The Rhythm of Life

Published：2026-07-30 04:32:25 Source: affordable electronic learning toys Author: Language Toys

Transcribed from the 1893 John Lane edition by David Price,educational nesting cups for 4 year olds [email protected]

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

Contents

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

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicityrules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of theorbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses notmeasured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless,the recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or lastyear, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week ornext year.  Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends uponthe tides of the mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorterand shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longerintervals towards recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerableyesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear,but the cause has not passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distressunsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorseitself does not remain—it returns.  Gaiety takes us by adear surprise.  If we had made a course of notes of its visits,we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation insteadof a discovery.  No one makes such observations; in all the diariesof students of the interior world, there have never come to light therecords of the Kepler of such cycles.  But Thomas à Kempisknew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In his cellalone with the elements—‘What wouldst thou more than these?for out of these were all things made’—he learnt the stayto be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrancethat restrains the soul at the coming of the moment of delight, givingit a more conscious welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And ‘rarely, rarely comest thou,’ sighed Shelley, not toDelight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight.  Delight can be compelledbeforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can bebound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life outof metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled.  Thatflits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolicallycurved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the Imitationshould both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights,and to guess at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls werein close touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberatehuman rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universalmovement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences.  Eppursimuove.  They knew that presence does not existwithout absence; they knew that what is just upon its flight of farewellis already on its long path of return.  They knew that what isapproaching to the very touch is hastening towards departure. ‘O wind,’ cried Shelley, in autumn,

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

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interruptwith unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse ofonset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To livein constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be soughtin mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of thesenses, is to live without either rest or full activity.  The soulsof certain of the saints, being singularly simple and single, have beenin the most complete subjection to the law of periodicity.  Ecstasyand desolation visited them by seasons.  They endured, during spacesof vacant time, the interior loss of all for which they had sacrificedthe world.  They rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetnessalighting in their hearts.  Like them are the poets whom, threetimes or ten times in the course of a long life, the Muse has approached,touched, and forsaken.  And yet hardly like them; not always sodocile, nor so wholly prepared for the departure, the brevity, of thegolden and irrevocable hour.  Few poets have fully recognised themetrical absence of their Muse.  For full recognition is expressedin one only way—silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worshipthe moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribesare known to adore the sun, and not the moon.  For the periodicityof the sun is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestlyapparent, perpetually influential.  On her depend the tides; andshe is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrentlyirrigate lands where rain is rare.  More than any other companionof earth is she the Measurer.  Early Indo-Germanic languages knewher by that name.  Her metrical phases are the symbol of the orderof recurrence.  Constancy in approach and in departure is the reasonof her inconstancies.  Juliet will not receive a vow spoken ininvocation of the moon; but Juliet did not live to know that love itselfhas tidal times—lapses and ebbs which are due to the metricalrule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindlyattributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.  For man—exceptthose elect already named—is hardly aware of periodicity. The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative experienceupon which cumulative evidence is lacking.  It is in the after-partof each life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away withthe hope or fear of continuance.  That young sorrow comes so nearto despair is a result of this young ignorance.  So is the earlyhope of great achievement.  Life seems so long, and its capacityso great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs musthold—intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses asinevitable as the pauses of sleep.  And life looks impossible tothe young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairsof men, in a sense more subtle—if it is not too audacious to adda meaning to Shakespeare—than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life willwax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest inits phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands allthings—a sun’s revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.

DECIVILISED

The difficulty of dealing—in the course of any critical duty—withdecivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity—sparinghim no doubt the word—he defends himself against the charge ofbarbarism.  Especially from new soil—transatlantic, colonial—hefaces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuadedof his own youthfulness of race.  He writes, and recites, poemsabout ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessnessof his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless waysof a young society.  He is there to explain himself, voluble, witha glossary for his own artless slang.  But his colonialism is onlyprovincialism very articulate.  The new air does but make old decadencesseem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions theready-made, the uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy played long this pattering part of youth.  The New-Englanderhastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paintand feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to himthat you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dresscoat.  And when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise,the American was ill-content with the word of the judicious who laudedhim for some delicate successes in continuing something of the literatureof England, something of the art of France; he was more eager for theapplause that stimulated him to write romances and to paint panoramiclandscape, after brief training in academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly callingupon America to begin—to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a continuity whichonly a constant care can guide into sustained refinement and can savefrom decivilisation.

But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil.  The Englishtown, too, knows him in all his dailiness.  In England, too, hehas a literature, an art, a music, all his own—derived from manyand various things of price.  Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicityand cheapness, is impossible without a beautiful past.  Its chiefcharacteristic—which is futility, not failure—could notbe achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory reproduction, the quotidiandisgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality, purity, simplicity, precision—allthese are among the antecedents of trash.  It is after them; itis also, alas, because of them.  And nothing can be much sadderthan such a proof of what may possibly be the failure of derivation.

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

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

A REMEMBRANCE

When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall berolled up and sealed with their records within them, there will be noremembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems betterworth interpreting than the speech of many another.  Of himselfhe has left no vestiges.  It was a common reproach against himthat he never acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there wasnothing for it but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure. The delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroicdegree.  Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough to define andlimit and enforce so many significant negatives?  Words seem tooffend by too much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve. That reserve was life-long.  Loving literature, he never lifteda pen except to write a letter.  He was not inarticulate, he wasonly silent.  He had an exquisite style from which to refrain. The things he abstained from were all exquisite.  They were broughtfrom far to undergo his judgment, if haply he might have selected them. Things ignoble never approached near enough for his refusal; they hadnot with him so much as that negative connexion.  If I had to equipan author I should ask no better than to arm him and invest him withprecisely the riches that were renounced by the man whose intellect,by integrity, had become a presence-chamber.

