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Essays

by Alice Meynell · English · Gutenberg #1434 · 380,683 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Essays

Author: Alice Meynell


        
Release date: August 1, 1998 [eBook #1434]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Original publication: Burns & Oates, 1914

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1434

Credits: Transcribed from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ***




Transcribed from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





Essays by Alice Meynell


Contents:

WINDS AND WATERS

Ceres' Runaway
Wells
Rain
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Rushes and Reeds

IN A BOOK ROOM

A Northern Fancy
Pathos
Anima Pellegrina!
A Point of Biography
The Honours of Mortality
Composure
The Little Language
A Counterchange
Harlequin Mercutio

COMMENTARIES

Laughter
The Rhythm of Life
Domus Angusta
Innocence and Experience
The Hours of Sleep
Solitude
Decivilized

WAYFARING

The Spirit of Place
Popular Burlesque
Have Patience, Little Saint
At Monastery Gates
The Sea Wall

ARTS

Tithonus
Symmetry and Incident
The Plaid
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
Victorian Caricature
The Point of Honour

"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"

The Colour of Life
The Horizon
In July
Cloud
Shadows

WOMEN AND BOOKS

The Seventeenth Century
Mrs. Dingley
Prue
Mrs. Johnson
Madame Roland

"THE DARLING YOUNG"

Fellow Travellers with a Bird
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
The Unready
That Pretty Person
Under the Early Stars
The Illusion of Historic Time




CERES' RUNAWAY


One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a
Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the charming
quarry escapes, as it does in Rome.  The Municipality does not exist that
would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high
places of the city.  It is true that there have been the famous
captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover
a less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in
some miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed in
weeding the roadside.  They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the
ancient stones--rows of little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper
Tooting; one wonders why.  The governors of the city will not succeed in
making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a
thriving commerce.  Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and
shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups.  "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,"
says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid.  But a
couple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring--not
that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, but
because flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.

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

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

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

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




WELLS


The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
life.  A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live.  They are covered, they
are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
earthly or heavenly.  There is not one of the circumstances of this
capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style.  For
style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as
it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret
ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be
secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.

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

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of the
beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighter
actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way.  In a word,
the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterous
provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, and
decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas the
artist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means.  The
first hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which
we all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the second
lifted up the arches of the aqueduct.

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

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

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods.  The hiding-place
that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, at
their deepest, in communication with the open sky.  No other mine is so
visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to
think of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all charged
with shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying
that remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness.  Not a
pool without this visitant, or without passages of stars.  As for the
wells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as the
daily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter
fitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those
deeps.

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

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

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

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

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




RAIN


Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar
rain.  The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the
clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate
points.

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

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

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

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other.  Rain, as the
end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow.  It is a threat
and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps
are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
battlements of heaven.




THE TOW PATH


A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must
have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird your
shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even
path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side of meadows.

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain," only
too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the
riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are
swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green.  The line
drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it
makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easy
power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No dead weight follows you as you tow.  The burden is willing; it depends
upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of
helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught
or charge you with a make-believe.  It accompanies, it almost
anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so much as to give your
briskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to still
more nimble heels.  All your haste, moreover, does but waken a more
brilliantly-sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to
carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure,
enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free.  No
watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path.  What little
outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothly towed.
Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch the
birds, or listen to them.  They fly in such lofty air that they seem to
turn blue in the blue sky.  A flash of their flight shows silver for a
moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as
mountains are blue, and horizons.  The days are so still that you do not
merely hear the cawing of the rooks--you overhear their hundred private
croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by
wings.

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

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




THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS


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

These reflected heavens are different heavens.  On a darker and more
vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the
Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a
painter's part in setting their splendid subject free.  Two movements
shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of
constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague
bats flying.  The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.
Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and
returns, escapes and returns.  Fitful in the steady night, those
constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of
gleaming life.  You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them
seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but
deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could
really show such altered stars.  The flood lets a constellation fly, as
Juliet's "wanton" with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again.  At
moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-
set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars,
and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one
broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth
flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible,
mobile, and unalterable.  There is nothing else at once so keen and so
elusive.

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

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the
river Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on all
the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer.  It is
a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the
wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not
flying.  The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is
fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather.  But it gets disabled
if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feet
are wet.  On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the
waters.

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




RUSHES AND REEDS


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

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

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

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

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

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in
England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed
(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in
fact made the landscape.  Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere,
rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not
conspicuous; but here it is ownership.  But the rushes are a gipsy
people, amongst us, yet out of reach.  The landowner, if he is rather a
gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.  But if he is a man of
sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts.  His property, he
says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a
wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and
obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of
increase.  We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their
cargo.  It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his
neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his
showers elsewhere.  But the great thing is the view.  A well-appointed
country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own.  But
he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
happen to be caught by a region of rushes.  The water is his--he had the
pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time.  But the
bulrushes, the reeds!  One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
death.

