Ceres' Runaway

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Transcribed from the 1909 Constable & Co. Ltd. edition by DavidPrice,gift ideas with snowman kits for girls email [email protected]

Ceres’ Runaway & Other Essays

Contents:

Ceres’ Runaway
A Vanquished Man
A Northern Fancy
Laughter
Harlequin Mercutio
The Little Language
Anima Pellegrina!
The Sea Wall
The Daffodil
Addresses
The Audience
Tithonus
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Popular Burlesque
Dry Autumn
The Plaid
Two Burdens
The Unready
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult

CERES’ RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary pictureof a Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop—at least while thecharming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome.  The Municipalitydoes not exist that would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growthof green in the high places of the city.  It is true that therehave been the famous captures—those in the Colosseum, and in theBaths of Caracalla; moreover a less conspicuous running to earth takesplace on the Appian Way, in some miles of the solitude of the Campagna,where men are employed in weeding the roadside.  They slowly uprootthe grass and lay it on the ancient stones—rows of little corpses—forsweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders why.  The governorsof the city will not succeed in making the Via Appia look busy, or itsstripped stones suggestive of a thriving commerce.  Again, at thecemetery within the now torn and shattered Aurelian wall by the PortaSan Paolo, they are often mowing of buttercups.  “A lightof laughing flowers along the grass is spread,” says Shelley,whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid.  But a couple ofactive scythes are kept at work there summer and spring—not thatthe grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, butbecause flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessibleplaces, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success andvictory.  It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges inthe sun, swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges,and blooms aloft.  It makes light of the sixteenth century, ofthe seventeenth, and of the eighteenth.  As the historic ages growcold it banters them alike.  The flagrant flourishing statue, thehaughty façade, the broken pediment (and Rome is chiefly thecity of the broken pediment) are the opportunities of this vagrant gardenin the air.  One certain church, that is full of attitude, canhardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great stature and manystalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest summit tiptoe againstits sky.  The cornice of another church in the fair middle of Romelifts 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 andtufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone.  “A birdof the air carries the matter,” or the last sea-wind, sombre andsoft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a littlefertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hueand cry, this is Ceres’.  The municipal authorities, hot-foot,cannot catch it.  And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed,to mark the flight of the agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flyingbuttress, or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tilesof a twelfth-century tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grassgrows under their discomfited feet.  It actually casts a flushof green over their city piazza—the wide light-grey pavementsso 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, butstill beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles. Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly promptsthe civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazzainto a square.  The shrub is to take the place not so much of thepavement as of the importunate grass.  For it is hard to be beaten—andthe weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant!  The suntakes its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipalityin tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the“third” (which is in truth the fourth) Rome.

When I say grass I use the word widely.  Italian grass is notturf; it is full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic.  Noricher scents throng each other, close and warm, than these from a littlehand-space of the grass one rests on, within the walls or on the plain,or in the Sabine or the Alban hills.  Moreover, under the nameI will take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most welcomesurprise on certain ledges of the Vatican.  That great and beautifulpalace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon house, heremagnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious and nothingfurtive.  And outside one lateral window on a ledge to the sun,prospers this little garden of random salad.  Buckingham Palacehas nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot well thinkof little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any parapet it mayhave round a corner.

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

A VANQUISHED MAN

Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event,until 1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,as he wished, but by Tom Taylor.  Turning over these familiar andfamous volumes, often read, I wonder once more how any editor was boldto “take upon himself the mystery of things” in the caseof Haydon, and to assign to that venial moral fault or this the ill-fortuneand defeat that beset him, with hardly a pause for the renewal of theresistance of his admirable courage.

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowlyand lofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself toanswer to Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its reproach,to bear its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is all his history. There was no fault of the intellect in his apprehension of the thinghe thought to stand possessed of.  He conceived it aright, andhe was just in his rebuke of a world so dull and trivial before theart for which he died.  He esteemed it aright, except when he deemedit his.

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

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sadbut satisfied, to conclude with “See the result of—”,or “So it ever must be with him who yields to—,” orwhatever else may be the manner of ratifying the sentence on the condemnedand dead?  Haydon, we hear, omitted to ask advice, or, if he askedit, did not shape his course thereby unless it pleased him.  Haydonwas self-willed; he had a wild vanity, and he hoped he could persuadeall the powers that include the powers of man to prosper the work ofwhich he himself was sure.  He did not wait upon the judgementof the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He was foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it whenthere was a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when thepossession—which was the preservation—of these was at stake. There he was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause,the first, the fatal, the final injury—the initial subtle blowthat sent him on his career so wronged, so cleft through and through,that the mere course and action of life must ruin him—this judgement,in art, directed him in the decision of the most momentous of all publicquestions.  Haydon admired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought;and in great part, it seems, we owe our perpetual instruction by thosejudges of the Arts which are the fragments of the Elgin sculptures,to the fact that Haydon trusted himself with the trust that worked hisown destruction.  Into the presence especially of those seatedfigures, commonly called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts forsentence.  He lent an effectual hand to the setting-up of thatTribunal of headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused,neglected, forgot him—and by chance-medley was right, was right!—hadno possible authority for anything that it did against him, and thathe might have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover,that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battleby this ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Housesof Parliament with fresco, he was not one.  This affront he tookat the hands of men who had no real distinctions in their gift. He might well have had, by mere chance, some great companion with whomto share that rejection.  The unfortunate man had no such fortuitousfellowship at hand.  How strange, the solitude of the bad painteroutcast by the worst, and capable of making common cause indomitablywith the good, had there been any such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none.  There were ranged the unjust judges with theirblunders all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and therewas no artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better thantheir favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned,and a man besides through whose heart the public reproach was able tocut keenly.

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon?  It hasalways seemed to me that he was not without greatness—yet he wasalways without dignity—in those most cruel passages of his life,such as that of his defeat, towards the close of his war, by the showof a dwarf, to which all London thronged, led by Royal example, whilethe exhibition of his picture was deserted.  He was not betrayedby anger at this end of hopes and labours in which all that a man livesfor had been pledged.  Nay, he succeeded in bearing what a moreinward man would have taken more hardly.  He was able to say inhis loud voice, in reproach to the world, what another would have barredwithin: one of his great pictures was in a cellar, another in an attic,another at the pawnbroker’s, another in a grocer’s shop,another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames and colours andthe rent were unpaid.  Some solace he even found in stating a fewof these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic visitorto London, interested in the condition of the arts.  Well, whoshall live without support?  A man finds it where he can.

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds ussome other little thing—I think it is inaccuracy.  Poor Haydonsays in one phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and inanother soon following that the money given or lent to him had beeninsufficient to pay them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions,after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a slip. His editor says the discrepancy is “characteristic,” butI protest I cannot find another like it among those melancholy pages. If something graver could but be sifted out from all these journalsand letters of frank confession, by the explainer!  Here, then,is the last and least: Haydon was servile in his address to “menof rank.”  But his servility seems to be very much in thefashion of his day—nothing grosser; and the men who set the fashionhad not to shape their style to Haydon’s perpetual purpose, whichwas to ask for commissions or for money.

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

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils,and never a shilling in pay for teaching them.  He painted a goodthing—the head of his Lazarus.  He had no fault of theory:what fault of theory can a man commit who stands, as he did, by “Natureand the Greeks”?  In theory he soon outgrew the Italiansthen most admired; he had an honest mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never tobe gained, the impossible pardon—pardon for that first and lastmistake—the mistake as to his own powers.  If to pardon meansto dispense from consequence, how should this be pardoned?  Artwould cease to be itself, by such an amnesty.

A NORTHERN FANCY

“I remember,” said Dryden, writing to Dennis, “Iremember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet madea sober and witty answer to a bad poet who told him, ‘It was aneasy thing to write like a madman.’  ‘No,’ saidhe, ‘’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 lighthigh note, in English poetry throughout two centuries at least, andone English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid’ssong, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies—the age of the re-discovery of death; against the crimeof tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made thepoets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy—mayhave caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence,and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.  “I hearda maid in Bedlam,” runs the old song.  High and low the poetstried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be a maid andcrazed for love.  Except for the temporary insanity so indifferentlyworn by the soprano of the now deceased kind of Italian opera, and exceptthat a recent French story plays with the flitting figure of a villagegirl 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 heseems to aver) I have not met elsewhere than in England this solitaryand detached poetry of the treble note astray.

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

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

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

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemonaremembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth.  Of all thesongs of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination,there is nothing more passionate than that beginning “’Tissaid that some have died for love.”  To one who has alwaysrecognized the greatness of this poem and who possibly had known andforgotten how much Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgementafresh in ModernPainters, where this grave lyric is citedfor an example of great imagination.  It is the mourning and restlesssong of the lover (“the pretty Barbara died”) who has notyet broken free from memory into the alien world of the insane.

Barbara’s lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden’sAdam entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting thathe could endure to lose “the bliss, but not the place.” (And although this dramatic “Paradise Lost” of Dryden’sis hardly named by critics except to be scorned, this is assuredly afine and imaginative thought.)  It is nevertheless as a wandererthat the crazed creature visits the fancy of English poets with sucha wild recurrence.  The Englishman of the far past, barred by climate,bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and the intricate life and customs ofthe little town, must have been generally a home-keeper.  No adventure,no setting forth, and small liberty, for him.  But Tom-a-Bedlam,the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his hornfor alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, freeto suffer all the cold—an unsheltered creature; and the chillfancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey thathad no law.  Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that madethe 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 EnglishMiddle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they hada name for him as for the wild birds—Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow,Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam.  And after him came the“Abram men,” who were sane parodies of the crazed, and wentto the fairs and wakes in motley.  Evelyn says of a fop: “Allhis body was dressed like a maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam’s cap.” But after the Civil Wars they vanished, and no man knew how.  Intime old men remembered them only to remember that they had not seenany such companies or solitary wanderers of late years.