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

Men said that he led a dilettantelife.  They reproachedhim with the selflessness that made him somewhat languid.  Others,they seemed to aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateurat living.  So it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness,and that many of the things he had held slipped from his disinterestedhands.  So it was, too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate,liberal, instructed, studious, docile, austere?  An amateur manhe might have been called, too, because he was not discomposed by hisown experiences, or shaken by the discovery which life brings to us-thatthe negative quality of which Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partakenby our happiness.  He had always prayed temperate prayers and harbouredprobable wishes.  His sensibility was extreme, but his thoughtwas generalised.  When he had joy he tempered it not in the commonway by meditation upon the general sorrow but by a recollection of thegeneral pleasure.  It was his finest distinction to desire no differences,no remembrance, but loss among the innumerable forgotten.  Andwhen he suffered, it was with so quick a nerve and yet so wide an apprehensionthat the race seemed to suffer in him.  He pitied not himself sotenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for pain he was then feelinglypersuaded.  His darkening eyes said in the extreme hour: ‘Ihave compassion on the multitude.’

THE SUN

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

To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn tolook for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism thatis unity and life.  It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorian picture—(the school is still in full career,but essentially it belongs to that triumphal period)—is but adull sum of things put together, in concourse, not in relation; butthe true picture is one, however multitudinous it may be, forit is composed of relations gathered together in the unity of perception,of intention, and of light.  It is organic.  Moreover, howtruly relation is the condition of life may be understood from the extinctstate of the English stage, which resembles nothing so much as a RoyalAcademy picture.  Even though the actors may be added togetherwith something like vivacity (though that is rare), they have no vitalityin common.  They are not members one of another.  If the Churchand Stage Guild be still in existence, it would do much for the artby teaching that Scriptural maxim.  I think, furthermore, thatthe life of our bodies has never been defined so suggestively as byone who named it a living relation of lifeless atoms.  Could thevalue of relation be more curiously set forth?  And one might penetratesome way towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a trueliterary style in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifelessword with word.  And wherein lies the progress of architecturefrom the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopeanwall to the spring and the flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organicrelation?  But the way of such thoughts might be intricate, andthe sun rules me to simplicity.

He reigns as centrally in the blue sky as in the clouds.  OneOctober of late had days absolutely cloudless.  I should not havecertainly known it had there been a hill in sight.  The gradationsof the blue are incalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the centralfire.  As to the earthly scenery, there are but two ‘views’on the plain; for the aspect of the light is the whole landscape. To look with the sun or against the sun—this is the alternativesplendour.  To look with the sun is to face a golden country, shadowless,serene, noble and strong in light, with a certain lack of relief thatsuggests—to those who dream of landscape—the country ofa dream.  The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and the goldenricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with a colour. Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than its luminosity. For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is that which is fullof shadows—the landscape before you when you turn and face thesun.  Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, every uncertainaspen-leaf of the few trees, but every particle of the October air showsa shadow and makes a mystery of the light.  There is nothing butshadow and sun; colour is absorbed and the landscape is reduced to ashining simplicity.  Thus is the dominant sun sufficient for hisday.  His passage kindles to unconsuming fires and quenches intoliving ashes.  No incidents save of his causing, no delight saveof his giving: from the sunrise, when the larks, not for pairing, butfor play, sing the only virginal song of the year—a heart youngerthan Spring’s in the season of decline—even to the sunset,when the herons scream together in the shallows.  And the sun dominatesby his absence, compelling the low country to sadness in the melancholynight.

THE FLOWER

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

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling—subjectionto the smallest of the things he has abused.  The designer of cheappatterns is no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vainand transitory author by the phrase.  But I had rather learn mydecoration of the Japanese, and place against the blank wall one potplain from the wheel, holding one singular branch in blossom, in theattitude and accident of growth.  And I could wish abstention toexist, and even to be evident, in my words.  In literature as inall else man merits his subjection to trivialities by a kind of economicalgreed.  A condition for using justly and gaily any decoration wouldseem to be a certain reluctance.  Ornament—strange as thedoctrine sounds in a world decivilised—was in the beginning intendedto be something jocund; and jocundity was never to be achieved but bypostponement, deference, and modesty.  Nor can the prodigalityof the meadows in May be quoted in dispute.  For Nature has somethingeven more severe than moderation: she has an innumerable singleness. Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal; they show multitude, but notmultiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or who has ever gainedthe granting of the most foolish of his wishes—the prayer forreiteration?  It is a curious slight to generous Fate that manshould, like a child, ask for one thing many times.  Her answerevery time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day whenshe shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts—andmake it perhaps in secret—by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, canequal the last?  Of many thousand kisses the poor last—buteven the kisses of your mouth are all numbered.

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dressof man is so much to be desired.  The leg, completing as it doesthe form of man, should make a great part of that human scenery whichis at least as important as the scenery of geological structure, orthe scenery of architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but whichthe lovers of mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings haveconsented to ignore.  The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuchas it has the finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishingforms which, coming at the base of the human structure, show it to bea thing of life by its unstable equilibrium.  A lifeless structureis in stable equilibrium; the body, springing, poised, upon its fineankles and narrow feet, never stands without implying and expressinglife.  It is the leg that first suggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is erect upon the vital and tenselegs of man; and the herald Mercury, because of his station, looks new-lighted. All this is true of the best leg, and the best leg is the man’s. That of the young child, in which the Italian schools of painting delighted,has neither movement nor supporting strength.  In the case of thewoman’s figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness,that gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that areso organic.  But man should no longer disguise the long lines,the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of allgarments the most stupid.  Inexpressive of what they clothe asno kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they are neither implicitlynor explicitly good raiment.  It is hardly possible to err by violencein denouncing them.  Why, when a bad writer is praised for ‘clothinghis thought,’ it is to modern raiment that one’s nimblefancy flies—fain of completing the beautiful metaphor!