They are probably outlaws.  They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon
margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road.  No
wild flowers, however wild, are rebels.  The copses and their primroses
are good subjects, the oaks are loyal.  Now and then, though, one has a
kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees.
Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of
fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers
(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with
which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes
seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
They are suspect.  One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.

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




A NORTHERN FANCY


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

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

At least, it is principally a northern fancy.  Would the steadfast
Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high
note, so delicately untuned?  She who would not be prodigal of words
might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed
at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the
strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out

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

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

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth.  Of all the songs of
the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is
nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have
died for love."  To one who has always recognized the greatness of this
poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,
it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in _Modern Painters_,
where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination.  It
is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara
died") who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of
the insane.

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

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

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and not
singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring."  Wordsworth,
who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes the crazed one a
wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by chance, rare as an
Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-

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

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

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, than
Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the maid
crazed by love.  They left her to her light immortality; and she might be
drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her.  She
might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her heart was light after
trouble.  "Many light hearts and wings"--she had at least the bird's
heart, and the poet lent to her voice the wings of his verses.

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

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

Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her.  She had no
child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had long forgotten
how it died.  She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she, with
a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "good-morrow" rings from
Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow.  She knows that her love is dead, and
her perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of flowers than to the
old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia.  Strange was
the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now.  The world has
become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and
more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will
never recover, that sweetness.  Blake's was a more starry madness.
Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to the
legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful
but dull, and sings of her own "burning brow," as Herrick's wild one
never sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks of
flowers, or, rather, "the herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the
surest of all signs that the strange inspiration of the past centuries
was lost, vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself.  It had been wholly
English, whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English.

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




PATHOS


A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine:
"For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most real
personage of the piece, and not without some hints of 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 or
their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of the
French Byronic age was gay, done so much for us?  Is there to be no
laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham real-
life?  So it would seem.  Even what the great master has not shown us in
his work, that your critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it.
By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy he will come at it.  It is
of little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it is
precisely Snug who stirs their emotions so painfully.  Not the lion; they
can make shift to see through that: but the Snug within, the human Snug.
And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the
more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old
Double; and Harpagon is the tragic figure of Monomania; and as to Argan,
ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de Monsieur" must have been wrought by
those prescriptions!  _Et patati, et patata_.

It may be only too true that the actual world is "with pathos delicately
edged."  For Malvolio living we should have had living sympathies; so
much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a
credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a
chambermaid.  By an actual Bottom the weaver our pity might be reached
for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource
condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance.
But is not life one thing and is not art another?  Is it not the
privilege of literature to treat things singly, without the
after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many-
sided world?  Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge?
Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may
laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without
remorse, without reluctance.  If great creating Nature has not assumed
for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the
right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, of
taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day.  Art and
Nature are complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with one
another.  And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the corner,
as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat--(the
borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this
pass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general lack of a sense
of the separation between Nature and her sentient mirror in the mind.  In
some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself,
all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he is
impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is light-
heartedly capricious.  And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives
us--or used to give us, for even the word is obsolete--the pleasure of
_oubliance_.

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




ANIMA PELLEGRINA!


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

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

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

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

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

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be
but a property of the turn of speech.  It is rather the profounder
advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very
language keeps in store.  In another tongue you may sing, "happy who
looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the little
meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an
antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram?  Yet it is not
worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be
glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase _is_
intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the
occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm
may still be unknown to Englishmen--"_piuttosto bruttini_."  See what
an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but
tolerant and familiar.  You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art
of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they
be condemned.  _Brutto_--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for any
language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged
internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the
European concert.  But _bruttino_ is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive
that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence,
and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the
rear--"rather than not."  "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed
and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no
further.  After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be
composed of brass instruments.

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

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

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to
character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferable
speech.  And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languages
for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to
their own garden enclosed, without recognition.  Never may they be
disregarded or confounded with the universal stock.  If I would not so
neglect _piuttosto bruttini_, how much less a word dominating
literature!  And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no great
English author but has abundant possession.  No need to recall them.  But
even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full
consciousness of their birthright.  Thus does a man who was hardly an
author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights.  He has
incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that
time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and the
head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local
rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectual
place--_Felice chi vi mira_--or the art-critic's phrase--_piuttosto
bruttini_--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--who
would not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has given
us, but that has kept for its own--_ensoleille_?  Nowhere else is the sun
served with such a word.  It is not to be said or written without a
convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light and
radiation.  The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the
accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; therefore
neither England nor Italy can rival it.  But there needed also the senses
of the French--those senses of which they say far too much in every
second-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, but
which they have matched in their time with some inimitable words.  Perhaps
that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness
of the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830.  For I do not think
_ensoleille_ to be a much older word--I make no assertion.  Whatever its
origin, may it have no end!  They cannot weary us with it; for it seems
as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side,
vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air
is light, and white things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white
cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow.  A word of the sense of
sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the paraphrase is
but a picture.  For _ensoleille_ I would claim the consent of all
readers--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit of that French.  But
perhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes _le jour
s'annonce_ also sacred.

