Hearts of Controversy

Transcribed from the 1918 Burns & Oates edition by David Price, email

ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY

Contents:

Some Thoughts of a Reader of Tennyson

Dickens as a Man of Letters

Swinburne's Lyrical Poetry

Charlotte and Emily Bronte

Charmian

The Century of Moderation

SOME THOUGHTS OF A READER OF TENNYSON

Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that

unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years,

and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes

difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change

from the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not,

reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world.

Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than the

novelty of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of opinion

on Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as it

was in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but turned. All

that was not worth having of admiration then has soured into detraction

now. It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What the

herding of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take away to-day, that

and no more.

But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the tendency

of educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of Tennyson's

poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and now disposed

to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was a poet who

needed to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is he who wrote both

narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who--this is the

more important character of his poetry--had both a style and a manner: a

masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a

noble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. He is a subject

for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly another

poet. We may deeply admire and wonder, and, in another line or

hemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the luminous

suns of dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights; waters

their way with rushing streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionary

hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those touching

landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, cool

sombre summers, and meadows thronged with unnoticeable flowers; speeds

his carpet knight--or is that hardly a just name for one whose sword

"smites" so well?--upon a carpet of authentic wild flowers; pushes his

rovers, in costume, from off blossoming shores, on the keels of old

romance. The style and the manner, I have said, run side by side. If we

may take one poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damned

to poetry," why, then, Tennyson is condemned by a couple of sentences,

"to run concurrently." We have the style and the manner locked together

at times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should be

no danger for the more judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiar

Tennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a sweep of

protest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and

recent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the less

judicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation of

lovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the

nation of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once

majestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they

neglect in their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the

sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the

eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note--commonly called

Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world--the wild wood

note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, the

liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving

Nature, shall that choice nation within England long disregard these

virtues in the nineteenth-century master? How disregard him, for more

than the few years of reaction, for the insignificant reasons of his

bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, or what not? It

is no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to

disparage a poet who wrote but the two--had he written no more of their

kind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur," of which, before I quote them, I

will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporary

author's opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the high-water mark of

English style in poetry and prose, cited those lines as topmost in

poetry:-

On one side lay the ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the

simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the

yonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is

from Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and should

thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other

blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry

undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it

cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight;

it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the

friction of the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near to

a fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day.

That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we

should hold it for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; and

several of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in

the manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely

and tightly, in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or

they would even prefer to pick you the lock.

But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized should

be restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet Tennyson shows

us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the most dangerous.

It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that the

key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but

not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that

of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question

of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying

that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And

we could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse

that not only confesses but brags of difficulties, and not only suffers

from them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us the grimace of

the pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article of a

recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" who manifestly has an

insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, and

keeping at the same time any show of respect for the national grammar,

the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase "neath cliffs"

(apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic." Shall the

reader indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has other things to do.

This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of his

work is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish

comports with the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiar

secret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly

ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet

box. It is the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of

making a place for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly

_worked_, and the exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this

little paradox--that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of his

art.

In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little

unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet who

withstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France since the

Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet who

does not own inheritance.) It was some time about the date of the

Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffle

at the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a _tour de

phrase_ from Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later the

good example of French painting--rich interest paid for the loan of our

Constable's initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, French

critical business, over all the shallow places of our literature--these

have all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious

fluttering or jostling to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay

on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a

lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word

_brutalite_, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew

Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French character as to be

altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and

French "convenience." "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt,

"practical sense" his next dearest, and he throws them a score of times

in the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For he

bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions,

and attributes "ideas"--as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practical

sense"--to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment

does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be

disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably English

accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of

Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has

not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interest

of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our

seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth

century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolution

in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-century

studios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still running--in our

libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in our

Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever. Not the

Elizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelley

were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in their time.

France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson's

contemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in _Les Miserables_, that our people

imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us a

delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boy

imitates the Parisian street-boy. There is, in fact, something of a

street-boy in some of our late more literary mimicries.

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is

hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery.

He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient

to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "A

clear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough--indeed Tennyson

reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change their

sky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening

bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who lives

in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers";

"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing

not illustration.

If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the _one_ that he

is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that

are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But

he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the

advent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets of

the world. The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, it

need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It

may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of

this homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accounts

for Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh

also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have

outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is

conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those,

which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour

falls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance,

where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint

"horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light

delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the

closer secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has been

taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of

the exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his

ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter

places of his familiar nightingale:-

When first the liquid note beloved of men

Comes flying over many a windy wave;

to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of

Art"--the "clear-walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," the "full-

fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in

Ida"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin":-

At last I heard a voice upon the slope

Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?

To which an answer pealed from that high land,

But in a tongue no man could understand.

The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra,

but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world,

she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one with

Shakespeare's queen:-

We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.

Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style

rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than

the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true

Tennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than

vital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in "Harold," is not only

modern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years.

But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a

sharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a few

passages of "Queen Mary," and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in

"Harold." The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier

scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionable

tragedy:-

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

Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet. Those whom he

puzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to go

wide of any road--"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover

cries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to the

ways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely,

individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or

none--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used

to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying

public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has

heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate

perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and

uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student

of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age

that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now

taken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so divided

and so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to

the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads? The religious question that

arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity

and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of

yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that

pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblest

form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular

pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which

prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed

the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be

within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In

Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great

struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be

judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here

proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny.

The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that

magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam"

attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of

human anguish and intellect.

I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as

Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."

Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the

sleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see

them in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitely

and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to

think the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow morn

a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man.

As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are

fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of an

aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an

innocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the

rocks above; grass would not grow there.

This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,

His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be

these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world

blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to

us by such a fiction.

The Being that is in the clouds and air

. . .

Maintains a deep and reverential care

For the unoffending creature whom He loves.

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible

alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to

dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask

whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such

grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more

than a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon

our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth.

_In Memoriam_, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and

there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,

sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.

