Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

Contents:

Ceres' RunawayA Vanquished ManA Northern FancyLaughterHarlequin MercutioThe Little LanguageAnima Pellegrina!The Sea WallThe DaffodilAddressesThe AudienceTithonusThe Tow PathThe Tethered ConstellationsPopular BurlesqueDry AutumnThe PlaidTwo BurdensThe UnreadyThe Child of TumultThe Child of Subsiding Tumult

CERES' RUNAWAY

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

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

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

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

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

A VANQUISHED MAN

Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event, until1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ashe wished, but by Tom Taylor. Turning over these familiar and famousvolumes, often read, I wonder once more how any editor was bold to "takeupon himself the mystery of things" in the case of Haydon, and to assignto that venial moral fault or this the ill-fortune and defeat that besethim, with hardly a pause for the renewal of the resistance of hisadmirable courage. 

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowly andlofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself to answerto Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its reproach, tobear its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is all his history. There was no fault of the intellect in his apprehension of the thing hethought to stand possessed of. He conceived it aright, and he was justin his rebuke of a world so dull and trivial before the art for which hedied. He esteemed it aright, except when he deemed it his. 

His editor, thinking himself to be summoned to justify the chastisement, the destruction, the whole retribution of such a career, looks here andthere for the sins of Haydon; the search is rewarded with the discoveryof faults such as every man and woman entrusts to the common generosity, the general consciousness. It is a pity to see any man conning suchoffences by heart, and setting them clear in an editorial judgementbecause he thinks himself to hold a trust, by virtue of his biographicaloffice, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man. 

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad butsatisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever must bewith him who yields to--, " or whatever else may be the manner ofratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon, we hear, omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his coursethereby unless it pleased him. Haydon was self-willed; he had a wildvanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers that include thepowers of man to prosper the work of which he himself was sure. He didnot wait upon the judgement of the world, but thought to compel it. 

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He wasforemost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when there wasa question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when thepossession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake. There hewas not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, thefirst, the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle blow that sent himon his career so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the merecourse and action of life must ruin him--this judgement, in art, directedhim in the decision of the most momentous of all public questions. Haydonadmired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, itseems, we owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts whichare the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydontrusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction. Into thepresence especially of those seated figures, commonly called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts for sentence. He lent an effectual hand tothe setting-up of that Tribunal of headless stones. 

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused, neglected, forgot him--and by chance-medley was right, was right!--had nopossible authority for anything that it did against him, and that hemight have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover, that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battle bythis ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Houses ofParliament with fresco, he was not one. This affront he took at thehands of men who had no real distinctions in their gift. He might wellhave had, by mere chance, some great companion with whom to share thatrejection. The unfortunate man had no such fortuitous fellowship athand. How strange, the solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst, and capable of making common cause indomitably with the good, had therebeen any such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none. There were ranged the unjust judges with their blundersall in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and there was noartist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better than theirfavoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned, and aman besides through whose heart the public reproach was able to cutkeenly. 

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon? It has alwaysseemed to me that he was not without greatness--yet he was always withoutdignity--in those most cruel passages of his life, such as that of hisdefeat, towards the close of his war, by the show of a dwarf, to whichall London thronged, led by Royal example, while the exhibition of hispicture was deserted. He was not betrayed by anger at this end of hopesand labours in which all that a man lives for had been pledged. Nay, hesucceeded in bearing what a more inward man would have taken more hardly. He was able to say in his loud voice, in reproach to the world, whatanother would have barred within: one of his great pictures was in acellar, another in an attic, another at the pawnbroker's, another in agrocer's shop, another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames andcolours and the rent were unpaid. Some solace he even found in stating afew of these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic visitorto London, interested in the condition of the arts. Well, who shall livewithout support? A man finds it where he can. 

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us someother little thing--I think it is inaccuracy. Poor Haydon says in onephrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in another soonfollowing that the money given or lent to him had been insufficient topay them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions, after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a slip. Hiseditor says the discrepancy is "characteristic, " but I protest I cannotfind another like it among those melancholy pages. If something gravercould but be sifted out from all these journals and letters of frankconfession, by the explainer! Here, then, is the last and least: Haydonwas servile in his address to "men of rank. " But his servility seems tobe very much in the fashion of his day--nothing grosser; and the men whoset the fashion had not to shape their style to Haydon's perpetualpurpose, which was to ask for commissions or for money. 