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




A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret
because it is their only privacy.  You may watch or may surprise
everything else.  The nest is retired, not hidden.  The chase goes on
everywhere.  It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no
perpetual fear.  The songs are all audible.  Life is undefended,
careless, nimble and noisy.

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

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




THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY


The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, to
devote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustrated
papers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly a
confession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for.  Fifty
years ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were the
commonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty of
things of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and they
looked forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures; so that
what to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become the
problem of the nation and of the householder alike.  To-day men have
began to learn that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests.
Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that are
doomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows a
most dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process," and for
oblivion.

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




COMPOSURE


Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure do
these words bring for their own great disquiet!  Without the remoteness
of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly.
In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an
aloofness of language is needful.  Johnson feared death.  Did his noble
English control and postpone the terror?  Did it keep the fear at some
courteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the
very act of the leap and lapse of mortality?  Doubtless there is in
language such an educative power.  Speech is 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 counterchange, returns to
the writer's touch or breath his own intention, articulate: this is his
note.  Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been
thought, of the power and the responsibility of the note.  Of the
legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by
comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with
the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers
who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more
educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that
part.  Few languages offer the choice.  The fact that a choice is made
implies the results and fruits of a decision.  The French author is
without these.  They are of all the heritages of the English writer the
most important.  He receives a language of dual derivation.  He may
submit himself to either University, whither he will take his impulse and
his character, where he will leave their influence, and whence he will
accept their re-education.  The Frenchman has certainly a style to
develop within definite limits; but he does not subject himself to
suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of
various race within one literature.  Such a choice of subjection is the
singular opportunity of the Englishman.  I do not mean to ignore the
necessary mingling.  Happily that mingling has been done once for all for
us all.  Nay, one of the most charming things that a master of English
can achieve is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their
results so exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools
are made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove
them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world knew
they were.  Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to which
school of words shall have the place of honour in the great and sensitive
moments of an author's style: which school shall be used for
conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service.  And the choice
being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses of so many hearts
quickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a deliberate
return to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language.  "Doubtless
there is a place of peace."

A place of peace, not of indifference.  It is impossible not to charge
some of the moralists of the eighteenth century with an indifference into
which they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes
educated them.  Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable
of coming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion.  There is
no knowing to what distance the removal of the "appropriate sentiment"
from the central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal
in language, which came when it was needed.  Addison had assuredly
removed eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato
hailed the "pleasing hope," the "fond desire"; and the touch of war was
distant from him who conceived his "repulsed battalions" and his
"doubtful battle."  What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness
were restored once more, was doubtless journeyman's work 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 Chrysale herself might have
consented to be kissed by a grammarian.  It seemed to be forgotten that a
language with all its construction visible is a language little fitted
for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; and
that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effect
of alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable--that
to possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurk
and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security
of a dead tongue, without the death.

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in
origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase.  The most beautiful
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 eighteenth century or for the nineteenth or
for the twentieth to learn the splendour of such encounters, of such
differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and union.  But it is well that
we should learn them afresh.  And it is well, too, that we should not
resist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the
Latin.  Such a reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day.  We
want to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables.  We want the
poise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong
movement expresses it.  And not the phrase only but the form of verse
might render us timely service.  The controlling couplet might stay with
a touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for
his son.  But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of
submission on the part of the writer.  The couplet transgressed against,
trespassed upon, used loosely, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the
dignity neither of the rebel nor of the rule.

To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the very
closeness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes necessary.  Shall
not the Thing more and more, as we compose ourselves to literature,
assume the honour, the hesitation, the leisure, the reconciliation of the
Word?




THE LITTLE LANGUAGE


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

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes;
inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina
and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no
dialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with so
much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their almost
unwritten tongue.  Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into the homes of
dialect, does but show us how the language staggers under such a stress,
how it breaks down, and resigns that office.  One of the finest of the
characters in the ranks of his admirable fiction is that old manageress
of the narrow things of the house whose daughter is dying insane.  I have
called the dialect a shelter.  This it is; but the poor lady does not
cower within; her resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homely
refuge, suffering and inarticulate.  The two dramatists in their several
centuries also recognized the inability of the dialect.  They laid none
but light loads upon it.  They caused it to carry no more in their homely
plays than it carries in homely life.  Their work leaves it what it
was--the talk of a people talking much about few things; a people like
our own and any other in their lack of literature, but local and all
Italian in their lack of silence.