He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an

immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that most

significant modern question, French or not French? But he was, before

the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of

landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This

eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a

homeward ship with her "dewy decks," and in the sudden island landscape,

The clover sod,

That takes the sunshine and the rains,

Or where the kneeling hamlet drains

The chalice of the grapes of God.

It is poignant in the garden-night:-

A breeze began to tremble o'er

The large leaves of the sycamore,

. . .

And gathering freshlier overhead,

Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and swung

The heavy-folded rose, and flung

The lilies to and fro, and said

"The dawn, the dawn," and died away.

His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I think

the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more

greatly exalted than by Tennyson:-

As from beyond the limit of the world,

Like the last echo born of a great cry.

As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn"

does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in Tennyson's

page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "The

mountain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he brings the mountains too

near or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the word

withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn is

aloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with many

another word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary, into

something rich and strange. His own especially is the March month--his

"roaring moon." His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and

storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by the

gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the

energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in

the number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions of

poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he who

is insensible to the Tennyson note--the new note that we reaffirm even

with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in

our ears--the Tennyson note of splendour, all-distinct. He showed the

perpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the

captain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a

sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns

long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon

us an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz

rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain;

through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the

setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam,

denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that

seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the

transcendent vision, of Tennyson's genius.

Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "a

little wildly, or with the flower of the mind." Tennyson, the clearest-

headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little

foppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag; wild,

notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish;

notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat

misses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than

the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers are

his--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!

DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS

It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls the

sayings of many years had happened to this also, that Thackeray was the

unkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to be

that Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that he

had an eager faith in good ones. Nothing places him so entirely out of

date as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his

leap at it. He saw it in a woman's face first met, and drew it to

himself in a man's hand first grasped. He looked keenly for it. And if

he associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mental

ineptitude, he did not so relate sanctity; though he gave it, for

companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most tenderly.

We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr. Johnson's

famous sentence: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no joys."

Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no saints. Helen

Pendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not holy,

for she is an egoist in love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, for she too is

cruel; and even Lady Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor is Colonel

Newcome holy, for he is haughty; nor Dobbin, for he turns with a taunt

upon a plain sister; nor Esmond, for he squanders his best years in love

for a material beauty; and these are the best of his good people. And

readers have been taught to praise the work of him who makes none

perfect; one does not meet perfect people in trains or at dinner, and

this seemed good cause that the novelist should be praised for his

moderation; it seemed to imitate the usual measure and moderation of

nature.

But Charles Dickens closed with a divine purpose divinely different. He

consented to the counsels of perfection. And thus he made Joe Gargery,

not a man one might easily find in a forge; and Esther Summerson, not a

girl one may easily meet at a dance; and Little Dorrit, who does not come

to do a day's sewing; not that the man and the women are inconceivable,

but that they are unfortunately improbable. They are creatures created

through a creating mind that worked its six days for the love of good,

and never rested until the seventh, the final Sabbath. But granting that

they are the counterpart, the heavenly side, of caricature, this is not

to condemn them. Since when has caricature ceased to be an art good for

man--an honest game between him and nature? It is a tenable opinion that

frank caricature is a better incident of art than the mere exaggeration

which is the more modern practice. The words mean the same thing in

their origin--an overloading. But, as we now generally delimit the

words, they differ. Caricature, when it has the grotesque inspiration,

makes for laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration;

in either case there is a good understanding between the author and the

reader, or between the draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, for

example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating

pattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most

exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max

Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life without

harbouring a thought of self, but it is very good for us all to know that

such a girl was thought of by Dickens, that he loved his thought, and

that she is ultimately to be traced, through Dickens, to God.

But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and

the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to

resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand--the worst manner of

violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so

far, therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it was

also the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to the

generation that thought his tunings to be the finest "music." For

instance, in an early poem he intends to tell us how a man who loved a

woman welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound,

his impassioned breast against hers, abhorring. He might have convinced

us of that welcome by one phrase of the profound exactitude of genius.

But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatest

imaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces the

sentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One takes pleasure in

rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic. The poet

intended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention," as

Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish. In truth we do

more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language. For

exaggeration writes relaxed, and not elastic, words and verses; and it is

possible that the language suffers something, at least temporarily--during

the life of a couple of generations, let us say--from the loss of

elasticity and rebound brought about by such strain. Moreover,

exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively. There should have

been a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of exaggerating,

like that of boasting, "grows upon you."

It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration in

the work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. His violence and

vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but of

power; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that power should never

know. This is where his Judith holds herself to be so smirched and

degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to one

only, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left to

her entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes. To this, too,

the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of governesses: "My

dear, you exaggerate."

It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree of

imbecility in the reader, whereas caricature takes for granted a high

degree of intelligence. Dickens appeals to our intelligence in all his

caricature, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, or impish, as in Mrs.

Micawber. The word "caricature" that is used a thousand times to

reproach him is the word that does him singular honour.

If I may define my own devotion to Dickens, it may be stated as chiefly,

though not wholly, admiration of his humour, his dramatic tragedy, and

his watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape. Passages of his

books that are ranged otherwise than under those characters often leave

me out of the range of their appeal or else definitely offend me. And

this is not for the customary reason--that Dickens could not draw a

gentleman, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It matters little whether

he could or not. But as a fact he did draw a gentleman, and drew him

excellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. Chesterton has decided. The

question of the lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove a

negative, it is difficult also to present one; and to the making, or

producing, or liberating, or detaching, or exalting, of the character of

a lady there enter many negatives; and Dickens was an obvious and a

positive man. Esther Summerson is a lady, but she is so much besides

that her ladyhood does not detach itself from her sainthood and her

angelhood, so as to be conspicuous--if, indeed, conspicuousness may be

properly predicated of the quality of a lady. It is a conventional

saying that sainthood and angelhood include the quality of a lady, but

that saying is not true; a lady has a great number of negatives all her

own, and also some things positive that are not at all included in

goodness. However this may be--and it is not important--Dickens, the

genial Dickens, makes savage sport of women. Such a company of envious

dames and damsels cannot be found among the persons of the satirist

Thackeray. Kate Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at first sight the

enmity of her workshop companions; in the innocent pages of "Pickwick"

the aunt is jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by wounding the

vanity of the aunt as keenly as she may; and so forth through early books

and late. He takes for granted that the women, old and young, who are

not his heroines, wage this war within the sex, being disappointed by

defect of nature and fortune. Dickens is master of wit, humour, and

derision; and it must be confessed that his derision is abundant, and is

cast upon an artificially exposed and helpless people; that is, he, a

man, derides the women who miss what a man declared to be their "whole

existence."

