Chapter IV (3)

What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing for which we feel “The Ring and the Book” preponderantly done—it is at least what comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strongest and finest, from Browning’s genius—the exhibition of the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party; an exhibition forming quite the main substance of our author’s message. He has dealt, in his immense variety and vivacity, with other relations, but on this he has thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing of which his own rich experience most convincingly spoke to him. He has testified to it as charged to the brim with the burden of the senses, and has testified to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sublimated, for traceable application or fair record; he has figured it as never too much either of the flesh or of the spirit for him, so long as the possibility of both of these is in each, but always and ever as the thing absolutely most worth while. It is in the highest and rarest degree clarified and disengaged for Caponsacchi and Pompilia; but what their history most concludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever happened, worth while. Worth while most then for them or for us is the question? Well, let us say worth while assuredly for us, in this noble exercise of our imagination. Which accordingly shows us what we, for all our prose basis, would have found, to repeat my term once more, prepared for us. There isn’t a detail of their panting flight to Rome over the autumn Apennines—the long hours when they melt together only _not_ to meet—that doesn’t positively plead for our perfect prose transcript. And if it be said that the mere massacre at the final end is a lapse to passivity from the high plane, for our pair of protagonists, of constructive, of heroic vision, this is not a blur from the time everything that happens happens most effectively to Caponsacchi’s life. Pompilia’s is taken, but she is none the less given; and it is in his consciousness and experience that she most intensely flowers—with all her jubilation for doing so. So that _he_ contains the whole—unless indeed after all the Pope does, the Pope whom I was leaving out as too transcendent for _our_ version. Unless, unless, further and further, I see what I have at this late moment no right to; see, as the very end and splendid climax of all, Caponsacchi sent for to the Vatican and admitted alone to the Papal presence. _There_ is a scene if we will; and in the mere mutual confrontation, brief, silent, searching, recognising, consecrating, almost as august on the one part as on the other. It rounds us off; but you will think I stray too far. I have wanted, alas, to say such still other fond fine things—it being of our poet’s great nature to prompt them at every step—that I almost feel I have missed half my points; which will doubtless therefore show you these remarks in their nakedness. Take them and my particular contention as a pretext and a minor affair if you will only feel them at the same time as at the worst a restless refinement of homage. It has been easy in many another case to run to earth the stray prime fancy, the original anecdote or artless tale, from which a great imaginative work, starting off after meeting it, has sprung and rebounded again and soared; and perhaps it is right and happy and final that one should have faltered in attempting by a converse curiosity to clip off or tie back the wings that once have spread. You will agree with me none the less, I feel, that Browning’s great generous wings are over us still and even now, more than ever now; and also that they shake down on us his blessing.

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Footnote 8:

Address delivered before the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature in Commemoration of the Centenary of Robert Browning, May 7, 1912.

AN AMERICAN ART-SCHOLAR: CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
1908

I gladly embrace the occasion to devote a few words to the honoured memory of my distinguished friend the late Charles Eliot Norton, who, dying at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of October last, after having reached his eightieth year, had long occupied—and with an originality of spirit and a beneficence of effect all his own—the chair of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard University, as well as, in the view of the American world surrounding that seat of influence, the position of one of the most accomplished of scholars and most efficient of citizens. This commemorative page may not disclaim the personal tone, for I can speak of Charles Norton but in the light of an affection which began long years ago, even though my part in our relation had to be, for some time, markedly that of a junior; of which tie I was to remain ever after, despite long stretches of material separation, a conscious and grateful beneficiary. I can speak of him therefore as I happened myself to see and know him—with interest and sympathy acting, for considerable periods together, across distances and superficial differences, yet with the sense of his extremely individual character and career suffering no abatement, and indeed with my impression of the fine consistency and exemplary value of these things clear as never before.

I find this impression go back for its origin very far—to one autumn day when, an extremely immature aspirant to the rare laurel of the critic, I went out from Boston to Cambridge to offer him a contribution to the old, if I should not rather say the then middle-aged, “North American Review,” of which he had recently undertaken the editorship. I already knew him a little, enough to have met casual kindness at his hands; but my vision of his active presence and function, in the community that had happily produced and that was long to enjoy him, found itself, I think, completely constituted at that hour, with scarce an essential touch to be afterwards added. He largely developed and expanded as time went on; certain more or less local reserves and conservatisms fell away from him; but his temper and attitude, all his own from the first, were to give a singular unity to his life. This intensity of perception on his young visitor’s part may perhaps have sprung a little from the fact that he accepted on the spot, as the visitor still romantically remembers, a certain very first awkward essay in criticism, and was to publish it in his forthcoming number; but I little doubt whether even had he refused it the grace of the whole occasion would have lost anything to my excited view, and feel sure that the interest in particular would have gained had he charmingly put before me (as he would have been sure to do) the ground of his discrimination. For his eminent character as a “representative of culture” announced itself exactly in proportion as one’s general sense of the medium in which it was to be exerted was strong; and I seem verily to recall that even in the comparative tenderness of that season I had grasped the idea of the precious, the quite far-reaching part such an exemplar might play. Charles Norton’s distinction and value—this was still some years before his professorate had taken form—showed early and above all the note and the advantage that they were to be virtues of American application, and were to draw their life from the signal American opportunity; to that degree that the detailed record of his influence would be really one of the most interesting of American social documents, and that his good work is best lighted by a due acquaintance with the conditions of the life about him, indispensable for a founded recognition of it. It is not too much to say that the representative of culture—always in the high and special sense in which he practised that faith—had before him in the United States of those days a great and arduous mission, requiring plentiful courage as well as plentiful knowledge, endless good humour as well as assured taste.