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

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

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

These writers in Venetian--they are named because in no other Italian
dialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so excellent as
Signor Fogazzaro's--have left the unlettered local language in which they
loved to deal, to its proper limitations.  They have not given weighty
things into its charge, nor made it heavily responsible.  They have added
nothing to it; nay, by writing it they might even be said to have made it
duller, had it not been for the reader and the actor.  Insomuch as the
intense expressiveness of a dialect--of a small vocabulary in the mouth
of a dramatic people--lies in the various accent wherewith a southern
citizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to restore
its life to the written phrase.  In dialect the author is forbidden to
search for the word, for there is none lurking for his choice; but of
tones, allusions, and of references and inferences of the voice, the
speaker of dialect is a master.  No range of phrases can be his, but he
has the more or the less confidential inflection, until at times the
close communication of the narrow street becomes a very conspiracy.

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

The middle class--the _piccolo mondo_--that shares Italian dialect with
the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either the opulent
or the indigent of the same city.  They have moreover the busy
intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its keenest.  Their
speech keeps them a sequestered place which is Italian, Italian beyond
the ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration.  And--what
is pretty to observe--the speakers are well conscious of the characters
of this intimate language.  An Italian countryman who has known no other
climate will vaunt, in fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like
manner he is conscious of the local character of his language, and tucks
himself within it at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad.  A
properly spelt letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs
Dingley and Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language,
ill-written, was "snug."

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler
language insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller?
discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despair
thus prattle and gibber and stammer?  Rather perhaps this departure from
English is but an excursion after gaiety.  The ideal lovers, no doubt,
would be so simple as to be grave.  That is a tenable opinion.
Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and age by age they have
exchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless never
studied, and perhaps never loved.  Why so?  They might have chosen broken
English of other sorts--that, for example, which was once thought amusing
in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman--a
complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please
anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams;
or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English devised by Mrs
Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian.  But none of these found
favour.  The choice has always been of the language of children.  Let us
suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in the Titian
picture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a background
of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the inspirers of those prattlings.  "See
then thy selfe likewise art lyttle made," says Spenser's Venus to her
child.

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




A COUNTERCHANGE


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

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

There is, in short, a general international counterchange.  It is
altogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with its
extremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make a
phrase, and another should have and enjoy it.  And, in fact, there are
certain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literary
German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all
severity to be deprived.  For Germans often tell you of words in their
own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not be
translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer
hands.  There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a
better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with the
thought it secures, would find also their advantage.

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

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in
all Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, either
majestic or comic.  To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a
frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no
longer detects.  A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers
to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter" for
a whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to the
less practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist.

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

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

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

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

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




HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO


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

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody,
the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial
one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere.  He is officious
and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he
tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin
comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory
survives differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his
friend."  What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio is
chiefly this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully
capable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he lived
indeed, he dies indeed.  Another thing that marks the close of a career
of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck.  Who ever heard of
Arlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his sword-play, overtaken by
tragedy?  His time had surely come.  The gay companion was to bleed;
Tybalt's sword had made a way.  'Twas not so deep as a well nor so wide
as a church-door, but it served.

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

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

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

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




LAUGHTER


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

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

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant
signalling, an endless recognition.  Forms of approach are remitted.  And
the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no
gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and
down the pages of the paper and the book.  See, again, the theatre.  A
somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our
present stage that little else can claim--paradox again apart--to be
taken seriously.

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away from
the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittest
for children, and unfitted for the beard.  Laughter is everywhere and at
every moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and in
some degree distinctive of men, and no mean part of their prerogative and
privilege.  The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are not
men are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation.  They will not
refuse explanation.  And there is little upon which a man will so value
himself as upon that sense, "in England, now."

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

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among such a
people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who laugh
without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who perhaps
first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that they were not
gloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not that excuse; and
many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to what is humorous and what
is not.  This last is the most harmless of all kinds of superfluous
laughter.  When it carries an apology, a confession of natural and genial
ignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs a laugh of hazard and
experiment, she is to be more than forgiven.  What she must not do is to
laugh a laugh of instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that was
never worth the taking.

