Essays...................................................................................................................................................................1

Alice Meynell ...........................................................................................................................................1

CERES' RUNAWAY..............................................................................................................................2

WELLS....................................................................................................................................................3

RAIN ........................................................................................................................................................5

THE TOW PATH....................................................................................................................................6

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS ................................................................................................7

RUSHES AND REEDS ...........................................................................................................................8

A NORTHERN FANCY.........................................................................................................................9

PATHOS ................................................................................................................................................11

ANIMA PELLEGRINA! .......................................................................................................................12

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................14

THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY .....................................................................................................15

COMPOSURE.......................................................................................................................................16

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE ..................................................................................................................17

A COUNTERCHANGE........................................................................................................................19

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO..................................................................................................................21

LAUGHTER ..........................................................................................................................................22

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE ......................................................................................................................23

DOMUS ANGUSTA .............................................................................................................................25

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE.....................................................................................................26

THE HOURS OF SLEEP......................................................................................................................27

SOLITUDE ............................................................................................................................................28

DECIVILIZED......................................................................................................................................30

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE .......................................................................................................................31

POPULAR BURLESQUE .....................................................................................................................33

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT ....................................................................................................34

AT MONASTERY GATES..................................................................................................................36

THE SEA WALL ...................................................................................................................................38

TITHONUS ............................................................................................................................................40

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT...........................................................................................................43

THE PLAID ...........................................................................................................................................46

THE FLOWER......................................................................................................................................47

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM...............................................................................................................48

VICTORIAN CARICATURE ...............................................................................................................49

THE POINT OF HONOUR ...................................................................................................................50

THE COLOUR OF LIFE .......................................................................................................................51

THE HORIZON .....................................................................................................................................53

IN JULY .................................................................................................................................................54

CLOUD ..................................................................................................................................................55

SHADOWS ............................................................................................................................................57

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY......................................................................................................59

MRS. DINGLEY...................................................................................................................................61

PRUE.....................................................................................................................................................63

MRS. JOHNSON ...................................................................................................................................65

MADAME ROLAND ............................................................................................................................67

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD ...........................................................................................69

THE CHILD OF TUMULT ...................................................................................................................71

THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT............................................................................................74

THE UNREADY...................................................................................................................................75

THAT PRETTY PERSON....................................................................................................................77

UNDER THE EARLY STARS.............................................................................................................79

THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME ................................................................................................80

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a Municipality hot in chase of a wild

cropat least while the charming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does not exist that

would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high places of the city. It is true that

there have been the famous capturesthose in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover a less

conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in some miles of the solitude of the Campagna,

where men are employed in weeding the roadside. They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the ancient

stonesrows of little corpsesfor sweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders why. The governors of

the city will not succeed in making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a thriving

commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo,

they are often mowing of buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread," says Shelley,

whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a couple of active scythes are kept at work there

summer and springnot that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the beeorchis, but because

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessible places, the wild summer growth of Rome

has a prevailing success and victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun, swings in

the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and blooms aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, of

the seventeenth, and of the eighteenth. As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike. The flagrant

flourishing statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment (and Rome is chiefly the city of the broken

pediment) are the opportunities of this vagrant garden in the air. One certain church, that is full of attitude,

can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on

its furthest summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fair middle of Rome lifts out of

the shadows of the streets a row of accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the

Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds its account in travertine and tufa,

reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea wind, sombre

and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat,

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal

authorities, hotfoot, cannot catch it. And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of the

agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles

of a twelfthcentury tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet. It

actually casts a flush of green over their city piazzathe wide lightgrey pavements so vast that to keep

them weeded would need an army of workers. That army has not been employed; and grass grows in a small

way, but still beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles. Perhaps a hatred of its

delightful presence is what chiefly prompts the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazza into

a square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of the pavement as of the importunate grass. For it is hard

to be beatenand the weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes its part, and one

might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through

When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf; it is full of things, and they are chiefly

aromatic. No richer scents throng each other, close and warm, than these from a little handspace of the grass

one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine or the Alban hills. Moreover, under the name I

will take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican.

That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon house, here magnificent, here

careless, but with nothing pretentious and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window on a ledge to the

sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican

dignity, but one cannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any parapet it may have

Moreover, in Italy the vegetablesthe table oneshave a wildness, a suggestion of the grass, from lands at

liberty for all the tilling. Wildish peas, wilder asparagusthe field asparagus which seems to have

disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his manifestations of frugalityand strawberries

much less than halfway from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent of the

gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lostthese are all Italian things of savage savour and

simplicity. The most cultivated of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but something better,

as her city is yet not a town but something better, and her wilderness something better than a desert. In all the

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive secrets of the methods and supplies of

the fresh and perennial means of life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber sets

his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they are carried, they are hushed, from the spring

to the tap; and when their voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be said that the

song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether earthly or heavenly. There is not one of the

circumstances of this capture of streamsthe company, the waterrate, and the restthat is not a sign of the

illluck of modern devices in regard to style. For style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action,

a gesture, as it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret ways; whereas the finish of

modern life and its neatness seem to be secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings; they form its very construction. Style

does not exist in modern arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the successeswhich are

not to be deniedof their outer part; the happy little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its

absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumph and success of the present

art of raiment"fit" itselfis but the result of a masked and lurking labour and device.

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of the beauty that comes of pausing slightly

upon the smaller and slighter actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way. In a word, the

workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterous provider of contemporary things; and the

ready, well appointed, and decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas the artist

craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means. The first hides the streams, under stress and

pressure, in paltry pipes which we all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the second lifted

The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way to ugliness, but in some countries, at

some dates, it is the sure way. In all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden means

must needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity. This is easy to understand, but it is less easy

to explain the illfortune that presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, all the

illfavoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them serviceable and effectual, urges him to use

them, seal them, and inter them, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily world. It

is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to explain the beautiful good luck attending the

simpler devices which are, after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy conditions, neither from

the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from the workman looking askance at his unhandsome material,

comes a first proposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight. But fate spares not that

suggestion to the able and the unlucky at their task of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the means of our lives those which we should

wish to see open to the sun, with their waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they are lapped in

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding place that nature and the simpler crafts

allot to the waters of wells are, at their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is so

visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to think of the waters of this planet, shallow

and profound, all charged with shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying that remote

fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness. Not a pool without this visitant, or without passages of

stars. As for the wells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as the daily bathingplaces

of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter fitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun is shattered out of its circle, scattered

into waves, broken across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall through chestnut

woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves. To all these waters the agile air has perpetual

access. Not so can great towns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely the illluck of

Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have the grace of visible wells; such as Venice,

where every campo has its circle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the pavement, its soft kiss of

the copper vessel with the surface of the water below, and the cheerful work of the cable.

Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their plain with the strong, steady, and level

flight of arches from the watersheds in the hills to the and city; and having the waters captive, they knew how

to compel them to take part, by fountains, in this Roman triumph. They had the wit to boast thus of their

None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a more invincible liberty of the heart.

And the captivity and the leap of the heart of the waters have outlived their captors. They have remained in

Rome, and have remained alone. Over them the victory was longer than empire, and their thousands of loud

voices have never ceased to confess the conquest of the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one,

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact of Rome. You could not look to the city

from the mountains or to the distance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetual

waterswaters bound upon daily tasks and minute services. This, then, was the style of a master, who does

not lapse from "incidental greatness," has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish of his phrases,

and does not think the means and the approaches are to be plotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without

haste, and without misgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption in the doing nor ruin

after they are done finds anything in them to betray. There was never any disgrace of means, and when the

world sees the work broken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour of Michelangelo's chisel,

little more than begun, a Roman structure long exposed in disarray upon these the light of day looks full,

Not excepting the falling starsfor they are far less suddenthere is nothing in nature that so outstrips our

unready eyes as the familiar rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the clouds, if we

had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with them by the glancing of our eyes, would be

infinitely separate, units, an innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate points.

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once, being our impression of a shower,

shows us how certainly our impression is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. What

we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly

bewildered sense of things that flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes of

man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an

instant the image that puzzles them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowly from

the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are not theirs. There seems to be such a

difference of instants as invests all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, a

The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of our halting apprehension; and the

pause between the distant woodman's stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the

impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and the stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off

like a captivity evaded. Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and their perception,

outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering

picture that is all our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and beauty of that art is surely

not that we see by flashes, but that nature flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the

impressionist to make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon him, and plays with

Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the ministration of water is so manifest in the

coming raincloud that the husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed in the arms

of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the shower withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the

coming cloud. His sense of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as he shoots a little

ahead of the equally uncertain groundgame, he knows approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession.

So much is the rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a way, by lying in wait, to

put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud "outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to

repeat and to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable. The rain is wasted upon

the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the

sealedup street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling unfruitfully.

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled breast to make all the multitude of days

unlike each other. Rain, as the end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning away the

sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared

with which the Alps are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and battlements of

A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must have some part in the sense of

enterprise wherewith you gird your shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heartanimating strain," only too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as

the ranks of the riverside plants, with their small summitflower of violetpink, are swept aside like a long

green breaker of flourishing green. The line drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows

taut; it makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easy power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of "feeling hearts" according to the

erroneous sentiment of a verse of Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of sensitive

hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the

happy labourers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on the long

towpath, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, you need but to walk in your swinging

You work merely as the millstream worksby simple movement. At lock after lock along a hundred miles,

deeproofed mills shake to the wheel that turns by no greater stress, and you and the river have the same

There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the bright Thames walking softly in your blood,

or you that are flowing by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the wheeling river makes the sky wheel

about your head and swings the lighted clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying high for

mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You will not envy them for so brief a success.

Did not Wordsworth want a "little boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even the athlete, though he may go further,

cannot do better than you, walking your effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps. Your

moderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you the sufficient mastery of the towpath.

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it life, and if it is buoyant it will be more

buoyant under the buoyant burdenthe yielding checkthan ever before. An unharnessed walk must begin

to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is easier than towing? So is the drawing of water in

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of metre, without the sweet and

No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it depends upon you gaily, as a friend may do

without making any depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught

or charge you with a makebelieve. It accompanies, it almost anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so

much as to give your briskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to still more nimble heels.

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to carry you, so fine is the mutual good

will) gives work to your figure, enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free. No watching

of mechanisms for the labourer of the towpath. What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer

smoothly towed. Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch the birds, or listen to

them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver

for a moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons. The

days are so still that you do not merely hear the cawing of the rooksyou overhear their hundred private

As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an end. This year's robins are in full voice; and

the only song that is not for love or nestingthe childish song of boybirds, the freshest and youngest

Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist's wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome

that light but resounding note. Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent, stealthy soles of the

It is no small thingno light discoveryto find a river Andromeda and Arcturus and their bright neighbours

wheeling for half a summer night around a polestar in the waters. One star or twodelicate visitants of

streamswe are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition. Or

the southern waves may show the lightnot the imageof the evening or the morning planet. But this, in a

pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripplelengthened light; it is the startling image of a whole large

These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more vacant field than that of the real skies,

the shape of the Lyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a painter's

part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright

flashing of constellations in the deep Weirpool, and the dark flashes of the vague bats flying. The stars in

the stream fluctuate with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes

and returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so

remote, have a suddenness of gleaming life. You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them seem

to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant

flight and rebound, could really show such altered stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet's "wanton"

with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to

leave the darklyset, widelyspaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate

the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and

a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these. The dimmer

constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the river Thamesthe manyrayed

silverwhite seed that makes journeys on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of

summer. It is a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and

speeding on those pretty points when it is not flying. The streets of London are among its many highways, for

it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather. But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the water

so that its finelyfeathered feet are wet. On gentle breezes it is able to cross dryshod, walking the waters.

All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations. It is far adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It

offers thistle plants (or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops of many thousand

hills. Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet it in battalions than in these invincible units astray. But

if the farmer owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid riverside garden wherein it would be a great

Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growth that feels the implicit spring. It had

been more abandoned to winter than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than

the dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds were the appropriate lyre of the cold.

On them the nimble winds played their dry music. They were part of the winter. It looked through them and

spoke through them. They were spears and javelins in array to the sound of the drums of the north.

The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those that stand solid. The sedges whistle his tune.

They let the colour of his light look throughlowflying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day.

The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds. They belong to the margins of lands, the space

between the farms and the river, beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilous

footing for the cattle. They are the fringe of the low lands, the sign of streams. They grow tall between you

and the near horizon of flat lands. They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them grow flowers of

Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of the sedge, and our full landscape is the

better for the distinction of its points, its needles, and its resolute right lines.

Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need the sound of rushes; but they are most

sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the treetops knew not of.

Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they

bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the

pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm gale, like the many

lovers of a poet who have a thousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in England seem to escape that

insistent ownership which has so changed (except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has

in fact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the

boundaries in the south are not conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy people,

amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather a gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.

But if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he says, goes right

down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult

to say, and obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of increase. We may

therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their cargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon

his neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his showers elsewhere. But the great

thing is the view. A wellappointed countryhouse sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But

he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his

otherwise contented eyes should happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his he had the

pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders

whether a very thorough landowner, but a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing

They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon margins, as the gipsies make a home

upon the green edges of a road. No wild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primroses are

good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has a kind of suspicion of some of the other

kinds of treesthe Corot trees. Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of fuller

foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers (manifest property, every one), two or three

translucent aspens, with which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes seemed to

wear a certain lookan extraterritorial look, let us call it. They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a

And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not say so, that the Corot trees, though they

do not dwell upon margins, are in spirit almost as extraterritorial as the rushes. In proof of this he very often

cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view is better, as a view, without them. Though their roots

are in his ground right enough, there is a something about their heads . But the reason he gives for wishing

"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of

madness, yet made a sober and witty answer to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like a

madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write

like a fool.'" Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in English poetry

throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song,

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuriesthe age of the

rediscovery of death; against the crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made

the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancymay have caused this trolling of

unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear. "I heard a maid in

Bedlam," runs the old song. High and low the poets tried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be

a maid and crazed for love. Except for the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now

deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays with the flitting figure of a village

girl robbed of her wits by woe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have found

his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached

At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the

low voice to that high note, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of words might yet,

indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and strange tune of Bedlam, like the

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona remembers, that lingered in the ear of

Wordsworth. Of all the songs of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing

more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have died for love." To one who has always

recognized the greatness of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,

it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in Modern Painters, where this grave lyric is cited for an

example of great imagination. It is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara died")

Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam entreats the expelling angel that he might

do, protesting that he could endure to lose "the bliss, but not the place." (And although this dramatic

"Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except to be scorned, this is assuredly a fine and

imaginative thought.) It is nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of English poets

with such a wild recurrence. The Englishman of the far past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill lighted

winters, and the intricate life and customs of the little town, must have been generally a homekeeper. No

adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But TomaBedlam, the wild man in patches or in

ribbons, with his wallet and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free to

suffer all the coldan unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath

on a journey that had no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the swinging song: "From the

hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it was one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English Middle Ages was unvisited by him who

frightened the children; they had a name for him as for the wild birdsRobin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow,

Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, TomaBedlam. And after him came the "Abram men," who were sane parodies of

the crazed, and went to the fairs and wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed like a

maypole, or a TomaBedlam's cap." But after the Civil Wars they vanished, and no man knew how. In time

old men remembered them only to remember that they had not seen any such companies or solitary

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and not singing within Bedlam early in the

morning, "in the spring." Wordsworth, who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes the crazed

one a wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by chance, rare as an Oread, and nearly as wild as

His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall in such a way of living; and his grave

sense of civilization, BOURGEOIS in the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after death to

the company of man, to the "holy bell," which Shakespeare's Duke remembered in banishment, and to the

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, than Wordsworth, when they in turn were

touched by the fancy of the maid crazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and she might be

drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her. She might have her hair torn by the

bramble, but her heart was light after trouble. "Many light hearts and wings"she had at least the bird's

There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant woman of later feeling was rather the sane

Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She had no child, or if there had ever been a

child of hers, she had long forgotten how it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she,

with a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "goodmorrow" rings from Herrick's poem, fresh as

cockcrow. She knows that her love is dead, and her perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of

flowers than to the old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice

of Ophelia. Strange was the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The world has become

once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not

recovered, and perhaps will never recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more starry madness. Crabbe,

writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to the legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed

maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful but dull, and sings of her own "burning brow," as Herrick's wild one never

sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks of flowers, or, rather, "the herbs I loved to rear";

and perhaps she is the surest of all signs that the strange inspiration of the past centuries was lost, vanished

like TomaBedlam himself. It had been wholly English, whereas the English eighteenth century was not

It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have played in poetry with such a fancy; or

that Petrarch, for example, could so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligible sentiment.

And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into the momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his

disregard of this northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was an alien upon earth, what were she in the

Inferno? What word can express her strangeness there, her vagrancy there? And with what eyes would they

A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine: "For our part, the drunken tinker

[Christopher Sly] is the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that is

worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio." Has it indeed come to this? Have

the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz or their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of the

French Byronic age was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature free from the

preoccupation of a sham reallife? So it would seem. Even what the great master has not shown us in his

work, that your critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it. By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy

he will come at it. It is of little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug

who stirs their emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they can make shift to see through that: but the Snug

within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more

appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Harpagon is the tragic figure of

Monomania; and as to Argan, ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de Monsieur" must have been wrought by

It may be only too true that the actual world is "with pathos delicately edged." For Malvolio living we should

have had living sympathies; so much aspiration, so illeducated a love of refinement; so unarmed a credulity,

noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the weaver our pity

might be reached for the sake of his single selfreliance, his fancy and resource condemned to burlesque and

ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance. But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the

privilege of literature to treat things singly, without the afterthoughts of life, without the troublous

completeness of the manysided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge? Fortunately unreal is

his world when he will have it so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without

misgiving, without remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed for herself she has

assuredly secured to the great creating poet the right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving

out, of taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day. Art and Nature are complementary;

in relation, not in confusion, with one another. And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the corner, as

it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat(the borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil

tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)is but another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation

between Nature and her sentient mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature

herself, allinclusive; but in othersand chiefly in comedyhe is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to

know what is not to his purpose, he is lightheartedly capricious. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he

gives usor used to give us, for even the word is obsoletethe pleasure of OUBLIANCE.

Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caught him a clout as he went. Yet he will do it

again; and those likeminded will assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human, how

much more sensitive, how much more responsible, is the art of the critic than the world has ever dreamt till

now. And, superior in so much, they will still count their importunate sensibility as the choicest of their gifts.

And Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his admiration than the pathos of the time.

It is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun. 'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it are wet.

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger's fresh and alien sense of its signal

significance; a phrase that is its own essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of other tongues.

Easilyshall I say cheaply? spiritual, for example, was the nation that devised the name anima pellegrina,

wherewith to crown a creature admired. "Pilgrim soul" is a phrase for any language, but "pilgrim soul!"

addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be overpraised, "pilgrimsoul!" is a phrase of fondness,

the high homage of a lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has

admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly surpassed themthis is the facile Italian ecstasy,

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of

admiration, as it were a sentence of life passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern

editor had thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note. It was, he said, poetical.

Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar

phrase of the more modern lovesong suited the day of Bellini. But it is only Italian, bygone Italian, and not a

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

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be but a property of the turn of speech. It is

rather the profounder advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very language

keeps in store. In another tongue you may sing, "happy who looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other

tongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an antithesis the

illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram? Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he

should rather be glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase IS intellectual, impassioned, and

an epigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm may still be unknown to

Englishmen"piuttosto bruttini." See what an allItalian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but

tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art of several kinds, and you confess at

once that not otherwise should they be condemned. BRUTTOuglyis the word of justice, the word for

any language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged internationally with a general

meaning, wholesale, in the course of the European concert. But BRUTTINO is a soothing diminutive, a

diminutive that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is, moreover, guarded

by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the rear "rather than not." "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little

way that we need say few words aboutthe fewer the better;" nay, this paraphrase cannot achieve the

homely Italian quality whereby the printed and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go

no further. After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be composed of brass instruments.

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into which a traveller hither has to enter! Do

we possess anything here more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than our particle

"un"? Poor are those living languages that have not our use of so rich a negative. The French equivalent in

adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itselfor hardly; it does not attain the participle; so that no

French or Italian poet has the words "unloved", "unforgiven." None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the

gravest and the most majestic of all ironies. In our English, the words that are denied are still there"loved,"

"forgiven": excluded angels, who stand erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not be

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain of loss, or so much outer darkness, or

so much barred beatitude in sight. Allpresent, allsignificant, allremembering, all foretelling is the word,

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to character and thought, and by no

means only an accident of untransferable speech. And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of

languages for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to their own garden enclosed,

without recognition. Never may they be disregarded or confounded with the universal stock. If I would not so

neglect PIUTTOSTO BRUTTINI, how much less a word dominating literature! And of such words of

ascendancy and race there is no great English author but has abundant possession. No need to recall them.