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, andnot 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 mightsee by chance, rare as an Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-

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

His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befallin such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization, bourgeoisin the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after deathto the company of man, to the “holy bell,” which Shakespeare’sDuke remembered in banishment, and to the congregation and their “Christianpsalm.”

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad,than Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of themaid crazed by love.  They left her to her light immortality; andshe might be drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile norbury her.  She might have her hair torn by the bramble, but herheart was light after trouble.  “Many light hearts and wings”—shehad at least the bird’s heart, and the poet lent to her voicethe wings of his verses.

There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she.  The vagrantwoman of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer Elliott’sfine lines in “The Excursion”—

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

Trouble did not “try” the Elizabethan wild one, it undidher.  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, whowas more weary than she, with a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn;her “good-morrow” rings from Herrick’s poem, freshas cock-crow.  She knows that her love is dead, and her perplexityhas regard rather to the many kinds of flowers than to the old storyof his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as thetragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia.  Strangewas 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’swas 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, andsings of her own “burning brow,” as Herrick’s wildone never sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talksof flowers, or, rather, “the herbs I loved to rear”; andperhaps she is the surest of all signs that the strange inspirationof the past centuries was lost, vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been wholly English, whereas the English eighteenth century wasnot wholly English.

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

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certainnevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it notfor the paradox one might say, it never was so grave.  Everywherethe joke “emerges”—as an “elegant” writermight have it—emerges to catch the attention of the sense of humour;and everywhere the sense of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honourthe appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing.  It wears (letthe violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinklein abeyance, and an eye in suspense.  It is much at the serviceof the vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughtersof the game.  It stands in untoward places, or places that wereonce inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, someubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.

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

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

Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, likerhetoric and the arts, a habit.  And it is in some sort a habitwhen it is not inevitable.  If we ask ourselves why we laugh, wemust confess that we laugh oftenest because—being amused—weintend 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 restorelaughter itself to its own place.  We have fallen into the wayof using it to prove something—our sense of the goodness of thejest, to wit; but laughter should not thus be used, it should go free. It is not a demonstration, whether in logic, or—as the word demonstrationis now generally used—in emotion; and we do ill to charge it withthat office.

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss amongsuch a people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes wholaugh without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, whoperhaps first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that theywere 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 humorousand what is not.  This last is the most harmless of all kinds ofsuperfluous laughter.  When it carries an apology, a confessionof natural and genial ignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs alaugh of hazard and experiment, she is to be more than forgiven. What she must not do is to laugh a laugh of instruction, and as it wereretrieve the jest that was never worth the taking.

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

If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content tosignal their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall keepthe laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply,and not thrice at the same thing—once for foolish surprise, andtwice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it be known that theyare amused—then it may be time to persuade this laughing nationnot to laugh so loud as it is wont in public.  The theatre audiencesof louder-speaking nations laugh lower than ours.  The laugh thatis chiefly a signal of the laugher’s sense of the ridiculous isnecessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of covering what we mayperhaps wish to hear from the actors.  It is a public laugh, andno ordinary citizen is called upon for a public laugh.  He maylaugh in public, but let it be with private laughter there.

Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these timesof dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humourin 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 conspicuousin 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 thewit “out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine,” and todeny Ben Jonson’s “tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, wittyPlautus,” and the rest.  Doubtless Greece determined thecustom for all our Occident; but none the less might the modern worldgrow more sensible of the value of composure.

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give reinas 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, andhonour in refusing to govern this.  It is as though we were ashamedof reason here, and shy of dignity, and suspicious of temperance, anddiffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that whichloses nothing by seclusion.

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO

The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fellwith him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, forEnglish drama.  That manner of man—Arlecchino, or Harlequin—hadoutlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the fatherof the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinateTranio in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, thanthe smouldering of the old man.  Arlecchino frolics in and outof the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in hislightest, his brightest, his most vital shape.

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody,the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurialone, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Molière. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergasteand Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather toAntiquity and the Latin comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the Englishstage his mere memory survives differently to a later age in the personof “Charles, his friend.”  What convinces me that hevirtually died with Mercutio is chiefly this—that this comradeof Romeo’s lives so keenly as to be fully capable of the deaththat he takes at Tybalt’s sword-point; he lived indeed, he diesindeed.  Another thing that marks the close of a career of agesis his loss of his long customary good luck.  Who ever heard ofArlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his sword-play, overtakenby tragedy?  His time had surely come.  The gay companionwas to bleed; Tybalt’s sword had made a way.  ’Twasnot so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but it served.

Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the primitiveItalian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional little stage ofthe past, has a hero’s place, whereas when he interferes in humanaffairs he is only the auxiliary.  He might be lover and bridegroomon 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 friendof the bridegroom.  The five figures of the old stage dance attendance;they play around the business of those who have the dignity of mortality;they, poor immortals—a clown who does not die, a pantaloon neverfar from death, who yet does not die, a Columbine who never attainsDesdemona’s death of innocence or Juliet’s death of rectitudeand passion—flit in the backward places of the stage.

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

Immortality, did I say?  It was immortality until Mercutio fell. And if some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has transformedso many scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, sinceMercutio died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more thana marionnette; he has returned whence he came.  A man mayplay him, but he is—as he was first of all—a doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took life, and, so promoted, flitted througha 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.  Itis but a memory of Arlecchino that our children see, a poor statue orimage endowed with mobility rather than with life.

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

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfishmaster 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 Gallinaand Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use nodialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language withso much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their almostunwritten tongue.  Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into thehomes of dialect, does but show us how the language staggers under sucha stress, how it breaks down, and resigns that office.  One ofthe finest of the characters in the ranks of his admirable fiction isthat old manageress of the narrow things of the house whose daughteris dying insane.  I have called the dialect a shelter.  Thisit 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 inabilityof the dialect.  They laid none but light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in their homely plays than it carriesin homely life.  Their work leaves it what it was—the talkof a people talking much about few things; a people like our own andany other in their lack of literature, but local and all Italian intheir lack of silence.

Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people thanto one less pleased with chatter or more pleased with books.  Iam 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, chargedwith all its history and all its achievements; for the speakers of dialect,of a certain rank, speak Italian, too.  But to tamper with theirdialect, or to take it from them, would be to leave them houseless andexposed in their daily business.  So much does their patois seemto be their refuge from the heavy and multitudinous experiences of aliterary tongue, that the stopping of a fox’s earth might be takenas the image of any act that should spoil or stop the talk of the associatedseclusion of their town, and leave them in the bleakness of a largerpatriotism.

The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languagesthat might all have proved right “Italian” had not Dante,Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taughthard things in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy livesor hard, and evidently can die, therein.  The hands and feet thathave served the villager and the citizen at homely tasks have all thelowliness of his patois, to his mind; and when he must perforce yieldup their employment, we may believe that it is a simple thing to diein 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 flightor to spur it upon hard travelling.

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

These writers in Venetian—they are named because in no otherItalian dialect has work so popular as Goldoni’s been done, norso excellent as Signor Fogazzaro’s—have left the unletteredlocal language in which they loved to deal, to its proper limitations. They have not given weighty things into its charge, nor made it heavilyresponsible.  They have added nothing to it; nay, by writing itthey might even be said to have made it duller, had it not been forthe reader and the actor.  Insomuch as the intense expressivenessof a dialect—of a small vocabulary in the mouth of a dramaticpeople—lies in the various accent wherewith a southern citizenknows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to restore itslife to the written phrase.  In dialect the author is forbiddento search for the word, for there is none lurking for his choice; butof tones, allusions, and of references and inferences of the voice,the speaker of dialect is a master.  No range of phrases can behis, but he has the more or the less confidential inflection, untilat times the close communication of the narrow street becomes a veryconspiracy.

Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is somethingall unlike, for instance, the mere jargon of London streets.  Thedifference may be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have ahighly organized and orderly grammar.  The Londoner cannot keepthe small and loose order of the grammar of good English; the Genoeseconjugates his patois verbs, with subjunctives and all things of thathandsome kind, lacked by the English of Universities.

The middle class—the piccolomondo—thatshares Italian dialect with the poor are more strictly local in theirmanners than either the opulent or the indigent of the same city. They have moreover the busy intelligence (which is the intellect ofpatois) at its keenest.  Their speech keeps them a sequesteredplace which is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, andbeyond the reach of alteration.  And—what is pretty to observe—thespeakers are well conscious of the characters of this intimate language. An Italian countryman who has known no other climate will vaunt, infervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like manner he is consciousof the local character of his language, and tucks himself within itat home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad.  A properly speltletter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs Dingley and Stellato the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill-written, was“snug.”

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the noblerlanguage insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller? discardnoble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despair thus prattleand gibber and stammer?  Rather perhaps this departure from Englishis but an excursion after gaiety.  The ideal lovers, no doubt,would be so simple as to be grave.  That is a tenable opinion. Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and age by age they haveexchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless never studied,and perhaps never loved.  Why so?  They might have chosenbroken English of other sorts—that, for example, which was oncethought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by theEnglishman—a complication of humour fictitious enough, one mightthink, to please anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or thestyle of telegrams; or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage’sEnglish devised by Mrs Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian. But none of these found favour.  The choice has always been ofthe language of children.  Let us suppose that the flock of wingedLoves worshipping Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child thatrides his lion erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, maybe the inspirers of those prattlings.  “See then thy selfelikewise art lyttle made,” says Spenser’s Venus to her child.