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

THE UNIT OF THE WORLD

The quarrel of Art with Nature goes on apace.  The paintershave long been talking of selecting, then of rejecting, or even, withMr. Whistler, of supplanting.  And then Mr. Oscar Wilde, in thewitty and delicate series of inversions which he headed ‘The Decayof Lying,’ declared war with all the irresponsibility naturallyattending an act so serious.  He seems to affirm that Nature isless proportionate to man than is architecture; that the house is builtand the sofa is made measurable by the unit measure of the body; butthat the landscape is set to some other scale.  ‘I preferhouses to the open air.  In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity,is absolutely the result of indoor life.’  Nevertheless,before it is too late, let me assert that though nature is not alwaysclearly and obviously made to man’s measure, he is yet the unitby which she is measurable.  The proportion may be far to seekat times, but the proportion is there.  Man’s farms aboutthe lower Alps, his summer pastures aloft, have their relation to thewhole construction of the range; and the range is great because it isgreat in regard to the village lodged in a steep valley in the foothills.  The relation of flower and fruit to his hands and mouth,to his capacity and senses (I am dealing with size, and nothing else),is a very commonplace of our conditions in the world.  The armof man is sufficient to dig just as deep as the harvest is to be sown. And if some of the cheerful little evidences of the more popular formsof teleology are apt to be baffled, or indefinitely postponed, by theretorts that suggest themselves to the modern child, there remains thesubtle and indisputable witness borne by art itself: the body of mancomposes with the mass and the detail of the world.  The pictureis irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figure amongst its naturalaccessories in the landscape, and would not have them otherwise.

But there is one conspicuous thing in the world to which man hasnot served as a unit of proportion, and that one thing is a popularlyrevered triumph of that very art of architecture in which Mr. OscarWilde has confidence for keeping things in scale.  Human ingenuityin designing St. Peter’s on the Vatican, has achieved this oneexception to the universal harmony—a harmony enriched by discords,but always on one certain scale of notes—which the body makeswith the details of the earth.  It is not in the landscape, whereMr. Oscar Wilde has too rashly looked for contempt and contumely, butin the art he holds precious as the minister to man’s egotism,that man’s Ego is defied.  St. Peter’s is not necessarilytoo large (though on other grounds its size might be liable to correction);it is simply out of relation to the most vital thing on the earth—thething which has supplied some secret rod to measure the waves withal,and the whales, the sea-wall cliffs, the ears of wheat, the cedar-branches,pines and diamonds and apples.  Now, Emerson would certainly nothave felt the soft shock and stimulus of delight to which he confesseshimself to be liable at the first touch of certain phrases, had notthe words in every case enclosed a promise of further truth and of asecond pleasure.  One of these swift and fruitful experiences visitedhim with the saying—grown popular through him—that an architectshould have a knowledge of anatomy.  There is assuredly a germand a promise in the phrase.  It delights us, first, because itseems to recognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive,character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades usthat Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size—the unitthat is sometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measureof what is great and small among things animate and inanimate. And in spite of themselves the architects of St. Peter’s wereconstrained to take something from man; they refused his height fortheir scale, but they tried to use his shape for their ornament. And so in the blankest dearth of fancy that ever befel architect orbuilder they imagined human beings bigger than the human beings of experience;and by means of these, carved in stone and inlaid in mosaic, they setup a relation of their own.  The basilica was related to the colossalfigure (as a church more wisely measured would have been to living man),and so ceased to be large; and nothing more important was finally achievedthan transposal of the whole work into another scale of proportions—ascale in which the body of man was not the unit.  The pile of stonesthat make St. Peter’s is a very little thing in comparison withSoracte; but man, and man’s wife, and the unequal statures ofhis children, are in touch with the structure of the mountain ratherthan with that of the church which has been conceived without referenceto the vital and fundamental rule of his inches.

Is there no egotism, ministering to his dignity, that man, havingthe law of the organism of the world written in his members, can takewith him, out of the room that has been built to accord with him, intothe landscape that stands only a little further away?  He has deliberatelymade the smoking chair and the table; there is nothing to surprise himin their ministrations.  But what profounder homage is renderedby the multitudinous Nature going about the interests and the businessof which he knows so little, and yet throughout confessing him! His eyes have seen her and his ears have heard, but it would never haveentered into his heart to conceive her.  His is not the fancy thatcould have achieved these woods, this little flush of summer from theinnumerable flowering of grasses, the cyclic recreation of seasons. And yet he knows that he is imposed upon all he sees.  His staturegives laws.  His labour only is needful—not a greater strength. And the sun and the showers are made sufficient for him.  His furnituremust surely be adjudged to pay him but a coarse flattery in comparisonwith the subjection, yet the aloofness, of all this wild world. This is no flattery.  The grass is lumpy, as Mr. Oscar Wilde remarkswith truth: Nature is not man’s lacquey, and has no preoccupationabout his more commonplace comforts.  These he gives himself indoors;and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things carefully providedby self-love?  But when that faroucheNature, who has neverspoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of hintinghis wishes or his tastes—when she reveals the suggestions of hisform and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposeslets him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets himsuspect further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand—thenman becomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness,and a favour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewithhis tailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool.

BY THE RAILWAY SIDE

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

When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shoutingblasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man—an Italianof the type that grows stout and wears whiskers.  The man was inbourgeoisdress, and he stood with his hat off in front of thesmall station building, shaking his thick fist at the sky.  Noone was on the platform with him except the railway officials, who seemedin doubt as to their duties in the matter, and two women.  Of oneof these there was nothing to remark except her distress.  Shewept as she stood at the door of the waiting-room.  Like the secondwoman, she wore the dress of the shopkeeping class throughout Europe,with the local black lace veil in place of a bonnet over her hair. It is of the second woman—O unfortunate creature!—that thisrecord is made—a record without sequel, without consequence; butthere is nothing to be done in her regard except so to remember her. And thus much I think I owe after having looked, from the midst of thenegative happiness that is given to so many for a space of years, atsome minutes of her despair.  She was hanging on the man’sarm in her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting. She had wept so hard that her face was disfigured.  Across hernose was the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear.  Haydonsaw it on the face of a woman whose child had just been run over ina London street.  I remembered the note in his journal as the womanat Via Reggio, in her intolerable hour, turned her head my way, hersobs lifting it.  She was afraid that the man would throw himselfunder the train.  She was afraid that he would be damned for hisblasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear.  It was horrible,too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour. No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman’s horror. But has any one who saw it forgotten her face?  To me for the restof the day it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and againstit appeared the dwarf’s head, lifted with sobs, under the provincialblack lace veil.  And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundariesof sleep!  Close to my hotel there was a roofless theatre crammedwith people, where they were giving Offenbach.  The operas of Offenbachstill exist in Italy, and the little town was placarded with announcementsof LaBellaElena.  The peculiar vulgar rhythmof the music jigged audibly through half the hot night, and the clappingof the town’s-folk filled all its pauses.  But the persistentnoise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of those threefigures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of the day.