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

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

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

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

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




THE RHYTHM OF LIFE


If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods
towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards
recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be
intolerable to-morrow; to-day it is easy to bear, but the cause has not
passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to
leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not
remain--it returns.  Gaiety takes us by a dear 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 instead of a discovery.  No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there
have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.  But
Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In
his cell alone with the elements--"What wouldst thou more than these? for
out of these were all things made"--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the
soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight.  And "rarely, rarely
comest thou," sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight.  Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus
compelled.  _That_ flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or
hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the "Imitation" should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess
at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls were in close touch with
the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no
infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from
them the knowledge of recurrences.  _Eppur si muove_.  They knew that
presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon
its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.  They knew
that what is approaching 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 interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and
retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To live in constant efforts
after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production,
or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live
without either rest or full activity.  The souls of certain of the
saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the most
complete subjection to the law of periodicity.  Ecstasy and desolation
visited them by seasons.  They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the
interior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world.  They
rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their
hearts.  Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the
course of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.
And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour.  Few
poets have fully recognized the metrical absence of their muse.  For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon.  On her depend the tides; and
she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently
irrigate lands where rain is rare.  More than any other companion of
earth is she the Measurer.  Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by
that name.  Her metrical phases are the symbol of the order of
recurrence.  Constancy in approach and in departure is the reason of her
inconstancies.  Juliet will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the
moon; but Juliet did not live to know that love itself has tidal
times--lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interior
heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward
alteration in the beloved.  For man--except those 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 experience upon which cumulative evidence is long
lacking.  It is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt so
definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance.  That
young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young
ignorance.  So is the early hope of great achievement.  Life seems so
long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the
intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations, between
actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep.  And life looks
impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and
unfailing refreshment.  It would be for their peace to learn that there
is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not too
audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant to
contain.  Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life
will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in
its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all
things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.




DOMUS ANGUSTA


The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities.  Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot.  A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a "vain capacity," so well explained has it ever been.

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

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia.  But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet.  Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness.  And yet for every vain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates.  It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires.  The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity.  On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; 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 imprecision of speech.  For, doubtless, right language
enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.  Who, for
instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his
confidence?  Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate
syllable of his tenderness?  There is a "pledging of the word," in
another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise.  The poet
pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar
sanction.  And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it
not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase.  Consciousness and the
word are almost as closely united as thought and the word.  Almost--not
quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, 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 heroic virtue; and
to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the
indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the
familiar.  It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradicts
life.  Unlikely people die.  The one certain thing, it is also the one
improbable.  A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature
that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die.  That is a true
destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.
It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion.  Mrs.
Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.  Considering her mental powers,
by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly
inappropriate.  Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to
an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies.  More than Promethean was the
audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark.  But otherwise the
grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more
significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of
rhetoric; he is perdurable 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 woman in the world.  I thank
my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the
French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at.  But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in a
book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from 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 looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting.  To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--"wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?"




INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE


I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in
union or in antithesis.  They assuredly have an inseverable union in the
art of literature.  The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each
poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the
cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the
virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them
for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forgo
Innocence and Experience at once and together.  Obviously, Experience can
be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly
solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's
histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other
men's summaries and conclusions.  Therefore I bind Innocence and
Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble
isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness.  But if I had a mind to
forgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of
others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.
Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
borrow.  Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory
with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry
consider this matter.  These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in
adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even
been introduced.  Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various,
numerous, and cruel.  No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life
concerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so much
experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_.  To achieve that
tone in its fullness it is necessary to take for one's own the
_praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not
to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than
any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all
kinds of poets.

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

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence.  Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption,
of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were
thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.
This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither
love nor remember in common.




THE HOURS OF SLEEP


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, has
the extremest sense of light.  Almost the most shining lines in English
poetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake, written
confessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, and
those dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is as dark as he
can make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the green
plain and the river is too bright for day.  So, indeed, is another
brightness of Blake's, which is also, in his poem, a child's dream, and
was certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in which he woke to
write the Songs of Innocence:-

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

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

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

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




SOLITUDE


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

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs.  Of many of their kingdoms they are
ignorant, but of this most ignorant.  They have not guessed that they own
for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
obscure enfranchisement.  They do not claim even the solitude of closed
corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
so much.  For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
to wish.

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

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

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

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

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
inaccessible?  There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
drawing of J.F. Millet.  The little figure is away, aloof.  The girl
stands so when the painter is gone.  She waits so on the sun for the
closing of the hours of pasture.  Millet has her as she looks, out of
sight.

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

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

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

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

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

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so
there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.  It
is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression.  It is
the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready
glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have
neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no
flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the
street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.




DECIVILIZED


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

But decivilized man is not peculiar to new soil.  The English town, too,
knows him in all his dailiness.  In England, too, he has a literature, an
art, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price.
Trash, in the fullness of its insimplicity and cheapness, is impossible
without a beautiful past.  Its chief characteristic--which is futility,
not failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory
reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art,
especially the utterance by words.  Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic
quality, purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the
antecedents of trash.  It is after them; it is also, alas, because of
them.  And nothing can be much sadder that such a proof of what may
possibly be the failure of derivation.