Swift was the best prattler.  He had caught the language, surprisedit in Stella when she was veritably a child.  He did not push herclumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolongedin her a childhood he had loved.  He is “seepy.” “Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue.”  It is a realgood-night.  It breathes tenderness from that moody and uneasybed of projects.

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

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

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

Animapellegrinaseems to be Italian of no later datethan Pergolese’s airs, and suits the time as the familiar phraseof the more modern love-song suited the day of Bellini.  But itis only Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past ofany other European nation, but only of this.

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

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

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that wouldbe but a property of the turn of speech.  It is rather the profounderadvantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as thevery language keeps in store.  In another tongue you may sing,“happy who looks, happier who sighs”; but in what othertongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what othershall you get from so weak an antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectualepigram?  Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to call itan illusion; he should rather be glad to travel into the place of alanguage where the phrase isintellectual, impassioned, and anepigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate himself, andnot the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof thecharm may still be unknown to Englishmen—“piuttostobruttini.”  See what an all-Italian spirit is here,and what contempt, not reluctant, but tolerant and familiar.  Youmay hear it said of pictures, or works of art of several kinds, andyou confess at once that not otherwise should they be condemned. Brutto—ugly—is the word of justice, the word forany language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchangedinternationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course ofthe European concert.  But bruttinois a soothing diminutive,a diminutive that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that impliesinnocence, and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shruggingin the rear—“rather than not.”  “Ratherugly than not, and ugly in a little way that we need say few words about—thefewer the better;” nay, this paraphrase cannot achieve the homelyItalian quality whereby the printed and condemnatory criticism is madea 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 intowhich a traveller hither has to enter!  Do we possess anythinghere more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany)than our particle “un”?  Poor are those living languagesthat have not our use of so rich a negative.  The French equivalentin adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itself—orhardly; it does not attain the participle; so that no French or Italianpoet has the words “unloved”, “unforgiven.” None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravest and the mostmajestic of all ironies.  In our English, the words that are deniedare still there—“loved,” “forgiven”: excludedangels, who stand erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone,what shall not be done.

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

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, properto character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferablespeech.  And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languagesfor their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, properto their own garden enclosed, without recognition.  Never may theybe disregarded or confounded with the universal stock.  If I wouldnot so neglect piuttostobruttini, how much less a worddominating literature!  And of such words of ascendancy and racethere 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 outhis hand to take his rights.  He has incomparable language whenhe is at a certain page of his life; at that time he sate down to sketchhis 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 alocal rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectualplace—Felicechivimira—orthe art-critic’s phrase—piuttostobruttini—ofeasy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words—and it has many—whowould not treasure the language that has given us—no, not thathas given us, but that has kept for its own—ensoleillè? Nowhere else is the sun served with such a word.  It is not tobe said or written without a convincing sense of sunshine, and fromthe very word come light and radiation.  The unaccustomed northcould not have made it, nor the accustomed south, but only a nationpart-north and part-south; therefore neither England nor Italy can rivalit.  But there needed also the senses of the French—thosesenses of which they say far too much in every second-class book oftheir enormous, their general second-class, but which they have matchedin their time with some inimitable words.  Perhaps that matchingwas done at the moment of the full literary consciousness of the senses,somewhere about the famous 1830.  For I do not think ensoleillèto be a much older word—I make no assertion.  Whatever itsorigin, may it have no end!  They cannot weary us with it; forit seems as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side,vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, theair is light, and white things passing blind the eyes—a woman’slinen, white cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense of sight, and a summer word, in short, comparedwith which the paraphrase is but a picture.  For ensoleillèI would claim the consent of all readers—that they shall all acknowledgethe spirit of that French.  But perhaps it is a mere personal preferencethat makes lejours’annoncealso sacred.

If the hymn, “Stabat Mater dolorosa,” was written inLatin, this could be only that it might in time find its true languageand incomparable phrase at last—that it might await the day oflife in its proper German.  I found it there (and knew at oncethe authentic verse, and knew at once for what tongue it had been reallydestined) in the pages of the prayer-book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruckchurch, and in the accents of her voice.

THE SEA WALL

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

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

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

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

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

This is by the way.  Charles II has been cheered; the feat isdone, the dismay is imagined with joy.  And yet the Merry Monarch’swas a dismal time.  Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from theFrench King remembered and claimed by the restored throne of England,and the Dutch in the Medway—all this was disaster.  Nonethe less, having the vanity of new clothes and a pretty figure, didwe—especially by the mouth of Andrew Marvell—deride ourvictors, making sport of the Philistines with a proper national senseof 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 greatnovelist found the smallness of some South German States to be the subjectof unsating banter.  The German scenes at the end of “VanityFair,” for example, may prove how much the ridicule of mere smallness,fewness, poverty (and not even real poverty, privation, but the povertythat shows in comparison with the gold of great States, and is properlyin proportion) rejoiced the sense of humour in a writer and moralistwho intended to teach mankind to be less worldly.  In Andrew Marvell’sday they were even more candid.  The poverty of privation itselfwas provocative of the sincere laughter of the inmost man, the true,infrequent laughter of the heart.  Marvell, the Puritan, laughedthat very laughter—at leanness, at hunger, cold, and solitude—inthe face of the world, and in the name of literature, in one memorablesatire.  I speak of “Flecno, an English Priest in Rome,”wherein nothing is spared—not the smallness of the lodging, northe lack of a bed, nor the scantiness of clothing, nor the fast.

“This basso-rilievo of a man—”

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last.

It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallnessof the country of Holland matter for a cordial jest.  But, besidesthe smallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage inregard to the sea.  In the Venetians, commerce with the sea, conflictwith the sea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing peace—albeita less instant battle and a more languid victory—were confessedto be noble; in the Dutch they were grotesque.  “With madlabour,” says Andrew Marvell, with the spirited consciousnessof the citizen of a country well above ground and free to watch thelabour at leisure, “with mad labour” did the Dutch “fishthe land to shore.”

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

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

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

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-nymphsshould find themselves provided with a capital cabillauof shoalsof pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and it mustbe allowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony.  There isnot a smile for us in “Flecno,” but it is more than possibleto smile over this “Character of Holland”; at the excludedocean returning to play at leap-frog over the steeples; at the riseof government and authority in Holland, which belonged of right to theman who could best invent a shovel or a pump, the country being so leaky:-

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

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell,more than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was lightin so burly a frame—we have lost with these the wild humour thatwore so well the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so muchorder, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality—ina word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past.  We who cannot standfirm within two lines, but must slip beyond and between the boundaries,who tolerate the couplets of Keats and imitate them, should praise theday of Charles II because of Marvell’s art, and not for love ofthe 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 morepoetic poets, hitherto called somewhat slightingly the Cavalier poets,who matched the wit of the Puritan with a spirit simpler and less mocking.

It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that someremembered winter storms lately turned their great artillery. It was a time of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and soclose, up in the towers of the seaside stronghold, that one seemed tobe indeed admitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds.  Thegale came with an indescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemedto break itself upon the heights, yet passed unbroken out to sea; inthe voice of the sea there were pauses, but none in that of the urgentgale with its hoo-hoo-hoo all night, that clamoured down the callingof the waves.  That lack of pauses was the strangest thing in thetempest, 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 secretextreme to which this hurry and force were tending?  You askedless what thing was driving the flocks of the storm than what was drawingthem.  The attraction seemed the greater violence, the more irresistible,and the more unknown.  And there were moments when the end seemedabout to be attained.

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

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

THE DAFFODIL

To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershedand breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter—freshand warm are the energies of such bracing action; but more animatingstill is it to live so as to breast the stress of time.

Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the timeand enlarge the capacity of the day—our poor day that so easilyshrinks and dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every first of March, for example, may sweep upon a largecurve and come home annually after a swinging flight.  To the infinitevariety of natural days may be entrusted half the work of strengtheningthe flight against time, but the other half must be the task of thevehement heart.  Nature assuredly does not fail.  Days, seasons,and years are as wide asunder as the unforeseen can set them, and acrowd of children is not more various.  But the resisting heartseems of late to be somewhat lacking.  We are inclined to turnour heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the gates of the wind,and to go the smooth road.

We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killingcourse than the natural event would take us.  It is not enoughthat we should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail thecurrent with the ease of our untimely luxuries.  Our daffodilsare no longer to have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relatethem to the lagging swallow.  By the time the barely budding woodsgive a poor man’s lodging to the cold daffodil—a scantykind taking the wind with a short stalk and giving it but small petalsto buffet—we have already said farewell to the tall and splendidgreen-house daffodil that never braved the cold.  We gave to thisour untimely welcome long before the snowdrop came, and the golden nameof daffodil has lost its vernal sound.  And when we part with theimproved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly know or care whetherthe starveling is yet mustering in hollows of woodlands, or whetherit is over or to come.  We are attending to a yellower tulip, nodoubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is opening in thechilly wood.

The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accusedourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and havenot noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselvesmemories confused and undefined.  Late springs and early, gentleand hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its wayand its revenges.  If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothingis easier.  There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct;and the sliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannouslycareless.  It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly;and when we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils,and have hardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises,we are already on the way of least resistance, the friction of lifeis gone; and in our last old age the past will seem to dwindle evenlike the dwindled present of our decline.

There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, onesingle grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, tomeet it, to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own;and this is travel.  It is the finest and most effectual flightagainst time of all.  What elastic days are those wherein I makehead against a travelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries,hail frontiers, face a new manner of building, cross the regions ofsilver roofs and of heavy Alpine stone, and bring with me the late lightupon billowy gables and red eaves!  And how buoyant the week inwhich I anticipate the sun upon the roofless east!  How serriedare the days with forests, how enlarged by plains, how thronged by cities,how singled by the pine, how newly audible by a new sea!  Far wasthe sunrise from the sunset, and noon is one memorable midday with shortenedshadows upon some solitary road.

Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, wintersand nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springsthat brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring. None of us has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipatedvoices.  The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky!  Bright nightsand glowing houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all theseuntimely fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privationsof a winter in disguise.

In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They had the privilege of their latitude—vigorous and rigorousseasons.  They had a year full of change—their time was stretchedwhether with impatience or with patience, with conflict or with felicity. Their salt meats were not the worst of it; there was the siege of darkness,the captivity of cold, the threat of storm, and the labour to closewith the closing enemy, to break ways and save animals alive, and keepthe laws in force in the street in the long and secret nights. From such a season of winter at home, winter well known, men broke freeto hail their daffodils.  They found them, short, strong, and shivering,in the still open and undefended woods.  In the springs beforeChaucer, and earlier than the day of the first spring lyric, in thesame places grew the keen wild flowers as now; but they assuredly weremarked with another welcome; they made memories; this year’s wildharvest was not confused with that of last year, or of half-a-scoreof years gone by.  Distance of vital time set the springs far apart,and made the daffodils strangers.

They were greeted with the courtesy due to strangers, so fresh musthave been the senses of the villager, and of the citizen of the villagetown.  Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did never. He of old went from a little town, close and serried as a new box oftoys, with one step into the unsmirched country, carrying an unsatedheart.  Refreshed with the animating compulsion of changeful lifewere man and woman, and much like their child in a constant capacityfor unique experiences, unique days, years that are separate, known,and distinguishable, and not only separate but long.

Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our fugitive,resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by means of thissovereign remedy of travel.  It is to be feared that a modern journeyis not always to us so bracing a manner of living as was the untravelledjourney of hard days at home to the ancient islander.  To journeyas he did, keeping his feet, with a moving heart against the movingseasons, to resist, to withstand, widened the hours; but his posterityare taking all means to narrow their own, even on the railway. To go the same way every year, for instance, is to lose, when a fewsuch years are gone, nearly all the gain to life.  To take no heedat all of the way, but merely to be by any means at the end of the travelling,to sleep or go by night, and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours,junctions, and dining-cars, is but to close up the time as though youclosed a telescope.  A long railway journey and a long motor journeymay be taken with the flight of time as well as against it, and thehabit of summaries can use these too to its own end.  Precipitate,unresisting, are the day in the train and the heedless night. We love to reproach ourselves with living at too great a speed, having,perhaps, no sense of the second meaning of the phrase.  Medicinemay, perhaps, fulfil her promise of giving us a few more years, buthabit derides her by making each year a scanty gift.

Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will notlet the sun rule the day.  He would see to it that our hours werevarious; but we have preferred to his various face the plain face ofa clock, and the lights without vicissitudes of our nights without seasons.

ADDRESSES

Not free from some ignominious attendance upon the opinion of theworld is he who too consciously withdraws his affairs from its judgements. He is indebted to “the public.”  He is at least indebtedto it for the fact that there is, yonder, without, a public.  Lackingthis excluded multitude his fastidiousness would have no subject, andhis singularity no contrast.  He would, in his grosser moods, havenothing to refuse, and nothing, in his finer, to ignore.

He, at any rate, is one, and the rest are numerous.  They ministerto him popular errors.  But if they are nothing else in regardto himself, they are many.  If he must have distinction, it isthere on easy terms—he is one.

Well for him if he does not contract the heavier debt shoulderedby the man who owes to the unknown, un-named, and uncounted his pleasurein their conjectured or implicit envy; who conceives the jealousy theymay have covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus silently begins andends within his own morosity the story of his base advantage.

Vanity has indignity as its underside.  And how shall even thepleasure in beauty be altogether without it?  For since beauty,like other human things, is comparative, how shall the praise, or theadmiration, thereof be free from (at least) some reference to the unbeautiful? Or from some allusion to the less beautiful?  Yet this, if inevitable,is little; it may be negligible.  The triumph of beauty is allbut innocent.  It is where no beauty is in question that lurksthe unconfessed appeal to envy.  That appeal is not an appeal toadmiration—it lacks what is the genial part of egoism.  Forwho, except perhaps a recent writer of articles on society in America,really admires a man for living in the approved part of Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the westernside of the Atlantic.  It is a vanity without that single apologyfor vanity—gaiety of heart.  The first things that are, inLondon, sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of thesky.  There are some amongst us whose wives have constrained themto dwell underground for love of an address.  Modern and foolishis that contempt for daylight.  To the simple, day is beautiful;and “beautiful as day” a happy proverb.

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality,dwells one certain dominance.  And if One, vigilant for the duesof His vicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription? We reply, The Sun’s.

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves daylightthe finest thing we know.  Beauty of artificial lights is in ourstreets at night, but their chief beauty is when, just before night,they adorn the day.  The late daylight honours them when it soeasily and sweetly subdues and overcomes them, giving to the electriclamp, to the taper, to the hearth fire, and to the spark, a lovelinessnot their own.

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and thereamongst us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object ofunconfessed contempt.  Both are contrary to that more authentic,that essential solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live,and wherein all men are compelled to die.  Both are unpublishedeven now, even in our days, when it costs men so little to manifestthe effrontery of their opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness ischiefly that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinctionbrought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it andour actual life, a generation or two, an education or two.  Obviously,it was riches that made the class differences, if not now, then a littletime ago.  Therefore the New England citizen should not be reprovedby us for anything except his too great candour.  A social guide-bookto some city of the Republic is in my hands.  I note how the verynames of streets take a sound of veneration or of cheerful derisionfrom the writer’s pen.  It is evident that the names arealmost enough.  They have an expression.  He is like a naïfteller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his own smiles in ordertill he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaksit upon parishes.  He turns me a phrase with the northern end ofa town and makes an epigram of the southern.  He caps a sarcasmwith an address.

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

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capturean address by the hem if he may.  You would think a good addressto be of all blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gainedor missed, and no two ways about it.  But not so.  You shallsee it waylaid at the angles of squares, with no slight exercise ofskill, delayed, entreated, detained, entangled, intricately caught,persuaded to round a corner, prolonged beyond all probability, pursued.

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visitthere.  It will bear the number of a narrow house.  May itavow its poverty and be poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigidhumility, shall have no thought nor no eye askance upon the multitude.

THE AUDIENCE

The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waitingis only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every nighttakes place.  The audience are the players.  Their audienceon the stage are bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipatethem, and to divine them.  But once known and their character establishedin relation to a particular play, the audience—what is calledthe audience—need give no further trouble.  They themselvescannot alter; they are fixed and compelled by the tremendous force ofaverages.  The most inexorable of laws, and the most irresistibleof necessities are upon them; they cannot do otherwise; they are outof the reach of accidents; they are made fast in their own mediocrity. They are a thousand London people; and no genius, or no imbecility,amongst them has any effect upon that secure sovereignty of a number.

The long laugh generally means that the house—by its unalterablemajority—has laughed at one joke three times.  The stagewaits upon the audience, and the audience rehearses its collective andinevitable laugh.  It performs.  It communicates itself, andart is a communication.  A small and chosen party is made up, behindthe footlights, to see a thousand people, given helpless into the handsof destiny and subject to averages, so express themselves.

The audience’s audience (the people on the stage) are persuadedinto applauding the laugh too long and too often.  The author is,of course, one of them, and he applauds by making too many such translations. They are perhaps worth making, and even worth renewing in acknowledgementof a smile; but it is surely to encourage the house unduly to make themso important.  The actors applaud their audience by repeating—andnot once or only twice—a piece of comic business.  Does theAverage laugh so well as indeed to deserve all this?

The Average does little more than laugh.  It knows that itsown truest talents are indubitably comic.  We have no real tragicaudiences.  This is no expression of regret over legitimate audiences,or audiences of the old school, or any audiences of that kind, whoseday may or may not have had a date.  It is a mere statement ofthe fact that audiences have lost, or never had, a distinguishing perceptionof emotion, whereas they have every kind of perception of humour, distinguishingand general.  Their laugh never fails.  If their friends behindwould really care to improve them, it might be done by exacting fromthem a little more temperance in their sense of comedy.  We shallnever have a really good school of audience without the exercise ofsome such severity.

For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean thatit is unchangeable for its time merely.  There might be a slowupraising of the level.  It would still be a level, and there wouldstill be a compelling law upon one thousand that it should do the samething as another thousand; but that same thing might become somewhatmore intelligent.

When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of audienceas to merit this admirable supply to their demands?—this applauseof their understanding?  Is there not in the whole excellent pieceof work, something all too independent of their part in the theatre?

If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, andByron that all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the audiencehas conceived that all arts should have but one mystery for its blundering,and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it does but admirethe actor as in a drawing.

The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shallnot accept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them;when one brilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the footlightsshall meet a brilliant simplicity on the other.  Which troupe,which side, to begin?

TITHONUS

“It was resolved,” said the morning paper, “tocolour the borders of the panels and other spaces of Portland stonewith arabesques and other patterns, but that no paint should be used,as paint would need renewing from time to time.  The colours, therefore,”—andhere is the passage to be noted—“are all mixed with waxliquefied 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 wasdesired to remove it.”  Not, apparently, that a new surfaceis formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence,be chipped off again; but that the “ornament” is drivenin and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is nothingpossible to cut away by any industry.  In this humorous form ofornament we are beforehand with Posterity.  Posterity is baffled.