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this exerciseof historical morality, until a man in flourishing London is not afraidto assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there is not a wateringplace upon our coasts but is securely aware of merited misfortune on theAdriatic. 

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils, andnever a shilling in pay for teaching them. He painted a good thing--thehead of his Lazarus. He had no fault of theory: what fault of theory cana man commit who stands, as he did, by "Nature and the Greeks"? Intheory he soon outgrew the Italians then most admired; he had an honestmind. 

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to begained, the impossible pardon--pardon for that first and last mistake--themistake as to his own powers. If to pardon means to dispense fromconsequence, how should this be pardoned? Art would cease to be itself, by such an amnesty. 

A NORTHERN FANCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SEA WALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 "This basso-rilievo of a man--"

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DAFFODIL

To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed andbreast the floods, to go north and breast the winter--fresh and warm arethe energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it tolive so as to breast the stress of time. 

Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time andenlarge the capacity of the day--our poor day that so easily shrinks anddwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every firstof March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come homeannually after a swinging flight. To the infinite variety of naturaldays may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight againsttime, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart. Natureassuredly does not fail. Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder asthe unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various. But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We areinclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon thegates of the wind, and to go the smooth road. 

We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killingcourse than the natural event would take us. It is not enough that weshould run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the currentwith the ease of our untimely luxuries. Our daffodils are no longer tohave the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to thelagging swallow. By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man'slodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind taking the wind with a shortstalk and giving it but small petals to buffet--we have already saidfarewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never bravedthe cold. We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdropcame, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. Andwhen we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardlyknow or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows ofwoodlands, or whether it is over or to come. We are attending to ayellower tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew isopening in the chilly wood. 

The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accusedourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and have notnoted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselvesmemories confused and undefined. Late springs and early, gentle andhard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its way and itsrevenges. If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothing is easier. There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct; and thesliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannouslycareless. It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly; and whenwe keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils, and havehardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises, we are alreadyon the way of least resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in ourlast old age the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled presentof our decline. 

There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one singlegrasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, to meet it, to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own; and thisis travel. It is the finest and most effectual flight against time ofall. What elastic days are those wherein I make head against atravelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries, hail frontiers, facea new manner of building, cross the regions of silver roofs and of heavyAlpine stone, and bring with me the late light upon billowy gables andred eaves! And how buoyant the week in which I anticipate the sun uponthe roofless east! How serried are the days with forests, how enlargedby plains, how thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newlyaudible by a new sea! Far was the sunrise from the sunset, and noon isone memorable midday with shortened shadows upon some solitary road. 

Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, winters andnights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs thatbrought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring. None of ushas seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipatedvoices. The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky! Bright nights and glowinghouses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all these untimelyfruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privations of a winterin disguise. 

In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They hadthe privilege of their latitude--vigorous and rigorous seasons. They hada year full of change--their time was stretched whether with impatienceor with patience, with conflict or with felicity. Their salt meats werenot the worst of it; there was the siege of darkness, the captivity ofcold, the threat of storm, and the labour to close with the closingenemy, to break ways and save animals alive, and keep the laws in forcein the street in the long and secret nights. From such a season ofwinter at home, winter well known, men broke free to hail theirdaffodils. They found them, short, strong, and shivering, in the stillopen and undefended woods. In the springs before Chaucer, and earlierthan the day of the first spring lyric, in the same places grew the keenwild flowers as now; but they assuredly were marked with another welcome;they made memories; this year's wild harvest was not confused with thatof last year, or of half-a-score of years gone by. Distance of vitaltime set the springs far apart, and made the daffodils strangers. 

They were greeted with the courtesy due to strangers, so fresh must havebeen the senses of the villager, and of the citizen of the village town. Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did never. He of old wentfrom a little town, close and serried as a new box of toys, with one stepinto the unsmirched country, carrying an unsated heart. Refreshed withthe animating compulsion of changeful life were man and woman, and muchlike their child in a constant capacity for unique experiences, uniquedays, years that are separate, known, and distinguishable, and not onlyseparate but long. 

Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our fugitive, resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by means of thissovereign remedy of travel. It is to be feared that a modern journey isnot always to us so bracing a manner of living as was the untravelledjourney of hard days at home to the ancient islander. To journey as hedid, keeping his feet, with a moving heart against the moving seasons, toresist, to withstand, widened the hours; but his posterity are taking allmeans to narrow their own, even on the railway. To go the same way everyyear, for instance, is to lose, when a few such years are gone, nearlyall the gain to life. To take no heed at all of the way, but merely tobe by any means at the end of the travelling, to sleep or go by night, and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours, junctions, and dining-cars, is but to close up the time as though you closed a telescope. A longrailway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with the flight oftime as well as against it, and the habit of summaries can use these tooto its own end. Precipitate, unresisting, are the day in the train andthe heedless night. We love to reproach ourselves with living at toogreat a speed, having, perhaps, no sense of the second meaning of thephrase. Medicine may, perhaps, fulfil her promise of giving us a fewmore years, but habit derides her by making each year a scanty gift. 

Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not letthe sun rule the day. He would see to it that our hours were various;but we have preferred to his various face the plain face of a clock, andthe lights without vicissitudes of our nights without seasons. 

ADDRESSES

Not free from some ignominious attendance upon the opinion of the worldis he who too consciously withdraws his affairs from its judgements. Heis indebted to "the public. " He is at least indebted to it for the factthat there is, yonder, without, a public. Lacking this excludedmultitude his fastidiousness would have no subject, and his singularityno contrast. He would, in his grosser moods, have nothing to refuse, andnothing, in his finer, to ignore. 

He, at any rate, is one, and the rest are numerous. They minister to himpopular errors. But if they are nothing else in regard to himself, theyare many. If he must have distinction, it is there on easy terms--he isone. 

Well for him if he does not contract the heavier debt shouldered by theman who owes to the unknown, un-named, and uncounted his pleasure intheir conjectured or implicit envy; who conceives the jealousy they mayhave covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus silently begins and endswithin his own morosity the story of his base advantage. 

Vanity has indignity as its underside. And how shall even the pleasurein beauty be altogether without it? For since beauty, like other humanthings, is comparative, how shall the praise, or the admiration, thereofbe free from (at least) some reference to the unbeautiful? Or from someallusion to the less beautiful? Yet this, if inevitable, is little; itmay be negligible. The triumph of beauty is all but innocent. It iswhere no beauty is in question that lurks the unconfessed appeal to envy. That appeal is not an appeal to admiration--it lacks what is the genialpart of egoism. For who, except perhaps a recent writer of articles onsociety in America, really admires a man for living in the approved partof Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the western side ofthe Atlantic. It is a vanity without that single apology forvanity--gaiety of heart. The first things that are, in London, sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of the sky. Thereare some amongst us whose wives have constrained them to dwellunderground for love of an address. Modern and foolish is that contemptfor daylight. To the simple, day is beautiful; and "beautiful as day" ahappy proverb. 

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality, dwells one certain dominance. And if One, vigilant for the dues of Hisvicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription? Wereply, The Sun's. 

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves daylightthe finest thing we know. Beauty of artificial lights is in our streetsat night, but their chief beauty is when, just before night, they adornthe day. The late daylight honours them when it so easily and sweetlysubdues and overcomes them, giving to the electric lamp, to the taper, tothe hearth fire, and to the spark, a loveliness not their own. 

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there amongstus is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of unconfessedcontempt. Both are contrary to that more authentic, that essentialsolitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live, and wherein allmen are compelled to die. Both are unpublished even now, even in ourdays, when it costs men so little to manifest the effrontery of theiropinions. 

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is chieflythat here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinctionbrought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it and ouractual life, a generation or two, an education or two. Obviously, it wasriches that made the class differences, if not now, then a little timeago. Therefore the New England citizen should not be reproved by us foranything except his too great candour. A social guide-book to some cityof the Republic is in my hands. I note how the very names of streetstake a sound of veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer's pen. It is evident that the names are almost enough. They have an expression. He is like a _naif_ teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his ownsmiles in order till he have done. 

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it uponparishes. He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town and makesan epigram of the southern. He caps a sarcasm with an address. 

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect, hadwe the same simplicity. It is to be thought that we too hold an address, be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit to snatch itfrom us, she must needs do so with violence. Such unseemly violence, inthis as in other transactions, is ours in the clinging and not hers inthe taking. For equal is the force of Fortune, and steady is her grasp, whether she despoil the great of their noble things or strip the mean ofthings ignoble, whether she take from the clutching or the yielding hand. 