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

Such is our confidence in a descent we know.  But, of a sequel which of
us is sure?  Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent
depreciation?  And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary
tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour?  Or who
shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when
and how the bastardy befalls?  The decivilized have every grace as the
antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of
their mediocrities.  No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or
laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by
some living sweetness once.  Nor are the decivilized to blame as having
in their own persons possessed civilization and marred it.  They did not
possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
inclination for things mentally inexpensive.  And the tendency can hardly
do other than continue.

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




THE SPIRIT OF PLACE


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

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

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

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

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

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay
measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile march
with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies.
If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curious
local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights.  Their way is
for the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not
hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the
sub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strength
that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a little
art, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means.  If
it were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for
those melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the
bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and what
effect of liberty.

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

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

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

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




POPULAR BURLESQUE


The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the
motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with
the sound of processionals and of recessionals--a certain popular version
of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of
derision raised by the makers of this likeness of something unworshipful
on the earth beneath, so much the more am I convinced that the national
humour is that of banter, and that no other kind of mirth so gains as
does this upon the public taste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT


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

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
nothing else.  Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the
beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning."  When
complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but
what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with
more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of
manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of.  To the
simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a
striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible
act of giving.  We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste
answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example.  An
elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral
_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain
number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally
translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
nothing else can do it.  Would it were possible to present the phrase to
English readers in all its own helpless good-humour.  The excellent woman
who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot
recall it without a smile.  To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all
speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached,
and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect
"familiar, but by no means vulgar."  Besides, even if our Englishwoman
could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity
of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so
complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of
excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal.  And everywhere in
the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to
beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can
hardly reply without kindness.  Where the tourist is thoroughly well
known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the
rich; but about the byways and remoter places there must still be some
dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive
haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by
travellers.

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

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

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

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our
literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by
tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been
stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led
underground.  The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of
the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have
ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears.  But it seems
that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the
subject of a Spanish song.

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




AT MONASTERY GATES


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

The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of the
dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, and
backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a
cleft high up among the hills of Wales.  The brown habit is this, and
these are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and
loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky.  Just such a
Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final
crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the
encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night.  The same order
of friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the
Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteen
chapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine.

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

The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it is
modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
brothers of an earlier time.  No one, except the journalists of
yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old
world."  No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the
excursionists.

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

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at
them without obtrusive curiosity.  It was only from a Salvation Army girl
that you heard the brutal word of contempt.  She had come to the place
with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcome
to do, within the monastery grounds.  She stood, a figure for Bournemouth
pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbrian
saint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and
between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries
continually since the coming of the friars.  One might have asked of her
the kindness of a fellow-feeling.  She and he alike were so habited as to
show the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business."  By
some such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted to
include her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him.  Or one might have
asked of her the condescension of forbearance.  "Only fancy," said the
Salvation Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy making
such a fool of one's self!"

The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran's
ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy.  As a pocket
it relieves the over-burdened hands.  A bottle of the local white wine
made by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, is
carried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates.  The
friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and
not only to make, but also to toss them.  Those who chanced to be in the
room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly.  But that was
the last that was seen of his handiwork.  Victor Hugo sings in _La
Legende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creature
is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by
quite an ordinary and a simple pancake.  It was clean gone, and there was
an end of it.  Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake
from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by the
spectators.  It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to
meditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident was
explained.

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

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

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
sound of that evening prayer.  The care of them is the central work of
the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is
principally a place of studies.  So much elect intellect and strength of
heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world!  True, the friars are not
doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair.  These
"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing,
hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--upon
the Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, or
reluctantly jostling other men for places.  They might be among the
involuntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof is
a discouraged fiction.  There is absolutely no limit to the superfluous
activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by the
dwellers within such walls as these.  The output--again a beautiful
word--of the age is lessened by this abstention.  None the less hopes the
stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery
gates.




THE SEA WALL


A singular love of walls is mine.  Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright shadows of
grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick above
into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, with
its too many windows and too few walls, the city which of all capitals
takes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some other
attraction or aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at the
base, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the inexpressive peering
of windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area,"
and by the helpless hollows of shop-fronts.

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

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

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as secures
many a mile of gentle English coast to the east.  The Dutch dyke has not
that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look of
haste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumbered
Dutch fields to look at the sea, there is nothing in the least like
England; and even the Englishman of to-day is apt to share something of
the old perversity that was minded to cast derision upon the Dutch in
their encounters with the tides.

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slight
derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more romantic, and, as
it were, more slender.  We English, once upon a time, did especially
flout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth the
writing.  It may be no more than a brief perversity that has set a number
of our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II.  Perhaps, even, it is
no more than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense of
the bourgeois.  The bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he is
were he to stand up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of
his dismay is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton
art.  And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginary
audience?  Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are not
the least of the makings of an author.  A few men and women he achieves
within his books; but others does he create without, and to those figures
of all illusion makes the appeal of his art.  More candid is the author
who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart.  He has
at least a living hearer.