POCKET VOCABULARIES

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

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

PATHOS

A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minormagazine: ‘For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly]is the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hintsof the pathos that is worked out more fully, though by different ways,in Bottom and Malvolio.’  Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz and the other things comparedto which ‘le spleen’ was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature free from the preoccupationof a sham real-life?  So it would seem.  Even what the greatmaster has not shown us in his work, that your critic convinced of pathosis resolved to see in it.  By the penetration of his intrusivesympathy he will come at it.  It is of little use now to explainSnug the joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug who stirstheir emotions so painfully.  Not the lion; they can see throughthat: but the Snug within, the human Snug.  And Master Shallowhas the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing;and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Arganin his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human natureshudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.’s aunt. Etpatati, etpatata.

It may be only too true that the actual world is ‘with pathosdelicately edged.’  For Malvolio living we should have hadliving sympathies: so much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement;so unarmed a credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughterof a chambermaid.  By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity mightbe reached for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resourcecondemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another?  Is it not theprivilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly,without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completenessof the many-sided world?  Is not Shakespeare, for this reason,our refuge?  Fortunately unreal is his world when he will haveit so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: withoutmisgiving, without remorse, without reluctance.  If great creatingNature has not assumed for herself she has assuredly secured to thegreat creating poet the right of partiality, of limitation, of settingaside and leaving out, of taking one impression and one emotion as sufficientfor the day.  Art and Nature are separate, complementary; in relation,not in confusion, with one another.  And all this officious clevernessin seeing round the corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literaryart in the flat—(the borrowing of similes from other arts is ofevil tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)—is but anothersign of the general lack of a sense of the separation between Natureand the sentient mirror in the mind.  In some of his persons, indeed,Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others—andchiefly in comedy—he is partial, he is impressionary, he refusesto know what is not to his purpose, he is an artist.  And in thatgay, wilful world it is that he gives us—or used to give us, foreven the world is obsolete—the pleasure of oubliance.

Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caughthim a clout as he went.  Yet he will do it again; and those like-mindedwill assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human,how much more sensitive, how much more responsible, is the art of thecritic than the world has ever dreamt till now.  And, superiorin so much, they will still count their superior weeping as the choicestof their gifts.  And Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have nobetter subject for his admiration than the pathos of the time. It is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun.  ’Tisa strange serpent; and the tears of it are wet.

THE POINT OF HONOUR

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

Because Impressionism is so free, therefore is it doubly bound. Because there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible. To undertake this art for the sake of its privileges without confessingits obligations—or at least without confessing them up to thepoint of honour—is to take a vulgar freedom: to see immunitiesprecisely where there are duties, and an advantage where there is abond.  A very mob of men have taken Impressionism upon themselvesin this our later day.  It is against all probabilities that morethan a few among these have within them the point of honour.  Intheir galleries we are beset with a dim distrust.  And to distrustis more humiliating than to be distrusted.  How many of these landscape-painters,deliberately rash, are painting the truth of their own impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered; truth and falsehoodas to fact are, happily for the intelligence of the common conscience,not hard to divide.  But when the dubiumconcerns not factbut artistic truth, can the many be sure that their sensitiveness, theircandour, their scruple, their delicate equipoise of perceptions, thevigilance of their apprehension, are enough?  Now Impressionistsof late have told us things as to their impressions—as to theeffect of things upon the temperament of this man and upon the moodof that—which should not be asserted except on the artistic pointof honour.  The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they shouldnot trust themselves for truth extraordinary.  They can face thegeneral judgment, but they should hesitate to produce work that appealsto the last judgment, which is the judgment within.  There is toomuch reason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to derivefrom the greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of,no point of view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no moodworth waylaying.  And to be, departipris,an Impressionist without these!  O Velasquez!  Nor is literaturequite free from a like reproach in her own things.  An author,here and there, will make as though he had a word worth hearing—nay,worth over-hearing—a word that seeks to withdraw even while itis uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all too probably aplatitude.  But obviously, literature is not—as is the craftand mystery of painting—so at the mercy of a half-imposture, soguarded by unprovable honour.  For the art of painting is reservedthat shadowy risk, that undefined salvation.  May the gods guardus from the further popularising of Impressionism; for the point ofhonour is the simple secret of the few.

COMPOSURE

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

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more educativelyis a part of a language a school to him who chooses that part. Few languages offer the choice.  The fact that a choice is madeimplies the results and fruits of a decision.  The French authoris without these.  They are of all the heritages of the Englishwriter the most important.  He receives a language of dual derivation. He may submit himself to either University, whither he will take hisimpulse and his character, where he will leave their influence, andwhence he will accept their education.  The Frenchman has certainlya style to develop within definite limits; but he does not subject himselfto suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currentsof various race within one literature.  Such a choice of subjectionis the singular opportunity of the Englishman.  I do not mean toignore the necessary mingling.  Happily that mingling has beendone once for all for us all.  Nay, one of the most charming thingsthat a master of English can achieve is the repayment of the unitedteaching by linking their results so exquisitely in his own practice,that words of the two schools are made to meet each other with a surpriseand delight that shall prove them at once gayer strangers, and sweetercompanions, than the world knew they were.  Nevertheless thereremains the liberty of choice as to which school of words shall havethe place of honour in the great and sensitive moments of an author’sstyle: which school shall be used for conspicuousness, and which formultitudinous service.  And the choice being open, the perturbationof the pulses and impulses of so many hearts quickened in thought andfeeling in this day suggests to me a deliberate return to the recollectednessof the more tranquil language.  ‘Doubtless there is a placeof peace.’