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capture anaddress by the hem if he may. You would think a good address to be ofall blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gained or missed, and no two ways about it. But not so. You shall see it waylaid at theangles of squares, with no slight exercise of skill, delayed, entreated, detained, entangled, intricately caught, persuaded to round a corner, prolonged beyond all probability, pursued. 

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visit there. It will bear the number of a narrow house. May it avow its poverty andbe poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigid humility, shall have nothought nor no eye askance upon the multitude. 

THE AUDIENCE

The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waiting isonly a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every nighttakes place. The audience are the players. Their audience on the stageare bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipate them, and todivine them. But once known and their character established in relationto a particular play, the audience--what is called the audience--needgive no further trouble. They themselves cannot alter; they are fixedand compelled by the tremendous force of averages. The most inexorableof laws, and the most irresistible of necessities are upon them; theycannot do otherwise; they are out of the reach of accidents; they aremade fast in their own mediocrity. They are a thousand London people;and no genius, or no imbecility, amongst them has any effect upon thatsecure sovereignty of a number. 

The long laugh generally means that the house--by its unalterablemajority--has laughed at one joke three times. The stage waits upon theaudience, and the audience rehearses its collective and inevitable laugh. It performs. It communicates itself, and art is a communication. Asmall and chosen party is made up, behind the footlights, to see athousand people, given helpless into the hands of destiny and subject toaverages, so express themselves. 

The audience's audience (the people on the stage) are persuaded intoapplauding the laugh too long and too often. The author is, of course, one of them, and he applauds by making too many such translations. Theyare perhaps worth making, and even worth renewing in acknowledgement of asmile; but it is surely to encourage the house unduly to make them soimportant. The actors applaud their audience by repeating--and not onceor only twice--a piece of comic business. Does the Average laugh so wellas indeed to deserve all this?

The Average does little more than laugh. It knows that its own truesttalents are indubitably comic. We have no real tragic audiences. Thisis no expression of regret over legitimate audiences, or audiences of theold school, or any audiences of that kind, whose day may or may not havehad a date. It is a mere statement of the fact that audiences have lost, or never had, a distinguishing perception of emotion, whereas they haveevery kind of perception of humour, distinguishing and general. Theirlaugh never fails. If their friends behind would really care to improvethem, it might be done by exacting from them a little more temperance intheir sense of comedy. We shall never have a really good school ofaudience without the exercise of some such severity. 

For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean that it isunchangeable for its time merely. There might be a slow upraising of thelevel. It would still be a level, and there would still be a compellinglaw upon one thousand that it should do the same thing as anotherthousand; but that same thing might become somewhat more intelligent. 

When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of audience asto merit this admirable supply to their demands?--this applause of theirunderstanding? Is there not in the whole excellent piece of work, something all too independent of their part in the theatre?

If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, and Byronthat all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the audience hasconceived that all arts should have but one mystery for its blundering, and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it does but admire theactor as in a drawing. 

The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shall notaccept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them; when onebrilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the footlights shallmeet a brilliant simplicity on the other. Which troupe, which side, tobegin?

TITHONUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TOW PATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

POPULAR BURLESQUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRY AUTUMN

One who has much and often protested against the season of Autumn, herpathos, her chilly breakfast-time, her "tints, " her decay, and herextraordinary popularity, saw cause one year to make a partialrecantation. Autumn, until then, had seemed to be a practitioner of allthe easy arts at once, or rather, she had taken the easy way with thearts of colour, sentiment, suggestion, and regret. 

She had often encouraged and rewarded, also, the ingratitude of a wholenation for a splendid summer, somewhat officiously cooling, refreshing, allaying, and comforting the discontent of the victims of an English sun. She had soothed the fuming citizen, and brought back the fogs of custom, effaced the skies, to which he had upturned no very attentive eye, muffled up his chin, and in many other ways curried favour. Not only didshe fall in with his landscape mood, but she made herself his housemateby his fireplaces, drew his curtains, shut out her own wet winds in thestreets, and became privy to the commoner comforts of man, like a wildcreature tamed and conniving at human sport and schemes. "Domesticated"Gothic itself, or the governesses who daily by advertisement describethemselves by that same strange modern adjective, could not be more bentupon the flattery of man in his less heroic moments. 

Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accomplice ofdaily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now accepted senseof a once noble word, comfortable. Besides, her show of stormy forestsis done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment, with dashingsand underlinings--we all know the sort of letter, for instance, whichanswers to the message and proclamation of Autumn, as she usually is inthe outer world. A complete sentimentalist is she, whether in the opencountry or when she looks in at the lighted windows, and goodnaturedlymakes her voice like a very goblin's outside, for the increasing of thebourgeois' _bien-etre_. 