But even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full consciousness of their birthright.

Thus does a man who was hardly an author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He has

incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that time he sate down to sketch his child,

dying in its babyhood, and the head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local rhymebalanced epigram, a gracious

antithesis, taking an intellectual placeFelice chi vi miraor the artcritic's phrase piuttosto bruttiniof

As for French, if it had no other sacred wordsand it has manywho would not treasure the language that

has given usno, not that has given us, but that has kept for its ownensoleille? Nowhere else is the sun

served with such a word. It is not to be said or written without a convincing sense of sunshine, and from the

very word come light and radiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the accustomed

south, but only a nation partnorth and part south; therefore neither England nor Italy can rival it. But there

needed also the senses of the Frenchthose senses of which they say far too much in every secondclass

book of their enormous, their general secondclass, but which they have matched in their time with some

inimitable words. Perhaps that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness of the

senses, somewhere about the famous 1830. For I do not think ensoleille to be a much older wordI make no

assertion. Whatever its origin, may it have no end! They cannot weary us with it; for it seems as new as the

sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hillside, vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the

word, the air is light, and white things passing blind the eyesa woman's linen, white cattle, shining on the

way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense of sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with

which the paraphrase is but a picture. For ensoleille I would claim the consent of all readersthat they shall

all acknowledge the spirit of that French. But perhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes le jour

If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this could be only that it might in time find its

true language and incomparable phrase at lastthat it might await the day of life in its proper German. I

found it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once for what tongue it had been really

destined) in the pages of the prayerbook of an applewoman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of

There is hardly a writer nowof the third class probably not one who has not something sharp and sad to

say about the cruelty of Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference

to the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the mosses are said to be full.

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of the curious and conspicuous fact of the

suppression of death and of the dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are theyall the

dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their little last hours, where are they buried?

Where is the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an

earthworm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are, as it

were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a wellbred man who does openly some little

solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a meaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are

But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and plunder. It is certain that much of the

visible life passes violently into other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all. Amid all

the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our more accessible

counties now, and many thousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing is

done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Short lives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable

flocks of them always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep the millions of the

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold winter. The late frosts were so sudden,

and the famine was so complete, that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired that

February to make known all the secrets; everything was published. Death was manifest. Editors, when a great

The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and forced to do thus. They became like Shelley

in the monument which the art and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in

betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldierpasse encore. But

the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has

just been said, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in the case of birds in cages, who,

again, are compelled to die with observation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is no display

of the battlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the gamebag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with

strange decorum. You may pass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here and there

where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a butcher's shop in

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild world. They will not have a man to

die out of sight. I have turned over scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again

there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. But there never is a modern biography that

has taken the hint of Nature. One and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out of all

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal illness. If the man had recovered, his

illness would have been rightly his own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news for

the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of any physical suffering, over and done in our own

lives, to be displayed and described? This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no one is

authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story of pain ought not to be told of us, seeing that

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively, and that is his own mental illness, or

the dreams and illusions of a long delirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should be

made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as is possible to the alienated spirit; he

should be left to the "not himself," and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he could

The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door of Rossetti's house, for example, and

refuse him to the reader. His mortal illness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affected objection

is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts (others being already well known) in the life of

Shelley. Nevertheless, these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is not biography is the detail of the

accident of the manner of his death, the detail of his cremation. Or if it was to be toldtold brieflyit was

certainly not for marble. Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as he died young. It was a

detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that was a frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing

with an insignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality. Those are illnamed biographers who seem to

think that a betrayal of the ways of death is a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a last

chapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, of all survivors, are called upon, in honour

and reason, to look upon a death with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely, this is, for a

time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year, disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night

by night. They have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have to mourn his dying and to

welcome his recovery in such a mingling of distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known

even to dreams save in that first year of separation. But they are not biographers.

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret because it is their only privacy. You

may watch or may surprise everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes on everywhere. It

is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no perpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is

It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, to paint dead birds. Time was when they

did it continually in that British School of watercolour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, it was

agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him, for he is not to be caught dead. A bird is

A poet, on the contrary, is easilytoo easilycaught dead. Minor artists now seldom stipple the bird on its

back, but a good sculptor and a University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentially

The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, to devote itself to the use of the day or of

the week, in illustrated papersthe enormous production of art in black and whiteis assuredly a

confession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for. Fifty years ago, men worked for the honours

of immortality; these were the commonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty of things

of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and they looked forward to surviving themselves by

painting bad pictures; so that what to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become the

problem of the nation and of the householder alike. Today men have began to learn that their sons will be

grateful to them for few bequests. Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that are doomed

to the natural and necessary enddestruction; and art shows a most dignified alacrity to do her best, daily,

Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap costs the artist something; nay, it implies

an acceptance of the inevitable that is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in the singular and

manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so short a life. Fittingly indeed does life reward

the acceptance of death, inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There is a real circulation of bloodquick

use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. The honour of the day is for ever the honour of that day. It goes into

the treasury of things that are honestly andcompletely ended and done with. And when can so happy a

thing be said of a lifeless oilpainting? Who of the wise would hesitate? To be honourable for one dayone

named and dated day, separate from all other days of the agesor to be for an unlimited time tedious?

Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure do these words bring for their own great

disquiet! Without the remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly. In

order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful. Johnson

feared death. Did his noble English control and postpone the terror? Did it keep the fear at some courteous,

deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the very act of the leap and lapse of mortality?

Doubtless there is in language such an educative power. Speech is a school. Every language is a persuasion,

an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note indeed but gives the tone. Every language imposes a

quality, teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tonethe voiceof the instrument.

Every language, by counter change, returns to the writer's touch or breath his own intention, articulate: this

is his note. Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been thought, of the power and the

responsibility of the note. Of the legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by comparing

the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close emotion, the interior

trouble, of those writers who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more educatively is a part of a language a school to

him who chooses that part. Few languages offer the choice. The fact that a choice is made implies the results

and fruits of a decision. The French author is without these. They are of all the heritages of the English writer

the most important. He receives a language of dual derivation. He may submit himself to either University,

whither he will take his impulse and his character, where he will leave their influence, and whence he will

accept their reeducation. The Frenchman has certainly a style to develop within definite limits; but he does

not subject himself to suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of various race

within one literature. Such a choice of subjection is the singular opportunity of the Englishman. I do not mean

to ignore the necessary mingling. Happily that mingling has been done once for all for us all. Nay, one of the

most charming things that a master of English can achieve is the repayment of the united teaching by linking

their results so exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools are made to meet each other

with a surprise and delight that shall prove them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the

world knew they were. Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to which school of words shall

have the place of honour in the great and sensitive moments of an author's style: which school shall be used

for conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service. And the choice being open, the perturbation of the

pulses and impulses of so many hearts quickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a

deliberate return to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language. "Doubtless there is a place of peace."

A place of peace, not of indifference. It is impossible not to charge some of the moralists of the eighteenth

century with an indifference into which they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes educated

them. Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable of coming within arm'slength of a real or

spiritual emotion. There is no knowing to what distance the removal of the "appropriate sentiment" from the

central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal in language, which came when it was needed.

Addison had assuredly removed eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the

"pleasing hope," the "fond desire"; and the touch of war was distant from him who conceived his "repulsed

battalions" and his "doubtful battle." What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored once

more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times. Men were too eager to go into the workshop of language.

There were unreasonable raptures over the mere making of common words. "A handshoe! a fingerhat! a

foreword! Beautiful!" they cried; and for the love of German the youngest daughter of Chrysale herself might

have consented to be kissed by a grammarian. It seemed to be forgotten that a language with all its

construction visible is a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are

material; and that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effect of alien derivations is a

privilege and an advantage incalculablethat to possess that half of the language within which Latin

heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue,

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in origin, divided in race, within a master's

phrase. The most beautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare. "Superfluous

kings," "A lass unparalleled," "Multitudinous seas": we needed not to wait for the eighteenth century or for

the nineteenth or for the twentieth to learn the splendour of such encounters, of such differences, of such

nuptial unlikeness and union. But it is well that we should learn them afresh. And it is well, too, that we

should not resist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the Latin. Such a reaction is in

some sort an ethical need for our day. We want to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want

the poise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement expresses it. And not the

phrase only but the form of verse might render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a

touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son. But it should not be attempted

without a distinct intention of submission on the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against,

trespassed upon, used loosely, is like a law outstripped, defiedto the dignity neither of the rebel nor of the

To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion taking us

by the heart makes necessary. Shall not the Thing more and more, as we compose ourselves to literature,

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

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes; inasmuch as, with us, the castes and

classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with so much literature as to take from the

people the shelter of their almost unwritten tongue. Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into the homes of

dialect, does but show us how the language staggers under such a stress, how it breaks down, and resigns that

office. One of the finest of the characters in the ranks of his admirable fiction is that old manageress of the

narrow things of the house whose daughter is dying insane. I have called the dialect a shelter. This it is; but

the poor lady does not cower within; her resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homely refuge,

suffering and inarticulate. The two dramatists in their several centuries also recognized the inability of the

dialect. They laid none but light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in their homely plays than it

carries in homely life. Their work leaves it what it wasthe talk of a people talking much about few things;

a people like our own and any other in their lack of literature, but local and all Italian in their lack of silence.

Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people than to one less pleased with chatter or more

pleased with books. I am writing of men, women, and children (and children are not forgotten, since we share

a patois with children on terms of more than common equality) who possess, for all occasions of ceremony

and opportunities of dignity, a general, national, liberal, able, and illustrious tongue, charged with all its

history and all its achievements; for the speakers of dialect, of a certain rank, speak Italian, too. But to tamper

with their dialect, or to take it from them, would be to leave them houseless and exposed in their daily

business. So much does their patois seem to be their refuge from the heavy and multitudinous experiences of

a literary tongue, that the stopping of a fox's earth might be taken as the image of any act that should spoil or

stop the talk of the associated seclusion of their town, and leave them in the bleakness of a larger patriotism.

The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languages that might all have proved right

"Italian" had not Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard things

in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, and evidently can die, therein. The hands

and feet that have served the villager and the citizen at homely tasks have all the lowliness of his patois, to his

mind; and when he must perforce yield up their employment, we may believe that it is a simple thing to die in

so simple and so narrow a language, one so comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, and compassionate; so

confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling, inapt to wing any wearied thought upon difficult flight or to

Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be undergone; but the words that have done no

more than order the things of the narrow street are not words to put a fine edge or a piercing point to any

human pang. It may even well be that to die in dialect is easier than to die in the eloquence of Manfred,

though that declaimed language, too, is doubtless a defence, if one of a different manner.

These writers in Venetianthey are named because in no other Italian dialect has work so popular as

Goldoni's been done, nor so excellent as Signor Fogazzaro'shave left the unlettered local language in

which they loved to deal, to its proper limitations. They have not given weighty things into its charge, nor

made it heavily responsible. They have added nothing to it; nay, by writing it they might even be said to have

made it duller, had it not been for the reader and the actor. Insomuch as the intense expressiveness of a

dialectof a small vocabulary in the mouth of a dramatic peoplelies in the various accent wherewith a

southern citizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to restore its life to the written phrase.

In dialect the author is forbidden to search for the word, for there is none lurking for his choice; but of tones,

allusions, and of references and inferences of the voice, the speaker of dialect is a master. No range of

phrases can be his, but he has the more or the less confidential inflection, until at times the close

Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is something all unlike, for instance, the mere jargon of

London streets. The difference may be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have a highly organized and

orderly grammar. The Londoner cannot keep the small and loose order of the grammar of good English; the

Genoese conjugates his patois verbs, with subjunctives and all things of that handsome kind, lacked by the

The middle classthe piccolo mondothat shares Italian dialect with the poor are more strictly local in

their manners than either the opulent or the indigent of the same city. They have moreover the busy

intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its keenest. Their speech keeps them a sequestered place

which is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration. Andwhat is

pretty to observethe speakers are well conscious of the characters of this intimate language. An Italian

countryman who has known no other climate will vaunt, in fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like manner

he is conscious of the local character of his language, and tucks himself within it at home, whatever Tuscan

he may speak abroad. A properly spelt letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs Dingley and

Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill written, was "snug."

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler language insufficient, do they ensconce

themselves in the smaller? discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despair thus prattle

and gibber and stammer? Rather perhaps this departure from English is but an excursion after gaiety. The

ideal lovers, no doubt, would be so simple as to be grave. That is a tenable opinion. Nevertheless, age by age

they have been gay; and age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless

never studied, and perhaps never loved. Why so? They might have chosen broken English of other

sortsthat, for example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived

by the Englishmana complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a

fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English

devised by Mrs Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian. But none of these found favour. The choice has

always been of the language of children. Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in

the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk,

may be the inspirers of those prattlings. "See then thy selfe likewise art lyttle made," says Spenser's Venus to

Swift was the best prattler. He had caught the language, surprised it in Stella when she was veritably a child.

He did not push her clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged in her a

childhood he had loved. He is "seepy." "Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue." It is a real goodnight. It

"Il s'est trompe de defunte." The writer of this phrase had his sense of that portly manner of French, and his

burlesque is fine; butthe paradox must be riskedbecause he was French he was not able to possess all its

grotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the English reader. The words are in the mouth of a

widower who, approaching his wife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur." "Monsieur," again; the

French reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place; it says little or nothing to him, whereas

the Englishman, who has no word of the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but who must

use one of two English words of different allusionman or I gentleman knows the exact value of its

commonplace. The serious Parisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there had been a

divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is not yet aware of this, and explains to himself the

presence of "un monsieur" in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte."

The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with national character is to cause an English

reader to pity the mocking author who was debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his

own comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishman does possess it. Your official, your

professional Parisian has a vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelist perceives this

he does not perceive it all, because some of the words are the only words in use. Take an author at his serious

moments, when he is not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and then touches a word

that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English. "L'Histoire d'un Crime," of Victor Hugo, has so many of

these touches as to be, by a kind of reflex action, a very school of English. The whole incident of the omnibus

in that grave work has unconscious international comedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus

had been, it will be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of the Coup d'Etat, but each

had his official scarf. Scarfpish!"l'echarpe!" "Ceindre l'echarpe"there is no real English equivalent.

Civic responsibility never was otherwise adequately expressed. An indignant deputy passed his scarf through

the window of the omnibus, as an appeal to the public, "et l'agita." It is a pity that the French reader, having

no simpler word, is not in a position to understand the slight burlesque. Nay, the mere word "public," spoken

with this peculiar French good faith, has for us I know not what untransferable gravity.

There is, in short, a general international counterchange. It is altogether in accordance with our actual state of

civilization, with its extremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make a phrase, and

another should have and enjoy it. And, in fact, there are certain French authors to whom should be secured

the use of the literary German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all severity to

be deprived. For Germans often tell you of words in their own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly

they should not be translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands. There would

be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word,

So with French humour. It is expressly and signally for English ears. It is so even in the commonest farce.

The unfortunate householder, for example, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory "pour

retablir la circulation," and the other who describes himself "souschef de bureau dans l'enregistrement," and

he who proposes to "faire hommage" of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"these

and all their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their own country the perfection of their dulness.

We only, who have the alternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it. It is not the least of the

advantages of our own dual English that we become sensible of the mockery of certain phrases that in France

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in all Latin languagesrhetoric that has

ceased to have allusions, either majestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a

frequent comedy that the wellaccustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no longer detects. A guard on a

French railway, who advised two travellers to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter"

for a whole hour in the waitingroom of such or such a station seemed to the less practised tourist to be a

One of the phrases always used in the business of charities and subscriptions in France has more than the

intentional comedy of the farcewriter; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitors in the

country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouons cinquante centimesles benefices

seront verses integralement e la souscription qui est ouverte e la commune pour la construction de notre

"Fletrir," again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly common word of controversy. The

comic dramatist is well aware of the spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will

reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of

refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's

"fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as some of the processes of the several

The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thinS for an Englishman. They are not all, it is true, so finely

comic as "Il s'est trompe de defunte." In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there is enough

humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; for the author who perceives the comedy as

well as custom will permit, and for the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if not so keen

as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same quality of language. When of the fourteen couples

to be married by the mayor, for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a lookeron pronounces: "Il s'est

empetre dans les futurs." But for a reader who has a full sense of the several languages that exist in English at

the service of the several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of official France, high or

lowdaily Francea gratuitous and uncovenanted smile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French

literature has not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of

circumstance makes it so. A very little of the mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the

"sixieme et septieme arron dissements," in the twinkling of an eye. So is it with the mere "domicile;" with

the aid of but a little of the burlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal" becomes as

grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "e domicile" merelythe word of every shopmanis, in the

unconscious mouths of the speakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only an Englishman hears

it; so is the advice of the police that you shall "circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you

So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale," "maison mortuaire," and the still more serious

"repos dominical," "oraison dominicale." There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspicious gravity with

which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at, the language offering no relief of contrast; and

what is much to the credit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, through this general

unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors of comedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar

thing, and compels that most elaborate dulness to amuse us. US, above all, by virtue of the custom of

Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the English poets that so persist in France may

not reveal something within the English languageone would be somewhat loth to think so reserved to

the French reader peculiarly? Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the select? Then would some of the

mysteries of French reading of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has

hitherto satisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to account for Byron, and the desire of

the rhetorician to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, patatras! Who can say?

The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell with him a gay and hardly human figure; it

fell, perhaps finally, for English drama. That manner of manArlecchino, or Harlequin had outlived his

playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a

little in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the

other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and

out of the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his brightest, his most vital

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonderworker, the

man in disguise, the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious and

efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a reference

rather to Antiquity and the Latin comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory

survives differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his friend." What convinces me that he virtually

died with Mercutio is chiefly thisthat this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully capable of the

death that he takes at Tybalt's swordpoint; he lived indeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the

close of a career of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who ever heard of Arlecchino

unfortunate before, at fault with his swordplay, overtaken by tragedy? His time had surely come. The gay

companion was to bleed; Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas not so deep as a well nor so wide as a

Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the primitive Italian play, because Harlequin, on

that conventional little stage of the past, has a hero's place, whereas when he interferes in human affairs he is

only the auxiliary. He might be lover and bridegroom on the primitive stage, in the comedy of these few and

unaltered types; but when Pantaloon, Clown, and Harlequin play with really human beings, then Harlequin

can be no more than a friend of the hero, the friend of the bridegroom. The five figures of the old stage dance

attendance; they play around the business of those who have the dignity of mortality; they, poor

immortalsa clown who does not die, a pantaloon never far from death, who yet does not die, a Columbine

who never attains Desdemona's death of innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude and passionflit in the

Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he serves. Is there a memory of Harlequin in that

delicate figure? Something of the subservient immortality, of the light indignity, proper to Pantaleone,

Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the Clown, hovers away from the stage when Ariel is released from

Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell. And if some claim be made to it still because

Harlequin has transformed so many scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, since Mercutio

died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a marionnette; he has returned whence he came.

A man may play him, but he isas he was first of alla doll. From dollhood Arlecchino took life, and, so

promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be again what he first was; save that, as once a doll

played the man, so now a man plays the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children see, a poor

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the serious ages of the world an hour's refuge from

the unforgotten burden of responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, made dramatically the

spectator's own. We are not serious now, and no heart now is quite light, even for an hour.

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain nevertheless that laughter never was so

honoured as now; were it not for the paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere the joke

"emerges"as an "elegant" writer might have itemerges to catch the attention of the sense of humour; and

everywhere the sense of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip,

and a wrinkle in abeyance, and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the vagrant encounterer, and

may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game. It stands in untoward places, or places that were once

inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant signalling, an endless recognition.

Forms of approach are remitted. And the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no

gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and down the pages of the paper and

the book. See, again, the theatre. A somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our

present stage that little else can claimparadox again apartto be taken seriously.

