Chapter III: Part 3

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage wherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it here again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our literature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prose stands for appeal: "I lingered . . . under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviously unskilled reflection, and of her aspect no record worth having. Wild fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the neglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed by their contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was she as might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed by Coriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world from before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemned his Romans: "_I_ banish you."

CHARMIAN

"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian," wrote Keats, conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the pageant of ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was not Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay, in which she mimicked, the Queen.

In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our appreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waiting gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not boast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty, who shall discern her.

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the "lurid," the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us take the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly port, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "O Eastern star!"

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these--except the dog when he bays the moon--look skyward not at all. The events of the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach and withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather look into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds.

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise, or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral, rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls his fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers, and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration anything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in the secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled, disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art. So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of art are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain, natural twilight before night, or natural twilight--Corot's--before day, than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, who praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a mystery; and must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Light is all mystery when you face the sun, and every particle of the innumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal shadow.

Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask for even natural veils. In California we may, not because the light is too luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender in California, tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greece is both tender and clear.

When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympathetic listener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electric light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is the one success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with natural things--villages, ancient streets of cities, where it makes the most beautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house to opposite house in Genoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the judicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine hamlet, find the electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over the little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop, and solitary and clear over the church portal.

Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, you denounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, calling up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah, yes--the electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, so disenchanting." It is, on the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be "harnessed," as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us electric light. For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovely lamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitation--the powerful fall of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" cried the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it?" He recognised the simplicity of that power. It is a second-rate passion--that for the waterfall, and often exacting in regard to visitors from town. "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, "and was not sorry to find it dry." It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer of scenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name to-day) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it, because it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of Milan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and so does now and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found his exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me a clean moonrise, and heavenly heavens.

There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the lady whom you serve." She has outlived her in every city in Europe; but only for the time of setting straight her crown--the last servility. She could not live but by comparison with the Queen.

THE CENTURY OF MODERATION

After a long literary revolt--one of the recurrences of imperishable Romance--against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, and it has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of the measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed it is well enough that we should compare--not necessarily check--some of our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfect propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all! But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certain genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for extreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth- century men stuck straws in their periwigs.

That time--surpassing and correcting the century then just past in "taste"--was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, in the chapter of the passions--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where to rage." And in the later years of the same literary century Johnson himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a word as "madded"--"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for the noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you, Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

And dubious title shakes the madded land.

There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does not thus more or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to go to the bad poets; we need go no lower than the good.

And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain,

says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader). Also

There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires.

In the only passage of the _Dunciad_ meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!

A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left anonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, never fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a vision of that deceased poet:

Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes
Beheld the poet's awful form arise.

Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon some graver themes,

Envy to black Cocytus shall retire
And howl with furies in tormenting fire.

"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a furious joy and pride of soul."

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls,
Whose livid waves involve despairing souls;
The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

And a war-horse!

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

And a demon!

Provoking demons all restraint remove.

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_:

When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood
Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood;
When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore,
And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore.

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they "contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous:

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings,
Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds,
And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot,
Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Again:

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,
Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common- sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious, common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady":

Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in closer--in slighter yet more significant--comparison with the eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a great melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why? Because it was "artificial," and the eighteenth century must have "nature"--nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity. As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry Barnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.