A place of peace, not of indifference.  It is impossible notto charge some of the moralists of the last century with an indifferenceinto which they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudeseducated them.  Addison thus gave and took, until he was almostincapable of coming within arm’s-length of a real or spiritualemotion.  There is no knowing to what distance the removal of the‘appropriate sentiment’ from the central soul might haveattained but for the change and renewal in language, which came whenit was needed.  Addison had assuredly removed eternity far fromthe apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the ‘pleasinghope,’ the ‘fond desire;’ and the touch of war wasdistant from him who conceived his ‘repulsed battalions’and his ‘doubtful battle.’  What came afterwards, whensimplicity and nearness were restored once more, was doubtless journeyman’swork at times.  Men were too eager to go into the workshop of language. There were unreasonable raptures over the mere making of common words. ‘A hand-shoe! a finger-hat! a foreword!  Beautiful!’they cried; and for the love of German the youngest daughter of Chrysaleherself might have consented to be kissed by a grammarian.  Itseemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visibleis a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes;that its images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certainspiritualising and subtilising effect of alien derivations is a privilegeand an advantage incalculable—that to possess that half of thelanguage within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusionsare at play is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, withoutthe death.

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various inorigin, divided in race, within a master’s phrase.  The mostbeautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare. ‘Superfluous kings,’ ‘A lass unparalleled,’‘Multitudinous seas:’ we needed not to wait for the eighteenthcentury or for the nineteenth to learn the splendour of such encounters,of such differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and union.  Butit is well that we should learn them afresh.  And it is well, too,that we should not resist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhatto the side of the Latin.  Such a reaction is in some sort an ethicalneed for our day.  We want to quell the exaggerated decision ofmonosyllables.  We want the poise and the pause that imply vitalityat times better than headstrong movement expresses it.  And notthe phrase only but the form of verse might render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a touch a modern grief, as itranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son.  But it shouldnot be attempted without a distinct intention of submission on the partof the writer.  The couplet transgressed against, trespassed upon,shaken off, is like a law outstripped, defied—to the dignity neitherof the rebel nor of the rule.  To Letters do we look now for theguidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion takingus by the heart makes necessary.  Shall not the Thing more andmore, as we compose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, thehesitation, the leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

It is good to go, now and again—let the American phrase bepermitted—‘back of’ some of our contemporaries. We never desired them as coëvals.  We never wished to sharean age with them; we share nothing else with them.  And we deliverourselves from them by passing, in literature, into the company of anauthor who wrote before their time, and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist—intoa time before he was, or his Humour.  Obviously we go in like mannerbehind many another, but the funny writer of the magazines is suggestedbecause in reference to him our act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a reluctant ancestry, by an impertinentdescent.  It may be objected that such a connection is but a trivialthing to attribute, as a conspicuous incident, to a man of letters. So it is.  But the triviality has wide allusions.  It is oftena question which of several significant trivialities a critic shallchoose in his communication with a reader who does not insist that allthe grave things shall be told him.  And, by the way, are we eversufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few years havegiven to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues.  To go to Dr.Oliver Wendell Holmes’s period is to get rid of many things; togo to himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to standat its unprophetic source.  And we love such authors as Dickensand this American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of theircorrupt following.  We would make haste to ignore their posterity,and to assure them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs inthe bastardy.

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explainwhy the little humour in ElsieVennerand the BreakfastTableseries is not only the first thing the critic touches butthe thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to theworld.  The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his ‘socialentertainment,’ the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor Relation,almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty per cent.of the things they say—no more—are good enough to remainafter the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off.  But that halfis excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance—themost stimulating and fecundating of qualities—the humour of ithas set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth.  LikeMr. Lowell’s it was humour in dialect—not Irish dialectnor negro, but American; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until then she had felt within herself that there was nothing to laughat.  ‘Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman,’says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Rather, she takes herself seriouslywhen she makes the average spiritual woman: as seriously as that womantakes herself when she makes a novel.  And in a like mood Naturemade New England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities,with long views, with energetic provincialism.

If we remember best TheWonderfulOne-HossShay, we do so in spite of the religious and pathetic motiveof the greater part of Dr. Holmes’s work, and of his fancy, whichshould be at least as conspicuous as his humour.  It is fancy ratherthan imagination; but it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, thanthe larger art of imagery, which is apt to be vague, because it is intellectualand adult.  No grown man makes quite so definite mental imagesas does a child; when the mind ages it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguerpictures.  The young mind of Dr. Holmes has less intellectual imaginationthan intelligent fancy.  For example: ‘If you ever saw acrow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speakerand a lively listener.  The bird in sable plumage flaps heavilyalong his straightforward course, while the other sails round him, overhim, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather,shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and finally reachesthe crow’s perch at the same time the crow does;’ but thecomparison goes on after this at needless length, with explanations. Again: ‘That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things withoutopening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the door anddriven the reporter from the keyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic Virgin!to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses.’ And this, of the Landlady: ‘She told me her story once; it wasas if a grain that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualiseitself by a special narrative.’  ‘The riotous tumultof a laugh, which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features.’ ‘Think of the Old World—that part of it which is the seatof ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help marching in step withhis kind in the rear of such a procession.’  ‘Youngfolk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any givenlittle John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.’ And that exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movementand the inward tranquillity of the woods.  Such things are thebest this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, orbe bare thoughts shapely with their own truth.

Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes’s comment on life, and of thephrase wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has unpreoccupied and alert eyes.  Strangely enough, by theway, this watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be theslovenly observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse’sgallop, ‘skimming along within a yard of the ground.’ Who shall trust a man’s nimble eyes after this, when habit andcredulity have taught him?  Not an inch nearer the ground goesthe horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk.  But Dr. Holmes’svigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of NewEngland inland life.  Much careful literature besides has beenspent, after the example of ElsieVennerand the Autocrat,upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comfortsachieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest,the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of thecountry-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgarby undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by demonstrativeness—theirkindness by reticence, and their religion by candour.