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away from the Oriental estimate of laughter as a

thing fitter for women, fittest for children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is everywhere and at every

moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and in some degree distinctive of men, and no

mean part of their prerogative and privilege. The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are not men

are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation. They will not refuse explanation. And there is little upon

Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in

some sort a habit when it is not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must confess that we laugh

oftenest becausebeing amusedwe intend to show that we are amused. We are right to make the sign, but

a smile would be as sure a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but be changing the convention; and

the change would restore laughter itself to its own place. We have fallen into the way of using it to prove

somethingour sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but laughter should not thus be used, it should go

free. It is not a demonstration, whether in logic, oras the word demonstration is now generally usedin

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among such a people as ourselves containing

wide and numerous classes who laugh without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who

perhaps first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that they were not gloomy; but a vast number of

laymen also who had not that excuse; and many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to what is

humorous and what is not. This last is the most harmless of all kinds of superfluous laughter. When it carries

an apology, a confession of natural and genial ignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs a laugh of hazard

and experiment, she is to be more than forgiven. What she must not do is to laugh a laugh of instruction, and

There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to a sense of humour, but who laugh from

a sense of happiness. Childish is that trick, and sweet. For children, who always laugh because they must, and

never by way of proof or sign, laugh only half their laughs out of their sense of humour; they laugh the rest

under a mere stimulation: because of abounding breath and blood; because some one runs behind them, for

example, and movement does so jog their spirits that their legs fail them, for laughter, without a jest.

If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to signal their perception of humour by

the natural smile, and shall keep the laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply,

and not thrice at the same thingonce for foolish surprise, and twice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it

be known that they are amusedthen it may be time to persuade this laughing nation not to laugh so loud as

it is wont in public. The theatre audiences of louderspeaking nations laugh lower than ours. The laugh that is

chiefly a signal of the laugher's sense of the ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of

covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the actors. It is a public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is

called upon for a public laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with private laughter there.

Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times of dispersion and of scattering, keep

henceforth our sense of humour in a place better guarded, as something worth a measure of seclusion. It

should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in adventurous places. For the sense of humour has other

things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter. It has negative tasks of valid virtue; for

example, the standing and waiting within call of tragedy itself, where, excluded, it may keep guard.

No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best. This would be to deny Shakespeare as his

comrades knew him, where the wit "outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine," and to deny Ben Jonson's

"tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus," and the rest. Doubtless Greece determined the custom for all

our Occident; but none the less might the modern world grow more sensible of the value of composure.

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein as to this of humour, and none other do

we indulge with so little fastidiousness. It is as though there were honour in governing the other senses, and

honour in refusing to govern this. It is as though we were ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and

suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that which loses

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man,

according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities

not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or

last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of

events; it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods

towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause was

intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not

passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and

remorse itself does not remainit returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made a course of

notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation instead of a

discovery. No one makes such observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there have

never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. But Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences,

if he did not measure them. In his cell alone with the elements"What wouldst thou more than these? for out

of these were all things made"he learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness, and the

remembrance that restrains the soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious

welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And "rarely, rarely comest thou," sighed Shelley, not to

Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to

our serviceAriel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is

not the spirit that is thus compelled. THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the "Imitation" should both have been keen and simple enough to

perceive these flights, and to guess at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch with the

spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the

universal movement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppur si muove. They knew that

presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on

its long path of return. They knew that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards departure.

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to

weaken the impulse of onset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant efforts after

an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of

the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of the saints, being singularly

simple and single, have been in the most complete subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolation

visited them by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the interior loss of all for which they

had sacrificed the world. They rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts.

Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the course of a long life, the Muse has approached,

touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the

departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few poets have fully recognized the metrical

absence of their muse. For full recognition is expressed in one only waysilence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship the moon, and not the sun; a great

number worship both; but no tribes are known to adore the sun, and not the moon. On her depend the tides;

and she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands where rain is rare. More

than any other companion of earth is she the Measurer. Early Indo Germanic languages knew her by that

name. Her metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in approach and in departure

is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet

did not live to know that love itself has tidal timeslapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the

interior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.

For manexcept those elect already namedis hardly aware of periodicity. The individual man either never

learns it fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative experience upon

which cumulative evidence is long lacking. It is in the afterpart of each life that the law is learnt so

definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. That young sorrow comes so near to despair is

a result of this young ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems so long, and its

capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must holdintervals between

aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks impossible to the

young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn

that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtleif it is not too audacious to add a meaning to

Shakespearethan the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home;

their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that

they are ruled by the law that commands all thingsa sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human destiny, charged with a fate too great,

a history too various, for its slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their complaints

have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human lot. A disproportionall in favour of

manbetween man and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent and

so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a "vain capacity," so well explained

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave Emilia. But inarticulate has been the

voice within the narrow house. Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little argument or

definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain

destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide house we hear of,

clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming

might well move pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an

enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its inarticulatenessnot, certainly, its fewness of words,

but its inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right language enlarges the soul as no other

power or influence may do. Who, for instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his

confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate syllable of his tenderness? There is

a "pledging of the word," in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poet pledges his

word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar sanction. And I suppose that even physical pain

takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and the word are

almost as closely united as thought and the word. Almostnot quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know it to be general. Life is great that is

trivially transmitted; love is great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and to the

keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the

vulgar, secret in the familiar. It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradicts life. Unlikely people

die. The one certain thing, it is also the one improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little

nature that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a true destruction, and the thought of it

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause. It does not bid us follow man or woman

to an illogical conclusion. Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers,

by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having

seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that,

having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with

something more significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is perdurable

because he is not completed. His humours are strangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not

worthy to die; for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal. I protest I do not

laugh at man or woman in the world. I thank my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that

the French so pleasantly call une joyeusete; these are to smile at. But the gay injustice of laughter is between

That narrow housethere is sometimes a message from its living windows. Its bewilderment, its reluctance,

its defect, show by moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions

unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of

meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in union or in antithesis. They

assuredly have an inseverable union in the art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for

each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the cumulative experiences of other men,

and to use these in place of the virginal fruit of thoughtwhereas one would hardly consent to take them for

ordering even the most habitual of daily affairsis to forgo Innocence and Experience at once and together.

Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly solitary

quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's histories, and does not give to his own word the

common sanction of other men's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in

one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from manof his uniqueness. But if

I had a mind to forgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I would

rather appropriate their future than their past. Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence,

if I must borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love poetry consider this matter. These are the

lovepoets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even

been introduced. Their verse is full of ready made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life

supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides sexcould quite suffice for so much

experience, so much disillusion, so much deception. To achieve that tone in its fullness it is necessary to take

for one's own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped himnot to live but to

have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoard of

As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one friar goes about darned because of another's rending,

so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the

resultant verse succeed in implying so muchor rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very

sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness

and to overcome it. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's fellow men's old

shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to utilize the

mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this

lovepoetry are familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise and pledge, the loss of

the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love: which is the vow. "Till death!" "For ever!" are cries too

simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least tolerable of banalitiesthat

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence. Not a passage of

cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose lovepoetry were

thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are they his by some state within the

mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness,

without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has nightpowers of

feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in

dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their

In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper her influence, and she draws the emotion,

the senses, and the nerves of the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt

and terror to which not only can no event of the real day persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps

not even the capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the night, even though

The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and their dominions, knows that the mood of

night will have its hour; he puts off his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state, by

day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftener in a young child's mind than "I shall

endure to think of it in the daytime." By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, not to be

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is to miss something of the powers of a

complex mind. One might imagine the rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, and

tempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance and expectancy.

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium, would be to live too much in the

day; and hardly less would be the loss of him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence

of the hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night, or guessing whether the state of

day or dark is the truer and the more natural, he would be rash who should make too sure.

In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the

character of night as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep are too

much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm

broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when

the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the

hour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise and among so many people that you

shall not be aware of them; you may thus merely force and prolong the day. But to do so is not to live well

both lives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to be cradled in the swing of change.

There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such a cradle of alternate hours. "It cannot be,"

It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, has the extremest sense of light. Almost the

most shining lines in English poetrylines that cast sunrise shadowsare those of Blake, written

confessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, and those dreams the dreams of little

chimneysweepers; all is as dark as he can make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the green

plain and the river is too bright for day. So, indeed, is another brightness of Blake's, which is also, in his

poem, a child's dream, and was certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in which he woke to write

O what land is the land of dreams? What are its mountains, and what are its streams? O father, I saw my

mother there, Among the lilies by waters fair. Among the lambs clothed in white, She walk'd with her

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

Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep. In some landscapes of his early manner he has

the very light of dreams, and it was surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and dreams claimed

his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an illumination. Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because

in summer so many of the hours of sleep are also hours of light. He carries the mood of man's night out into

the sunshineCorot did so and lives the life of night, in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun. In the

only time when the heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmic power of night at its

He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To that life belongs many another kind of

work, and a sense of other kinds of beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extreme

perception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the explanation of all the memories of dreams recalled by these

visionary paintings, done in earlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of all the world.

Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets with one of these works of Corot's first manner

with a cry, not of welcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by the spirit of the hours of

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization has been kind. But there are the

multitudes to whom civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its shavings,

sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone,

we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and virtually illimitable possession of

all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are

ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a

place of unhidden liberty and of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed

corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command so much. For the solitude that has a

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand

thousand places in the woods, and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by miles; they

are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely the dominion of every man for the day of his

possession. There is loneliness for innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages, so many

solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of the earth; no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened

or the silence marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there before. Solitude is

separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and a thicket may be as secret as a forest. It

is not so difficult to get for a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, it is still an

open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes," and a space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live whole lives and never know. Do they suffer

from their deprivation of even the solitude of the hidingplace? There are many who never have a whole hour

alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people may in a boardinghouse, by

paradoxical choice, familiar with one another and not intimate. They live under careless observation and

subject to a vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the unconscious loss which is futile and

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their solitude to the perpetual society of

the school, the cloister, or the hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible, without

moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no

barren or futile loss, and they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude deferred.

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and inaccessible? There is the loneliness

of the shepherdess in many a drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl stands so when

the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks,

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate possession of the rich, they too deny

themselves the natural solitude of a woman with a child. A newlyborn child is so nursed and talked about,

handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much importunate service going forward, that a

woman is hardly alone long enough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood moves separately,

beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses. All is commonplace until the doors are closed upon the

two. This unique intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more than single solitude; it is a

redoubled isolation more remote than mountains, safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than

That solitude partakenthe only partaken solitude in the worldis the Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery

to that obligation and a betrayal of that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of all crimes.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying

beside the longer, as a child's foot runs. But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is that of a woman

against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers, are held to excuse

her. She gains the most slovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the vulgar grounds that her

Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim today, by the way, some such fondling as a heroine of

the dock receives from common opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation. He was

master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was his secret, and the public was not privy to his artistic

conscience. He does violence to the obligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know

very explicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he is lawless in a more literal sense, but only hopes the world will

believe that he has a whole code of his own making. It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to break

obvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public, and to abide the common rebuke.

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to

make those far and wide and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of the accessibility

of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside, is enough to lead thither.

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. In order to fulfil the apparent professions

and to keep the published promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusion or of a

very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state of solitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike

any other. The traveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost lifelong solitude is possible

knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he has seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is

broken by his passage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but they are not aware that he looks

at them. Nay, they look at him as though they were invisible. Their unselfconsciousness is absolute; it is in

the wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are curious, and turn to watch the

passerby, they are essentially alone. Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that look in

any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a lifelong solitary. He never bore himself as though he were

invisible. He never had the impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind, blank hut

in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and

milder sylvan solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a lifelong, habitual, and wild solitariness would be

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the

sign of perpetual crowds. It is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It is the quickly

caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their forfeited

place apart; who have neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor

impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the street, no hope of news from solitary

The difficulty of dealingin the course of any critical dutywith decivilized man lies in this: when you

accuse him of vulgarity sparing him no doubt the wordhe defends himself against the charge of

barbarism. Especially from new soilremote, colonialhe faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of

savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches and

canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the

lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless

slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does but make old decadences

seem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the readymade, the uncostly, the refuse

feeling of a race decivilizing. He who played long this pattering part of youth, hastened to assure you with so

selfdenying a face he did not wear warpaint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to

him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a secondhand (figurative) dress coat. And when it

was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, even the American was ill content with the word of the judicious

who lauded him for some delicate successes in continuing something of the literature of England, something

of the art of France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulated him to write poems in prose form and

to paint panoramic landscape, after brief training in academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices

are constantly calling upon America to beginto begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no

beginning for her, but instead a fine and admirable continuity which only a constant care can guide into

But decivilized man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too, knows him in all his dailiness. In

England, too, he has a literature, an art, a music, all his ownderived from many and various things of price.

Trash, in the fullness of its insimplicity and cheapness, is impossible without a beautiful past. Its chief

characteristicwhich is futility, not failurecould not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory

reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially the utterance by words. Gaiety,

vigour, vitality, the organic quality, purity, simplicity, precisionall these are among the antecedents of

trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because of them. And nothing can be much sadder that such a proof of

Evidently we cannot choose our posterity. Reversing the steps of time, we may, indeed choose backwards.

We may give our thoughts noble forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be also

well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and not our inheritance only, but our heredity.

Our minds may trace upwards and follow their ways to the best wellheads of the arts. The very habit of our

thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatal history. Their companions must be lovely,

but need be no lovelier than their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may be

Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which of us is sure? Which of us is secured

against the dangers of subsequent depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary

tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation

becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilized have every grace

as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. No

balladconcert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made

easy, by some living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilized to blame as having in their own persons

possessed civilization and marred it. They did not possess it; they were born into some tendency to

derogation, into an inclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardly do other than

Nothing can look duller than the future of this secondhand and multiplying world. Men need not be

common merely because they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what

dullness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truththat the vulgarized are not

uncivilized, and that there is no growth for themit does not look like a future at all. More balladconcerts,

more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more

young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his

voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.

He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just

built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of

desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them when

they are the promise of an impotent people? "I will do such things: what they are yet I know not."

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The

inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible

utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake together a nightingale's notes, or strike or

drive them into haste, nor can you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas

weddingbells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling. I have known some grim bells,

with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness

made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed

time to flywild prisonersby twos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives one or twelve taking

wingthey are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered from the close hands of this actual

present. Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past.

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surely after but one hearing are bells of an

unseen cathedral of France when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in

"Parsifal." They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower;

they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields and the

manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the breath of the earth, overheard in a far

streetcry or in the tinkle of some blacksmith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks its local

tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in

its dignity, and you know how familiar, how childlike, how lifelong it is in the ears of the people. The bells

are strange, and you know how homely they must be. Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel,

that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It

is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of

remembrance. The untravelled spirit of placenot to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be

discovered, never absent, without variationlurks in the byways and rules over the towers, indestructible,

an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within its

immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Long white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and

prophecies; they give promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and unforeseen goal

for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be made. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to

pay such a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a

peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is

there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child. He is well used to words and voices that he does not

understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud in the

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay measures, when we whip them to run

down the scale to ring in a weddingbells that would step to quite another and a less agile march with a

better gracethere are belfries that hold far sweeter companies. If there is no music within Italian churches,

there is a most curious local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights. Their way is for the

ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper

belltunes, made for bells. Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the subdivisions of

the arts, and better able to understand the strength that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of

a little art, and to the limits nay, the very embarrassmentsof those means. If it were but possible to give

here a real belltunewhich cannot be, for those melodies are rather longthe reader would understand

how some village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the bells, with what

These hamletbells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use

the word relatively. The belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the time when Italy

seems to have been generally rebuilt. But, needless to say, this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy. At

that time they must have had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, and golden throats,

precisely tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a more just scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry

holds in leash. But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the order of the game of a

charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by man this is by far the most lighthearted. You do not hear

it from the great churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the bells for Santa Maria del Fiore

and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does not ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, and

The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble bells. Obviously it stands alone with its

own village, and can therefore hear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no other bells in earshot.

Other such dovecotedoors are suddenly set open to the cloud, on a festa morning, to let fly those

softvoiced flocks, but the nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune is uninterrupted.

Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequestered art of composing melodies for bellscharming

division of an art, having its own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding by lawdwells

in these solitary places. No tunes in a town would get this hearing, or would be made clear to the end of their

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a belltune of its own; the custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as

in Genoa does the nervous tourist complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear an

honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of

place does not signal to him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by one, the

belfries stand and play their tunes. Variable are those lonely melodies, having a differing gaiety for the

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud

as to be unforgotten when the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to earth's

untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that sways across one of the greatest of all the seashores of

The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which

annually animates the bystreets with the sound of processionals and of recessionalsa certain popular

version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of

this likeness of something unworshipful on the earth beneath, so much the more am I convinced that the

national humour is that of banter, and that no other kind of mirth so gains as does this upon the public taste.

Here, for example, is the popular idea of a street festival; that day is as the people will actually have it, with

their own invention, their own material, their own means, and their own spirit. They owe nothing on this

occasion to the promptings or the subscriptions of the classes that are apt to take upon themselves the

direction and tutelage of the people in relation to any form of art. Here on every fifth of November the people

have their own way with their own art; and their way is to offer the service of the imagemaker, reversed in

It is a wanton fancy; and perhaps no really barbarous people is capable of so overturning the innocent plan of

original portraiture. To make a mental image of all things that are named to the ear, or conceived in the mind,

being an industrious custom of children and childish people which lapses in the age of much idle reading, the

making of a material image is the still more diligent and more sedulous act, whereby the primitive man

controls and caresses his own fancy. He may take arms anon, disappointed, against his own work; but did he

From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the person of the guy. If it were but an antithesis to the

citizen's idea of something admirable which he might carry in procession on some other day, the carrying of

the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot at a suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to

make a goodlooking doll in its praise. There is absolutely no image making art in the practice of our

people, except only this art of rags and contumely. Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of

anger for a certain cause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual malice and of so

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes dailyor so it seemsmore and more the

holiday temper of the majority. Mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only

intelligence. They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it. Say that the guy is

the effigy of an agitator in the cause of something to be desired; the street man and boy have then two

motives of mocking: they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing to suspect the reformer

of some kind of hypocrisy. Perhaps the guy of this occasion is most characteristic of all guys in London. The

people, having him or her to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity of their annual procession. They

anticipate time, and make an image when it is not November, and sell it at the market of the kerb.

Hear, moreover, the songs which some nameless one makes for the citizens, perhaps in thoughtful

renunciation of the making of their laws. These, too, seem to have for their inspiration the universal taunt.

They are, indeed, most in vogue when they have no meaning at allthis it is that makes the succes fou (and

here Paris is of one mind with London) of the street; but short of such a triumph, and when a meaning is

Bank Holiday courtship (if the inappropriate word can be pardoned) seems to be done, in real life, entirely by

banter. And it is the strangest thing to find that the banter of women by men is the most mocking in the

exchange. If the burlesque of the maid's tongue is provocative, that of the man's is derisive. Somewhat of the

order of things as they stood before they were inverted seems to remain, nevertheless, as a memory; nay, to

give the inversion a kind of lagging interest. Irony is made more complete by the remembrance, and by an

implicit allusion to the state of courtship in other classes, countries, or times. Such an allusion no doubt gives

With the most strange submission these Englishwomen in their millions undergo all degrees of derision from

the tongues of men who are their mates, equals, contemporaries, perhaps in some obscure sense their suitors,

and in a strolling manner, with one knows not what ungainly motive of reserve, even their admirers. Nor from

their tongues only; for, to pass the time, the holiday swain annoys the girl; and if he wears her hat, it is ten to

We have to believe that unmocked love has existence in the streets, because of the proof that is published

when a man shoots a woman who has rejected him; and from this also do we learn to believe that a woman of

the burlesque classes is able to reject. But for that sign we should find little or nothing intelligible in what we

In its easy moments, in its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles all tradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy

clowning after a fashion that is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same twang in country places; and

whether the English maid, having, like the antique, thrown her apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets of

Hampstead Heath or among sylvan trees, it seems that the most humorous thing to be done by the swain

would be, in the opinion in vogue, to stroll another way. Insular I have said, because I have not seen the like

But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual inversion of the worship of images on the fifth

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy ceased, in England, to be held

necessary in the course of communication with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most

gentle; there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a reluctance not only to refuse

but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office; a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a

purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or sign, nothing whatever of intercourse.