The advice which M. Rodin received in his youth from Constant--"Learn to

see the other side; never look at forms only in extent; learn to see them

always in relief"--is the contrary of the counsel proper for a reader of

Dickens. That counsel should be, "Do not insist upon seeing the immortal

figures of comedy 'in the round.' You are to be satisfied with their

face value, the face of two dimensions. It is not necessary that you

should seize Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and grasp the whole man and his

destinies." The hypocrite is a figure dreadful and tragic, a shape of

horror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite, and a bright image of heart-

easing comedy. For comic fiction cannot exist without some such paradox.

Without it, where would our laugh be in response to the generous genius

which gives us Mr. Pecksniff's parenthesis to the mention of sirens

("Pagan, I regret to say"); and the scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after a

stormy domestic scene within, goes as it were accidentally to the door to

admit the rich kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff,

gently warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade,

and opened the street door, as if he thought he had, from his vineyard,

heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain." The visitor had

thundered at the door while outcries of family strife had been rising in

the house. "'It is an ancient pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my dear

sir; for, if I am not mistaken, Adam was the first of the calling. My

Eve, I grieve to say, is no more, sir; but' (and here he pointed to his

spade, and shook his head, as if he were not cheerful without an effort)

'but I do a little bit of Adam still.' He had by this time got them into

the best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller and the bust by Spoker

were." And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper table:

"'This,' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a Mingling

that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry.'

Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never

rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants to

merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table."

Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should be

as mad as Mr. Dick. None the less is it a happy thing for any reader to

watch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dick

was to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could not be

kept out of the manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime looking very

deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb." And the

amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable-marrows over

the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt, again! And Augustus Moddle, our own

Moddle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately brooded

over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, "makes us shudder." A

good medical diagnosis. Long live the logical French intellect!

Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereas

Passion and Pity speak the universal tongue.

It is strange--it seems to me deplorable--that Dickens himself was not

content to leave his wonderful hypocrite--one who should stand

imperishable in comedy--in the two dimensions of his own admirable art.

After he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, tasting him with the "strenuous

tongue" of Keats's voluptuary bursting "joy's grapes against his palate

fine," Dickens most unfairly gives himself the other and incompatible joy

of grasping his Pecksniff in the third dimension, seizes him "in the

round," horsewhips him out of all keeping, and finally kicks him out of a

splendid art of fiction into a sorry art of "poetical justice," a

Pecksniff not only defeated but undone.

And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners is a less fault than his

reforming them. It is truly an act denoting excessive simplicity of mind

in him. He never veritably allows his responsibility as a man to lapse.

Men ought to be good, or else to become good, and he does violence to his

own excellent art, and yields it up to his sense of morality. Ah, can we

measure by years the time between that day and this? Is the fastidious,

the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild, and not the

remote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge to his egoism,

or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombey

to his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally to prosper? Truly, the

most unpardonable thing Dickens did in those deplorable last chapters of

his was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, in difficulties"--the

perfect Micawber nature is respected as to his origin, and then perverted

as to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty ever came back to England

with such tidings. And our last glimpse of the emigrants had been made

joyous by the sight of the young Micawbers on the eve of emigration;

"every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its body by a strong

line," in preparation for Colonial life. And then Dickens must needs go

behind the gay scenes, and tell us that the long and untiring delight of

the book was over. Mr. Micawber, in the Colonies, was never again to

make punch with lemons, in a crisis of his fortunes, and "resume his

peeling with a desperate air"; nor to observe the expression of his

friends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's masterly exposition of the

financial situation or of the possibilities of the coal trade; nor to eat

walnuts out of a paper bag what time the die was cast and all was over.

Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary liabilities were

over, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyous

impossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold improbability.

There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cut

away: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos, for example; that of Mr. Dombey's

installation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us as to Mr.

Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it was

that urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we venture to complain?

The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right to

belabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us?

And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he must do what he will with

that finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in the

fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate for

whom we care little either way; it is nothing to us, whom Carker never

convinced, that the train should catch him, nor that the man with the

moustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should be crushed by the

falling house. Here the end holds good in art, but the art was not good

from the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes experience a

change of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of each is most

excellently told.

George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction

was dialogue. But there is surely one thing at least as difficult--a

thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more

difficult than dialogue; and that is the telling _what happened_.

Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all

the violence of our stage--our national undramatic character--is

perceptible in the narrative of our literature. The things the usual

modern author says are proportionately more energetically produced than

those he tells. But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of

one thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a

perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him act

found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in

_Oliver Twist_, the murder in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, the coming of the

train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his

guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swift

spirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in

_David Copperfield_ through the poorest part of the book--Steerforth's

story. There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from the

first words, "'Don't you think that,' I said to the coachman, 'a very

remarkable sky?'" to the end of a magnificent chapter. "Flying clouds

tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the

clouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all

day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long

before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out

over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and

had its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea,

the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss,

were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The

people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair." David

dreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down a

precipice--into the depths of sleep." In the morning, "the wind might

have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I

had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns

out of hundreds." "It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a

rifle," says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious

impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing

more perceptibly than it came.

The tempest in _David Copperfield_ combines Dickens's dramatic tragedy

of narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here are

landscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and a

wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-

stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within

the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and

cast them out with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never

fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness." Again, "Now

the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree."

And yet again, "I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers;

and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed

to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace." Yet,

with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no _body_ of

style.

Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also the

simple eyes of a free intelligence, and the light heart. He gave his

senses their way, and well did they serve him. Thus his eyes--and no

more modern man in anxious search of "impressions" was ever so simple and

so masterly: "Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his

funereal gloves." "'I thank you,' said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long

black sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, 'not any.'" Mr. and Mrs.

Tope "are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces

of the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the button-

holes of the Dean & Chapter." The two young Eurasians, brother and

sister, "had a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a

certain air of being the objects of the chase rather than the followers."

This phrase lacks elegance--and Dickens is not often inelegant, as those

who do not read him may be surprised to learn--but the impression is

admirable; so is that which follows: "An indefinable kind of pause coming

and going on their whole expression, both of face and form." Here is

pure, mere impression again: "Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-

desk, gave me her cold finger-nails." Lady Tippins's hand is "rich in

knuckles." And here is vision with great dignity: "All beyond his figure

was a vast dark curtain, in solemn movement towards one quarter of the

heavens."

With that singleness of sight--and his whole body was full of the light

of it--he had also the single hearing; the scene is in the Court of

Chancery on a London November day: "Leaving this address ringing in the

rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him

no more." "Mr. Vholes emerged into the silence he could scarcely be said

to have broken, so stifled was his tone." "Within the grill-gate of the

chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ,

white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling

in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . .

until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of

music. Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble

effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the

roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great

tower; and then the sea was dry and all was still." And this is how a

listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: "The word

'confidence,' shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced

together, is uttered."

Wit, humour, derision--to each of these words we assign by custom a part

in the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not read

Dickens--perhaps even those who read him a little--may acclaim him as a

humourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whatever

his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had

held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn

salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is

foremost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of wit

just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood

up), as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost." Or

rather than this:-

He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg

naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might

be expected--if his development received no untimely check--to be

completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gently

presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. "'For meat,' he

said with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove.'"

A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be

vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in

shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the

novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given

place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr.

Brown, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, thought that Dickens

committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right

enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must

own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as

it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that

Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them

precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But

for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows

what is not. A little representative collection of the bad or foolish

English of his day might be made by gathering up what Dickens forbore and

what he derided; for instance, Mr. Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifying

emotions of no common description," and Littimer's report that "the young

woman was partial to the sea." This was the polite language of that

time, as we conclude when we find it to be the language that Charlotte

Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it. Dickens, too,

had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an

inflation--rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes

himself--but he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They are charged

upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits by

to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' prison "from

His Most Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects." Mr. Micawber

listened, we read, "with a little of an author's vanity, contemplating

(not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall." It should be

remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that

hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as

when he gave to his cordial readers matter for facile sentiment and for

humour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved and to

laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please

them, and it is evident that he pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr.

Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle,

Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little

Nell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerful

ghost.

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of

something strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity,

an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion--whatever the

interest may be--in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye

at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly

happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or

strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his

heroes--those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once

conventional and improbable--with whimsically ugly names; while his

invented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory

silent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger. A

suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors,

something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love

of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of his

discoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has its

part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially

those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example,

of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)

in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the

Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and of

Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at Master

Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his

voice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a

scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life

Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of

somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-

head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything

else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such

exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently

grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and

Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a

spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and

sentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimental

excitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of

mind. Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are

wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no very

long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into

his boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men and

women everywhere in his books--distractions of laughter as well. All

this seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is the

simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was as

present to him as an actor's audience is to the actor, and I cannot think

that this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is not

solitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may

wish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, he

had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within his

inner mind.

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go

on to accuse Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that his grammar is

not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than

Thackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack.

Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens

"might not always be parsed," but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.

Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apart

from the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his little

education, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that records

his reluctance to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to me

perfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk." In his

exquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, we

find his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the

second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education.

"Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succoured

his convict with his brother-in-law's provisions) "I pondered whether the

Church would be powerful enough to shield me . . if I divulged to that

establishment." And this is the phrase that may remind us of the

eighteenth-century writers of prose, and among those writers of none so

readily as of Bolingbroke: it occurs in that passage of Esther's life in

which, having lost her beauty, she resolves to forego a love unavowed.

"There was nothing to be undone; no chain for him to drag or for me to

break."

If Dickens had had the education which he had not, his English could not

have been better; but if he had had the _usage du monde_ which as a

young man he had not, there would have been a difference. He would not,

for instance, have given us the preposterous scenes in _Nicholas_

_Nickleby_ in which parts are played by Lord Frederick Verisopht, Sir

Mulberry Hawke, and their friends; the scene of the hero's luncheon at a

restaurant and the dreadful description of the mirrors and other

splendours would not have been written. It is a very little thing to

forgive to him whom we have to thank for--well, not perhaps for the

"housefull of friends" for the gift of whom a stranger, often quoted,

once blessed him in the street; we may not wish for Mr. Feeder, or Major

Bagstock, or Mrs. Chick, or Mrs. Pipchin, or Mr. Augustus Moddle, or Mr.

F.'s aunt, or Mr. Wopsle, or Mr. Pumblechook, as an inmate of our homes.

Lack of knowledge of the polite world is, I say, a very little thing to

forgive to him whom we thank most chiefly for showing us these

interesting people just named as inmates of the comedy homes that are not

ours. We thank him because they are comedy homes, and could not be ours

or any man's; that is, we thank him for his admirable art.

SWINBURNE'S LYRICAL POETRY

The makers of epigrams, of phrases, of pages--of all more or less brief

judgements--assuredly waste their time when they sum up any one of all

mankind; and how do they squander it when their matter is a poet! They

may hardly describe him; nor shall any student's care, or psychologist's

formula, or man-of-letters' summary, or wit's sentence define him.