As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibilitywhich Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in ElsieVenner,it is strange that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should presentit—not in its own insolubility but—in caricature. As though the secrets of the inherited body and soul needed to be heightenedby a bit of burlesque physiology!  It is in spite of our protestagainst the invention of Elsie’s horrible plight—a conceptionand invention which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentiallyfrivolous—that the serpent-maiden moves us deeply by her last‘Good night,’ and by the gentle phrase that tells us ‘Elsiewept.’  But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in proposingthe question of separate responsibility so as to convince every civilisedmind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change wrought therebyin the discipline of the world.  For Dr. Holmes incidentally letsus know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance anddestructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that negation is temperedby a working instinct of intolerance and destructiveness, will dealwith the felon, after all, very much in the manner achieved by the presentprevalent judicialness, unscientific though it may be.  And tosay this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has worked, througha number of books, to futile purpose.  His books are justifiedby something quite apart from his purpose.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The United States have produced authors not a few; among some namesnot the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or threenames of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more thanone man of letters—judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient,happy, temperate, delighted.  The colonial days, with the ‘painful’divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimentalperiod of ambition and attempts at a literature that should be youngas the soil and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, witha literature that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism ofthe army;—none of these periods of the national life could fitlybe represented by a man of letters.  And though James Russell Lowellwas the contemporary of the ‘transcendentalists,’ and aman of middle age when the South seceded, and though indeed his fameas a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through the smoke and the dust,through the gravity and the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the otherside, yet he was virtually the child of national leisure, of moderationand education, an American of the seventies and onwards.  He representedthe little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness, consiststhe excellence of Americans—an excellence they must be contentto share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them toabandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeededin definitely describing in words.  Mr. Lowell was a refutationof the fallacy that an American can never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothingmarks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarlinessis a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily,and yet would seem composed; he makes his allusions tread closely oneupon another, and there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealedvigilance, as to the effect their number and their erudition will produceupon the reader.  The American sensitiveness takes with him thatpleasantest of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of theloveable weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now andagain, ‘Well, what do you think of my country?’

Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style inthe thought that informs it—for they who make such a separationcan hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase,in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic—Irecognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion anda delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this criticalcentury.  Those small volumes, AmongMyBooksand MyStudyWindows, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism is the rarest thing in them.  I call noneto mind except the strange judgment on Dr. Johnson: ‘Our presentconcern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one. . . Take Dr. Johnsonas an instance.  The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shownany capacity for art,’ and so forth.  One wonders how Lowellread the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and thePreface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English writer’ssupreme art—art that declares itself and would not be hidden. But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival,a writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, andthey prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisitein sentencing.  His essay ‘On a Certain Condescension inForeigners’ is famous, but an equal fame is due to ‘My GardenAcquaintance’ and ‘A Good Word for Winter.’ His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one wonders how prattlersat a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich.  The birds thatnest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but his parishioners,so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does he become whenhe is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile.  And all thewhile it is the word that he is intent upon.  You may trace hisreading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garneredfor use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages.  You wonderat the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme inthe Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the briefverse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dantehas transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil somewhatnoble in Homer.  In his own use, and within his own English, hehas the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every wordnew for the day’s work.  He gave to the language, and didnot take from it; it gained by him, and lost not.  There are writersof English now at work who almost convince us of their greatness untilwe convict them on that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonablecost; they are glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leavebehind them.

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

DOMUS ANGUSTA

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large humandestiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for itsslight capacities.  Men have commonly complained of fate; but theircomplaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of thehuman lot.  A disproportion—all in favour of man—betweenman and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted inliterature: so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the habituallamentation as to the trouble of a ‘vain capacity,’ so wellexplained has it ever been.

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

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

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its inarticulateness—not,certainly, its fewness of words, but its inadequacy and imprecisionof speech.  For, doubtless, right language enlarges the soul asno other power or influence may do.  Who, for instance, but trustsmore nobly for knowing the full word of his confidence?  Who butloves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate syllable of histenderness?  There is a ‘pledging of the word,’ inanother sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise.  Thepoet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein apeculiar sanction.  And I suppose that even physical pain takeson an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united as thought andthe word.  Almost—not quite; in spite of its inexpressivespeech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond, as it were,its poor power.

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature,we know it to be general.  Life is great that is trivially transmitted;love is great that is vulgarly experienced.  Death, too, is a heroicvirtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissivein the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secretin the familiar.  It is destructive because it not only closesbut contradicts life.  Unlikely people die.  The one certainthing, it is also the one improbable.  A dreadful paradox is perhapswrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and yet is constrainedto die.  That is a true destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

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

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

REJECTION

Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world.  She has a penitentialor a vidual singleness.  We can conceive an antique world in whichlife, art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things;for us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of manythings.  We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not leteven a master’s work pass unfanned and unpurged.  Even amonghis phrases one shall be taken and the other left.  For he mayunawares have allowed the habitualness that besets this multitudinouslife to take the pen from his hand and to write for him a page or aword; and habitualness compels our refusals.  Or he may have allowedthe easy impulse of exaggeration to force a sentence which the meretruth, sensitively and powerfully pausing, would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of its own in human history.  Bydepreciating our language it has stimulated change, and has kept thecirculating word in exercise.  Our rejection must be alert andexpert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it.  It makes us shrewderthan we wish to be.  And, indeed, the whole endless action of refusalshortens the life we could desire to live.  Much of our resolutionis used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision. Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say withwhat loss to our treasury of quietness?  We are defrauded of ourinterior ignorance, which should be a place of peace.  We are forcedto confess more articulately than befits our convention with ourselves. We are hurried out of our reluctances.  We are made too much aware. Nay, more: we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewingbecomes almost inevitable.  As for the spiritual life—O weary,weary act of refusal!  O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulnessof fear!  ‘We live by admiration’ only a shortenedlife who live so much in the iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy there hides I know not what ultimate denial;if not on one side, on the other.  If joy is given to us withoutreserve, not so do we give ourselves to joy.  We withhold, we close. Having denied many things that have approached us, we deny ourselvesto many things.  Thus does ilgranrifiutodivide and rule our world.

Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice. Rejection has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured. When we garnish a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture morevarious, than might haunt the dreams of decorators.  There is nolimit to our rejections.  And the unconsciousness of the decoratorsis in itself a cause of pleasure to a mind generous, forbearing, anddelicate.  When we dress, no fancy may count the things we willnone of.  When we write, what hinders that we should refrain fromStyle past reckoning?  When we marry—.  Moreover, ifsimplicity is no longer set in a world having the great and beautifulquality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the qualityof refinement.  And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection. One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negativehas offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement is not negative, because it must be compassed by many negations. It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations,it exacts experience.  No slight or easy charge, then, is committedto such of us as, having apprehension of these things, fulfil the officeof exclusion.  Never before was a time when derogation was alwaysso near, a daily danger, or when the reward of resisting it was so great. The simplicity of literature, more sensitive, more threatened, and moreimportant than other simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shallnever relax the good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.

THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE

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

‘Seek to have less rather than more.’  It is a counselof perfection in TheImitationofChrist. And here, undoubtedly, is the secret of all that is virile and classicin the art of man, and of all in nature that is most harmonious withthat art.  Moreover, this is the secret of Italy.  How littledo the tourists and the poets grasp this latter truth, by the way—andthe artists!  The legend of Italy is to be gorgeous, and they haveher legend by rote.  But Italy is slim and all articulate; hermost characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished,with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loadedwith paint.  Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with theabrupt flatness of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloesby the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf—thesemake keen lines of slender vegetation.  And they own the seasonsby a gentle confession.  Rather than be overpowered by the clamorousproclamation of summer in the English woods, we would follow June tothis subtler South: even to the Campagna, where the cycle of the seasonspasses within such narrow limitations that insensitive eyes scarcelyrecognise it.  In early spring there is a fresher touch of greenon all the spaces of grass, the distance grows less mellow and moreradiant; by the coming of May the green has been imperceptibly dimmedagain; it blushes with the mingled colours of minute and numberlessflowers—a dust of flowers, in lines longer than those of oceanbillows.  This is the desert blossoming like a rose: not the obviousrose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various flower that gathersonce in the year in every hand’s-breadth of the wilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of harmonious seed,coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is gradually changedto the lighter harmonies of winter.  All this fine chromatic scalepasses within such modest boundaries that it is accused as a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have a still more delicatepleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea.  The passingfrom the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour to thecolour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the sapphireof the Mediterranean—the significance of these sea-seasons, sofar from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary senses,as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all fulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that is lovelyand moderate by the insistence of his descriptions.  He would findadjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to searchfor words for the white.  A white Mediterranean is not in the legend. Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white seais the flower of the breathless midsummer.  And in its clear, silentwaters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucentliving creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl.

But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it isin agricultural Italy that the littlelessmakes so undesignedly,and as it were so inevitably, for beauty.  The country that isformed for use and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a lesson in literature!  How feelingly it persuades us thatall except a very little of the ornament of letters and of life makesthe dulness of the world.  The tenderness of colour, the beautyof series and perspective, and the variety of surface, produced by thesmall culture of vegetables, are among the charms that come unsought,and that are not to be found by seeking—are never to be achievedif they are sought for their own sake.  And another of the delightsof the useful laborious land is its vitality.  The soil may bethin and dry, but man’s life is added to its own.  He hasembanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat inthe light shadows of olive leaves.  Thanks to the métayerland-tenure, man’s heart, as well as his strength, is given tothe ground, with his hope and his honour.  Louis Blanc’s‘point of honour of industry’ is a conscious impulse—itis not too much to say—with most of the Tuscan contadini; butas each effort they make for their master they make also for the breadof their children, it is no wonder that the land they cultivate hasa look of life.  But in all colour, in all luxury, and in all thatgives material for picturesque English, this lovely scenery for foodand wine and raiment has that littlelessto which wedesire to recall a rhetorical world.

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE’S ODES

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

But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet’swork with praise of an infrequent mood?  Infrequent such a moodmust needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic.  Tohave attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and graceas a true history of literature would show to be above price, even gaugedby the rude measure of rarity.  Transcendent simplicity could notpossibly be habitual.  Man lives within garments and veils, andart is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the lovelinessof his life; when they are rent asunder it is impossible not to be awarethat an overwhelming human emotion has been in action.  Thus Departure,IfIwereDead, AFarewell,Eurydice, TheToys, St. Valentine’sDay—though here there is in the exquisite imaginative playa mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling—group themselvesapart as the innermost of the poet’s achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in greatimages, and display—rather than, as do the poems first glancedat, betray—the beauties of poetic art.  Emotion is here,too, and in shocks and throes, never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos.  If any other poet has filled a cup with adraught so unalloyed, we do not know it.  Love and sorrow are purein TheUnknownEros; and its author has not refusedeven the cup of terror.  Against love often, against sorrow nearlyalways, against fear always, men of sensibility instantaneously guardthe quick of their hearts.  It is only the approach of the pangthat they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul and spirit,a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion defends himselfin the twinkling of an eye.  But through nearly the whole of CoventryPatmore’s poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch. Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch.  That is,his capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness ismore than the capacity of other men.  He endures therefore whatthey could but will not endure and, besides this, degrees that theycannot apprehend.  Thus, to have studied TheUnknownErosis to have had a certain experience—at least the impassionedexperience of a compassion; but it is also to have recognised a soulbeyond our compassion.

What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insistupon our knowing.  He leaves more liberty for a well-intentionedreader’s error than makes for peace and recollection of mind inreading.  That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable. It has the obscurity of profound clear waters.  What the poet chieflysecures to us is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowaland reception, does but rehearse the action of the union of God withhumanity—that there is no essential man save Christ, and no essentialwoman except the soul of mankind.  When the singer of a Song ofSongs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that humanlove had first borrowed the truths of the love of God.  The thoughtgrows gay in the three Psycheodes, or attempts a gaiety—thereader at least being somewhat reluctant.  How is it?  Mr.Coventry Patmore’s play more often than not wins you to but aslow participation.  Perhaps because some thrust of his has leftyou still tremulous.