Will this victory over our sons’ sons be the last resolutetyranny prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeatof the future?  To impose that compulsion has been hitherto oneof the strongest of human desires.  It is one, doubtless, to beoutgrown by the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards,let this success in the stencilling of St Paul’s teach us, toour confusion.  There is evidently a man—a group of men—happyat this moment because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, toforce our posterity to have their cupola of St Paul’s with thestone mouldings stencilled and “picked out” with nigglingcolours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not.  Andthis is a survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attestedby history.

It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, andnot to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternallegislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this formerhuman wish.  If Galileo’s Inquisitors put a check upon theearth, which yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers’who arrested the moving man, and inhibited the moving God.  Thesixteenth century and a certain part of the age immediately followingseem to be times when the desire had conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of the sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning ofthe seventeenth in England—for in those days we were somewhatin the rear.  Thereis the obstinate, confident, unreluctant,undoubting, and resolved seizure upon power.  Thenwas Romerebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign and style.  Then wasmany 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 daythen present would have them, if the dead hand—the living handthat was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death—couldby any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age thatmay be more than willing to build for itself.  The day may sooncome 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 havea stone building in view for an age or two.  We can hardly avoidsome of the forms of tyranny over the future, but few, few are the livingmen who would consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul’s—thispetroleum and this wax.

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament,and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future. How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day shouldbe made secure against all mischances—smoke, damp, “therisk of bulging,” even accidents attending the washing of upperfloors—all was discussed in confidence with the public. It was impossible for anyone who read the papers then to escape fromsome at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge. From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert andmost deliberate schemes were gathered in order to defeat the naturaland 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 unparalleledobstinacy.  They had not the malice of the petroleum that doesviolence to St Paul’s; but they had instead an indomitable patience. Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and allhis work—refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancellingindulgences—by a perseverance that nothing could discourage. Who has not known somewhat indifferent painters mighty busy about theircolours and varnishes?  Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for thepreparation of the lime, and in the case of the Ludwig Kirche this limeremained there for eight years, with frequent stirrings.  Thiswas in order that the whole fresco, when at last it was entrusted toits bed, should be set there for immortality.  Nor did the masterfail to thwart time by those mechanical means that should avert therisk of bulging already mentioned.  He neglected no detail. He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the laws ofnature, to frustrate them.  Gravitation found him prepared, andso did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents. Against bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possibletrickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of thehuman conspiracy.  In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seemto stand well.  It would have been more just—so the presentage thinks of these preserved walls—if the day that admired themhad had them exclusively, and our day had been exempt.  The paintedcathedrals of the Middle Ages have undergone the natural correction;why not the Ludwig Kirche?

In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder toshoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and art. They had just called iron into their cabal.  Cornelius came fromMunich to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heartof 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 donewith the best results in England, in defiance of the weather, of theriver, of the mere days, of the divine order of alteration, and, ina word, of heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, limethat 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 beenhastily attributed to damp were really owing to the use of lime in toofresh a state.  Of the experimental works painted at Munich, thoseonly have faded which are known to have been done without due attentionto the materials.  Thus, afigureofBavaria, paintedbyKaulbach, whichhasfadedconsiderably, isknowntohavebeenexecutedwithlimethatwastoofresh.”  One cannotrefrain from italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take a littleless of this important care about the lime, to have a better confidence,to be more impatient and eager, and all had been well: nottodo—a virtue of omission.

This is not a matter of art-criticism.  It is an ethical questionhitherto unstudied.  The makers of laws have not always been obligedto 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—thatis, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of personor property.  Some such hold upon the time to come we are obligedto claim, and to claim it for our own sakes—because of the reflexeffect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering thetime to come.  Every maker of a will does at least this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate?  Not they. They found the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will. It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead,nor to efface the records of a past that offended them.  It didnot satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative menaceand instant compulsion.  When they had burnt libraries and throwndown 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 outragedthe future.

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

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

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge andthe probable wisdom of our successors.  A certain reverend officialdocument, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommendedto the veneration of the present times “those past ages with theirstore of experience.”  Doubtless, as the posterity of theirpredecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors,none—none.  Therefore, if they were a little reverend ourown posterity is right reverend.  It is a flippant and novelty-lovinghumour that so flatters the unproved past and refuses the deferencedue to the burden of years which is ours, which—grown still graver—willbe our children’s.

THE TOW PATH

A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaidedmust have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird yourshoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on theeven path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames—the sideof meadows.

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

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like thejoys of “feeling hearts” according to the erroneous sentimentof a verse of Moore’s.  The joys of sensitive hearts aremany; but the joys of sensitive hands are few.  Here, however,in the effectual act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscularupon the happy labourers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and allother means of violence.  Here, on the long tow-path, between warm,embrowned meadows and opal waters, you need but to walk in your swingingharness, and so take your friends up-stream.

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

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

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, asthe wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings thelighted clouds or the blue to face your eyes.  The birds, flyinghigh for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You will not envy them for so brief a success.  Did not Wordsworthwant a “little boat” for the air?  Did not Byron callhim a blockhead therefor?  Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense oftowing.

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 youthe sufficient mastery of the towpath.

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

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

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

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seemsto carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure,enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free. No watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path.  Whatlittle outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothlytowed.  Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head highand watch the birds, or listen to them.  They fly in such loftyair that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky.  A flash of theirflight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in that sunnydistance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons.  The daysare so still that you do not merely hear the cawing of the rooks—youoverhear their hundred private croakings and creakings, the soliloquyof the solitary places swept by wings.

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

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

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS

It is no small thing—no light discovery—to find a riverAndromeda and Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for halfa summer night around a pole-star in the waters.  One star or two—delicatevisitants of streams—we are used to see, somewhat by a sleightof the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition.  Or thesouthern waves may show the light—not the image—of the eveningor the morning planet.  But this, in a pool of the country Thamesat night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image ofa whole large constellation burning in the flood.

These reflected heavens are different heavens.  On a darkerand more vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of theLyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the watersplay a painter’s part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashingof constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of thevague bats flying.  The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alienmotion.  Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large starsescapes and returns, escapes and returns.  Fitful in the steadynight, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have asuddenness of gleaming life.  You imagine that some unexampledgale might make them seem to shine with such a movement in the veritablesky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant flightand rebound, could really show such altered stars.  The flood letsa constellation fly, as Juliet’s “wanton” with a tetheredbird, only to pluck it home again.  At moments some rhythmic fluxof the water seems about to leave the darkly-set, widely-spaced Bearabsolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitatethe 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 theirnoble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else at once so keen and so elusive.

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with nosuch vanishings as these.  The dimmer constellations of the softnight are reserved by the skies.  Hardly is a secondary star seenby the large and vague eyes of the stream.  They are blind to thePleiades.

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds inthe river Thames—the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeyson 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 whereverthe wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it isnot flying.  The streets of London are among its many highways,for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather.  Butit gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that itsfinely-feathered feet are wet.  On gentle breezes it is able tocross dry-shod, walking the waters.

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

POPULAR BURLESQUE

The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is themotive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streetswith the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certainpopular version of “Lest we forget” their unvaried theme;the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likenessof something unworshipful on the earth beneath, so much the more amI convinced that the national humour is that of banter, and that noother kind of mirth so gains as does this upon the public taste.

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

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

From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the personof the guy.  If it were but an antithesis to the citizen’sidea of something admirable which he might carry in procession on someother day, the carrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he wouldhoot at a suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to makea good-looking doll in its praise.  There is absolutely no image-makingart in the practice of our people, except only this art of rags andcontumely.  Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were thatof anger for a certain cause, the destruction would not be the workof so thin an annual malice and of so heartless a rancour.

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily—orso it seems—more and more the holiday temper of the majority. Mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is theonly intelligence.  They make an image of some one in whom theydo not believe, to deride it.  Say that the guy is the effigy ofan agitator in the cause of something to be desired; the street manand boy have then two motives of mocking: they think the reform to benot worth doing, and they are willing to suspect the reformer of somekind of hypocrisy.  Perhaps the guy of this occasion is most characteristicof 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, andsell it at the market of the kerb.

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

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

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

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

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

But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual inversionof the worship of images on the fifth of November, is that of a sentenceof Wordsworth’s—“We live by admiration.”

DRY AUTUMN

One who has much and often protested against the season of Autumn,her pathos, her chilly breakfast-time, her “tints,” herdecay, and her extraordinary popularity, saw cause one year to makea partial recantation.  Autumn, until then, had seemed to be apractitioner of all the easy arts at once, or rather, she had takenthe easy way with the arts of colour, sentiment, suggestion, and regret.

She had often encouraged and rewarded, also, the ingratitude of awhole nation for a splendid summer, somewhat officiously cooling, refreshing,allaying, and comforting the discontent of the victims of an Englishsun.  She had soothed the fuming citizen, and brought back thefogs of custom, effaced the skies, to which he had upturned no veryattentive eye, muffled up his chin, and in many other ways curried favour. Not only did she fall in with his landscape mood, but she made herselfhis housemate by his fireplaces, drew his curtains, shut out her ownwet winds in the streets, and became privy to the commoner comfortsof man, like a wild creature tamed and conniving at human sport andschemes.  “Domesticated” Gothic itself, or the governesseswho daily by advertisement describe themselves by that same strangemodern adjective, could not be more bent upon the flattery of man inhis less heroic moments.

Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accompliceof daily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now acceptedsense of a once noble word, comfortable.  Besides, her show ofstormy forests is done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment,with dashings and underlinings—we all know the sort of letter,for instance, which answers to the message and proclamation of Autumn,as she usually is in the outer world.  A complete sentimentalistis she, whether in the open country or when she looks in at the lightedwindows, and goodnaturedly makes her voice like a very goblin’soutside, for the increasing of the bourgeois’ bien-être.