If a dog or a cat accosts you, or a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and breathing

nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to you on some obscure impulse of friendly

approach, you acknowledge it. But the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no

recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in his direction, and never a word to

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more

inhuman to refuse an answer to the beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning." When

complaint is made of the modern social mannerthat it has no merit but what is negative, and that it is apt

even to abstain from courtesy with more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requiresthe habit of

manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To the simply human eye, however, the

prevalent manner towards beggars is a striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible act of giving. We have not the

ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for

example. An elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral palazzo to the village, and

accustomed to meet, emptyhanded, a certain number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be,

literally translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word she naturally puts into the

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local dialecta dialect that puts any two people

at once upon equal terms as nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to English

readers in all its own helpless goodhumour. The excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity

thereby, and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot recall it

without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly

lady of corresponding station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have nothing

answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque

in the case of all speakersa dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in which no

book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect "familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our

Englishwoman could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a

poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine,

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of excuse customary in the courteous

manners of Portugal. And everywhere in the South, where an almost welldressed old woman, who suddenly

begins to beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can hardly reply without

kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly well known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage

manners in the rich; but about the byways and remoter places there must still be some dismay at the anger,

the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of almsgiving is

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically as we show it by our lofty ways

towards those who so manifestly put themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there; but

silence or a storm of impersonal protesta protest that appeals vaguely less to the beggars than to some not

impossible policedoes not seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, a

scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and the thanks of the mendicant; but we

have a strange way of vindicating that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a

simply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It is not merely a rough and

contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of intercoursethe last outrage. How do we propose to redress

those conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the presence, the voice, and the

being of this brother, and if, because fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in the indifference of the wise. "Have

patience, little saint," is a phrase that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible

fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hillvillage among the most barren of the Maritime Alps,

where huts of stone stand among the stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. The

people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and beg without the delay of a moment as

soon as they see your unwonted figure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form of

refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlestit is worth while to remember is the most effectual.

An indignant tourist, one who to the portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that

of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars

beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of

something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to the violence of the rich.

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar is still merry anywhere, he hides away

what it would so cheer and comfort us to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is

hardly intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon

the morals of the road. He no longer trusts the world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholehearted

mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby an unattached creature can go in a

new direction with a new wind. The merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches

of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible to the seated and stable social world.

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our literature with mad songs, and even one or

two poets of today have, by tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been stopped; it

has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led underground. The light melancholy and the

windblown joys of the song of the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have ceased

to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seems that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it is not a song of violence or fear. It is the

random trolling note of a man who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill fortune, but takes it by

choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand of unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its

own choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems, therefore, the song of an indomitable

No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it, unless a queen, English or foreign,

should claim her privilege. Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of the monastic life,

it is only because she was not admitted to see more than beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show

The Monastery is of freshlooking Gothic, by Puginthe first of the dynasty: it is reached by the white

roads of a limestone country, and backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a cleft

high up among the hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, and these are the sandals, that come and go by hills

of finer, sharper, and loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky. Just such a Via Crucis climbs

the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte

Rosa, while the encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night. The same order of friars keep that sub

Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same

Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green over the blunt hilltops, and the sky

vibrating with larks, a long wing of smoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidly

cultivated above, has a valuable subsoil, and is burrowed with mines; the breath of pit and factory, out of

sight, thickens the lower sky, and lies heavily over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper blue clear and the

head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady ray of the evening star. The people

scattered about are not mining people, but halfhearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottages are rather

cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates have taken some beauty with time, having dips and

dimples, and grass upon their edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure to see. How

willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more than half the colourover all the chocolate

and all the blue with which the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler,

or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine and the bright grey of an English sky.

The greystone, greyroofed monastery looks young in one senseit is modern; and the friars look young in

anotherthey are like their brothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists of yesterday, would

spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here,

With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work upon their land, planting parsnips in

rows, or tending a prosperous beefarm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging

the washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine which slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse,

and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the obscure

impulses of a dog's heart atoned for by long and selfconscious remorsehe bit the poet; and tried, says

one of the friars, to make doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on monastery

ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing

renown to be got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from other valleys, his

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have become well used, and the infrequent

excursionists, for lack of intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at them without

obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girl that you heard the brutal word of contempt. She

had come to the place with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcome to do,

within the monastery grounds. She stood, a figure for Bournemouth pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and

watched the son of the Umbrian saintthe friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and between

the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries continually since the coming of the friars. One

might have asked of her the kindness of a fellowfeeling. She and he alike were so habited as to show the

world that their life was aloof from its "idle business." By some such phrase, at least, the friar would

assuredly have attempted to include her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might have asked of

her the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy," said the Salvation Army girl, watching the friar out of

The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran's ecstatic picture, is turned to use when

the friars are busy. As a pocket it relieves the overburdened hands. A bottle of the local white wine made by

the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, is carried in the cowl as a present to the

stranger at the gates. The friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and not only to

make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in the room stood prudently aside, and the brother

tossed boldly. But that was the last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in La Legende des

Siecles of disappearance as the thing which no creature is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be

accomplished by quite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there was an end of it. Nor

could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined

by the spectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to meditate and drew his cowl about

Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get up gaily to this difficult service. Of all

duties this one never grows easy or familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is something to have found but

one act aloof from habit. It is not merely that the friars overcome the habit of sleep. The subtler point is that

they can never acquire the habit of sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life but would gain a

secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness and perpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at

midnight without a will that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done, and, with an intention

The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of the French fields, and the hour of

nightl'ora di nottewhich rings with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriatic

littoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for the dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the sound of that evening prayer. The care of

them is the central work of the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is principally a

place of studies. So much elect intellect and strength of heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True,

the friars are not doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair. These "bearded

counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing, hold silence; whereas they might be

"operating"beautiful word!upon the Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making

speeches, or reluctantly jostling other men for places. They might be among the involuntary busybodies who

are living by futile tasks the need whereof is a discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the

superfluous activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by the dwellers within such walls as

these. The output again a beautiful wordof the age is lessened by this abstention. None the less hopes

the stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery gates.

A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childish association with mountainclimbing roads

narrow in the bright shadows of grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick above into the

blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, with its too many windows and too few walls, the

city which of all capitals takes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some other attraction or

aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at the base, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the

inexpressive peering of windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area," and by the

I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wroughtiron. A wall is the safeguard of

simplicity. It lays a long level line among the indefinite chances of the landscape. But never more majestic

than in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot upon the rock, builds in the serried ilexwood

and builds out the wave. The seawall is the wall at its best. And fine as it is on the strong coast, it is

That sea wall is low and long; seapinks grow on the salt grass that passes away into shingle at its foot. It is

at close quarters with the winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the skyline of sea is

jagged. Never from any height does the ocean horizon show thus broken and battered at its very verge, but

from the flat coast and the narrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; and the stormy

light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shifting with the buoyant hillocks and their restless line.

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low seawall as secures many a mile of gentle English

coast to the east. The Dutch dyke has not that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look of

haste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumbered Dutch fields to look at the sea, there

is nothing in the least like England; and even the Englishman of to day is apt to share something of the old

perversity that was minded to cast derision upon the Dutch in their encounters with the tides.

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slight derision of the nations who hold

themselves to be more romantic, and, as it were, more slender. We English, once upon a time, did especially

flout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth the writing. It may be no more than a brief

perversity that has set a number of our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it is no more

than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense of the bourgeois. The bourgeois would be more

simple than, in fact, he is were he to stand up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of his dismay

is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton art. And, when all is done, who performs for

any but an imaginary audience? Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are not the least of the

makings of an author. A few men and women he achieves within his books; but others does he create without,

and to those figures of all illusion makes the appeal of his art. More candid is the author who has no world,

but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart. He has at least a living hearer.

This is by the way. Charles II has been cheered; the feat is done, the dismay is imagined with joy. And yet the

Merry Monarch's was a dismal time. Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from the French King remembered

and claimed by the restored throne of England, and the Dutch in the Medwayall this was disaster. None the

less, having the vanity of new clothes and a pretty figure, did we especially by the mouth of Andrew

Marvellderide our victors, making sport of the Philistines with a proper national sense of enjoyment of

such physical disabilities, or such natural difficulties, or such misfavour of fortune, as may beset the alien.

Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment. They are so still; or they were so certainly in the

day when a great novelist found the smallness of some South German States to be the subject of unsating

banter. The German scenes at the end of "Vanity Fair," for example, may prove how much the ridicule of

mere smallness, fewness, poverty (and not even real poverty, privation, but the poverty that shows in

comparison with the gold of great States, and is properly in proportion) rejoiced the sense of humour in a

writer and moralist who intended to teach mankind to be less worldly. In Andrew Marvell's day they were

even more candid. The poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincere laughter of the inmost man,

the true, infrequent laughter of the heart. Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughterat leanness, at

hunger, cold, and solitudein the face of the world, and in the name of literature, in one memorable satire. I

speak of "Flecno, an English Priest in Rome," wherein nothing is sparednot the smallness of the lodging,

It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallness of the country of Holland matter for a cordial

jest. But, besides the smallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage in regard to the sea. In the

Venetians, commerce with the sea, conflict with the sea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing peacealbeit

a less instant battle and a more languid victorywere confessed to be noble; in the Dutch they were

grotesque. "With mad labour," says Andrew Marvell, with the spirited consciousness of the citizen of a

country well above ground and free to watch the labour at leisure, "with mad labour" did the Dutch "fish the

How did they rivet with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre, their newcatched miles, And to the stake a

struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their watery Babel far

The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed, And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea nymphs should find themselves provided with

a capital cabillau of shoals of pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and it must be allowed

that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony. There is not a smile for us in "Flecno," but it is more than

possible to smile over this "Character of Holland"; at the excluded ocean returning to play at leapfrog over

the steeples; at the rise of government and authority in Holland, which belonged of right to the man who

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

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell, more than his practical joke, and more

than the heart that was light in so burly a framewe have lost with these the wild humour that wore so well

the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium,

and vitality in a word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot stand firm within two lines, but

must slip beyond and between the boundaries, who tolerate the couplets of Keats and imitate them, should

praise the day of Charles II because of Marvell's art, and not for love of the sorry reign. We had plague, fire,

and the Dutch in the Medway, but we had the couplet; and there were also the measures of those more poetic

poets, hitherto called somewhat slightingly the Cavalier poets, who matched the wit of the Puritan with a

It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that some remembered winter storms lately turned their

great artillery. It was a time of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and so close, up in the towers of

the seaside stronghold, that one seemed to be indeed admitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds. The

gale came with an indescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemed to break itself upon the heights, yet

passed unbroken out to sea; in the voice of the sea there were pauses, but none in that of the urgent gale with

its hoohoohoo all night, that clamoured down the calling of the waves. That lack of pauses was the

strangest thing in the tempest, because the increase of sound seemed to imply a lull before. The lull was never

perceptible, but the lift was always an alarm. The onslaught was instant, where would it stop? What was the

secret extreme to which this hurry and force were tending? You asked less what thing was driving the flocks

of the storm than what was drawing them. The attraction seemed the greater violence, the more irresistible,

and the more unknown. And there were moments when the end seemed about to be attained.

The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of

material things; but the fierce gale is soft. Along the short grass, trembling and cowering flat on the scarped

hillside, against the staggering horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the battery of the

tempest is a quick and enormous softness. What down, what sand, what deep moss, what elastic wave could

This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the seawall up together. The next day it left the waters white

with the thrilling whiteness of foam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such narrow waters you do

not see the distances, the wide levels of fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and long

wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and transitory brightness so far out that all the waves, near

and far, seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond the other, and league beyond league, into foam.

But the Channel has its own strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the freshest of all

noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon the white seawall, under the random shadow of

"It was resolved," said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of the panels and other spaces of Portland

stone with arabesques and other patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewing

from time to time. The colours, therefore,"and here is the passage to be noted"are all mixed with wax

liquefied with petroleum; and the wax surface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax is left time to form an

imperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of the stone with a chisel if it was desired

to remove it." Not, apparently, that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance,

could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" is driven in and incorporate, burnt in and

absorbed, so that there is nothing possible to cut away by any industry. In this humorous form of ornament

Will this victory over our sons' sons be the last resolute tyranny prepared by one age for the coercion,

constraint, and defeat of the future? To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the strongest of

human desires. It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps

onwards, let this success in the stencilling of St Paul's teach us, to our confusion. There is evidently a

mana group of menhappy at this moment because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our

posterity to have their cupola of St Paul's with the stone mouldings stencilled and "picked out" with niggling

colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a survival of one of the obscure pleasures

It is impossible to read the Thirtynine Articles, for example, and not to recognize in those acts of final,

allresolute, eager, eternal legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this former human wish.

If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, which yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the

Reformers' who arrested the moving man, and inhibited the moving God. The sixteenth century and a certain

part of the age immediately following seem to be times when the desire had conspicuously become a passion.

Say the middle of the sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in England for in

those days we were somewhat in the rear. THERE is the obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and

resolved seizure upon power. THEN was Rome rebuilt, refaced, marked with a single sign and style. Then

was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate of the unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the

day to come were to be as the day then present would have them, if the dead handthe living hand that was

then to die, and was to keep its hold in deathcould by any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be more than willing to build for

itself. The day may soon come when no man will do even so much without some impulse of apology.

Posterity is not compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor to look at them; but

it is more or less obliged to have a stone building in view for an age or two. We can hardly avoid some of the

forms of tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would consent to share in this horrible

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, and the efforts of all in council

were directed upon the future. How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be made

secure against all mischancessmoke, damp, "the risk of bulging," even accidents attending the washing of

upper floorsall was discussed in confidence with the public. It was impossible for anyone who read the

papers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge. From Genoa, from

Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to

defeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient and effacing time.

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date, decorated a vast quantity of wall space of

more than one order of architecture. Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place with unparalleled

obstinacy. They had not the malice of the petroleum that does violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an

indomitable patience. Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all his

workrefused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgencesby a perseverance that nothing

could discourage. Who has not known somewhat indifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and

varnishes? Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in the case of the Ludwig

Kirche this lime remained there for eight years, with frequent stirrings. This was in order that the whole

fresco, when at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality. Nor did the master fail to

thwart time by those mechanical means that should avert the risk of bulging already mentioned. He neglected

no detail. He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the laws of nature, to frustrate them.

Gravitation found him prepared, and so did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents. Against

bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possible trickling from an upper floor he had asphalt;

it was all part of the human conspiracy. In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand well. It would

have been more justso the present age thinks of these preserved wallsif the day that admired them had

had them exclusively, and our day had been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages have

In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to shoulder against the walk of time and against

his gentle act and art. They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came from Munich to London,

looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heart of confidence into the breast of the Commission. The

situation, he averred, need not be too damp for immortality, with due care. What he had done in the

Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek might be done with the best results in England, in defiance of the weather,

of the river, of the mere days, of the divine order of alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime that had not been kept quite long enough,

ready to fulfil its mission; they would have none of it. They evaded it, studied its ways, and put it to the rout.

"Many failures that might have been hastily attributed to damp were really owing to the use of lime in too

fresh a state. Of the experimental works painted at Munich, those only have faded which are known to have

been done without due attention to the materials. THUS, A FIGURE OF BAVARIA, PAINTED BY

WITH LIME THAT WAS TOO FRESH." One cannot refrain from italics: the way was so easy; it was only

to take a little less of this important care about the lime, to have a better confidence, to be more impatient and

This is not a matter of artcriticism. It is an ethical question hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not

always been obliged to face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in part for that

future whereof the present needs to be assured that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security

of person or property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim, and to claim it for our

own sakesbecause of the reflex effect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They found the present all too narrow for the

imposition of their will. It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface the

records of a past that offended them. It did not satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative

menace and instant compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and pursued the

rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it that none living should evade them, then they

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the effectual and final success of their

measureswould their writ run in time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their

subjects?whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid counsels and upon those busy vigils of

the keepers of the world, they silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They wrote in statute books;

they would have written their will across the skies. Their hearts would have burnt for lack of records more

inveterate, and of testimonials that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever doubt

lest posterity might try their lock. Perhaps they did never so much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and

emancipated for whom their prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of these our more diffident times! They, who

would have written their present and actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleum

and wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in withholding from their hands this means of finality and

violence. Into our hands it has been given at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that we had

been proved in the school of forbearance. Something, indeed, we may have learnt therein, but not enough, as

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and the probable wisdom of our successors. A

certain reverend official document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to the

veneration of the present times "those past ages with their store of experience." Doubtless, as the posterity of

their predecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, nonenone. Therefore, if they

were a little reverend our own posterity is right reverend. It is a flippant and novelty loving humour that so

flatters the unproved past and refuses the deference due to the burden of years which is ours, whichgrown

The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the art of nations. Being in its own methods

and attitude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of accidental value, and not of

integral necessity. The virtual discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second French Empire,

caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may look when Symmetry

has grown vulgar. The lesson was most welcome. Japan has had her full influence. European art has learnt the

value of position and the tact of the unique. But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all her characteristic art) content

with her own conventions; she is local, provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a

Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched by Japanese example of Incident and the

Unique. Music had attained the noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too,

symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phase and of fragment, succeeded. The

sense of symmetry is strong in a complete melodyof symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least

stationary formbalance; whereas the leitmotif is isolated. In domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident

make a familiar antithesisthe very commonplace of rival methods of art. But the same antithesis exists in

less obvious forms. The poets have sought "irregular" metres. Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing its

right place, in the most modern of modern portraits. In these we have, if not the Japanese suppression of

minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese exaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and

buoyancy. The smile, the figure, the draperynot yet settled from the arranging touch of a hand, and

showing its markthe restless and unstationary foot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere

like a single breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of Japanese art, yet has the nimble

touch of Japanese incident. In passing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the

aspect of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or in motion the aspen and the

freeleafed poplar have the alertness and expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and

elms are gathered in their station. All this is not Japanese, but from such accident is Japanese art inspired,

What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament. Greek art and Gothic alike have series,

with repetition or counter change for their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw the distinction

between this motive and that of the Japanese. The Japanese motives may be defined as uniqueness and

position. And these were not known as motives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration.

Repetition and counterchange, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, as in the diaper patterns for

which these people have so singular an invention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principal

inspiration. And it is quite worth while, and much to the present purpose, to call attention to the chief

peculiarity of the Japanese diaper patterns, which is INTERRUPTION. Repetition there must necessarily be

in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which is, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and

freshly unexpected. The place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and the avoidance of

correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design of this class inimitable. Thus, even in a repeating

pattern, you have a curiously successful effect of impulse. It is as though a separate intention had been

formed by the designer at every angle. Such renewed consciousness does not make for greatness. Greatness

in design has more peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in their curious brevity. It is

scarcely necessary to say that a line, in all other schools of art, is long or short according to its place and

purpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns that the line is always short; and many

repeating designs are entirely composed of this various and variouslyoccurring brevity, this prankish

avoidance of the goal. Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in the unit of their repeating patterns, by

another simple devicethat of numbers. They make a small difference in the number of curves and of lines.

A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it would look too much like a contrast. For

example, three rods on one side and six on another would be something else than a mere variation, and

variety would be lost by the use of them. The Japanese decorator will vary three in this place by two in that,

and a sense of the defeat of symmetry is immediately produced. With more violent means the idea of

Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanese compositions, complete designs in

which there is no point of symmetry. It is a balance of suspension and of antithesis. There is no sense of lack

of equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect of giving or of subtracting value. A

small thing is arranged to reply to a large one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance that makes

it a (Japanese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in other countries) the scales commonly in use are furnished

with only a single weight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it nearer or farther upon

a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so many ounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds

when it hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays some such part with the twig or the

bird in the upper corner of a Japanese composition. Its place is its significance and its value. Such an art of

position implies a great art of intervals. The Japanese chooses a few things and leaves the space between

them free, as free as the pauses or silences in music. But as time, not silence, is the subject, or material, of

contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement of spacethat is, collocationthat makes the value of

empty intervals. The space between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuable because it is

just so wide and no more. And this, again, is only another way of saying that position is the principle of this

Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped to justify the more stenographic school of

etching. Greatly transcending Japanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moral

support from the islands of the Japanese. He too etches a kind of shorthand, even though his notes appeal

much to the spectator's knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but the spectator's simple

vision. Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have

written his signs so freely had not the Japanese so freely drawn his own. Furthermore still, the transitory and

destructible material of Japanese art has done as much as the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery

of processes, to reconcile the European designerthe black and white artistto working for the day, the day

of publication. Japan lives much of its daily life by means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of

paper, printed. But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper with us means short life,

quick abolition, transformation, reappearance, a very circulation of life. This is our present way of surviving

ourselvesthe new version of that feat of life. Time was when to survive yourself meant to secure, for a time

indefinitely longer than the life of man, such dull form as you had given to your work; to intrude upon

posterity. To survive yourself, today, is to let your work go into daily oblivion.

Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper does not last for ever, and that material has

clearly suggested to them a different condition of ornament from that with which they adorned old lacquer,

fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For the transitory material they keep the more purely pictorial art of

landscape. What of Japanese landscape? Assuredly it is too far reduced to a monotonous convention to merit

the serious study of races that have produced Cotman and Corot. Japanese landscape drawing reduces things

seen to such fewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people less freshspirited and

more inclined to take themselves seriously than these Orientals. A preoccupied people would never endure it.

But a little closer attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive attitude towards

landscapeit is an attitude almost traitorously evasivea more significant reason. It is that the distances,

the greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and the flight of a sky, are all certainly

alien to the perceptions of a people intent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to define by that phrase

the curious Japanese search for accidents? Upon such search these people are avowedly intent, even though

they show themselves capable of exquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit of

growth of a normal flower. They are not in search of the perpetual slight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal

of the language poetic ("a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson of the way of a poet's

speech)and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of the pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no,

what the Japanese are intent upon is perpetual slight disorder. In Japan the man in the fields has eyes less for

the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in the path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious

sense of pleasure in fortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque strangeness he will load himself

with the stone and carry it home to his garden. The art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace,

and not the art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this people conventionally signify wave or

cloud. All these curls have an attitude which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a

human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or niggling labour. Why these curves

should be so charming it would be hard to say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place

where the upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately unexpected every time,

andespecially in gold embroideriesis sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, while

A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no other art has the figure suffered such

crooked handling. The Japanese have generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of

perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and admiration; and it is quite possible

that we might miss it in pictorial presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty

where we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is certainly not difficult to guess at. And,

accordingly, you are generally aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity, evento

be very generoushas been admired by the Japanese artist, and is represented here and there occasionally, in

the figure of warrior or mousme. But even with this exception the habit of Japanese figuredrawing is

evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It is curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so

constant as to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective foreshortening. With us it is to

the youngest child only that there would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently

forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders." The European child would not see fun in the

living man so presented, butunused to the same effect "in the flat"he thinks it prodigiously humorous in

a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The Japanese keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of

humour. It amuses him, but not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened figure should,

in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more

derision in it than the simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion of ignominy. And, moreover,

the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely scorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to insist upon the ignoble character of

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of symmetry. The world knows too much of

the abuse of Greek decoration, and would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art afresh in a

future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may be the phases of the arts, there is the abiding

principle of symmetry in the body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance is equal. Exterior

human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact where there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres

of life and movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man is Greek without and Japanese

within. But the absolute symmetry of the skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a

principle. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human action. Attitude and motion disturb

perpetually, with infinite incidents inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of sleepthe

symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is that symmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it

rules the dance and the battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because this hand holds the

goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that the sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that

caresses the unequal heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are inflections thereof.

All human movement is a variation upon symmetry, and without symmetry it would not be variation; it

would be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art. The order of inflection that is not

infraction has been explained in a most authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should

save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments: "Law, the rectitude of

humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has

been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the

music of verse arises, not from infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the greatest poets

have been those the modulus of whose verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in

correspondence with feelings and passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law puts a

strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality

of poetic language is a continual SLIGHT novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three

modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in praise of the truer order of life."

And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most beautiful and most secure when it is put to

the proof. That perpetual proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life. Symmetry is a profound,

The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle or be fanned away. It has life and it is

not without law; it has an obvious life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law and

the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form of man, and life occult like his

unequal heart. And this seems to be the nobler and the more perdurable relation.

It is disconcerting to hear of the plaid in India. Our dyes, we know, they use in the silk mills of Bombay, with

the deplorable result that their old clothes are dull and unintentionally falsified with infelicitous decay. The

Hindus are a washing people; and the sun and water that do but dim, soften, and warm the native vegetable

dyes to the last, do but burlesque the aniline. Magenta is bad enough when it is itself; but the worst of

magenta is that it spoils but poorly. No bad modern forms and no bad modern colours spoil well. And

spoiling is an important process. It is a testone of the ironical tests that come too late with their proofs.

London porticohouses will make some such ruins as do chemical dyes, which undergo no use but derides

them, no accidents but caricature them. This is an old enough grievance. But the plaid!

The plaid is the Scotchman's contribution to the decorative art of the world. Scotland has no other indigenous

decoration. In his most admirable lecture on "The Two Paths," Ruskin acknowledged, with a passing

misgiving, that his Highlanders had little art. And the misgiving was but passing, because he considered how

fatally wrong was the art of India"it never represents a natural fact. It forms its compositions out of

meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line . . . It will not draw a man, but an eightarmed monster;

it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zigzag." Because of this aversion from Nature the Hindu and

his art tended to evil, we read. But of the Scot we are told, "You will find upon reflection that all the highest

points of the Scottish character are connected with impressions derived straight from the natural scenery of

What, then, about the plaid? Where is the natural fact there? If the Indian, by practising a nonnatural art of

spirals and zigzags, cuts himself off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight," to

what did the good and healthy Highlander condemn himself by practising the art of the plaid? A spiral may

be found in the vine, and a zigzag in the lightning, but where in nature is the plaid to be found? There is

surely no curve or curl that can be drawn by a designing hand but is a play upon some infinitely various

natural fact. The smoke of the cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so

multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bends upon currents

of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by

the finest Oriental handand that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has

captured the curve of the section of a seawaveits flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single movement,

whereas the line of cigarette smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions. No, it is

impossible to accept the saying that the poor spiral or scroll of a human design is anything but a participation

Now the plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin says of Oriental designthe plaid is not

only cut off from nature, and cut off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in inorganic

quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradiction of all natural or vital forms. And it is equally

defiant of vital tone and of vital colour. Everywhere in nature tone is gradual, and between the fainting of a

tone and the failing of a curve there is a charming analogy. But the tartan insists that its tone shall be

invariable, and sharply defined by contrasts of dark and light. As to colour, it has colours, not colour.

But that plaid should now go so far afield as to decorate the noble garment of the Indies is ill news. True,

Ruskin saw nothing but cruelty and corruption in Indian life or art; but let us hear an Indian maxim in regard

to those who, in cruel places, are ready sufferers: "There," says the Mahabharata, "where women are treated

with respect, the very gods are said to be filled with joy. Women deserve to be honoured. Serve ye them.

Bend your will before them. By honouring women ye are sure to attain to the fruition of all things." And the

rash teachers of our youth would have persuaded us that this generous lesson was first learnt in Teutonic

Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably be suffered to reply, to this Hindu

profession of reverence. Accordingly the woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil to the souls

of her motherinlaw, grandmotherinlaw, and great grandmotherinlaw, in gratitude for their giving

her a good husband. And to go back for a moment to Ruskin's contrast of the two races, it was assuredly

under the stress of some too rash reasoning that he judged the lovely art of the East as a ministrant to

superstition, cruelty, and pleasure, whether wrought upon the temple, the sword, or the girdle. The innocent

art of innocent Hindu women for centuries decked their most modest heads, their dedicated and sequestered

There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by those who suffer from it or who are

participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the

flower his own paltriness revisits him his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his

slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really

had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of

design and decoration have sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a cumulative

force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal and leafthe fluent forms that a man has not

by heart but certainly by roteare woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and insimplicity

have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a

farm house arrayed for those whom Americans call summerboarders, is beset with flowers. It blooms, a

dry, woollen, papery, castiron garden. The floor flourishes with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalized

into a kind of order; the tablecover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wallpaper is set with

bunches; the rigid machinelace curtain is all of roses and lilies in its very construction; over the muslin

blinds an impotent sprig is scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bellropes, in the plaster pictureframes,

in the painted teatray and on the cups, in the pediment of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the

barometer, in the finials of sofa and armchair, in the finger plates of the "grained" door, is to be seen the

ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale inspiration of the flower. And what is this bossiness around the

grate but some blunt, blackleaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but the retribution of the flower is

precisely weariness. It is the persecution of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weaklingsubjection to the smallest of the things he has abused.

The designer of cheap patterns is no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory

author by the phrase. In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to trivialities by his economical

greed. A condition for using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a measure of reluctance.

Ornamentstrange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilizedwas in the beginning intended to be

something jocund; and jocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty.

Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has something even more

severe than modertion: she has an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal; they

show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace of decoration. Who has ever

multiplied or repeated his delights? or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes

the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man should, like a child, ask for one

thing many times. Her answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she shall

make the one tremendous difference among her giftsand make it perhaps in secretby naming one of

them the ultimate. What, for novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the last? Of

many thousand kisses the poor lastbut even the kisses of your mouth are all numbered.

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired. The leg,

completing as it does the form of man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is at least as

important as the scenery of geological structure, or the scenery of architecture, or the scenery of vegetation,

but which the lovers of mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have consented to ignore. The leg is

the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has the finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms

which, coming at the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life by its unstable equilibrium. A

lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the body, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet,

never stands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first suggested the phantasy of flight. We

imagine wings to the figure that is erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,

because of his station, looks newlighted. All this is true of the best leg, and the best leg is the man's. That of

the young child, in which the Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither movement nor supporting

strength. In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives

the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic. But man should no longer disguise the

long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.

Inexpressive of what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be, they are neither implicitly

nor explicitly good raiment. It is hardly possible to err by violence in denouncing them. Why, when an

indifferent writer is praised for "clothing his thought," it is to modern raiment that one's agile fancy

The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other than the mass of sooty colourdark

without depthand the multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and meet,

and listen to the speaker. For the undistinguished are very important by their numbers. These are they who

make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalized; as units they inevitably lack something of

interest; all the more they have cumulative effect. It would be well if we could persuade the average man to

take on a certain human dignity in the clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to be

changed. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their national customsand the wretchedest

of them all the wearing of other men's old raimentthat they must wait for reform until the reformed dress,

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a certain social immorality in the

caricature of the midcentury and earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim the vulgarizing of the

married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that

humourist's serial, "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," which were presumably considered good comic reading

in the "Punch" of that time, and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to

make a serious comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put oneself at

a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such

as it is, if he thought it worth his eyesight. The lastnamed has to bear the least tolerable of modern

reproachesthat he lacks humour; but he need not always care. Now to turn over Douglas Jerrold's

monologues is to find that people in the midcentury took their mirth principally from the life of the arriere

boutique. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature. Therefore we must take something of

the vulgarity of Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential vulgarity

is that of the woman. There is in some old "Punch" volume a drawing by Leechwhom one is weary of

hearing named the gentle, the refinedwhere the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the letterpress.

Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond

description gross. And page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish

ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time there was, moreover, one great humourist, one

whom I infinitely admire; he, too, I am grieved to remember, bore his part willingly in vulgarizing the

woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarizing of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman

suing man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned without

restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibilityin none of these ignominies is woman so

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's contemporary. And accordingly the married

woman and her child are humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is moderately and

dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that her husbandhimself wearisome enough to die

ofis weary of her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should furtively spend

money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire

to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby, with enormous cheeks

and a hideous rosette in its hata burlesque babyshould be a grotesque object of her love, for that too

makes subtly for her abasement. Charles Keene, again another contemporary, though he lived into a later

and different time. He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy indignities of civic physique,

of stupid prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he found

themwhether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as

delightone is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a

completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then

again we get convinced that real apprehensionreal apprehensivenesswould not have insisted upon such

things, could not have lived with them through almost a whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of

years ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the invention of that day. A

drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella

open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a nightcap.

Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge wellfed figure was drawn, and how the coat

wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched

by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middleage, of moneymaking;

the old common jape against the motherinlaw; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with

shambling sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was."

In all these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys.

The hint of tenderness which in really fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or

from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs;

nevertheless, we acknowledge that there is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they are not

caricatures, and certainly in "Robert," the City waiter of "Punch." But so irresistible is the derision of the

woman that all Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon her. Never for any grace

gone astray is she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always

for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates

her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851, or thereaboutsthe

pleasure in this particular form of human disgracehas passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which

some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex. But

the vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English the most English thing that England

had in days when she bragged of many anotherand it was not able to survive an increased commerce of

manners and letters with France. It was the chief immorality destroyed by the French novel.

Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez. In Spain was the Point put upon Honour;

and Velasquez was the first Impressionist. As an Impressionist he claimed, implicitly if not explicitly, a

whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness; he made an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he

relied on his own candour, and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept the chastity of art when

other masters were content with its honesty, and when others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded the

point of honour. Contemporary masters more or less proved their position, and convinced the world by

something of demonstration; the first Impressionist simply asked that his word should be accepted. To those

who would not take his word he offers no bond. To those who will, he grants the distinction of a share in his

Somewhat unrefined, in comparison with his lofty and simple claim to be believed on a suggestion, is the

commoner painter's production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions of ordinary experience, his

selfdefence against the suspicion of making irresponsible mysteries in art. "You can see for yourself," the

lesser man seems to say to the world, "thus things are, and I render them in such manner that your

intelligence may be satisfied." This is an appeal to average experienceat the best the cumulative

experience; and with the average, or with the sum, art cannot deal without derogation. The Spaniard seems to

say: "Thus things are in my pictorial sight. Trust me, I apprehend them so." We are not excluded from his

counsels, but we are asked to attribute a certain authority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of that art

of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and not far from the endnot far short of the wholeof the art

of painting. So little indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a great Impressionist's impression that

Velasquez requires us to be in some degree his colleagues. Thus may each of us to whom he appeals take

praise from the praised: he leaves my educated eyes to do a little of the work. He respects my responsibility

no lessthough he respects it less explicitlythan I do his. What he allows me would not be granted by a

meaner master. If he does not hold himself bound to prove his own truth, he returns thanks for my trust. It is

as though he used his countrymen's courteous hyperbole and called his house my own. In a sense of the most

Because Impressionism with all its extremelet us hope its ultimatederivatives is so free, therefore is it

doubly bound. Because there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible. To undertake this art for

the sake of its privileges without confessing its obligationsor at least without confessing them up to the

point of honouris to take a vulgar freedom: to see immunities precisely where there are duties, and an

advantage where there is a bond. A very mob of men have taken Impressionism upon themselves, in several

forms and under a succession of names, in this our later day. It is against all probabilities that more than a few

among these have within them the point of honour. In their galleries we are beset with a dim distrust. And to

distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted. How many of these landscape painters, deliberately rash,

are painting the truth of their own impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered; truth and

falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide. But when

the dubium concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that their sensitiveness, their candour,

their scruple, their delicate equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are enough? Now

Impressionists have told us things as to their impressionsas to the effect of things upon the temperament of

this man and upon the mood of thatwhich should not be asserted except on the artistic point of honour. The

majority can tell ordinary truth, but should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary. They can face the

general judgement, but they should hesitate to produce work that appeals to the last judgement, which is the

judgement within. There is too much reason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to differ from

the greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point of view worth seizing, no vigilance

worth awaiting, no mood worth waylaying. And to be, de parti pris, an Impressionist without these! O

Velasquez! Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach in her own things. An author, here and there, will

make as though he had a word worth hearingnay, worth overhearinga word that seeks to withdraw

even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all too probably a platitude. But obviously,

literature is notas is the craft and mystery of paintingso at the mercy of a halfimposture, so guarded by

unprovable honour. For the art of painting is reserved that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation. If the

artistic temperamenttedious word!with all its grotesque privileges, becomes yet more common than it is,

there will be yet less responsibility; for the point of honour is the simple secret of the few.

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the

colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so

only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of

betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the

value of which is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of life is the

colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the

So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life is outdone by all the colours of the world. Its

very beauty is that it is white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red, but less red

than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine

colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory;

but under the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the London horizon, it is as delicately

flushed as the paler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of June.

For months together London does not see the colour of life in any mass. The human face does not give much

of it, what with features, and beards, and the shadow of the tophat and chapeau melon of man, and of the

veils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousand injuries and accidents. The popular

face of the Londoner has soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown. We miss little

beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbers outofdoors. You get it in some quantity

when all the heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open air,

needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, in the open air, "clothed with the sun," whether the

The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the landscape the human colour of life. He is

allowed to come out of all his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer northwest evening,

on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of eight he sheds the slough of nameless coloursall allied to

the hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for its boysand he makes, in his

hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between the greyblue water and the greyblue sky. Clothed now with

the sun, he is crowned byandby with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They are so quickly restored. There seems to

be nothing to do, but only a little thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last and most finished

action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing

mistaken for art by other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete

the landscape with the lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts

with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his

slenderness, his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, he gives

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is

always to do, by the happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in the

streetsand no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your green grass. The gasometer even must

fall to pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so remediable as the work of

modern man"a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said, "very soothing." And by remediable I mean,

of course, destructible. As the bathing child shuffles off his garmentsthey are few, and one brace suffices

himso the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the

things that collect about railway stations. A single night almost clears the air of London.

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave

indeed on a real sea coast. To have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O memorable

little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land.

The sea had the dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspectthe dark and not the opal tints. The

sky was also deep. Everything was very definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most

luminous thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because it was a

little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most

luminous thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of life.

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be

delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the

scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that

seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to spin and cook

for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the

largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre,

have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the innermostthe privacy of deathwas

never allowed to put obstacles in the way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were,

duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of

representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear

political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public

To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden.

You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up. It is like the scene in

the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more

than bid them. He lifts them, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both arms; he takes

them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressive force. Or it is as when a conductor takes his players

to successive heights of music. You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the distances unfold

unlookedfor wings and take an even flight. You are but a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds. This distant hill outsoars that less distant,

but all are on the wing, and the plain raises its verge. All things follow and wait upon your eyes. You lift

these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by the pilgrimage of your body. "Lift thine eyes to the

It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another that makes the way up a hill so full of

universal movement. All the landscape is on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harbours

literally come to light; the headlands repeat themselves; little cups within the treeless hills open and show

their farms. In the sea are many regions. A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface is turned. There

are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. Not a step of your journey up the height that has not its

replies in the steady motion of land and sea. Things rise together like a flock of manyfeathered birds.

But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search of. That is your chief companion on your

way. It is to uplift the horizon to the equality of your sight that you go high. You give it a distance worthy of

the skies. There is no distance, except the distance in the sky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the

height is to be seen the distance of this world. The line is sent back into the remoteness of light, the verge is

So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less near than Queen Mab and her chariot can

equal its fineness. Here on the edges of the eyelids, or there on the edges of the worldwe know no other

place for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender. The touches of her passing, as close as

dreams, or the utmost vanishing of the forest or the ocean in the white light between the earth and the air;

nothing else is quite so intimate and fine. The extremities of a mountain view have just such tiny touches as

On the horizon is the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars the simplicity of light; but there colour is effaced,

not as men efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears on that shining edge;

there is not substance enough for colour. The rim of the hill, of the woodland, of the meadowland, of the

sealet it only be far enoughhas the same absorption of colour; and even the dark things drawn upon the

bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is among them, and they are mingled with it. The horizon has its

own way of making bright the pencilled figures of forests, which are black but luminous.

On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. There you perceive that an ordinary sky of

cloudsnot a thunder skyis not a wall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat each

other grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky and earth that gather alike the great lines

of their designs to the same distant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up in unintelligible heights

Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted is the horizon. Not the bark of the trees in

its right colour; not the spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the parks; not the

smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; but rather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a

beautiful thing of the London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, not where the soft

sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to put all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to

A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the line and defines it, or mingles it with the

raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormy

horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raise the light from beyond the shower,

and the shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they

see but little of their sea. A child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that they cannot see in

the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world. Never in the solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of

Good Hope and Cape Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seen anything but a little

circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he was alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes. The

sailor has nothing but his mast, indeed. And but for his mast he would be isolated in as small a world as that

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them so perpetually for man, and opens them

A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offing hardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear

him you might think something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the centre of it.

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your

descent. The further sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding world, with its looks

serene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, its signs and communications of light, gathers

down and pauses. This flock of birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth. The Cardinal

weighs down the audience with his downward hands. Farewell to the most delicate horizon.

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of the green of leaves. It is no longer a difference

in degrees of maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their differences of

character and not of mere date. Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a

daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as

Gravity is the wordnot solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as at night. The daylight trees of July are

signs of common beauty, common freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day. In

childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite

recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April eveningsa heartache for them, which in riper

But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find daily things tedious, and familiar things

importunate, that it has no great delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness of the summer that

has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere day and of late summer becomes perceptible to mature eyes

that have long ceased to be sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot now find anything in nature too

familiar; eyes which have, indeed, lost sight of the further awe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer see so

much of the past in April twilight as they saw when they had no past; but which look freshly at the dailiness

of green summer, of early afternoon, of every sky of any form that comes to pass, and of the darkened elms.

Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting close, unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold

head when it looks alone to a late sun. But if one could go by all the woods, across all the old forests that are

now meadowlands set with trees, and could walk a county gathering trees of a single kind in the mind, as one

walks a garden collecting flowers of a single kind in the hand, would not the harvest be a harvest of poplars?

A veritable passion for poplars is a most intelligible passion. The eyes do gather them, far and near, on a

whole day's journey. Not one is unperceived, even though great timber should be passed, and hillsides dense

and deep with trees. The fancy makes a poplar day of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for

the poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be all various, but the poplars are separate.

All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with them) shake themselves perpetually free of

the motionless forest. It is easy to gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay them a flash of

recognition of their gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenly aware of them close by. Light and the

breezes are as quick as the eyes of a poplarlover to find the willing tree that dances to be seen.

No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for oneself an oak day so well. The oaks would

wait to be found, and many would be missed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert enough for a

traveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do not sleep. From within some little grove of other trees

a single poplar makes a slight sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind. They are salient

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars. And yet their green is not rich; the coolest

have a colour much mingled with a cloudgrey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize their

unfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplar and the aspen do not darkenor

hardlyand the deepest summer will not find a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingers cool as aspen leaves," he knew the

coolest thing in the world. It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both

sidesthe greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as little

rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine

between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. You may have the sky sprinkled through them

Sending your fancy poplargathering, then, you ensnare wild trees, beating with life. No fisher's net ever took

such glancing fishes, nor did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibrating Pleiades.

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see the clear sky might seem her chief loss,

but that is shared by the rest of England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear sky is,

elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go for a week or two at a time, even though you

hold your head up as you walk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you shall see no

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glass towards the sky when you open

them towards the street. They are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were

used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so much as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is

not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the world. It

has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The terrestrial scenerythe tourist'sis a prisoner

compared with this. The tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's

diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for its changes it depends upon the mobility of the

skies. The mere green flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the greater it must wait

upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade according to its passage; they wear so

simply, from head to foot, the luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their own local

colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced before the allimportant mood of the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a

sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and partakes in the landscape obviously,

lies halfway across the mountain slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the view

by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest things are done from its own place, aloft.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries than a poet conceals, but, like him,

not by interception. Thence it writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils of the

sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it sheds deep colour upon the forest land of

Sussex, so that, seen from the hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its own beauty is unaltered when it has no

earthly beauty to improve. It is always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gasworks and

the stucco, above the faces of painted white housesthe painted surfaces that have been devised as the only

things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some little landscape of rather paltry

interesta conventional river heavy with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;

and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always have it, with "autumn tints." High

over these rises, in the enormous scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expectedan heroic sky. Few

of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done under such a heaven. It was surely

designed for other days. It is for an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the

distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and cloudless sky? The very horizons of the

landscape are near, for the round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are

unmeasuredyou rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with conscious flight, than it could ever have

journeyed otherwise. Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are mountains

indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are pigmy. Yet the skyheights, being so far off, are

not overpowering by disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the human measure.

The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile

building, while the cloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations.

The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the custody of his rays, but by becoming the

counsellor of his temper. The cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenly

bright upon tree and tower, with irongrey storm for a background. Or when anger had but threatened, the

cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset.

It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There is a heavenly game, on southwest wind

days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and

All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed about it. As the clouds marshalled the earthly

mountains, so the clouds in turn are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are swept at once by

a single ray, warmed with a single colour. Promontory after leaguelong promontory of a stiller

Mediterranean in the sky is called out of mist and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very great, but a

All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery. It is only in London, for part of the

autumn and part of the winter, that the unnatural smokefog comes between. And for many and many a day

no London eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like a man's hand. There never was a great

painter who had not exquisite horizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a great thing.

He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses its shape. A cloudlover is not content to

see a snowy and rosy head piling into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude. The

perspective of a cloud is a great part of its designwhether it lies so that you can look along the immense

horizontal distances of its floor, or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountain steeps in

the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain that stands, with you, on the earth.

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merely the guardian of the sun's rays and

their director. It is the sun's treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk of sunshine and

moonshine, but not of cloudshine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one

of the most majestic of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this is the friend of the

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautiful of all. It has spaces of a grey for

which there is no name, and no other cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. The

showercloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with so influential a flight that no ship going out

to sea can be better worth watching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that people take their

rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that drops it. It is merely rain, and means wetness. The

showercloud there has limits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It has not come from

the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not shoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, for this city,

hardly comes or goes; it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on the path of its retreat.

Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and unencumbered with paper patterns the

ceiling and walls of a simple house is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of shadows.

The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be offered to the light and to yonder handful of long

sedges and rushes in a vase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better than a tedious,

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line and intersecting curve, and pictorially

presented to the eyes, not to the mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single; it draws

a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen again, and that, untouched, varies with the

journey of the sun, shifts the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of time, though all

the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon its importunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and

wiser the dance, that do not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure, while the

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing southward, after the winter and the

spring, it surprises you in the sudden gleam of a northwestering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shed by a late

sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays the flitting of the sun into unwonted skiesa

sun that takes the midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sallyporte, and is about to alight on

an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, with which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but four candles to make a hanging Oriental

bell play the most buoyant jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palmbranch a symmetrical

countercharge of shadows, and here two palmbranches close with one another in shadow, their arches

flowing together, and their paler greys darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the walls that should be sprinkled with

shadows. Let, then, a plaque or a picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once for

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows which is the landscape of sunshine.

Facing a May sun you see little except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow be the day bright

enoughcompose the very air through which you see the light. The trees show you a shadow for every leaf,

and the poplars are sprinkled upon the shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of

every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine have been entangled as though by some

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded sun. Turn sunward from the north, and

shadows come to life, and are themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks still and changeless. So many squares

of sunshine abide for so many hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished. Him

who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long sunshine than by the haste and passage of a

shadow. Although there may be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no noonday

wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and their life will be carried across by a brilliant

To the sick man a cloudshadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see its shape, its color, its approach, or

its flight. It does but darken his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it pluck and

snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. What flash of light could be more bright for him than

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. If he had seen the bird itself he would have

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of the bird in the air, and the flight of its

shadow on earth. This goes across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while in the

shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and

darker on the soft and dry grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and clings.

In the great bird country of the northeastern littoral of England, about Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the

shadows of the high birds are the movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to make

a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearlwhite sea birds, or of the solitary creature

driving on the wind. Theirs is always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways: in

from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the crops are late by a month. They

fly so high that though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the earth

there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights.

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as dreams," at the end of their flight into

the clefts, platforms, and ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside by degrees,

with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until there comes the general shadow of night

The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have traced wild and innumerable paths across the

midMay earth; their shadows have fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement

of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth that carries her clasped shadow from the

All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling and election to the most wifely of all

wifehoodsthat of a soldier's wifehistory has made her countrymen aware. Inasmuch as Colonel

Hutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is something more than his biographerhis historian. And

she convinces her reader that her Puritan principles kept abreast of her affections. There is no

selfabandonment; she is not precipitate; keeps her own footing; wife of a soldier as she is, would not have

armed him without her own previous indignation against the enemy. She is a soldier at his orders, but she had

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarred for her use, she relates her own

childhood and youth. She was a child such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she

was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be

delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except

when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy Apsley, at four years old, read English

perfectly, and was "carried to sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had

eight tutors in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in Latin, albeit they were at school and she had

no teacher except her father's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow." She was not

companionable. Her many friends were indulged with "babies" (that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces.

She exhorted the maids, she owned, "much." But she also heard much of their love stories, and acquired a

It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson.

The sonnet was read to him, and discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a young

woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a

woman had made it. Another said, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned, later,

that he said "two" out of civility (very good civility of a kind that is not now practised) to a lady who chanced

to be present; but that he knew well there was but one; and he named her. From her future husband Lucy

Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and always will be, praised: "Mr.

Hutchinson, she says, "fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of a

He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasured conscience did not prevent her from noting

the jealousy of her young friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick

in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered

up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austerity did not hinder him

from wearing his "fine, thickset head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect,

but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was

negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor first saw her, she was "not

ugly in a careless ridinghabit." As for him, "in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she writes)

with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and

countenance enough to beget love in any one." He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when

she was so deformed by smallpox that "the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God

The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far

more serious sense than our own time uses. One phrase has a Stevensonlike character, a kind of gesture of

language; this is where she praises her husband's "handsome management of love." {1} She thus prefaces her

description of her honoured lord: "If my treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever I

committed to its trust ." She boasts of her country in lofty phrase: "God hath, as it were, enclosed a people

here, out of the waste common of the world." And again of her husband: "It will be as hard to say which was

the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He had made up his accounts with life and

death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the

passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by

She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility,

their willingness, their "admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent goodnature as would have thawed

a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was not his time to love." In her widowhood she

remembered that she had been commanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is the

lovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of

She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the cause. The fevers, "little less than

plagues," that were common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is "the

devil's exquisite solicitor." All Royalists are of "the wicked faction." She suspected his warders of poisoning

Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence of kindness, a

bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months. A poison of strange

operation! "We must leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest,

whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of

God." When he was near death, she adds, "a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked him how he did.

On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some

are stated with dignity. Her power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and public interests of

her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisite diction, are such as may well make a reader ask how

and why the literature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became

"feminine" in the estimation of a later age; that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the

estimation of men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us

marvel at the downfall followingat Goldsmith's invention of the women of "The Vicar or Wakefield" in

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty of sky and landscape, but now and

then in her work there appears an abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural worldin her day an implicit

feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the

use or delight of man's life." "He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those pleasant walks which, at

the sweet season of the spring, invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys." And she describes

a dream whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an England was hers! And what an

English! A memorable vintage of our literature and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} All we have to call her by more tenderly is the mere D,

the D that ties her to Stella, with whom she made the twoinone whom Swift loved "better a thousand times

than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of

writing it. "MD sometimes means Stella alone," says one of many editors. "The letters were written

nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not require to be said that it was really for

Stella's sake alone that they were penned." Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And the editor does

not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only,

with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the

"she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In love "to divide is not to take away,"

as Shelley says; and Dingley's half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing

from the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has

disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalisthe finds her irksome.

Through one of his most modern representatives he has but lately called her a "chaperon." A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been pressed into that character; D certainly

was not, and has in this respect been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD,"

"saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear

girls," "brats," "huzzies both," "impudence and saucyface," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and delights,"

"dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars" (which means "girls"), "ten thousand times

dearest MD," and so forth in a hundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but obviously

not because of their own complaining. Swift called them so because they were mortal; and he, like all great

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with his summary and wholesale

readymade sentiment, has thus obstinately put them asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than

foolishly play havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing in the world. "I am weary

of friends, and friendships are all monsters, except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have

done. But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend: but methinks," he adds, "when I

write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it

looks like PMD." Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you must know, are not women." "God

Almighty preserve you both and make us happy together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we

may never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives." "Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love

poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy day since he left you, as hope saved."

With themwith herhe hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of St. James's coffeehouse, whither

he went on the Irish mail day, and was "in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting." He hid with them in

the long labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning. If no letter came, he comforted himself

with thinking that "he had it yet to be happy with." And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold

and lachrymose blunders the grace and singularitythe distinctionof this sweet romance. "Little,

sequestered pleasurehouse"it seemed as though "the many could not miss it," but not even the few have

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella should be the victim of hope deferred,

watching for letters from Swift. But day and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; he

waits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it is full I will send it whether MD writes or

not; and so that will be pretty." "Naughty girls that will not write to a body!" "I wish you were whipped for

forgetting to send. Go, be far enough, negligent baggages." "You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and

then comes Dingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with something

handsome and genteel, as 'your most humble cumdumble.'" But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task: "Here is such a stir and bustle with this

little MD of ours; I must be writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle things, and twittle

twattle." "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing to them in the morning." Is it not a

stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley that she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name and

memory? When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is "writing in bed, like a tiger," she should go gay

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will not let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of

sentiment for Stella. Marry come up! Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken very

seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That would have been no ill share for Dingley. But

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her. For now and then Swift parts his dear

MD. When he does so he invariably drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or

"Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere. He is anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and

about her health generally; whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "new fever,"

because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" And Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a

journey from Dublin to Wexford. "I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not so

bad as Stella; she tells thumpers." Stella is often reproved for her spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the

better hand. But she is a puzzleheaded woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourth letter,

Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody Blunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you

not an impudent slut to except a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley, I am always in

bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself." "You are a pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and

'fifth' in the margin, and your 'journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shall never have done."

"I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything." Swift is insistently grateful for their

inquiries for his health. He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his prattle. Both women

MDare rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to

take over to her in Ireland. "He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say nothing; I am as

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in a hundred essays, to be

retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to

have gone stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks to MD's prayers," wrote the

immortal man who loved her, in a private fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's,

nor for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all the credit of those prayers, and

Through the long history of human relations, which is the history of the life of our race, there sounds at

intervals the clamour of a single voice which has not the tone of oratory, but asks, answers, interrupts itself,

interruptswhat else? Whatever else it interrupts is silence; there are pauses, but no answers. There is the

jest without the laugh, and again the laugh without the jest. And this is because the letters written by Madame

de Sevigne were all saved, and not many written to her; because Swift burnt the letters that were the dearest

things in life to him, while "MD" both made a treasury of his; and because Prue kept all the letters which

Steele wrote to her from their marriageday onwards, and Steele kept none of hers.

In Swift's case the silence is full of echoes; that is to say, his letters repeat the phrases of Stella's and

Dingley's, to play with them, flout them, and toss them back against the two silenced voices. He never lets the

word of these two women fall to the ground; and when they have but blundered with it, and aimed it wide,

and sent it weakly, he will catch it, and play you twenty delicate and expert juggling pranks with it as he

sends it back into their innocent faces. So we have something of MD's letters in the "journal," and this in the

only form in which we desire them, to tell the truth; for when Swift gravely saves us some specimens of

Stella's wit, after her death, as she spoke them, and not as he mimicked them, they make a sorry show.

In many correspondences, where one voice remains and the other is gone, the retort is enough for two. It is as

when, the other day, the half of a pretty quarrel between nurse and child came down from an upper floor to

the ears of a mother who decided that she need not interfere. The voice of the undaunted child it was that was

audible alone, and it replied, "I'm not; YOU are"; and anon, "I'll tell YOURS." Nothing was really missing

But Steele's letters to Prue, his wife, are no such simple matter. The turn we shall give them depends upon the

unheard tone whereto they reply. And there is room for conjecture. It has pleased the more modern of the

many spirits of banter to supply Prue's eternal silence with the voice of a scold. It is painful to me to complain

of Thackeray; but see what a figure he makes of Prue in "Esmond." It is, says the nineteenthcentury

humourist, in defence against the pursuit of a jealous, exacting, neglected, or evaded wife that poor Dick

Steele sends those little notes of excuse: "Dearest Being on earth, pardon me if you do not see me till eleven

o'clock, having met a schoolfellow from India"; "My dear, dear wife, I write to let you know I do not come

home to dinner, being obliged to attend some business abroad, of which I shall give you an account (when I

see you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedient husband"; "Dear Prue, I cannot come home to

dinner. I languish for your welfare"; "I stay here in order to get Tonson to discount a bill for me, and shall

dine with him to that end"; and so forth. Once only does Steele really afford the recent humourist the

suggestion that is apparently always so welcome. It is when he writes that he is invited to supper to Mr.

Boyle's, and adds: "Dear Prue, do not send after me, for I shall be ridiculous." But even this is to be read not

ungracefully by a wellgraced reader. Prue was young and unused to the world. Her husband, by the way,

had been already married; and his greater age makes his constant deference all the more charming.

But with this one exception, Steele's little notes, kept by his wife while she lived, and treasured after her

death by her daughter and his, are no record of the watchings and dodgings of a London farce. It is worth

while to remember that Steele's dinner, which it was so often difficult to eat at home, was a thing of midday,

and therefore of midbusiness. But that is a detail. What is desirable is that a reasonable degree of sweetness

should be attributed to Prue; for it is no more than just. To her Steele wrote in a dedication: "How often has

your tenderness removed pain from my aching head, how often anguish from my afflicted heart. If there are

such beings as guardian angels, they are thus employed. I cannot believe one of them to be more good in

True, this was for the public; but not so were these daily notes; and these carry to her his assurance that she is

"the beautifullest object in the world. I know no happiness in this life in any degree comparable to the

pleasure I have in your person and society." "But indeed, though you have every perfection, you have an

extravagant fault, which almost frustrates the good in you to me; and that is, that you do not love to dress, to

appear, to shine out, even at my request, and to make me proud of you, or rather to indulge the pride I have

Prue cannot have been a dull wife, for this last compliment is a reply, full of polite alacrity, to a letter from

her asking for a little flattery. How assiduously, and with what a civilized absence of uncouthness, of

shamefacedness, and of slang of the mind, with what simplicity, alertness, and finish, does he step out at her

invitation, and perform! She wanted a compliment, though they had been long married then, and he

Her request, by the way, which he repeats in obeying it, is one of the few instances of the other side of the

correspondenceone of the few direct echoes of that one of the two voices which is silent.

The ceremony of the letters and the deferent method of address and signature are never dropped in this most

intimate of letterwriting. It is not a little depressing to think that in this very form and state is supposed, by

the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of the husband of farce, the "rogue." One does not like the word. Is

it not clownish to apply it with intention to the husband of Prue? He did not pay, he was always in

difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for

which he had to beg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for the unhandsome incredulity

which is proud to be always at hand with an ironic commentary on such letters as his.

I have no wish to bowdlerize Sir Richard Steele, his ways and words. He wrote to Prue at night when the

burgundy had been too much for him, and in the morning after. He announces that he is coming to her

"within a pint of wine." One of his gayest lettersa love letter before the marriage, addressed to "dear

lovely Mrs. Scurlock"confesses candidly that he had been pledging her too well: "I have been in very good

company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk; so that I

Steele obviously drank burgundy wildly, as did his "good company"; as did also the admirable Addison, who

was so solitary in character and so serene in temperament. But no one has, for this fault, the right to put a

railing accusation into the mouth of Prue. Every woman has a right to her own silence, whether her silence be

hers of set purpose or by accident. And every creature has a right to security from the banterings peculiar to

the humourists of a succeeding age. To every century its own ironies, to every century its own vulgarities. In

Steele's time they had theirs. They might have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would have been with a

different rallying. Writers of the nineteenth century went about to rob her of her grace.

She kept some four hundred of these little letters of her lord's. It was a loyal keeping. But what does

Thackeray call it? His word is "thrifty." He says: "There are four hundred letters of Dick Steele's to his wife,

"Thrifty" is a hard word to apply to her whom Steele styled, in the year before her death, his "charming little

insolent." She was ill in Wales, and he, at home, wept upon her pillow, and "took it to be a sin to go to sleep."

Thrifty they may call her, and accurate if they will; but she lies in Westminster Abbey, and Steele called her

This paper shall not be headed "Tetty." What may be a graceful enough freedom with the wives of other men

shall be prohibited in the case of Johnson's, she with whose name no writer until now has scrupled to take

freedoms whereto all graces were lacking. "Tetty" it should not be, if for no other reason, for thisthat the

chance of writing "Tetty" as a title is a kind of facile literary opportunity; it shall be denied. The Essay owes

thus much amends of deliberate care to Dr. Johnson's wife. But, indeed, the reason is graver. What wish

would he have had but that the language in the making whereof he took no ignoble part should somewhere, at

Men who would trust Dr. Johnson with their orthodoxy, with their vocabulary, and with the most intimate

vanity of their human wishes, refuse, with every mark of insolence, to trust him in regard to his wife. On that

one point no reverence is paid to him, no deference, no respect, not so much as the credit due to our common

sanity. Yet he is not reviled on account of his Thralenor, indeed, is his Thrale now seriously reproached for

her Piozzi. It is true that Macaulay, preparing himself and his reader "in his wellknown way" (as a rustic of

Mr. Hardy's might have it) for the recital of her second marriage, says that it would have been well if she had

been laid beside the kind and generous Thrale when, in the prime of her life, he died. But Macaulay has not

left us heirs to his indignation. His wellknown way was to exhaust those possibilities of effect in which the

commonplace is so rich. And he was permitted to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by calling Mrs.