But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divineallusion, is a most familiar truth.  Love that is passionate hasmuch of the impulse of gravitation—gravitation that is not falling,as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the upwardlove hesitates and is fugitive.  St. Francis Xavier asked thatthe day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry,‘prays forbearance;’ the child is ‘fretted with salliesof his mothers kisses.’  It might be drawing an image tooinsistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.

The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotionso authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s poetry, cannotbe otherwise than consummate.  Often the word has a fulness ofsignificance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation.  Thisis always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heartof the author’s work.  Without such wonderful rightness,simplicity of course is impossible.  Nor is that beautiful precisionless in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Ameliaand elsewhere.  The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of whatwe take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that proclaiman intemperate scorn—political, social, literary.  The poemsare but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects—wemight as well do something to justify their scorn by using the mostmodern of adjectives—and call them topical.  Here assuredlythere is no composure.  Never before did superiority bear itselfwith so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace—reluctance.

If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim,or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, weare free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal versethe laws of verse set for use—cradle verse and march-marking verse(we are, of course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelledinto the musical time).  Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative,can surely be bound by no time measures—if for no other reason,for this: that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed. Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whetherthe irregular metre of TheUnknownErosis happilyused except for the large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properlyso called.  Lycidas, the Mrs. AnneKilligrew,the Intimations, and Emerson’s Threnody, consideredmerely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly thatthey certainly move without checks as without haste.  So with thegraver Odes—much in the majority—of Mr. Coventry Patmore’sseries.  A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, amore touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetusof pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to befound in his versification.  And what movement of words has everexpressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as theyare expressed in a celestial line—the eighth in the ode TotheUnknownEros?  When we are sensible ofa metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear the heroic lineis the unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedlyadd together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with somethingof a jerk.  And this adding—as, for instance, of a line offour syllables preceding or following one of six—occurs now andthen, and even in such a masterly measure of music as AFarewell. It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about ofa boat.  In TheAngelintheHouse,and other earlier poems, Mr. Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabicstanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinlypacked.  Moreover those first poems had a composure which was theprelude to the peace of the Odes.  And even in his slightest workhe proves himself the master—that is, the owner—of wordsthat, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they had never beenprofaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that it is the voiceless of a poet than of the very Muse.

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two wordsin union or in antithesis.  They assuredly have an inseverableunion in the art of literature.  The songs of Innocence and Experienceare for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; butto take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these inplace of the virginal fruit of thought—whereas one would hardlyconsent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs—isto forego Innocence and Experience at once and together.  Obviously,Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocenceof a singularly solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands intoother men’s histories, and does not give to his own word the commonsanction of other men’s summaries and conclusions.  ThereforeI bind Innocence and Experience in one, and take them as a sign of thenecessary and noble isolation of man from man—of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to forego that manner of personal separateness,and to use the things of others, I think I would rather appropriatetheir future than their past.  Let me put on their hopes, and thecolours of their confidence, if I must borrow.  Not that I wouldburden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this wouldbe more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetryconsider this matter.  These are the love-poets who have no reluctancein adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have noteven been introduced.  Their verse is full of ready-made memories,various, numerous, and cruel.  No single life—supposing itto be a liberal life concerned with something besides sex—couldquite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much déception. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one’sown the praeterita(say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men whohelped him—not to live but—to have lived; it is necessaryto have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoardof erotic remembrances with all kinds of poets.

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

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

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

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

I named Leech but now.  He was, in all things essential, Dickens’scontemporary.  And accordingly the married woman and her childare humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly.  For himshe is moderately and dully ridiculous.  What delights him as humorousis that her husband—himself wearisome enough to die of—isweary of her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her.  Itamuses him that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness,to the annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have nodesire to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosettein its hat—a burlesque baby—should be a grotesque objectof her love, for that too makes subtly for her abasement.  CharlesKeene, again—another contemporary, though he lived into a laterand different time.  He saw little else than common forms of humanignominy—indignities of civic physique, of stupid prosperity,of dress, of bearing.  He transmits these things in greater proportionthan he found them—whether for love of the humour of them, orby a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight—oneis not sure which is the impulse.  The grossness of the vulgaritiesis rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certainsensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we getconvinced that real apprehension—real apprehensiveness—wouldnot have insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them throughalmost a whole career.  There is one drawing in the Punchof years ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possibleto even the invention of that day.  A drunken citizen, in the usualbroadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and hisumbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when sheawakes, the wife asleep at his side in a nightcap.  Every one whoknows Keene’s work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure wasdrawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeoiswhiskers were indicated.  This obscene drawing is matched by manyequally odious.  Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life,of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law;ill-dressed men with whisky—ill-dressed women with tempers; everythingthat is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawinga bridegroom with shambling sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous;she is a widow, and she answers, ‘No, never was.’ In all these things there is very little humour.  Where Keene achievedfun was in the figures of his schoolboys.  The hint of tendernesswhich in really fine work could never be absent from a man’s thoughtof a child or from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subjectin hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene’s designs; nevertheless,we acknowledge that here is humour.  It is also in some of hisclerical figures when they are not caricatures, and certainly in ‘Robert,’the City waiter of Punch.  But so irresistible is the derisionof the woman that all Charles Keene’s persistent sense of vulgarityis intent centrally upon her.  Never for any grace gone astrayis she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for prattle, orfor beloved dress; but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsiveperson of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates herignoble rights.  If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whomis her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of theExhibition of 1851, or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particularform of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: thehabit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereasa silly man is not reproached through his sex.  But the vulgarityof which I have written here was distinctively English—the mostEnglish thing that England had in days when she bragged of many another—andit was not able to survive an increased commerce of manners and letterswith France.  It was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.

Related articles