But that year all had been otherwise.  Autumn had borne herselfwith a heroism of sunny weather.  Where we had been wont to seesignals of distress, and to hear the voluble outpouring of an excitabletemperament, with the extremity of scattered leaves and desperate damp,we beheld an aspect of golden drought.  Nothing mouldered—everythingwas consumed by vital fires.  The gardens were strewn with smoulderingsoft ashes of late roses, late honeysuckle, honey-sweet clematis. The silver seeds of rows of riverside flowers took sail on their randomjourney with a light wind.  Leaves set forth, a few at a time,with a little volley of birds—a buoyant caravel.  Or, inthe stiller weather, the infrequent fall of leaves took place quietly,with no proclamation of ruin, in the privacy within the branches. While nearly all the woods were still fresh as streams, you might seethat here or there was one, with an invincible summer smile, slowlyconsuming, in defiance of decay.  Life destroyed that autumn, notdeath.

The novelist would be at a loss had we a number of such years. He would lose the easiest landscape—for the autumn has among herfacile ways the way of allowing herself to be described by rote. But there were no regions of crimson woods and yellow—only thegrave, cool, and cheerful green of the health of summer, and now andthen that deep bronzing of the leaves that the sun brought to pass. Never did apples look better than in those still vigorous orchards. They shone so that lamps would hardly be brighter.  The apple-gathering,under such a sun, was nearly as warm and brilliant as a vintage; andindeed it was of the Italian autumn that you were reminded.  Therewere the same sunburnt tones, the same brown health.  There wasthe dark smile of chestnut woods as among the Apennines.

For it was chiefly within the woods that the splendid autumn withoutpathos gave delight.  The autumn withpathos has a way thereof overwhelming her many fragrances in the general odour of dead leavesgeneralized.  That year you could breathe all the several sweetscents, as discriminated and distinct as those of flowers on the topsof mountains—warm pine and beech as different as thyme and broom,unconfused.  Even the Spring, with her little divided breezes ofhawthorn, rose, and lilac, was not more various.

Moreover, while some of the woods were green, none of the fieldswere so.  In their sunburnt colours were to be seen “autumntints” of a far different beauty from that of a gaudy decay. Dry autumn is a general lover of simplicity, and she sweeps a landscapewith long plain colours that take their variations from the light. When the country looks “burnt up,” as they say who are ungratefulfor the sun, then are these colours most tender.  Grass, that hadlost its delicacy in the day when the last hay was carried, gets itagain.  For a little time it was—new-reaped—of somethingtoo hard a green; then came dry autumn along, and softened it into ahundred exquisite browns.  Dry autumn does beautiful things insepia, as the water-colour artist did in the early days, and draws divinebrown Turners of the first manner.

The fields and hedgerows must needs fade, and the sun made the fadingquick with the bloom of brown.  For one great meadow so softlygilded, I would give all the scarlet and yellow trees that ever madea steaming autumn gorgeous—all the crimson of the Rhine valleys,all the patched and spotted walnut-leaves of the mühl-thalby Boppard, and the little trees that change so suddenly to their yellowof decay in groups at the foot of the ruins of Sternberg and Liebenstein,every one of their branches disguised in the same bright, insignificant,unhopeful colour.

An autumn so rare should not close without a recorded “hailand farewell!”  Spring was not braver, summer was not sweeter. That year’s great sun called upon a great spirit in all the riversidewoods.  Those woods did not grow cold; they yielded to their lastsunset.

THE PLAID

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

The plaid is the Scotchman’s contribution to the decorativeart of the world.  Scotland has no other indigenous decoration. In his most admirable lecture on “The Two Paths,” Ruskinacknowledged, with a passing misgiving, that his Highlanders had littleart.  And the misgiving was but passing, because he consideredhow fatally wrong was the art of India—“it never representsa natural fact.  It forms its compositions out of meaningless fragmentsof colour and flowings of line . . . It will not draw a man, but aneight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral ora zig-zag.”  Because of this aversion from Nature the Hinduand his art tended to evil, we read.  But of the Scot we are told,“You will find upon reflection that all the highest points ofthe Scottish character are connected with impressions derived straightfrom the natural scenery of their country.”

What, then, about the plaid?  Where is the natural fact there? If the Indian, by practising a non-natural art of spirals and zig-zags,cuts himself off “from all possible sources of healthy knowledgeor natural delight,” to what did the good and healthy Highlandercondemn himself by practising the art of the plaid?  A spiral maybe found in the vine, and a zig-zag in the lightning, but where in natureis the plaid to be found?  There is surely no curve or curl thatcan be drawn by a designing hand but is a play upon some infinitelyvarious natural fact.  The smoke of the cigarette, more sensitivein motion than breath or blood, has its waves so multitudinously inflectedand reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bendsupon currents of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the mostactive, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by the finest Orientalhand—and that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the section of a sea-wave—itsflow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single movement, whereas theline of cigarette-smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicatedirections.  No, it is impossible to accept the saying that thepoor spiral or scroll of a human design is anything but a participationin the innumerable curves and curls of nature.

Now the plaid is not only “cut off” from natural sources,as Ruskin says of Oriental design—the plaid is not only cut offfrom nature, and cut off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measuredoff in inorganic quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradictionof all natural or vital forms.  And it is equally defiant of vitaltone and of vital colour.  Everywhere in nature tone is gradual,and between the fainting of a tone and the failing of a curve thereis a charming analogy.  But the tartan insists that its tone shallbe 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 noblegarment of the Indies is ill news.  True, Ruskin saw nothing butcruelty and corruption in Indian life or art; but let us hear an Indianmaxim in regard to those who, in cruel places, are ready sufferers:“There,” says the Mahabharata, “where womenare treated with respect, the very gods are said to be filled with joy. Women deserve to be honoured.  Serve ye them.  Bend your willbefore them.  By honouring women ye are sure to attain to the fruitionof all things.”  And the rash teachers of our youth wouldhave persuaded us that this generous lesson was first learnt in Teutonicforests!

Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably besuffered to reply, to this Hindu profession of reverence.  Accordinglythe woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil to the soulsof her mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and great-grandmother-in-law,in gratitude for their giving her a good husband.  And to go backfor a moment to Ruskin’s contrast of the two races, it was assuredlyunder the stress of some too rash reasoning that he judged the lovelyart of the East as a ministrant to superstition, cruelty, and pleasure,whether wrought upon the temple, the sword, or the girdle.  Theinnocent art of innocent Hindu women for centuries decked their mostmodest heads, their dedicated and sequestered beauty, their child-lovingbreasts, and consecrated chambers.

TWO BURDENS

One is on the breast and clings there with arms, and one on the backand clings with thongs.  The burden of the back bows the body,turns the face from the sky, narrows the lungs and flattens the foot;takes away the flight and the dance from the gait of man, and ties himtowards the earth—not only in the way of nature, by means of hisarched feet, but by a heavy lien upon his shoulders and his brows. It is the fardel that makes this vital figure to be subject visibly,and at several points, to that law of gravitation which, in a stateof liberty, it uses to withstand, to countervail, to leap from, to walkwith, making the universal tether elastic.  Bend in two this supplespine that can lift itself, like a snake erect, with something betterthan mere balance—with life and the active will; bend the back,and at once gravitation takes hold of the loins and grasps the knees,and pulls upon the shoulders, and the neck feels the weight of an abjecthead.

Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall findamong them a lower class of their own kind—poorer where all arepoor, and straining at their task where all are labouring—whowalk the dust with burdens on their backs.  Loads of field-labourare these, or of the labour in a fishing-port, and large in proportionto their weight; too large to be bound close and carried on the head,too wide to be borne on the shoulder, too unwieldy for the clasp ofarms.  Among American Indians, we are told, the women carry thetent so, and the gear of a dèmènagement, and thewarrior himself, upon his goods, not seldom.  In the agricultureof the European Continent the women carry the large loads thus, therefuse is laid upon them, and all that is bound up for burning; theyare the gleaners, not of wheat but of tares.  Or they carry fodderfor the imprisoned cattle, disappearing as they walk, bowed, quenched,hooded, and hidden with hay.

Women who bear this load do not prosper.  They have a downwardlook, albeit not as conspirators; and in them the earth carries a burdenlike their own, or but little more buoyant.  Stones off the faceof the stony fields, huge sheaves of stalks and husks after granariesare filled, fuel and forage—bent from the stature of women, thosewho bear those bundles go near the earth that gave them, and breatheher dust.

In Austria, where women carry the hod and climb the ladder; in theRhineland, where a cart goes along the valley roads drawn by a womanharnessed with a cow—even here I think the hardship hardly sogreat as where the burden is laid upon the bent back of her whose armsare too small or too weak to grasp it; for after long use in such carrying,the figure is no longer fit for habitual erection.  And the useis established with those women who are so loaded.  It is not thatall the labouring women of such a village or such a sea-port are burdenedin their turn with the burden of the back; it is rather that a classis formed, a class of the burdened and the bent; and to that class belongall ages; child-bearing women are in that sisterhood.  No strongerwomen can be seen than the upright women of Boulogne; to whom then,but the bent, are due the many cripples, the many dwarfs, the ill-bonedstragglers of that vigorous population, the many children growing awry,the many old people shuffling towards misshapen graves?

There is manifestly another burden, familiar and accustomed to thefigure of woman.  This does not bend her back, nor withdraw hereyes from the distance, nor rank her with the haggard waste of fields. It is borne in front, and she breasts the world with it; shoulder-high,and it is her ballast.  So loaded she stands like the Dresden Raphael,and there is no bearer of sword and buckler more erect.