Thrale's attachment to her second husband "a degrading passion," but by summoning a chorus of "all

London" to the same purpose. She fled, he tells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and

countrywomen to a land where she was unknown. Thus when Macaulay chastises Mrs. Elizabeth Porter for

marrying Johnson, he is not inconsistent, for he pursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for her audacity in

keeping gaiety and grace in her mind and manners longer than Macaulay liked to see such ornaments added

It is not so with succeeding essayists. One of these minor biographers is so gentle as to call the attachment of

Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi "a mutual affection." He adds, "No one who has had some experience of life will be

inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale." But there is no such courtesy, even from him, for Mrs. Johnson. Neither to

him nor to any other writer has it yet occurred that if England loves her great Englishman's memory, she

owes not only courtesy, but gratitude, to the only woman who loved him while there was yet time.

Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which a caricature has been acclaimed as the only

possible portrait of Mrs. Johnson. Garrick's school reminiscences would probably have made a much more

charming woman grotesque. Garrick is welcome to his remembrances; we may even reserve for ourselves the

liberty of envying those who heard him. But honest laughter should not fall into that tone of common

antithesis which seems to say, "See what are the absurdities of the great! Such is life! On this one point we,

even we, are wiser than Dr. Johnsonwe know how grotesque was his wife. We know something of the

privacies of her toilettable. We are able to compare her figure with the figures we, unlike him in his youth,

have had the opportunity of admiringthe figures of the wellbred and welldressed." It is a sorry success

But in fact such a triumph belongs to no man. When Samuel Johnson, at twentysix, married his wife, he

gave the dull an advantage over himself which none but the dullest will take. He chose, for love, a woman

who had the wit to admire him at first meeting, and in spite of first sight. "That," she said to her daughter, "is

the most sensible man I ever met." He was penniless. She had what was no mean portion for those times and

those conditions; and, granted that she was affected, and provincial, and short, and all the rest with which she

is charged, she was probably not without suitors; nor do her defects or faults seem to have been those of an

unadmired or neglected woman. Next, let us remember what was the aspect of Johnson's form and face, even

in his twenties, and how little he could have touched the senses of a widow fond of externals. This one loved

him, accepted him, made him happy, gave to one of the noblest of all English hearts the one love of its

sombre life. And English literature has had no better phrase for her than Macaulay's "She accepted, with a

readiness which did her little honour, the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son."

Her readiness did her incalculable honour. But it is at last worth remembering that Johnson had first done her

incalculable honour. No one has given to man or woman the right to judge as to the worthiness of her who

received it. The meanest man is generally allowed his own counsel as to his own wife; one of the greatest of

men has been denied it. "The lover," says Macaulay, "continued to be under the illusions of the wedding day

till the lady died." What is so graciously said is not enough. He was under those "illusions" until he too died,

when he had long passed her latest age, and was therefore able to set right that balance of years which has so

much irritated the impertinent. Johnson passed from this life twelve years older than she, and so for twelve

years his constant eyes had to turn backwards to dwell upon her. Time gave him a younger wife.

And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson's mouth, that mouth to which no one else has ever attributed any

beautiful sayings, the words of Marceline DesbordesValmore to the young husband she loved: "Older than

thou! Let me never see thou knowest it. Forget it! I will remember it, to die before thy death."

Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson's short sight for an added affront to Mrs. Johnson. The

bridegroom was too weak of eyesight "to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom." Nevertheless, he saw well

enough, when he was old, to distinguish Mrs. Thrale's dresses. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it

was unsuitable, he said, for her size; a little creature should show gay colours "like an insect." We are not

called upon to admire his wife; why, then, our taste being thus uncompromised, do we not suffer him to

admire her? It is the most gratuitous kind of intrusion. Moreover, the biographers are eager to permit that

touch of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale, which they officially deny in the case of Mrs.

Johnson. But the difference is all on the other side. He would not have bidden his wife dress like an insect.

Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick's mimicry of Johnson's lovemaking by repeating the words of

Johnson himself in after years"It was a lovematch on both sides." And obviously he was as strange a

lover as they said. Who doubted it? Was there any other woman in England to give such a suitor the

opportunity of an eternal love? "A life radically wretched," was the life of this master of Letters; but she, who

has received nothing in return except ignominy from these unthankful Letters, had been alone to make it

otherwise. Well for him that he married so young as to earn the ridicule of all the biographers in England; for

by doing so he, most happily, possessed his wife for nearly twenty years. I have called her his only friend. So

indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of

admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also the houseful of sad old women who quarrelled

under his beneficent protection. But what friend had he? He was "solitary" from the day she died.

Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal phrase the word "solitary" stands. He

wrote it, all Englishmen know where. He wrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he had been at

last set free from the dependence upon hope. He hoped no more, and he needed not to hope. The "notice" of

Lord Chesterfield had been too long deferred; it was granted at last, when it was a flattery which Johnson's

court of friends would applaud. But not for their sake was it welcome. To no living ear would he bring it and

He was indifferent, he was known. The sensitiveness to pleasure was gone, and the sensitiveness to pain,

slights, and neglect would thenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that to proof again.

No man in England, did I say? But, indeed, that is not so. No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could

have had power to cause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, readymade ridicule that has

been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved for twenty years, prayed for during thirtytwo years more,

who satisfied one of the saddest human hearts, but to whom the world, assiduous to admire him, hardly

accords human dignity. He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that

does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose. What was favour to him? "I am indifferent . . . I am

The articulate heroine has her reward of appreciation and her dues of praise; it is her appropriate fortune to

have it definitely measured, and generally on equal terms. She takes pains to explain herself, and is

understood, and pitied, when need is, on the right occasions. For instance, Madame Roland, a woman of

merit, who knew her "merit's name and place," addressed her memoirs, her studies in contemporary history,

her autobiography, her many speeches, and her last phrase at the foot of the undaunting scaffold, to a great

audience of her equals (more or less) then living and to live in the ages then to comeher equals and those

Another womanthe Queensuffered at that time, and suffered without the command of language, the

exactitude of phrase, the precision of judgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense of Innocence and

Moderation oppressed in her person. These were Madame Roland's; but the other woman, without eloquence,

without literature, and without any judicial sense of history, addresses no mere congregation of readers.

Marie Antoinette's unrecorded pangs pass into the treasuries of the experience of the whole human family.

All that are human have some part there; genius itself may lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe; the

great poets themselves may look into its distances and solitudes. Compassion here has no measure and no

language. Madame Roland speaks neither to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds her

Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by her own musical voice, presents her

to a world well prepared to do her justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justice in the

worldthe world that even when universal philosophy should reign would be inevitably the world of

mediocrity; justice that would come of enlightened views; justice that would be the lesson learnt by the

nations widely educated up to some point generally accessible; justice well within earthly sight and

competence. This confidence was also her reward. For what justice did the Queen look? Here it is the "abyss

Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into silence, and for the record of these two poor

failures of that long, indomitable, reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which expressed her life and mind

we are debtors to her friends. She herself has not confessed them. Nowhere else, whether in her candid

history of herself, or in her wise history of her country, or in her judicial history of her contemporaries, whose

spirit she discerned, whose powers she appraised, whose errors she foresaw; hardly in her thought, and never

in her word, is a break to be perceived; she is not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tells us of her

tearsthe tears of youth onlyher record is voluble and all complete. For the dignity of her style, of her

force, and of her balanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the two imperfections

which, to us who would be glad to admire in silence her heroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to

talk, are finer and more noble than her wellplaced language and the high successes of her decision and her

endurance. More than this, the two failures of this unfailing woman are two little doors opened suddenly into

those wider spaces and into that dominion of solitude which, after all, do doubtless exist even in the most

garrulous soul. By these two outlets Manon Roland also reaches the region of Marie Antoinette. But they

befell her at the close of her life, and they shall be named at the end of this brief study.

Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she seeks in all times and nations

because of the fact that she manifestly suppresses in her selfdescriptions any signs of a natural gaiety. Her

memoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is only in her letters, not intended for the world, that we are aware

of the inadvertence of moments. We may overhear a laugh at times, but not in those consciously sprightly

hours that she spent with her conventschool friend gathering fruit and counting eggs at the farm. She

pursued these country tasks not without offering herself the cultivated congratulation of one whom cities had

failed to allure, and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity. She did not forget the death of Socrates. Or,

rather, she finds an occasion to reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with having omitted what

another might have considered the tedious recollection of the condemnation of Phocion. She never wearied of

these examples. But it is her inexhaustible freshness in these things that has helped other writers of her time

In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of all exaggeration, which gives the reader a constant

sense of security. That virtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and attained with exact

consciousness of success. It would be almost enough (in the perfection of her practice) to make a great writer;

even a measure of it goes far to make a fair one. Her moderation of statement is never shaken; and if she now

and then glances aside from her direct narrative road to hazard a conjecture, the error she may make is on the

generous side of hope and faith. For instance, she is too sure that her Friends (so she always calls the

Girondins, using no nicknames) are safe, whereas they were then all doomed; a young man who had carried a

harmless message for hera mere notification to her family of her arrestreceives her cheerful

commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn that for this action he suffered on the scaffold and

that his father soon thereafter died of grief. But Madame Roland never matched such a delirious event as this

by any delirium of her own imagination. The delirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was

It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she stooped to verbal violence; et encore!

References to the banishment of Aristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and bending

swords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to be accused of violence in brandishing those

weapons. Sometimes, refuse rhetoric being all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in honest haste, as though it

were honest speech, and stands committed to such a phrase as this: "The dregs of the nation placed such a one

But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear and efficient French language. She never

wrote for the love of art, but without some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity is somewhat

altered by that importunate love of the Antique. In "Bleak House" there is an old lady who insisted that the

name "Mr. Turveydrop," as it appeared polished on the doorplate of the dancing master, was the name of the

pretentious father and not of the industrious sonalbeit, needless to say, one name was common to them.

With equal severity I aver that when Madame Roland wrote to her husband in the second person singular she

was using the TU of Rome and not the TU of Paris. French was indeed the language; but had it been French

in spirit she would (in spite of the growing Republican fashion) have said VOUS to this "homme eclaire, de

moeurs pures, e qui l'on ne peut reprocher que sa grande admiration pour les anciens aux depens des

modernes qu'il meprise, et le faible de trop aimer e parler de lui." There was no French TU in her relations

with this husband, gravely esteemed and appraised, discreetly rebuked, the best passages of whose Ministerial

reports she wrote, and whom she observed as he slowly began to think he himself had composed them. She

loved him with a loyal, obedient, and discriminating affection, and when she had been put to death, he, still at

This last letter was written at a moment when, in order to prevent the exposure of a public death, Madame

Roland had intended to take opium in the end of her cruel imprisonment. A little later she chose that those

who oppressed her country should have their way with her to the last. But, while still intending

selfdestruction, she had written to her husband: "Forgive me, respectable man, for disposing of a life that I

had consecrated to thee." In quoting this I mean to make no tooeasy effect with the word "respectable,"

Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces of silence, one when she, pure and

selfless patriot, had heard her condemnation to death. Passing out of the court she beckoned to her friends,

and signified to them her sentence "by a gesture." And again there was a pause, in the course of her last days,

during which her speeches had not been few, and had been spoken with her beautiful voice unmarred; "she

To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free

from all the preoccupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not compose

the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways

of a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you tarried; your former

experiences, your documents are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes

No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four years old who dictated a letter to a

distant cousin, with the sweet and unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls."

A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor,

but sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a

lady frog." None ever said their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own

kindchildrenhave not preceded them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five

whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success.

He was rather tired with writing, and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.

"Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for you." "Do you work," she asked,

"to buy the lovely puddin's?" Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth pursuing.

The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be soothed at night after a weeping dream that

a skater had been drowned in the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she should forget it by

thinking about the one unfailing and gay subjecther wishes. "Do you know," she said, without loss of time,

"what I should like best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her mother was so overcome by

this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer as to the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. "It

is for me to whistle for cabs," said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I go to parties." Another

morning she came down radiant. "Did you hear a great noise in the miggle of the night? That was me crying.

I cried because I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his nose."

The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing isno, nothing femininein this adult world. "I've

got a lotter than you," is the word of a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't I,

mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the backygarden." A little creature proffers

almost daily the reminder at luncheonat tarttime: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am the

favourite of the crust." Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the naif things that children might do in

their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having no

"It's JOLLY dull without you, mother," says a little girl who gentlest of the gentlehas a dramatic sense

of slang, of which she makes no secret. But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of metathesis,

about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the "standwash," the "sweepingcrosser," the

"sewing chamine." Genoese peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.

Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should by any means have an impression of

the country or the sea annually. A London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her pointing

finger, and names it "bird." Her brother, who wants to play with a bronze Japanese lobster, asks "Will you

At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most touching kind of newness. Thus, a child

of three asks you to save him. How moving a word, and how freshly said! He had heard of the "saving" of

other things of interestespecially chocolate creams taken for safekeepingand he asks, "Who is going to

save me today? Nurse is going out, will you save me, mother?" The same little variant upon common use is

in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help in the arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at

A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was taken lately to see a fellow author of

somewhat different standing from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. As

he dwelt in a part of the Southwest of the town unknown to her, she noted with interest the shops of the

neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop,

and that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before

a blooming parterre of confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he

In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent upon a certain questthe quest of a

genuine collector. We have all heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting chinadogs, of collecting cocked

hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her nothing except a sharp lookout upon the

proper names over all shopwindows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers. "I began three weeks ago next

Monday, mother," she says with precision, "and I have got thirtynine." "Thirtynine what?" "Smiths."

The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collecting together a handful of flowers that

should be all unique, single of their kind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the rejection of

most of the conventions of the authors who have reported them. They do not, for example, say "me is"; their

natural reply to "are you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have nothing but the

nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see it raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain resumes, "Lift I

An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for her by maternal authority. She wore

the garments under protest, and with some resentment. At the same time it was evident that she took no

pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend. He had imagined the making of this child

in the counsels of Heaven, and the decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair"a brown

tress." She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and she silently bore the poet a grudge for having

been the accessory of Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. The unpractised

ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable.

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years of mere learning to speak. The young

child now takes a current word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the

interruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, in children old enough to show their motives, a

conviction that a word of their own making is as good a communication as another, and as intelligible. There

is even a general implicit conviction among them that the grownup people, too, make words by the wayside

as occasion befalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings forward some hitherto

unheard? The child would be surprised to know how irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the settingout of a child on a journey of speech with so

small baggage and with so much confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple adventurer.

Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything strange or particularly expressive or descriptive.

The child trusts genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight of sunflowers, was eager to

describe them, and called them, without allowing himself to be checked for the trifle of a name,

"summersets." This was simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little older. "Why does

he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and

penetration, answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further question possible after an

To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a

few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realizeda personal matter. Questioned as to the

eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I took them just to appetize my

hunger." As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked

whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school. "I sometimes go

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to

turn the conversation. Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But

sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a

mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of

her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her

to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:

"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called a article,

which I doubt. Such a unletterary article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will not write any more such

This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister, and thought her forward for her age: "I

wish people knew just how old she is, mother, then they would know she is onward. They can see she is

Thus speak the naturally unreluclant; but there are other children who in time betray a little consciousness

and a slight mefiance as to where the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure. These

children may not be shy enough to suffer any self checking in their talk, but they are now and then to be

heard slurring a word of which they do not feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough

to cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup of tea to the writing table of her

mother, who had often feigned indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the

infusion." "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and then, in a halfwhisper, "Is bosh right, or

wash, mother?" She was not told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cup left the

A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute a hand that the petals of the flower never

afterwards lose the creases, is a type of the child. Nothing but the unfolding, which is as yet in the

nonexisting future, can explain the manner of the close folding of character. In both flower and child it

looks much as though the process had been the reverse of what it wasas though a finished and open thing

had been folded up into the budso plainly and certainly is the future implied, and the intention of

With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of impulses called "naughtiness" is perfectly

perceptibleit would seem heartless to say how soon. The naughty child (who is often an angel of

tenderness and charm, affectionate beyond the capacity of his fellows, and a very ascetic of penitence when

the time comes) opens early his brief campaigns and raises the standard of revolt as soon as he is capable of

But even the naughty child is an individual, and must not be treated in the mass. He is numerous indeed, but

not general, and to describe him you must take the unit, with all his incidents and his organic qualities as they

are. Take then, for instance, one naughty child in the reality of his life. He is but six years old, slender and

masculine, and not wronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate dress. His face is delicate and too often

haggard with tears of penitence that Justice herself would be glad to spare him. Some beauty he has, and his

mouth especially is so lovely as to seem not only angelic but itself an angel. He has absolutely no

selfcontrol and his passions find him without defence. They come upon him in the midst of his usual

Then for a wild hour he is the enemy of the laws. If you imprison him, you may hear his resounding voice as

he takes a running kick at the door, shouting his justification in unconquerable rage. "I'm good now!" is made

as emphatic as a shot by the blow of his heel upon the panel. But if the moment of forgiveness is deferred, in

the hope of a more promising repentance, it is only too likely that he will betake himself to a hostile silence

and use all the revenge yet known to his imagination. "Darling mother, open the door!" cries his touching

voice at last; but if the answer should be "I must leave you for a short time, for punishment," the storm

suddenly thunders again. "There (crash!) I have broken a plate, and I'm glad it is broken into such little pieces

that you can't mend it. I'm going to break the 'lectric light." When things are at this pass there is one way, and

only one, to bring the child to an overwhelming change of mind; but it is a way that would be cruel, used

more than twice or thrice in his whole career of tempest and defiance. This is to let him see that his mother is

troubled. "Oh, don't cry! Oh, don't be sad!" he roars, unable still to deal with his own passionate anger, which

is still dealing with him. With his kicks of rage he suddenly mingles a dance of apprehension lest his mother

should have tears in her eyes. Even while he is still explicitly impenitent and defiant he tries to pull her round

to the light that he may see her face. It is but a moment before the other passion of remorse comes to make

havoc of the helpless child, and the first passion of anger is quelled outright.

Only to a trivial eye is there nothing tragic in the sight of these great passions within the small frame, the

small will, and, in a word, the small nature. When a large and sombre fate befalls a little nature, and the stage

is too narrow for the action of a tragedy, the disproportion has sometimes made a mute and unexpressed

history of actual life or sometimes a famous book; it is the manifest core of George Eliot's story of Adam

Bede, where the suffering of Hetty is, as it were, the eye of the storm. All is expressive around her, but she is

hardly articulate; the book is full of wordspreachings, speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, but a space of

silence remains about her in the midst of the story. And the disproportion of passionthe inner

disproportionis at least as tragic as that disproportion of fate and action; it is less intelligible, and leads into

It seems, then, that this passionate play is acted within the narrow limits of a child's nature far oftener than in

those of an adult and finally formed nature. And this, evidently, because there is unequal force at work within

a child, unequal growth and a jostling of powers and energies that are hurrying to their development and

pressing for exercise and life. It is this helpless inequality this untimelinessthat makes the guileless

comedy mingling with the tragedies of a poor child's day. He knows thus muchthat life is troubled around

him and that the fates are strong. He implicitly confesses "the strong hours" of antique song. This same

boythe tempestuous child of passion and revoltwent out with quiet cheerfulness for a walk lately, saying

as his cap was put on, "Now, mother, you are going to have a little peace." This way of accepting his own

conditions is shared by a sister, a very little older, who, being of an equal and gentle temper, indisposed to

violence of every kind and tender to all without disquiet, observes the boy's brief frenzies as a citizen

observes the climate. She knows the signs quite well and can at any time give the explanation of some

particular outburst, but without any attempt to go in search of further or more original causes. Still less is she

moved by the virtuous indignation that is the least charming of the ways of some little girls. Elle ne fait que

constater. Her equanimity has never been overset by the wildest of his moments, and she has witnessed them

all. It is needless to say that she is not frightened by his drama, for Nature takes care that her young creatures

shall not be injured by sympathies. Nature encloses them in the innocent indifference that preserves their

Even the very frenzy of rage does not long dim or depress the boy. It is his repentance that makes him pale,

and Nature here has been rather forced, perhapswith no very good result. Often must a mother wish that

she might for a few years govern her child (as far as he is governable) by the lowest motivestrivial

punishments and paltry rewardsrather than by any kind of appeal to his sensibilities. She would wish to

keep the words "right" and "wrong" away from his childish ears, but in this she is not seconded by her

lieutenants. The child himself is quite willing to close with her plans, in so far as he is able, and is reasonably

interested in the results of her experiments. He wishes her attempts in his regard to have a fair chance. "Let's

hope I'll be good all tomorrow," he says with the peculiar cheerfulness of his ordinary voice. "I do hope so,

old man." "Then I'll get my penny. Mother, I was only naughty once yesterday; if I have only one naughtiness

tomorrow, will you give me a halfpenny?" "No reward except for real goodness all day long." "All right."