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

Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment.  They are so
still; or they were so certainly in the day when a great novelist found
the smallness of some South German States to be the subject of unsating
banter.  The German scenes at the end of "Vanity Fair," for example, may
prove how much the ridicule of mere smallness, fewness, poverty (and not
even real poverty, privation, but the poverty that shows in comparison
with the gold of great States, and is properly in proportion) rejoiced
the sense of humour in a writer and moralist who intended to teach
mankind to be less worldly.  In Andrew Marvell's day they were even more
candid.  The poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincere
laughter of the inmost man, the true, infrequent laughter of the heart.
Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughter--at leanness, at hunger,
cold, and solitude--in the face of the world, and in the name of
literature, in one memorable satire.  I speak of "Flecno, an English
Priest in Rome," wherein nothing is spared--not the smallness of the
lodging, nor the lack of a bed, nor the scantiness of clothing, nor the
fast.

   "This basso-rilievo of a man--"

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




TITHONUS


"It was resolved," said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of the
panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and other
patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewing
from time to time.  The colours, therefore,"--and here is the passage to
be noted--"are all mixed with wax liquefied with petroleum; and the wax
surface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax is left time to form an
imperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of the
stone with a chisel if it was desired to remove it."  Not, apparently,
that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance,
could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" is
driven in and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is
nothing possible to cut away by any industry.  In this humorous form of
ornament we are beforehand with Posterity.  Posterity is baffled.

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

It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and not
to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternal
legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this former
human wish.  If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, which
yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers' who arrested the
moving man, and inhibited the moving God.  The sixteenth century and a
certain part of the age immediately following seem to be times when the
desire had conspicuously become a passion.  Say the middle of the
sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in
England--for in those days we were somewhat in the rear.  _There_ is the
obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure upon
power.  _Then_ was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign and
style.  Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate of
the unborn.  The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to come were to be
as the day then present would have them, if the dead hand--the living
hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death--could by
any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be
more than willing to build for itself.  The day may soon come when no man
will do even so much without some impulse of apology.  Posterity is not
compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor
to look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone building
in view for an age or two.  We can hardly avoid some of the forms of
tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would
consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleum
and this wax.

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament,
and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future.  How the
frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be made
secure against all mischances--smoke, damp, "the risk of bulging," even
accidents attending the washing of upper floors--all was discussed in
confidence with the public.  It was impossible for anyone who read the
papers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities of
technical knowledge.  From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all
kinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to
defeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient and
effacing time.

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date,
decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of
architecture.  Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place with
unparalleled obstinacy.  They had not the malice of the petroleum that
does violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an indomitable patience.
Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all his
work--refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgences--by
a perseverance that nothing could discourage.  Who has not known somewhat
indifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes?
Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in
the case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years,
with frequent stirrings.  This was in order that the whole fresco, when
at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality.
Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those mechanical means that
should avert the risk of bulging already mentioned.  He neglected no
detail.  He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the
laws of nature, to frustrate them.  Gravitation found him prepared, and
so did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents.  Against
bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possible
trickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of the
human conspiracy.  In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand
well.  It would have been more just--so the present age thinks of these
preserved walls--if the day that admired them had had them exclusively,
and our day had been exempt.  The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages
have undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?

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

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

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

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

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run in
time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their
subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid
counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they
silenced by legislation and yet more legislation.  They wrote in statute
books; they would have written their will across the skies.  Their hearts
would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials
that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever
doubt lest posterity might try their lock.  Perhaps they did never so
much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their
prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.

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

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




SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT


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

Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched by
Japanese example of Incident and the Unique.  Music had attained the
noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too,
symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phase
and of fragment, succeeded.  The sense of symmetry is strong in a
complete melody--of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least
stationary form--balance; whereas the _leit-motif_ is isolated.  In
domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiar
antithesis--the very commonplace of rival methods of art.  But the same
antithesis exists in less obvious forms.  The poets have sought
"irregular" metres.  Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing its
right place, in the most modern of modern portraits.  In these we have,
if not the Japanese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese
exaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy.
The smile, the figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arranging
touch of a hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationary
foot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a single
breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of
Japanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident.  In passing,
a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspect
of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or in
motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness and
expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and
elms are gathered in their station.  All this is not Japanese, but from
such accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck of
perceptiveness.