It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race—or,if not indignity, provincialism—in the more extremely Orientalpeople, that a Japanese woman carries her child on her back and notupon her arm.  It is a charming infant, and the mother looks nomore than a gentle child; with the little creature bound to her backshe carries a soft lantern in a mild blue night.  She is not ofa classic race, and she shuffles on her subordinate way, an irresponsiblecreature, who must not proffer opinions except by way of quotation,and is scarcely of the inches that measure the landscape or of the aspectthat fronts the sky.

But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bearthe ignobler burden?  It is not long since an American woman wrotea book, WomenandEconomics, urging equal labourupon women, by the analogy of animals that know no distinction betweena strong sex and a weak, nor between a free sex and one confined tothe pen, or the lair, or the cover, by the care of little ones. The reply seems too obvious that the children of men are more helpless,and are helpless for a longer time, even in proportion to their longerlife, than the off-spring of other living creatures.  The childrenof men have to be carried.  This author complains that women areeconomically dependent upon men; and she finds that the world has “mistyideas upon the subject.”  If those misty ideas are to theeffect that a woman who keeps house for the service of herself, herhusband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return for maintenance,and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish that ideas “mistily”held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed were often so wellfounded.  Those who charge the husband with “employing”his wife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess,as well as “servant” or “housekeeper,” ministeringto herself and to the guests in whose company she has pleasure, andto whose respect she has a right.  Our economic author proceeds:“We are the only animal species in which the sex relation is alsoan economic factor. . . We have not been accustomed to face this factbeyond our loose generalization that it was ‘natural,’ andthat other animals did so too.”  Has anyone really been sorash as to aver “that other animals did so too”?  Theobvious truth is that other animals do otherwise, but that, whateverthey do, they make no rule or example for man.  Again: “Whateverthe economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do notget it.  The women who do the most work get the least money.” And yet but now they were charged with “getting it” toodependently, or rather, with having it “got” for them byman!  Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word “money,”which she here lets slip?

“He nearly persuades me to go on all fours,” sighs Voltairerising—rising erect reluctantly, one may almost say—fromthe reading of Rousseau.

THE UNREADY

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick.  Theyare, on the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, untiladvancing age teaches them agility.  This is not lack of sensitiveness,but mere length of process.  For instance, a child nearly newlyborn is cruelly startled by a sudden crash in the room—a childwho has never learnt to fear, and is merely overcome by the shock ofsound; nevertheless, that shock of sound does not reach the conscioushearing or the nerves but after some moments, nor before some momentsmore is the sense of the shock expressed.  The sound travels tothe remoteness and seclusion of the child’s consciousness, asthe roar of a gun travels to listeners half a mile away.

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eagerwith us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches—directas the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered bytrivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain. But you could count five between the prick of a surgeon’s instrumentupon 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 thearm that suffers it.  Even when pain has groped its way to hismind it hardly seems to bring local tidings thither.  The babydoes not turn his eyes in any degree towards his arm or towards theside that is so vexed with vaccination.  He looks in any otherdirection at haphazard, and cries at random.

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older childtrudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer.  It is the greatestfailure to take these little gobe-mouchesto a good conjurer. His successes leave them cold, for they had not yet understood whatit was the good man meant to surprise them withal.  The amateurit is who really astonishes them.  They cannot come up even withyour amateur beginner, performing at close quarters; whereas the masterof his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the laggingsenses of his honest audience.

You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from underhis ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in itsplace and off again ten times before the little breathless boy has begunto perceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched.

Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habitof awaiting, should surround themselves with pauses of patience. The simple little processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a commonsentence are too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot use twopronouns but they must confuse them.  I never found that a youngchild—one of something under nine years—was able to say,“I send them my love” at the first attempt.  It willbe “I send me my love,” “I send them their love,”“They send me my love”; not, of course, through any confusionof understanding, but because of the tardy setting of words in orderwith the thoughts.  The child visibly grapples with the difficulty,and is beaten.

It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to liketwice-told tales and foregone conclusions in their games.  Theyare not eager, for a year or two yet to come, for surprises.  Ifyou hide and they cannot see you hiding, their joy in finding you iscomparatively small; but let them know perfectly well what cupboardyou are in, and they will find you with shouts of discovery.  Thebetter the hiding-place is understood between you the more lively thedrama.  They make a convention of art for their play.  Theyounger the children the more dramatic; and when the house is filledwith outcries of laughter from the breathless breast of a child, itis that he is pretending to be surprised at finding his mother wherehe bade her pretend to hide.  This is the comedy that never tires. Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how he tries toput a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for, ifnot, he will find that children also have a manner of substitution,and that they will put half-hearted laughter in the place of their naturalimpetuous clamours.  It is certain that very young children liketo play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short game.

There is something so purely childlike in the delays of a child thatany exercise asking for the swift apprehension of later life, for theflashes of understanding and action, from the mind and members of childhood,is no pleasure to see.  The piano, for instance, as experts understandit, and even as the moderately-trained may play it, claims all the immediateaction, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to childhood.  Theremay possibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trainedwithout this specific violence directed upon the thing characteristicof their age—their unreadiness—but virtuosity at the pianocannot be one of them.  It is no delight, indeed, to see the shynessof children, or anything that is theirs, conquered and beaten; but theirpoor little slowness is so distinctively their own, and must needs bephysiologically so proper to their years, so much a natural conditionof the age of their brain, that of all childishnesses it is the onethat the world should have the patience to attend upon, the humanityto foster, and the intelligence to understand.

It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but avery little attention would prove how many apparent disconnexions thereare between the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not the brainthat is quick.  If, on a voyage in space, electricity takes thusmuch time, and light thus much, and sound thus much, there is one littlejogging traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten theirjourney, and this is the perception of a child.  Surely our ownmemories might serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitablymissed the principal point in any procession or pageant intended byour elders to furnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not our mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldinessof our senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the important moments of the passing of an Emperorat 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 gottelegraphic 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 eclipseset in and made reasonable progress; we kept up with everything.

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselvesto the world, practised and alert.  But it would be more to thepurpose that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealingswith them.  Those who run and keep together have to run at thepace of the tardiest.  But we are apt to command instant obedience,stripped of the little pauses that a child, while very young, cannotact without.  It is not a child of ten or twelve that needs themso; it is the young creature who has but lately ceased to be a baby,slow to be startled.

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of sensesand of an unprepared consciousness—this capacity for receivinga great shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after twoor three appreciable moments—if we would know anything of themoments of a baby

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too longfor children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is tooshort for them.  When it is exceedingly short they cannot, withoutan unnatural effort, have any perception of it.  When childrendo not see the jokes of the elderly, and disappoint expectation in otherways, only less intimate, the reason is almost always there.  Thechild cannot turn in mid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus tookplace moments ago.

THE CHILD OF TUMULT

A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute ahand that the petals of the flower never afterwards lose the creases,is a type of the child.  Nothing but the unfolding, which is asyet in the non-existing future, can explain the manner of the closefolding of character.  In both flower and child it looks much asthough the process had been the reverse of what it was—as thougha finished and open thing had been folded up into the bud—so plainlyand certainly is the future implied, and the intention of compressingand folding-close made manifest.

With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of impulsescalled “naughtiness” is perfectly perceptible—it wouldseem heartless to say how soon.  The naughty child (who is oftenan angel of tenderness and charm, affectionate beyond the capacity ofhis fellows, and a very ascetic of penitence when the time comes) opensearly his brief campaigns and raises the standard of revolt as soonas he is capable of the desperate joys of disobedience.

But even the naughty child is an individual, and must not be treatedin the mass.  He is numerous indeed, but not general, and to describehim you must take the unit, with all his incidents and his organic qualitiesas they are.  Take then, for instance, one naughty child in thereality of his life.  He is but six years old, slender and masculine,and not wronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate dress.  Hisface is delicate and too often haggard with tears of penitence thatJustice herself would be glad to spare him.  Some beauty he has,and his mouth especially is so lovely as to seem not only angelic butitself an angel.  He has absolutely no self-control and his passionsfind him without defence.  They come upon him in the midst of hisusual brilliant gaiety and cut short the frolic comedy of his fine spirits.

Then for a wild hour he is the enemy of the laws.  If you imprisonhim, you may hear his resounding voice as he takes a running kick atthe door, shouting his justification in unconquerable rage.  “I’mgood now!” is made as emphatic as a shot by the blow of his heelupon the panel.  But if the moment of forgiveness is deferred,in the hope of a more promising repentance, it is only too likely thathe will betake himself to a hostile silence and use all the revengeyet known to his imagination.  “Darling mother, open thedoor!” cries his touching voice at last; but if the answer shouldbe “I must leave you for a short time, for punishment,”the storm suddenly thunders again.  “There (crash!) I havebroken a plate, and I’m glad it is broken into such little piecesthat you can’t mend it.  I’m going to break the ’lectriclight.”  When things are at this pass there is one way, andonly one, to bring the child to an overwhelming change of mind; butit is a way that would be cruel, used more than twice or thrice in hiswhole career of tempest and defiance.  This is to let him see thathis mother is troubled.  “Oh, don’t cry!  Oh,don’t be sad!” he roars, unable still to deal with his ownpassionate anger, which is still dealing with him.  With his kicksof rage he suddenly mingles a dance of apprehension lest his mothershould have tears in her eyes.  Even while he is still explicitlyimpenitent and defiant he tries to pull her round to the light thathe may see her face.  It is but a moment before the other passionof remorse comes to make havoc of the helpless child, and the firstpassion of anger is quelled outright.