Definitions, because they must not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweep

too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the mere

describer's range and capture he may escape by as many doors as there are

outlets from a forest. But much ready-made platitude brings about the

world's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind its

epigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assigned

melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it

was said, are unhappy, and this was one exceptionally real. How unhappy

must he, then, certainly have been! And the blessed Blake himself was

incidentally cited as one of the company of depression and despair! It

is, perhaps, a liking for symmetry that prompts these futile syllogisms;

perhaps, also, it is the fear of human mystery. The biographer used to

see "the finger of God" pat in the history of a man; he insists now that

he shall at any rate see the finger of a law, or rather of a rule, a

custom, a generality. Law I will not call it; there is no intelligible

law that, for example, a true poet should be an unhappy man; but the

observer thinks he has noticed a custom or habit to that effect, and

Blake, who lived and died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, rather

than that an example of the custom should be lost.

But it is not only such a platitude of observation, such a cheap

generality, that is silenced in the presence of the poet whose name is at

the head of these pages. For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom our

phrases, and the judgements they record, should be denied, defeated, and

confused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of a poet a great sincerity, a

great imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are the

master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here--if we would not

wilfully be blind or blindfold--a poet, yes, a true poet, with a

perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a

poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm

soul, a poet with small intellect--and thrice a poet.

And, assuredly, if the creative arts are duly humbled in the universal

contemplation of Nature, if they are accused, if they are weighed, if

they are found wanting; if they are excused by nothing but our intimate

human sympathy with dear and interesting imperfection; if poetry stands

outdone by the passion and experience of an inarticulate soul, and

painting by the splendour of the day, and building by the forest and the

cloud, there is another art also that has to be humiliated, and this is

the art and science of criticism, confounded by its contemplation of such

a poet. Poor little art of examination and formula! The miracle of day

and night and immortality are needed to rebuke the nobler arts; but our

art, the critic's, mine to-day, is brought to book, and its heart is

broken, and its sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not

in the heavens nor in the sub-celestial landscape does this minor art

find its refutation, but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; and in

part the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels us

to a reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the critical

spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it has

to ask what literary sincerity--what value for art and letters--lived in

Swinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and

painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster and

dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography

offended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself called

upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses heart as

well as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air of greater

arts, and, with them, take exterior Nature's nobler reprobation.

I have to cite this instance of a change of mind, or of terms and titles,

in Swinburne's estimate of art and letters, because it is all-important

to my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and,

therefore, no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moral

fault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a most significant

literary insensibility--insensibility, whether to the quality of a

poetaster when he wrote "poet," or to that of a poet when he wrote

"poetaster," is of no matter.

Rather than justify the things I have ventured to affirm as to

Swinburne's little intellect, and paltry degree of sincerity, and

rachitic passion, and tumid fancy--judgement-confounding things to

predicate of a poet--I turn to the happier task of praise. A vivid

writer of English was he, and would have been one of the recurring

renewers of our often-renewed and incomparable language, had his words

not become habitual to himself, so that they quickly lost the light, the

breeze, the breath; one whose fondness for beauty deserved the serious

name of love; one whom beauty at times favoured and filled so visibly, by

such obvious visits and possessions, favours so manifest, that inevitably

we forget we are speaking fictions and allegories, and imagine her a

visiting power exterior to her poet; a man, moreover, of a less, not

more, than manly receptiveness and appreciation, so that he was entirely

and easily possessed by admirations. Less than manly we must call his

extraordinary recklessness of appreciation; it is, as it were, ideally

feminine; it is possible, however, that no woman has yet been capable of

so entire an emotional impulse and impetus; more than manly it might have

been but for the lack of a responsible intellect in that impulse; had it

possessed such an intellectual sanction, Swinburne's admiration of Victor

Hugo, Mazzini, Dickens, Baudelaire, and Theophile Gautier might have

added one to the great generosities of the world.

We are inclined to complain of such an objection to Swinburne's poetry as

was prevalent at his earlier appearance and may be found in criticisms of

the time, before the later fashion of praise set in--the obvious

objection that it was as indigent in thought as affluent in words; for,

though a truth, it is an inadequate truth. It might be affirmed of many

a verse-writer of not unusual talent and insignificance, whose affluence

of words was inselective and merely abundant, and whose poverty of

thought was something less than a national disaster. Swinburne's failure

of intellect was, in the fullest and most serious sense, a national

disaster, and his instinct for words was a national surprise. It is in

their beauty that Swinburne's art finds its absolution from the

obligations of meaning, according to the vulgar judgement; and we can

hardly wonder.

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another,

and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the

world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear

"musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised

and appropriate word. Swinburne is a complete master of the rhythm and

rhyme, the time and accent, the pause, the balance, the flow of vowel and

clash of consonant, that make the "music" for which verse is popular and

prized. We need not complain that it is for the tune rather than for the

melody--if we must use those alien terms--that he is chiefly admired, and

even for the jingle rather than for the tune: he gave his readers all

three, and all three in perfection. Nineteen out of twenty who take

pleasure in this art of his will quote you first

When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces

The Mother of months, in meadow and plain,

and the rest of the buoyant familiar lines. I confess there is something

too obvious, insistent, emphatic, too dapper, to give me more than a

slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of

English anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not really

applicable to our English metres, but the reader will underhand that I

mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapaests

in the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth-century poets, or most rarely.

They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the heroic

couplet, are the distinctive metre of that age. They swagger--or, worse,

they strut--in its lighter verse, from its first year to its last.

Swinburne's anapaests are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but for

all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter,

we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they _perform_. I love to

see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly

with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are

enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our

poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres

that Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most

lovely. _There_ is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty. For

even beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us or

offer herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of those

flying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of herself. "He lays

himself out," wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "to

delight and seduce. The great poets entice by a glorious accident . . .

but allurement, in Mr. Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and omega." This

is true of all that he has written, but it is true, in a more fatal

sense, of these famous tunes of his "music." Nay, delicate as they are,

we are convinced that it is the less delicate ear that most surely takes

much pleasure in them, the dull ear that chiefly they delight.

Compare with such luxurious canterings the graver movement of this

"Vision of Spring in Winter":

Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star,

Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune,

Nor strong sweet shape of the full-breasted noon;

But where the silver-sandalled shadows are,

Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar,

Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon.