What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament.
Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counterchange
for their ruling motive.  It is hardly necessary to draw the distinction
between this motive and that of the Japanese.  The Japanese motives may
be defined as uniqueness and position.  And these were not known as
motives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration.  Repetition
and counterchange, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, as
in the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular an
invention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principal
inspiration.  And it is quite worth while, and much to the present
purpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanese
diaper patterns, which is _interruption_.  Repetition there must
necessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which
is, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected.  The
place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and the
avoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design of
this class inimitable.  Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have a
curiously successful effect of impulse.  It is as though a separate
intention had been formed by the designer at every angle.  Such renewed
consciousness does not make for greatness.  Greatness in design has more
peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in their
curious brevity.  It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in all
other schools of art, is long or short according to its place and
purpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns that
the line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirely
composed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankish
avoidance of the goal.  Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in the
unit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device--that of
numbers.  They make a small difference in the number of curves and of
lines.  A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it
would look too much like a contrast.  For example, three rods on one side
and six on another would be something else than a mere variation, and
variety would be lost by the use of them.  The Japanese decorator will
vary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat of
symmetry is immediately produced.  With more violent means the idea of
symmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted.

Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanese
compositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry.  It
is a balance of suspension and of antithesis.  There is no sense of lack
of equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect of
giving or of subtracting value.  A small thing is arranged to reply to a
large one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance that
makes it a (Japanese) equivalent.  In Italy (and perhaps in other
countries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a single
weight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it
nearer or farther upon a horizontal arm.  It is equivalent to so many
ounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when it
hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod.  Distance plays some
such part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a Japanese
composition.  Its place is its significance and its value.  Such an art
of position implies a great art of intervals.  The Japanese chooses a few
things and leaves the space between them free, as free as the pauses or
silences in music.  But as time, not silence, is the subject, or
material, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement of
space--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals.  The
space between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuable
because it is just so wide and no more.  And this, again, is only another
way of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilful
art.

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

Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper does
not last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to them a
different condition of ornament from that with which they adorned old
lacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things.  For the transitory
material they keep the more purely pictorial art of landscape.  What of
Japanese landscape?  Assuredly it is too far reduced to a monotonous
convention to merit the serious study of races that have produced Cotman
and Corot.  Japanese landscape-drawing reduces things seen to such
fewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people less
fresh-spirited and more inclined to take themselves seriously than these
Orientals.  A preoccupied people would never endure it.  But a little
closer attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive
attitude towards landscape--it is an attitude almost traitorously
evasive--a more significant reason.  It is that the distances, the
greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and the
flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a people
intent upon little deformities.  Does it seem harsh to define by that
phrase the curious Japanese search for accidents?  Upon such search these
people are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable of
exquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit of
growth of a normal flower.  They are not in search of the perpetual
slight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("a
little wildly, or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson of the way
of a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of
the pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese are
intent upon is perpetual slight disorder.  In Japan the man in the fields
has eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in
the path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure in
fortunate accident of form.  For love of a little grotesque strangeness
he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden.  The
art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and not
the art of humanity.  Look at the curls and curves whereby this people
conventionally signify wave or cloud.  All these curls have an attitude
which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a
human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or
niggling labour.  Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard
to say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place where
the upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately
unexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--is
sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, while
the lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take by
nature.

A moment ago this art was declared not human.  And, in fact, in no other
art has the figure suffered such crooked handling.  The Japanese have
generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of
perpetual slight deformity.  Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and
admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorial
presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty
where we do not recognise it.  But if it is not easy to recognise, it is
certainly not difficult to guess at.  And, accordingly, you are generally
aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity,
even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, and
is represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior or
mousme.  But even with this exception the habit of Japanese
figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked.  It is
curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant as
to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective
foreshortening.  With us it is to the youngest child only that there
would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently
forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders."  The
European child would not see fun in the living man so presented,
but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously
humorous in a drawing.  But so only when he is quite young.  The Japanese
keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour.  It amuses him, but
not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened
figure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and
dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it than
the simple child.  The distortion is not without a suggestion of
ignominy.  And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely
scorn.  He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models.  He
makes free with them on equal terms.  He is familiar with them.

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to
insist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentional
caricatures.

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of
symmetry.  The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and
would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art
afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew.  But whatever may be
the phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in the
body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul.  Its balance is
equal.  Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact
where there is no symmetry interiorly.  For the centres of life and
movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality.  Man is
Greek without and Japanese within.  But the absolute symmetry of the
skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a
principle.  It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human
action.  Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite
incidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of
sleep--the symmetry of man.  Only in death and "at attention" is that
symmetry complete in attitude.  Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the
battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed.  All the more because this
hand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that the
sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequal
heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are
inflections thereof.  All human movement is a variation upon symmetry,
and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless,
fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art.  The order of
inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most
authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should
save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak
experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore,
"should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been
the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's
will and knew it not.  As all the music of verse arises, not from
infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the
greatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been most
variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and
passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme.  Law puts
a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law.
Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a
continual _slight_ novelty.  In the highest poetry, like that of Milton,
these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all
chime together in praise of the truer order of life."

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

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




THE PLAID


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

The plaid is the Sco

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