But that year all had been otherwise. Autumn had borne herself with aheroism of sunny weather. Where we had been wont to see signals ofdistress, and to hear the voluble outpouring of an excitable temperament, with the extremity of scattered leaves and desperate damp, we beheld anaspect of golden drought. Nothing mouldered--everything was consumed byvital fires. The gardens were strewn with smouldering soft ashes of lateroses, late honeysuckle, honey-sweet clematis. The silver seeds of rowsof riverside flowers took sail on their random journey with a light wind. Leaves set forth, a few at a time, with a little volley of birds--abuoyant caravel. Or, in the stiller weather, the infrequent fall ofleaves took place quietly, with no proclamation of ruin, in the privacywithin the branches. While nearly all the woods were still fresh asstreams, you might see that here or there was one, with an invinciblesummer smile, slowly consuming, in defiance of decay. Life destroyedthat autumn, not death. 

The novelist would be at a loss had we a number of such years. He wouldlose the easiest landscape--for the autumn has among her facile ways theway of allowing herself to be described by rote. But there were noregions of crimson woods and yellow--only the grave, cool, and cheerfulgreen of the health of summer, and now and then that deep bronzing of theleaves that the sun brought to pass. Never did apples look better thanin those still vigorous orchards. They shone so that lamps would hardlybe brighter. The apple-gathering, under such a sun, was nearly as warmand brilliant as a vintage; and indeed it was of the Italian autumn thatyou were reminded. There were the same sunburnt tones, the same brownhealth. There was the dark smile of chestnut woods as among theApennines. 

For it was chiefly within the woods that the splendid autumn withoutpathos gave delight. The autumn _with_ pathos has a way there ofoverwhelming her many fragrances in the general odour of dead leavesgeneralized. That year you could breathe all the several sweet scents, as discriminated and distinct as those of flowers on the tops ofmountains--warm pine and beech as different as thyme and broom, unconfused. Even the Spring, with her little divided breezes ofhawthorn, rose, and lilac, was not more various. 

Moreover, while some of the woods were green, none of the fields were so. In their sunburnt colours were to be seen "autumn tints" of a fardifferent beauty from that of a gaudy decay. Dry autumn is a generallover of simplicity, and she sweeps a landscape with long plain coloursthat take their variations from the light. When the country looks "burntup, " as they say who are ungrateful for the sun, then are these coloursmost tender. Grass, that had lost its delicacy in the day when the lasthay was carried, gets it again. For a little time it was--new-reaped--ofsomething too hard a green; then came dry autumn along, and softened itinto a hundred exquisite browns. Dry autumn does beautiful things insepia, as the water-colour artist did in the early days, and draws divinebrown Turners of the first manner. 

The fields and hedgerows must needs fade, and the sun made the fadingquick with the bloom of brown. For one great meadow so softly gilded, Iwould give all the scarlet and yellow trees that ever made a steamingautumn gorgeous--all the crimson of the Rhine valleys, all the patchedand spotted walnut-leaves of the _muhl-thal_ by Boppard, and the littletrees that change so suddenly to their yellow of decay in groups at thefoot of the ruins of Sternberg and Liebenstein, every one of theirbranches disguised in the same bright, insignificant, unhopeful colour. 

An autumn so rare should not close without a recorded "hail andfarewell!" Spring was not braver, summer was not sweeter. That year'sgreat sun called upon a great spirit in all the riverside woods. Thosewoods did not grow cold; they yielded to their last sunset. 

THE PLAID

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO BURDENS

One is on the breast and clings there with arms, and one on the back andclings with thongs. The burden of the back bows the body, turns the facefrom the sky, narrows the lungs and flattens the foot; takes away theflight and the dance from the gait of man, and ties him towards theearth--not only in the way of nature, by means of his arched feet, but bya heavy lien upon his shoulders and his brows. It is the fardel thatmakes this vital figure to be subject visibly, and at several points, tothat law of gravitation which, in a state of liberty, it uses towithstand, to countervail, to leap from, to walk with, making theuniversal tether elastic. Bend in two this supple spine that can liftitself, like a snake erect, with something better than mere balance--withlife and the active will; bend the back, and at once gravitation takeshold of the loins and grasps the knees, and pulls upon the shoulders, andthe neck feels the weight of an abject head. 

Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall find amongthem a lower class of their own kind--poorer where all are poor, andstraining at their task where all are labouring--who walk the dust withburdens on their backs. Loads of field-labour are these, or of thelabour in a fishing-port, and large in proportion to their weight; toolarge to be bound close and carried on the head, too wide to be borne onthe shoulder, too unwieldy for the clasp of arms. Among AmericanIndians, we are told, the women carry the tent so, and the gear of a_demenagement_, and the warrior himself, upon his goods, not seldom. Inthe agriculture of the European Continent the women carry the large loadsthus, the refuse is laid upon them, and all that is bound up for burning;they are the gleaners, not of wheat but of tares. Or they carry fodderfor the imprisoned cattle, disappearing as they walk, bowed, quenched, hooded, and hidden with hay. 

Women who bear this load do not prosper. They have a downward look, albeit not as conspirators; and in them the earth carries a burden liketheir own, or but little more buoyant. Stones off the face of the stonyfields, huge sheaves of stalks and husks after granaries are filled, fueland forage--bent from the stature of women, those who bear those bundlesgo near the earth that gave them, and breathe her dust. 

In Austria, where women carry the hod and climb the ladder; in theRhineland, where a cart goes along the valley roads drawn by a womanharnessed with a cow--even here I think the hardship hardly so great aswhere the burden is laid upon the bent back of her whose arms are toosmall or too weak to grasp it; for after long use in such carrying, thefigure is no longer fit for habitual erection. And the use isestablished with those women who are so loaded. It is not that all thelabouring women of such a village or such a sea-port are burdened intheir turn with the burden of the back; it is rather that a class isformed, a class of the burdened and the bent; and to that class belongall ages; child-bearing women are in that sisterhood. No stronger womencan be seen than the upright women of Boulogne; to whom then, but thebent, are due the many cripples, the many dwarfs, the ill-bonedstragglers of that vigorous population, the many children growing awry, the many old people shuffling towards misshapen graves?

There is manifestly another burden, familiar and accustomed to the figureof woman. This does not bend her back, nor withdraw her eyes from thedistance, nor rank her with the haggard waste of fields. It is borne infront, and she breasts the world with it; shoulder-high, and it is herballast. So loaded she stands like the Dresden Raphael, and there is nobearer of sword and buckler more erect. 

It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race--or, if notindignity, provincialism--in the more extremely Oriental people, that aJapanese woman carries her child on her back and not upon her arm. It isa charming infant, and the mother looks no more than a gentle child; withthe little creature bound to her back she carries a soft lantern in amild blue night. She is not of a classic race, and she shuffles on hersubordinate way, an irresponsible creature, who must not proffer opinionsexcept by way of quotation, and is scarcely of the inches that measurethe landscape or of the aspect that fronts the sky. 

But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bear theignobler burden? It is not long since an American woman wrote a book, _Women and Economics_, urging equal labour upon women, by the analogyof animals that know no distinction between a strong sex and a weak, norbetween a free sex and one confined to the pen, or the lair, or thecover, by the care of little ones. The reply seems too obvious that thechildren of men are more helpless, and are helpless for a longer time, even in proportion to their longer life, than the off-spring of otherliving creatures. The children of men have to be carried. This authorcomplains that women are economically dependent upon men; and she findsthat the world has "misty ideas upon the subject. " If those misty ideasare to the effect that a woman who keeps house for the service ofherself, her husband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return formaintenance, and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish thatideas "mistily" held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed wereoften so well founded. Those who charge the husband with "employing" hiswife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess, as wellas "servant" or "housekeeper, " ministering to herself and to the guestsin whose company she has pleasure, and to whose respect she has a right. Our economic author proceeds: "We are the only animal species in whichthe sex relation is also an economic factor. . . We have not beenaccustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization that it was'natural, ' and that other animals did so too. " Has anyone really been sorash as to aver "that other animals did so too"? The obvious truth isthat other animals do otherwise, but that, whatever they do, they make norule or example for man. Again: "Whatever the economic value of thedomestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do themost work get the least money. " And yet but now they were charged with"getting it" too dependently, or rather, with having it "got" for them byman! Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word "money, " which shehere lets slip?

"He nearly persuades me to go on all fours, " sighs Voltaire rising--risingerect reluctantly, one may almost say--from the reading of Rousseau. 

THE UNREADY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CHILD OF TUMULT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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