Only to a trivial eye is there nothing tragic in the sight of thesegreat passions within the small frame, the small will, and, in a word,the small nature.  When a large and sombre fate befalls a littlenature, and the stage is too narrow for the action of a tragedy, thedisproportion has sometimes made a mute and unexpressed history of actuallife or sometimes a famous book; it is the manifest core of George Eliot’sstory of AdamBede, where the suffering of Hetty is, asit were, the eye of the storm.  All is expressive around her, butshe is hardly articulate; the book is full of words—preachings,speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, but a space of silence remains abouther in the midst of the story.  And the disproportion of passion—theinner disproportion—is at least as tragic as that disproportionof fate and action; it is less intelligible, and leads into the intricaciesof nature which are more difficult than the turn of events.

It seems, then, that this passionate play is acted within the narrowlimits of a child’s nature far oftener than in those of an adultand finally formed nature.  And this, evidently, because thereis unequal force at work within a child, unequal growth and a jostlingof powers and energies that are hurrying to their development and pressingfor exercise and life.  It is this helpless inequality—thisuntimeliness—that makes the guileless comedy mingling with thetragedies of a poor child’s day.  He knows thus much—thatlife is troubled around him and that the fates are strong.  Heimplicitly confesses “the strong hours” of antique song. This same boy—the tempestuous child of passion and revolt—wentout with quiet cheerfulness for a walk lately, saying as his cap wasput on, “Now, mother, you are going to have a little peace.” This way of accepting his own conditions is shared by a sister, a verylittle older, who, being of an equal and gentle temper, indisposed toviolence of every kind and tender to all without disquiet, observesthe boy’s brief frenzies as a citizen observes the climate. She knows the signs quite well and can at any time give the explanationof some particular outburst, but without any attempt to go in searchof further or more original causes.  Still less is she moved bythe virtuous indignation that is the least charming of the ways of somelittle girls.  Ellenefaitqueconstater. Her equanimity has never been overset by the wildest of his moments,and she has witnessed them all.  It is needless to say that sheis not frightened by his drama, for Nature takes care that her youngcreatures shall not be injured by sympathies.  Nature enclosesthem in the innocent indifference that preserves their brains from themore harassing kinds of distress.

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 ratherforced, perhaps—with no very good result.  Often must a motherwish that she might for a few years govern her child (as far as he isgovernable) by the lowest motives—trivial punishments and paltryrewards—rather 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 herlieutenants.  The child himself is quite willing to close withher plans, in so far as he is able, and is reasonably interested inthe results of her experiments.  He wishes her attempts in hisregard to have a fair chance.  “Let’s hope I’llbe good all to-morrow,” he says with the peculiar cheerfulnessof his ordinary voice.  “I do hope so, old man.” “Then I’ll get my penny.  Mother, I was only naughtyonce yesterday; if I have only one naughtiness to-morrow, will you giveme a halfpenny?”  “No reward except for real goodnessall day long.”  “All right.”

It is only too probable that this system (adopted only after thefailure of other ways of reform) will be greatly disapproved as oneof bribery.  It may, however, be curiously inquired whether allkinds of reward might not equally be burlesqued by that word, and whetherany government, spiritual or civil, has ever even professed to denyrewards.  Moreover, those who would not give a child a penny forbeing good will not hesitate to fine him a penny for being naughty,and rewards and punishments must stand or fall together.  The morelogical 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 unusualsequel.  To this the rewarding mother may reply that it is notreasonable to take “goodness” in a little child of strongpassions as the normal condition.  The natural thing for him isto give full sway to impulses that are so violent as to overbear hispowers.

But, after all, the controversy returns to the point of practice. What is the thought, or threat, or promise that will stimulate the weakwill of the child, in the moment of rage and anger, to make a sufficientresistance?  If the will were naturally as well developed as thepassions, the stand would be soon made and soon successful; but as itis 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 mingledwith the thought of distant pleasure.  To meet the suffering ofrage and frenzy by the suffering of fear is assuredly to make of thelittle unquiet mind a battle-place of feelings too hurtfully tragic. The penny is mild and strong at once, with its still distant but certainjoys of purchase; the promise and hope break the mood of misery, andthe 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’svoice with a menacing, “What’s that noise?” The child was persistently crying and roaring on an upper floor, incontumacy against his French nurse, when the baritone and threateningquestion was sent pealing up the stairs.  The child was heard topause and listen and then to say to his nurse, “Ce n’estpas Monsieur; c’est Madame,” and then, without further lossof time, to resume the interrupted clamours.

Obviously, with a little creature of six years, there are two thingsmainly to be done—to keep the delicate brain from the evil ofthe present excitement, especially the excitement of painful feeling,and to break the habit of passion.  Now that we know how certainlythe special cells of the brain which are locally affected by pain andanger become hypertrophied by so much use, and all too ready for usein the future at the slightest stimulus, we can no longer slight theimportance of habit.  Any means, then, that can succeed in separatinga little child from the habit of anger does fruitful work for him inthe helpless time of his childhood.  The work is not easy, buta little thought should make it easy for the elders to avoid the provocationwhich they—who should ward off provocations—are apt to bringabout by sheer carelessness.  It is only in childhood that ourrace knows such physical abandonment to sorrow and tears, as a child’sdespair; and the theatre with us must needs copy childhood if it wouldcatch the note and action of a creature without hope.

THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT

There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the flightof 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 boundsand rebounds, and when it is most active then it is longest.  Itis not long with languor.  It has room for remoteness, and leisurefor oblivion.  It takes great excursions against time, and travelsso as to enlarge its hours.  This certain year is any one of theearly years of fully conscious life, and therefore it is of all thedates.  The child of Tumult has been living amply and changefullythrough such a year—his eighth.  It is difficult to believethat his is a year of the self-same date as that of the adult, the menwho 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 andwomen never travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a distantlight.  There is recognition and familiarity between their seasons. But the Child of Tumult has infinite prospects in his year.  Forgetfulnessand surprise set his east and his west at immeasurable distance. His Lethe runs in the cheerful sun.  You look on your own littleadult year, and in imagination enlarge it, because you know it to bethe contemporary of his.  Even she who is quite old, if she havea vital fancy, may face a strange and great extent of a few years ofher life still to come—his years, the years she is to live athis side.

Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy’slife, 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 blushesof pleasure, “a little duck what can walk”; but with a beautifullyclear 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 hetells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference tohis own wrongs.  On another occasion the unexpected little phrasewas varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousandof the side he favoured had fallen.  The child then came to hismother’s room with the question: “Have you heard the saddest?” Moreover the “saddest” caused him several fits of perfectlysilent tears, which seized him during the day, on his walks or at othermoments of recollection.  From such great causes arise such littlethings!  Some of his grief was for the nation he admired, and somewas for the triumph of his brother, whose sympathies were on the otherside, 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 theirpainfulness.  There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulationof 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’spassion upon his will.  That little will is taken captive entirely,and before the child was seven he knew that it was so.  Such aconsciousness 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.  Thetime of the subsiding of the tumult is by no means the least pitiableof the phases of human life.  Happily the recovery from each troubleis ready and sure; so that the child who had been abandoned to naughtinesswith all his will in an entire consent to the gloomy possession of hisanger, and who had later undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivitysuddenly 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 paleface is effaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought, and fiveshort minutes can restore the ruin, as though a broken little Germantown should in the twinkling of an eye be restored as no architect couldrestore it—should be made fresh, strong, and tight again, lookinglike a full box of toys, as a town was wont to look in the new daysof old.

When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows thegrowth of this tardy reason that—quickened—is hereafterto do so much for his peace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration. Denied a second handful of strawberries, and seeing quite clearly thatthe denial was enforced reluctantly, he makes haste to reply, “Itdoesn’t matter, darling.”  At any sudden noise in thehouse 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 soas to forget this gentle little duty, which was never required of him,but is of his own devising.

According to the opinion of his dear and admired American friend,he says all these things, good and evil, with an English accent; andat the American play his English accent was irrepressible.  “It’stoo comic; no, it’s too comic,” he called in his enjoyment;being the only perfectly fearless child in the world, he will not consentto the conventional shyness in public, whether he be the member of anaudience or of a congregation, but makes himself perceptible. And even when he has a desperate thing to say, in the moment of absoluterevolt—such a thing as “I can’tlike you, mother,”which anon he will recant with convulsions of distress—he hasto “speak the thing he will,” and when he recants it isnot for fear.

If such a child could be ruled (or approximately ruled, for inquisitorialgovernment could hardly be so much as attempted) by some small meansadapted to his size and to his physical aspect, it would be well forhis health, but that seems at times impossible.  By no effort canhis elders altogether succeed in keeping tragedy out of the life thatis so unready for it.  Against great emotions no one can defendhim by any forethought.  He is their subject; and to see him thusdevoted and thus wrung, thus wrecked by tempests inwardly, so that youfeel grief has him actually by the heart, recalls the reluctance—thequestion—wherewith you perceive the interior grief of poetry orof 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 possiblefor a child of seven to come through his childhood with griefs thatshould not so closely involve him, but should deal with the easier sentiments.

Despite all his simplicity, the child has (by way of inheritance,for he has never heard them) the self-excusing fictions of our race. Accused of certain acts of violence, and unable to rebut the chargewith any effect, he flies to the old convention: “I didn’tknow what I was doing,” he avers, using a great deal of gesticulationto express the temporary distraction of his mind.  “Darling,after nurse slapped me as hard as she could, I didn’t know whatI was doing, so I suppose I pushed her with my foot.”  Hismother knows as well as does Tolstoi that men and children know whatthey are doing, and are the more intently aware as the stress of feelingmakes the moments more tense; and she will not admit a plea which herchild might have learned from the undramatic authors he has never read.

Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from takingfright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult hasonly to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to givethe shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and changehis passion at its height.

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