It is only too probable that this system (adopted only after the failure of other ways of reform) will be greatly

disapproved as one of bribery. It may, however, be curiously inquired whether all kinds of reward might not

equally be burlesqued by that word, and whether any government, spiritual or civil, has ever even professed

to deny rewards. Moreover, those who would not give a child a penny for being good will not hesitate to fine

him a penny for being naughty, and rewards and punishments must stand or fall together. The more logical

objection will be that goodness is ideally the normal condition, and that it should have, therefore, no explicit

extraordinary result, whereas naughtiness, being abnormal, should have a visible and unusual sequel. To this

the rewarding mother may reply that it is not reasonable to take "goodness" in a little child of strong passions

as the normal condition. The natural thing for him is to give full sway to impulses that are so violent as to

But, after all, the controversy returns to the point of practice. What is the thought, or threat, or promise that

will stimulate the weak will of the child, in the moment of rage and anger, to make a sufficient resistance? If

the will were naturally as well developed as the passions, the stand would be soon made and soon successful;

but as it is there must needs be a bracing by the suggestion of joy or fear. Let, then, the stimulus be of a mild

and strong kind at once, and mingled with the thought of distant pleasure. To meet the suffering of rage and

frenzy by the suffering of fear is assuredly to make of the little unquiet mind a battleplace of feelings too

hurtfully tragic. The penny is mild and strong at once, with its still distant but certain joys of purchase; the

promise and hope break the mood of misery, and the will takes heart to resist and conquer.

It is only in the lesser naughtiness that he is master of himself. The lesser the evil fit the more deliberate. So

that his mother, knowing herself to be not greatly feared, once tried to mimic the father's voice with a

menacing, "What's that noise?" The child was persistently crying and roaring on an upper floor, in contumacy

against his French nurse, when the baritone and threatening question was sent pealing up the stairs. The child

was heard to pause and listen and then to say to his nurse, "Ce n'est pas Monsieur; c'est Madame," and then,

Obviously, with a little creature of six years, there are two things mainly to be doneto keep the delicate

brain from the evil of the present excitement, especially the excitement of painful feeling, and to break the

habit of passion. Now that we know how certainly the special cells of the brain which are locally affected by

pain and anger become hypertrophied by so much use, and all too ready for use in the future at the slightest

stimulus, we can no longer slight the importance of habit. Any means, then, that can succeed in separating a

little child from the habit of anger does fruitful work for him in the helpless time of his childhood. The work

is not easy, but a little thought should make it easy for the elders to avoid the provocation which theywho

should ward off provocations are apt to bring about by sheer carelessness. It is only in childhood that our

race knows such physical abandonment to sorrow and tears, as a child's despair; and the theatre with us must

needs copy childhood if it would catch the note and action of a creature without hope.

There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the flight of time; it does so move, and yet

withstands time's movement. It is full of pauses that are due to the energy of change, has bounds and

rebounds, and when it is most active then it is longest. It is not long with languor. It has room for remoteness,

and leisure for oblivion. It takes great excursions against time, and travels so as to enlarge its hours. This

certain year is any one of the early years of fully conscious life, and therefore it is of all the dates. The child

of Tumult has been living amply and changefully through such a yearhis eighth. It is difficult to believe

that his is a year of the selfsame date as that of the adult, the men who do not breast their days.

For them is the inelastic, or but slightly elastic, movement of things. Month matched with month shows a

fairly equal length. Men and women never travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a distant light.

There is recognition and familiarity between their seasons. But the Child of Tumult has infinite prospects in

his year. Forgetfulness and surprise set his east and his west at immeasurable distance. His Lethe runs in the

cheerful sun. You look on your own little adult year, and in imagination enlarge it, because you know it to be

the contemporary of his. Even she who is quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face a strange and great

extent of a few years of her life still to comehis years, the years she is to live at his side.

Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy's life, not so much by slow degrees as by sudden

and fitful accessions. His speech is yet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes of pleasure, "a little

duck what can walk"; but with a beautifully clear accent he greets his mother with the colloquial question,

"Well, darling, do you know the latest?" "The WHAT?" "The latest: do you know the latest?" And then he

tells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference to his own wrongs. On another occasion the

unexpected little phrase was varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the side he

favoured had fallen. The child then came to his mother's room with the question: "Have you heard the

saddest?" Moreover the "saddest" caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him during

the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection. From such great causes arise such little things!

Some of his grief was for the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whose

sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare his sensibilities.

The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growing fewer as he grows older, rather increase

than lessen in their painfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation of all the childish

powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger. This is not temptation; the word is too weak for the assault

of a child's passion upon his will. That little will is taken captive entirely, and before the child was seven he

knew that it was so. Such a consciousness leaves all babyhood behind and condemns the child to suffer. For a

certain passage of his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, nor strong enough to resist it, as he will

be. The time of the subsiding of the tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human life.

Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so that the child who had been abandoned to

naughtiness with all his will in an entire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and who had later

undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity suddenly turned again, "like rivers in the south." "Forget

it," he had wept, in a kind of extremity of remorse; "forget it, darling, and don't, don't be sad;" and it is he,

happily, who forgets. The wasted look of his pale face is effaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought,

and five short minutes can restore the ruin, as though a broken little German town should in the twinkling of

an eye be restored as no architect could restore itshould be made fresh, strong, and tight again, looking like

When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows the growth of this tardy reason

thatquickenedis hereafter to do so much for his peace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration. Denied

a second handful of strawberries, and seeing quite clearly that the denial was enforced reluctantly, he makes

haste to reply, "It doesn't matter, darling." At any sudden noise in the house his beautiful voice, with all its

little difficulties of pronunciation, is heard with the sedulous reassurance: "It's all right, mother, nobody

hurted ourselves!" He is not surprised so as to forget this gentle little duty, which was never required of him,

According to the opinion of his dear and admired American friend, he says all these things, good and evil,

with an English accent; and at the American play his English accent was irrepressible. "It's too comic; no, it's

too comic," he called in his enjoyment; being the only perfectly fearless child in the world, he will not

consent to the conventional shyness in public, whether he be the member of an audience or of a congregation,

but makes himself perceptible. And even when he has a desperate thing to say, in the moment of absolute

revoltsuch a thing as "I CAN'T like you, mother," which anon he will recant with convulsions of

distresshe has to "speak the thing he will," and when he recants it is not for fear.

If such a child could be ruled (or approximately ruled, for inquisitorial government could hardly be so much

as attempted) by some small means adapted to his size and to his physical aspect, it would be well for his

health, but that seems at times impossible. By no effort can his elders altogether succeed in keeping tragedy

out of the life that is so unready for it. Against great emotions no one can defend him by any forethought. He

is their subject; and to see him thus devoted and thus wrung, thus wrecked by tempests inwardly, so that you

feel grief has him actually by the heart, recalls the reluctancethe questionwherewith you perceive the

interior grief of poetry or of a devout life. Cannot the Muse, cannot the Saint, you ask, live with something

less than this? If this is the truer life, it seems hardly supportable. In like manner it should be possible for a

child of seven to come through his childhood with griefs that should not so closely involve him, but should

Despite all his simplicity, the child has (by way of inheritance, for he has never heard them) the

selfexcusing fictions of our race. Accused of certain acts of violence, and unable to rebut the charge with

any effect, he flies to the old convention: "I didn't know what I was doing," he avers, using a great deal of

gesticulation to express the temporary distraction of his mind. "Darling, after nurse slapped me as hard as she

could, I didn't know what I was doing, so I suppose I pushed her with my foot." His mother knows as well as

does Tolstoi that men and children know what they are doing, and are the more intently aware as the stress of

feeling makes the moments more tense; and she will not admit a plea which her child might have learned

Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from taking fright at the name of a bribe, the mother

of the Child of Tumult has only to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to give the

shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and change his passion at its height.

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are, on the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready

in reporting, until advancing age teaches them agility. This is not lack of sensitiveness, but mere length of

process. For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruelly startled by a sudden crash in the room a child

who has never learnt to fear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, that shock of sound

does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves but after some moments, nor before some moments more

is the sense of the shock expressed. The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion of the child's

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eager with us of later age that no point of time is

lost in its touchesdirect as the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered by trivialities;

even so immediate is the communication of pain. But you could count five between the prick of a surgeon's

instrument upon a baby's arm and the little whimper that answers it. The child is then too young, also, to refer

the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it. Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to

bring local tidings thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree towards his arm or towards the side

that is so vexed with vaccination. He looks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older child trudges after the nimbleness of a

conjurer. It is the greatest failure to take these little gobemouches to a good conjurer. His successes leave

them cold, for they had not yet understood what it was the good man meant to surprise them withal. The

amateur it is who really astonishes them. They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing

at close quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the lagging

You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under his ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase

of it, and have it in its place and off again ten times before the little breathless boy has begun to perceive in

Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habit of awaiting, should surround

themselves with pauses of patience. The simple little processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a

common sentence are too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot use two pronouns but they must

confuse them. I never found that a young childone of something under nine yearswas able to say, "I

send them my love" at the first attempt. It will be "I send me my love," "I send them their love," "They send

me my love"; not, of course, through any confusion of understanding, but because of the tardy setting of

words in order with the thoughts. The child visibly grapples with the difficulty, and is beaten.

It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to like twicetold tales and foregone conclusions in

their games. They are not eager, for a year or two yet to come, for surprises. If you hide and they cannot see

you hiding, their joy in finding you is comparatively small; but let them know perfectly well what cupboard

you are in, and they will find you with shouts of discovery. The better the hidingplace is understood

between you the more lively the drama. They make a convention of art for their play. The younger the

children the more dramatic; and when the house is filled with outcries of laughter from the breathless breast

of a child, it is that he is pretending to be surprised at finding his mother where he bade her pretend to hide.

This is the comedy that never tires. Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how he tries to put

a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for, if not, he will find that children also have a manner

of substitution, and that they will put halfhearted laughter in the place of their natural impetuous clamours.

It is certain that very young children like to play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short

There is something so purely childlike in the delays of a child that any exercise asking for the swift

apprehension of later life, for the flashes of understanding and action, from the mind and members of

childhood, is no pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as experts understand it, and even as the

moderatelytrained may play it, claims all the immediate action, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to

childhood. There may possibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trained without this specific

violence directed upon the thing characteristic of their agetheir unreadinessbut virtuosity at the piano

cannot be one of them. It is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children, or anything that is theirs,

conquered and beaten; but their poor little slowness is so distinctively their own, and must needs be

physiologically so proper to their years, so much a natural condition of the age of their brain, that of all

childishnesses it is the one that the world should have the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and

It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but a very little attention would prove how many

apparent disconnexions there are between the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not the brain that is

quick. If, on a voyage in space, electricity takes thus much time, and light thus much, and sound thus much,

there is one little jogging traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey, and this is the

perception of a child. Surely our own memories might serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably

missed the principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to furnish us with a historical

remembrance for the future. It was not our mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our

senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the important moments of the

passing of an Emperor at a different rate from theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of

anything else of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers from our parents' eyes, left us

stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Among the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best

was an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moon in the sky, in good time the

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselves to the world, practised and alert. But it

would be more to the purpose that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with them.

Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the tardiest. But we are apt to command instant

obedience, stripped of the little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It is not a child of

ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses and of an unprepared consciousnessthis

capacity for receiving a great shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long for children, so must we learn that our time,

when it is short, is too short for them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnatural effort,

have any perception of it. When children do not see the jokes of the elderly, and disappoint expectation in

other ways, only less intimate, the reason is almost always there. The child cannot turn in midcareer; he

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one significant lessonso it

seemswas learnt, which has outlived controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issuean

interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This is a disposition, a general consent, to

find the use and the value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of

progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than resignationa delight in those

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world, for childhood? Time was when

childhood was but borne with, and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold,

perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should acknowledge the approach to

But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a patient prophecy (the mother's), so was

education, some two hundred years ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature of

body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If her song is not restless, it is because she has

a sense of the results of time, and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time of danger;

"Would it were done." But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put it to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass.

She sings prophecies to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she spins, and a

John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child "that pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's

letter of condolencewas chiefly precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he

never lived to be. The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead, says of him: "At two and a half years

of age he pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three languages."

As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart

almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn

English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of

relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in

Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not to be too much believed when he is

describing what he admires; it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty times.

All being favourable, the child of Evelyn's studious home would have done all these things in the course of

nature within a few years. It was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to Evelyn, so

exquisite. The course of nature had not any beauty in his eyes. It might be borne with for the sake of the end,

but it was not admired for the majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mourns with him "the

strangely hopeful child," whowithout Comenius's "Janua" and without congruous syntaxwas fulfilling,

had they known it, an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and closing a

Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering to the estate of man. They thought their

little boy strangely hopeful because he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost the timely

perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. And yet it is our own modern age that is charged

It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, must rightly learn to confess the passing

and irrevocable hour; not slighting it, or bidding it hasten its work, not yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay, thou

art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and the world has lately been converted to

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act. To us the change is revealed as

perpetual; every passage is a goal, and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wear

Tout passe. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to

shelter and contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question most arbitrarily as to the

All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this suppression of the approach to what

seemed then the only time of fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they had the

Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as might be, if not sooner. When a poor

little boy came to be eight years old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to be proud of

his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not

initiated into any rudiments" till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of eight before

Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour,

rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood must have been when

nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything that was proper to five years old was defect. A

They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothing to say about his little ones that has a

sign of a smile in it. Twice are children not his own mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the wedding of a

maid of five years olda curious thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands

by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation

"with extraordinary patience." "The use I made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not

See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in literature, and how it abolished little girls.

It may be that there were in all ageseven thosecertain few boys who insisted upon being children;

whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, for example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid,

and there were the prosperous urchinangels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his little brother by

the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be called Tommy. But there were no "little radiant

girls." Now and then an "Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a matter of sewing

and reading. As for the little girl saints, even when they were so young that their hands, like those of St.

Agnes, slipped through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate suitors, which seems

necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval mind, but mars them for ours.

So does the hurrying and ignoring of littlegirlchildhood somewhat hamper the delight with which readers

of John Evelyn admire his most admirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in the

Court of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who passed through all those turbulent waters

without so much as the least stain or tincture in her christall." She held her state with men and maids for her

servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent

example and instruction to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give the least

countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did usually assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest

persons," and was as famous for her beauty as for her wit. One would like to forget the age at which she did

these things. When she began her service she was eleven. When she was making her rule never to speak to

Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and heroines, therefore, were of those ages.

The poets turned April into May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they shortened and

abridged the spring of their many songs. The particular year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as

who should say a fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and ellipses, figures, and

tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would not have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of

untimely flowers. The "muskrose" is never in fact the child of midMay, as he has it.

The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear of losing the idea of the bloom of their

youth makes him so tamper with the bloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen in the

"Spectator" has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last six years." The famous letter describing the

figure, the dance, the wit, the stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girl of

thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can." She adds, "I have a good portion which they

cannot hinder me of." This correspondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they have

bought their wedding clothes." There was no sense of childhood in an age that could think this an opportune

But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later centuryan age that has found all

things to be on a journey, and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its appointed

end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than a sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children.

Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer dusk, especially, is

the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all day,

intent upon all kinds of close industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings. But when late twilight

comes, there comes also the punctual wildness. The children will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere

What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory dark? The kitten grows alert at the

same hour, and hunts for moths and crickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours. The

The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and a rebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and

the children are to go home. But, with more or less of life and fire, the children strike some blow for liberty.

It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual child, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something,

This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with the weariness of men. But it is less

tolerable that the energy of men should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by children. Three tiny girls were to be

taught "old maid" to beguile the time. One of them, a nutbrown child of five, was persuading another to

The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour. It is full of traditions, and beset by

antique habits. The habit of prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of some

customs in mankind. But if the inquirers who appeal to that beginning remembered better their own infancy,

they would seek no further. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their thralldom. Try to

overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of their high antiquity weakens your hand.

Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of mystery is connected for ever the hearing

of a lullaby. The French sleepsong is the most romantic. There is in it such a sound of history as must

inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of the incalculable; and the songs themselves are

old. "Le Bon Roi Dagobert" has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurse knows

nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herself slept to when a child. The gaiety of the

thirteenth century, in "Le Pont d'Avignon," is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the tete e tete of child and

nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night. "Malbrook" would be comparatively modern, were not

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of them are put to sleep to strange

cradlesongs. The affectionate races that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white

child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical night. His closing eyes are filled with

He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious of something more than a change in

his sense of the present and in his apprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than the

destruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did, and the mere relation of time is as it was.

But that which has fallen together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is the past

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no more extremities. Recorded time has

no more terrors. The unit of measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of paltry

length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He had thought them to be wide.

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states, the conquests, and the temples of the

past, except only the measure which he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten years had

given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It was then that he conceived Antiquity. But now!

Is it to a decade of ten such little years as these now in his handten of his mature yearsthat men give the

dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if life shows now so small that the word age has lost its

In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a most noble rod to measure it byhe has his

own ten years. He attributes an overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and he

alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting

into the extremities of the past. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of Upper Egypt to

If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceived old time, communicates a

remembrance at least of the mystery to the mind of the man. The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he

cannot forget what was his conviction when he was a child. He had once a persuasion of Antiquity. And this

is not for nothing. The enormous undeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind.

But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive shocks. It is as though one strained level eyes

towards the horizon, and then were bidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor half acre

before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hitherto remote, remote youth of his own parents to

have been something familiarly near, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attila that is

displaced. Those ten last years of his have corrected the world. There needs no other rod than that ten years'

rod to chastise all the imaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip.

To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to hold thenceforth a mere century cheap

enough. But, it may be said, the mystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudges through

our own worldour contemporary worldis not very mysterious. We perceive its pace; it is a jogtrot.

The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scans through a shortened avenue the reaches

of the past. He marvels that he was so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts, for instance,

had been children, it would have been well enough for the child to measure their remoteness and their acts

with his own magnificent measure. But they were only men and demigods. Thus they belong to him as he is

nowa man; and not to him as he was oncea child. It was quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten

years' rule along the path from our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard in the man's

What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of such little times? Nay, it seems that childhood,

which created the illusion of ages, does actually prove it true. Childhood is itself Antiquityto every man

his only Antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot make Abraham old again in the mind of a man of

thirtyfive; but the beginning of every life is older than Abraham. THERE is the abyss of time. Let a man

turn to his own childhoodno furtherif he would renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of

For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes; but it has enormous space for its

flight. The child has an apprehension not only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusive

apprehension when he is learning "ancient" historya real apprehension when he is conning his own

immeasurable infancy. If there is no historical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed and

And it is of thismerely of thisthat "ancient" history seems to partake. Rome was founded when we

began Roman history, and that is why it seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirtyfive heard, at that present

age, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would be nowhere. But he built his wall, as a matter of

fact, when every one was seven years old. It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the only

Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learning something of antiquity in the first ten

years, the child enlarges the sense of time for all mankind. For even after the great illusion is over and history

is remeasured, and all fancy and flight caught back and chastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged. The

man remains capable of great spaces of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, but he finds them

within, he contains them, he is aware of them. History has fallen together, but childhood surrounds and

He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years that are the treasury of preceptionsthe

first. The great disillusion shall never shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that made them.

"Far apart," I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful. The past of childhood is not single, is not

motionless, nor fixed in one point; it has summits a world away one from the other. Year from year differs as

the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea. And the man of thirtyfive knows for ever afterwards

what is flight, even though he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by.

There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood, which is the extremest distance

known to any human fancy. Many other moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours of

weariness are longnot with a mysterious length, but with a mere length of protraction, so that the things

called minutes and halfhours by the elderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, the

children. The ancient moment is not merely one of theseit is a space not of long, but of immeasurable,

time. It is the moment of going to sleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has

long ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enough margin of dreams to him; and he does

not attend to its phantasies. He knows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at those hours,

but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child who passes with simplicity through the marginal

country; and the thing he meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable time.

His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She sings absolutely immemorial words. It matters

little what they may mean to waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the beginning of the

world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is

so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further backit is

already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory of a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy.

What are a mere forty years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!

{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper, and the ascription of a Stevensonlike

character to the quoted phrase, a letter of Stevenson's was published, and proved that he had read Lucy

Hutchinson's writings, and that he did not love her. "I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of

course, I admire, etc. . . I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of

my spirit. . . The way in which she talks of herself makes one's blood run cold." He was young at that time of

writing, and perhaps hardly aware of the lesson in English he had taken from her. We know that he never

wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer one to him in right

seventeenthcentury diction is establishedit is not too bold to say soby my recognition of his style in her

own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first in his voice, recognized in hers.