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank verse

which Swinburne released into new energies, new liberties, and new

movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who

know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English

heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical

bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his

genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels

the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the

practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid

and tame again, Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes, when he ought,

with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the lovely line on the forest

glades

That fear the faun's and know the dryad's foot,

in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five stepping

from the unaccented place to the accented without a tremor. (I must

again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be

adapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on

English metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think

"stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect

English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the

woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines--heroic lines

with a difference--as report the short-breathed messenger's reply to

Althea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died:

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

It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should have

made a trick and a manner of that most energetic device of his by which

he leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and on

to the first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, as

though a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It is in the same boar

hunt:

And fiery with invasive eyes,

And bristling with intolerable hair,

Plunged;--

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine

narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a

counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers. It is

even too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to out-run the

province of words, somewhat as that did the province of notes. But,

though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre may

be to strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand is

the straining accomplished! The spear, the arrow, the attack, the

charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the

walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to

programme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had ever

justified this slight perversion of aim, this excess--almost

corruption--of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well.

Now, if Swinburne's exceptional faculty of diction led him to immoderate

expressiveness, to immodest sweetness, to a jugglery, and

prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and

transmutations of sound--if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction

brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a part does it not

play in the matter of his poetry! So overweening a place does it take in

this man's art that I believe the words to hold and use his meaning,

rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the word. I believe

that Swinburne's thoughts have their source, their home, their origin,

their authority and mission in those two places--his own vocabulary and

the passion of other men. This is a grave charge.

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to his

own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name

for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions;

political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious,

agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he

fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he

enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France,

Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual

supplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. We

cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think a

question as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity he

has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed,

he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all

the surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his subservient and

impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible,

nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He

received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of

the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible

little more than a tone;--this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet

who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant

capacity, for those three august seventies has not room enough.

Charged, then, with other men's purposes--this man's Italian patriotism;

this man's love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as a

fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love

it); this man's despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man's

cry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago--a cry grown vain;

this man's contempt for the Boers--nay, was it so much as a man, with a

man's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that

less guilty judge, the crowd?--this man's--nay, this boy's--erotic

sickness, or his cruelty--charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is

primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhat

too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the

Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having no

property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in

a paradox of pride, boast of the past of others. And yet one might

rather choose to make use of one's fellow-men's old shoes than to put

their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed

passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was

accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred,

and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate

malignity; and here is another promiscuity--that of memories, and of a

licence partaken.

But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies,

by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this,

indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of that

heavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrity

here, his quick fellowship, his agile adoption, and his filial

tenderness--nay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist's

admiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy--and

Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of

enthusiasm--prompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the

supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the

seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. Happy

is he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful

voice to sing their raptures. Here is no humiliation in ready-made

lendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with them, and we

can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the

sons she embraces, and making her poets--the primary and the secondary,

the greater and the lesser--all equals in her arms. Let us see him in

that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon

him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being

servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with

Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and

Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of

the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine

them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages,

could yet join them in such a song as this:

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew

With all her spirit and life the sunrise through,

And through her lips the keen triumphant air

Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were,

And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east

Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast

Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth

Of wind and light that moved upon the earth,

Making the spring, and all the fruitful might

And strong regeneration of delight

That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man.

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea with

such fine verse, was not ashamed, in low company, to sing the famous

absurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and

raptures of vice," with many and many a passage of like character. I

think it more generous, seeing I have differed so much from the

Nineteenth Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from the

vacant, the paltry, the silly--no word is so fit as that last little

word--among his pages. Therefore, I have justified my praise, but not my

blame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Song

of Italy," "Les Noyades," "Hermaphroditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing

her Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or such a stanza as the one

beginning

O thought illimitable and infinite heart

Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute

That all keep heartless thine invisible part

And inextirpable thy viewless root

Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart

Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot.

It is for the reader who has preserved rectitude of intellect, sincerity

of heart, dignity of nerves, unhurried thoughts, an unexcited heart, and

an ardour for poetry, to judge between such poems and an authentic

passion, between such poems and truth, I will add between such poems and

beauty.

Imagery is a great part of poetry; but out, alas! vocabulary has here too

the upper hand. For in what is still sometimes called the magnificent

chorus in "Atalanta" the words have swallowed not the thought only but

the imagery. The poet's grievance is that the pleasant streams flow into

the sea. What would he have? The streams turned loose all over the

unfortunate country? There is, it is true, the river Mole in Surrey. But

I am not sure that some foolish imagery against the peace of the

burrowing river might not be due from a poet of facility. I am not

censuring any insincerity of thought; I am complaining of the insincerity

of a paltry, shaky, and unvisionary image.

Having had recourse to the passion of stronger minds for his provision of

emotions, Swinburne had direct recourse to his own vocabulary as a kind

of "safe" wherein he stored what he needed for a song. Claudius stole

the precious diadem of the kingdom from a shelf and put it in his pocket;

Swinburne took from the shelf of literature--took with what art, what

touch, what cunning, what complete skill!--the treasure of the language,

and put it in his pocket.

He is urgent with his booty of words, for he has no other treasure. Into

his pocket he thrusts a hand groping for hatred, and draws forth "blood"

or "Hell"--generally "Hell," for I have counted many "Hells" in a quite

short poem. In search of wrath he takes hold of "fire"; anxious for

wildness he takes "foam," for sweetness he brings out "flower," much

linked, so that "flower-soft" has almost become his, and not

Shakespeare's. For in that compound he labours to exaggerate

Shakespeare, and by his insistence and iteration goes about to spoil for

us the "flower-soft hands" of Cleopatra's rudder-maiden; but he shall not

spoil Shakespeare's phrase for us. And behold, in all this fundamental

fumbling Swinburne's critics saw only a "mannerism," if they saw even

thus much offence.

One of the chief pocket-words was "Liberty." O Liberty! what verse is

committed in thy name! Or, to cite Madame Roland more accurately, O

Liberty, how have they "run" thee!

Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is

thoroughly free except a fish? _Et encore_--even the "silent and

footless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. But

in the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is

this, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant here of an

excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This

poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the

poet of penury and defect.

