where the cycle of the seasons passes within such narrowlimitations that insensitive eyes scarcely recognise it. In early springthere is a fresher touch of green on all the spaces of grass, thedistance grows less mellow and more radiant; by the coming of May thegreen has been imperceptibly dimmed again; it blushes with the mingledcolours of minute and numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lineslonger than those of ocean billows. This is the desert blossoming like arose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and variousflower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of thewilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues ofharmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which isgradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter. All this finechromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that it is accusedas a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have astill more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea. The passing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colourto the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of thesapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, sofar from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinarysenses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it allfulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all thatis lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions. He wouldfind adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to searchfor words for the white. A white Mediterranean is not in the legend. Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea isthe flower of the breathless midsummer. And in its clear, silent waters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucentliving creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl. 

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

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES

To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than praise oftheir imagery. Imagery is the natural language of their poetry. Withouta parable she hardly speaks. But undoubtedly there is now and then apoet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too vitally, toosensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes for love of thebeautiful image. Those rare moments are simple, and their simplicitymakes one of the reader's keenest experiences. Other simplicities may beachieved by lesser art, but this is transcendent simplicity. There isnothing in the world more costly. It vouches for the beauty which ittranscends; it answer for the riches it forbears; it implies the artwhich it fulfils. All abundance ministers to it, though it is so single. And here we get the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret ofart at this perfection. All the faculties of the poet are used forpreparing this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed. The loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, onlyto be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be impossible werethey less glorious--are testimonies to the difference between sacrificeand waste. 

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

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

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

But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divineallusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is passionate has much ofthe impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there isno downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of thegreat for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates andis fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy mightbe shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' thechild is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses. ' It might bedrawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse. 

The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion soauthentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwisethan consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that givesthe reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplestodes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without suchwonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is thatbeautiful precision less in passages of description, such as thelandscape lines in _Amelia_ and elsewhere. The words are used to theuttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utteranceincreases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought inthe few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary. The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by theirsubjects--we might as well do something to justify their scorn by usingthe most modern of adjectives--and call them topical. Here assuredlythere is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself with solittle of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--reluctance. 

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

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

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

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

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

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature adelicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry werethus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neitherlove nor remember in public. 

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of acertain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century andearlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice thevulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerroldfor pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial, _Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably consideredgood comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintancewith a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a seriouscomment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous isto put one's-self at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himselfsomewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if hethought it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the leasttolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to turnover Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in themid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriereboutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature. Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as acircumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essentialvulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old _Punch_ volume adrawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, therefined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of theletter-press. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech ofher stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. Andpage by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of herfoolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that timethere was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly invulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarisingof the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law forevading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandonedwithout restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--innone of these ignominies is woman so common, foul, and foolish forDickens as she is in child-bearing. 

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

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