And here is a pocket-word which might have astonished us had we not known

how little anyway it signified. It occurs in something customary about

Italy:

Hearest thou,

Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears,

The world has heard thy children--and God hears.

Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, as

the last thought of this verse?

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A

temporary laying-waste, undoubtedly. That is, the contemporary use of

his vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent,

squandered, _gaspilles_. The contemporary use--I will not say the future

use, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he has not been able to

violate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenth-

century flower, the seventeenth-century fruit, or by his violence to

shake from either a drop of their dews.

At the outset I warned the judges and the pronouncers of sentences how

this poet, with other poets of quite different character, would escape

their summaries, and he has indeed refuted that maxim which I had learned

at illustrious knees, "You may not dissociate the matter and manner of

any of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire,

whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is

the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be

compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from

the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said

again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that

fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or is

Swinburne's a "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a thousand degrees

of talent from any generality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but,

possibly, also excepted by an essential inferiority from this great maxim

fitting only the greatest?

CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE

The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout

her career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of

English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond

recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her

a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious

elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She

practised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She

wrote "communicating instruction" for teaching; "an extensive and

eligible connexion"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on the

Continent"; "It operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a

child (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the toys he

possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to

affection." I have been already reproached for a word on Gibbon written

by way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some other

author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corrupt

following of that apostle and not of his own style. Gibbon's grammar is

frequently weak, but the corrupt followers have something worse than poor

grammar. Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and "the former." Our

literature was for at least half a century strewn with the wreckage of

Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at

Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the

rebellious city," writes the great historian. When Mr. Micawber

confesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to a

lofty and a distant Gibbon. So does Mr. Pecksniff when he says of the

copper-founder's daughter that she "has shed a vision on my path

refulgent in its nature." And when an author, in a work on "The Divine

Comedy," recently told us that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from

Dante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow," that also is a

shattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less than

Gibbon inflated the English our fathers inherited; because Johnson did

not habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual

imagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, and

leaves it either rigid or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by this

drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle of

her vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared out

of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a

language.

A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns

back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with

rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation,

how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she

has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and

air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little

colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with

her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he

would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was a

clergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her

parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My little

plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.--is coming on

Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me for

a full week."

In alternate pages _Villette_ is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel

of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble.

In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's

favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but

rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. To read of that sorrow again

is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most

women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of

Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the

hands of a child, to whom _Jane Eyre_ is allowed only in passages. We

are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"--the

two sisters and the brother--and in what a bed of living insufferable

memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death--alone

in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The

rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but

Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity,

rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her

melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terrible

and reluctant death.

But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind. Locked with

intricate wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of this

lonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable. It is well for the perpetual

fellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not take

therefrom a perdurable scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towards

childhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born.

Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte was

subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she suffered

what in Italian is called _soggezione_ in their presence. When she had

met six minor contemporary writers--by-products of literature--at dinner,

she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend that

these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary

London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And

what nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting?

Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time and

oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? The

others, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in still

further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before

Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit

a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her

contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in

and out of two or three negatives, but wrote--about this very Charlotte

Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not

answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely

reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no

consciousness of anything amiss.

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served

one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but

Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her

incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the

addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by

Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What sees

keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what

throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is

the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--that Miss

Austen ignores."

When the author of _Jane Eyre_ faltered before six authors, more or

less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English

who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?--and

therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There

can be little doubt. The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a

world long corrupted by "one good custom"--the good custom of Gibbon's

Latinity grown fatally popular--could at any time hold up her head

amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude

in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester

recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who

wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering

child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly

lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have

thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius

was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice

of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English,

whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly

Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English

wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a

defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the

strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows--hold

parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last

lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was

doubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "The

child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any

authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows her

worse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrases

fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the

heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she

suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached.

Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back

on, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had

she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger

now. She made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were

laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you

never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, this

foliage--the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are

not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers.

Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow,

and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at

once that the insufferable moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes

another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength."

And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence--"some

wronged and fettered wild beast or bird."

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from

such a mingled page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, softer and

better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste";

and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange";

and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, and

she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly--I gild thy

dreams.'" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried.

Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet."

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the

friction--friction of water to the oar, friction of air to the

pinion--friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of

language. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of the

daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and

relaxed.

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of

landscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later in

the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zone

sighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the

destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold

the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm."

"The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The

wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and

rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but

tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight

tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are

no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the

whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and

liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the

visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of

an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon:

something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that

moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an

articulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from

the dim wave."

Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have

undergone the inevitable dream of mourners--the human dream of the

Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of

the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the

"Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in

exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some

vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.

In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A

nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone

of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or

calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is

there any need to cite the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that contains the

avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten.

Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and

not of the recording words that are the author's means. And others again

would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in _Jane_

_Eyre_, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is

an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past.

"Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved."

"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of

wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs

of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The

nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I

again wept."

* * * * *

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the

road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily

seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised

imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems

to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches--the apparelled and

arrayed approaches and ritual of literature--and so to go further and to

be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.

Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery.

In the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that tells of the return to Thornfield

Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to

an image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other

hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke of

but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual

realities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling what

happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear that

nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But

her characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and temples

oracular, and to the vision of symbols.

You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic.

Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do

so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full

vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention

of similitudes.

Of many thousand kisses the poor last,

and

Now with his love, now in the colde grave

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

Sad with the promise of a different sun,

and

Piteous passion keen at having found,

After exceeding ill, a little good.

Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imagery

is for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which must

needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:

Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled,

Even as a nest with birds,

After the old ones by the hawk are killed.

I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that

without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because

it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities

holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a

minor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery

(which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery

(which is the moment of his most beautiful lines).

The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from

the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from

decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the

greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last

threshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and

in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.

Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of the

delays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strength

does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of

those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her

greater work is no more. On the hither side--the daily side--of imagery

she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has

written some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And

with what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let me alone, let me alone,'

said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too

. . . I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look

at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again,

and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I

love my murderer--but _yours_! How can I?' They were silent, their

faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears." "So

much the worse for me that I am strong," cries Heathcliff in the same

scene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you--Oh

God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of

one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of

emotion that she had kept from her girlhood--the unavowed custom of the

ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised

the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived--but

the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing

of stealth--to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen-

portrait, so her "I" is not heard here. She lends her voice in disguise

to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a young

man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takes

up the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is

then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediate

presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat

trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but Emily

Bronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)--to Isabella

Linton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which has

the rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amid

terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained

down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a

moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and

drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or

circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's

bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind

myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone,

and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I

said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll

think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it

is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the

clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was

sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my

cheek frozen against hers."

Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits

of any other author's labour that she gathered these eminent words. But

I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's--the

disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been

suggested, did Emily Bronte find her incident; she found it (but she

made, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer

Lytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emily

showed no sign at all of admiration when she did him so much honour as to

borrow the action of his studio-bravo.

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound

surprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost--the

ghost of the little girl--when she has been a dead adult woman twenty

years that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the

Heights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for.

Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the

tempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has a

counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, the

waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem so

sweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the

"heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven,

Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird

whose feathers she--delirious creature--plucks from the pillow of her

deathbed ("This--I should know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's.

Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted

to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt

rain coming"); the only two white spots of snow left on all the moors,

and the brooks brim-full; the old apple-trees, the smell of stocks and

wallflowers in the brief summer, the few fir-trees by Catherine's window-

bars, the early moon--I know not where are landscapes more exquisite and

natural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than the

window seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, when

Heathcliff lay within, dead and drenched with rain?

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage

wherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it here

again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our

literature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prose

stands for appeal: "I lingered . . . under that benign sky; watched the

moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind

breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine

unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviously

unskilled reflection, and of her aspect no record worth having. Wild

fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the

neglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed by

their contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was she

as might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed by

Coriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world

from before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemned

his Romans: "_I_ banish you."

CHARMIAN

"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian," wrote Keats,

conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the pageant of

ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was not

Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay,

in which she mimicked, the Queen.

In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our

appreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waiting

gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not

boast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty,

who shall discern her.

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the

"lurid," the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us take

the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly

port, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "O

Eastern star!"

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these--except

the dog when he bays the moon--look skyward not at all. The events of

the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach and

withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun

so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say

from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the

eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing

lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful

wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden

sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather

look into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds.

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So

that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a

quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise,

or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral,

rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates.

When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls his

fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion

shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring

chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the

humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the

chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a

whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated

light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers,

and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration

anything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in the

secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is

a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a

modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its

greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled,

disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art.

So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of art

are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain,

natural twilight before night, or natural twilight--Corot's--before day,

than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, who

praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a

mystery; and must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Light

is all mystery when you face the sun, and every particle of the

innumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal shadow.

Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask for

even natural veils. In California we may, not because the light is too

luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender in

California, tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greece

is both tender and clear.

When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympathetic

listener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electric

light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is the

one success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with natural

things--villages, ancient streets of cities, where it makes the most

beautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house to opposite house in

Genoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the

judicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine hamlet, find the

electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over

the little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop, and solitary

and clear over the church portal.

Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, you

denounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, calling

up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah,

yes--the electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, so

disenchanting." It is, on the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as

lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be

"harnessed," as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us

electric light. For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovely

lamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitation--the

powerful fall of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" cried

the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it?" He

recognised the simplicity of that power. It is a second-rate

passion--that for the waterfall, and often exacting in regard to visitors

from town. "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, "and was not sorry

to find it dry." It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer of

scenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name

to-day) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it, because

it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In

fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky.

Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall,

I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole

further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk

of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put

to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way

between cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The

horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of

Milan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and

so does now and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found

his exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me a

clean moonrise, and heavenly heavens.

There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the lady

whom you serve." She has outlived her in every city in Europe; but only

for the time of setting straight her crown--the last servility. She

could not live but by comparison with the Queen.

THE CENTURY OF MODERATION

After a long literary revolt--one of the recurrences of imperishable

Romance--against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, and

it has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of the

measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed

it is well enough that we should compare--not necessarily check--some of

our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfect

propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all!

But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certain

genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not

to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for

extreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to the

faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There

were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth-

century men stuck straws in their periwigs.

That time--surpassing and correcting the century then just past in

"taste"--was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, in

the chapter of the passions--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations.

Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where

to rage." And in the later years of the same literary century Johnson

himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a

word as "madded"--"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for

the noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you,

Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

And dubious title shakes the madded land.

There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does not

thus more or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to go to the bad

poets; we need go no lower than the good.

And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain,

says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader).

Also

There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires.

In the only passage of the _Dunciad_ meant to be poetic and not ironic

and spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Match

me such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!

A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left

anonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, never

fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a

vision of that deceased poet:

Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes

Beheld the poet's awful form arise.

Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon

some graver themes,

Envy to black Cocytus shall retire

And howl with furies in tormenting fire.

"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a

furious joy and pride of soul."

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find,

in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," things like these,

gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls,

Whose livid waves involve despairing souls;

The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew,

Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

And a war-horse!

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,

And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

And a demon!

Provoking demons all restraint remove.

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright

Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.

The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,

And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_:

When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood

Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood;

When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore,

And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore.

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they

"contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that

poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for

me anonymous:

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings,

Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds,

And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot,

Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Again:

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,

Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common-

sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious,

common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I

find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet

would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and

always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in

that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate

Lady":

Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if

the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect

towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an

inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of

Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet

how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in

closer--in slighter yet more significant--comparison with the eighteenth

than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,

Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade

Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and

nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,

Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a great

melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a

like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so

magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in

France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why?

Because it was "artificial," and the eighteenth century must have

"nature"--nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's

grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of

great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no

other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity.

As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept

uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have

come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry

Barnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.