What comes back to me then from the early day I have glanced at is exactly that prompt sense of the clustered evidence of my friend’s perfect adaptation to the civilising mission, and not least to the needfully dauntless and unperturbed side of it. His so pleasant old hereditary home, with its ample acres and numerous spoils—at a time when acres merely marginal and, so to speak, atmospheric, as well as spoils at all felicitously gathered, were rare in the United States—seemed to minister to the general assurance, constituting as they did such a picture of life as one vaguely supposed recognisable, right and left, in an old society, or, otherwise expressed, in that “Europe” which was always, roundabout one, the fond alternative of the cultivated imagination, but of which the possible American copy ever seemed far to seek. To put it in a nutshell, the pilgrimage to the Shady Hill of those years had, among the “spoils,” among pictures and books, drawings and medals, memories and relics and anecdotes, things of a remote but charming reference, very much the effect of a sudden rise into a finer and clearer air and of a stopgap against one’s own coveted renewal of the more direct experience. If I allude to a particular, to a personal yearning appreciation of those matters, it is with the justified conviction—this justification having been all along abundantly perceptible—that appreciation of the general sort only waited to be called for, though to be called for with due authority. It was the sign of our host, on the attaching spot, and almost the principal one, that he spoke, all round and with the highest emphasis, as under the warrant of authority, and that at a time when, as to the main matter of his claim and his discourse, scarce anyone pretended to it, he carried himself valiantly under that banner. The main matter of his discourse offered itself just simply as the matter of _civilisation_—the particular civilisation that a young roaring and money-getting democracy, inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with “business success,” most needed to have brought home to it. The New England air in especial was no natural conductor of any appeal to an esthetic aim, but the interest of Professor Norton’s general work, to say nothing of the interest of his character for a closer view, is exactly that the whole fruitful enterprise was to prove intimately a New England adventure; illustrating thus at the same time and once more the innate capacity of New England for leavening the great American mass on the finer issues.

To have grown up as the accomplished man at large was in itself at that time to have felt, and even in some degree to have suffered, this hand of differentiation; the only accomplished men of the exhibited New England Society had been the ministers, the heads of the congregations—whom, however, one docks of little of their credit in saying that their accomplishments and their earnestness had been almost wholly in the moral order. The advantage of that connection was indeed what Norton was fundamentally to have enjoyed in his descent, both on his father’s and his mother’s side (pre-eminently on the latter, the historic stock of the Eliots) from a long line of those stalwart pastoral worthies who had notably formed the aristocracy of Massachusetts. It was largely, no doubt, to this heritage of character and conscience that he owed the strong and special strain of confidence with which he addressed himself to the business of perfect candour toward his fellow-citizens—his pupils in particular; they, to whom this candour was to become in the long run the rarest and raciest and most endearing of “treats,” being but his fellow-citizens in the making. This view of an urgent duty would have been a comparatively slight thing, moreover, without the special preoccupations, without the love of the high humanities and curiosities and urbanities in themselves, without the conception of science and the ingrained studious cast of mind, which had been also an affair of heredity with him and had opened his eyes betimes to educative values and standards other than most of those he saw flourish near at hand. He would defer to dilettantism as little as to vulgarity, and if he ultimately embraced the fine ideal of taking up the work that lay close to him at home, and of irrigating the immediate arid tracts and desert spaces, it was not from ignorance of the temptation to wander and linger where the streams already flowed and the soil had already borne an abiding fruit.

He had come to Italy and to England early in life; he had repeated his visits to these countries with infinite relish and as often as possible—though never, as a good New Englander, without certain firm and, where they had to be, invidious discriminations; he was attached to them by a hundred intellectual and social ties; but he had been from the first incapable of doubting that the best activity and the liveliest interest lay where it always, given certain conditions, lies in America—in a measure of response to intellectual and esthethic “missionary” labour more traceable and appreciable, more distinguishably attested and registered, more directly and artlessly grateful, in a word, than in the thicker elemental mixture of Europe. On the whole side of taste and association his choice was thus betimes for conscious exile and for a considerably, though doubtless not altogether irremediably, deprived state; but it was at the same time for a freedom of exhortation and a play of ironic comment less restricted, after all, in the clear American air, than on ground more pretentiously enclosed—less restricted, that is, from the moment personal conviction might be absolute and indifference to every form of provincial bewilderment equally patient and complete. The incontestable _crânerie_ of his attitude—a thing that one felt to be a high form of sincerity—always at last won success; the respect and affection that more and more surrounded him and that finally made his situation sole of its kind and pre-eminently happy, attest together the interesting truth that unqualified confidence in one’s errand, the serenest acceptance of a responsibility and the exercise of a critical authority never too apt to return critically upon itself, only require for beneficent action that they be attended at once with a fund of illustration and a fund of good humour.

Professor Norton’s pre-eminent work in the interpretation of Dante—by which I mean his translation, text and notes, of the “Divine Comedy” and the “New Life,” an achievement of infinite piety, patience and resource; his admirable volume on Church-Building in the Middle Ages (to say nothing of his charming earlier one, “Study and Travel in Italy,” largely devoted to the cathedral of Orvieto); his long and intimate friendship with Ruskin, commemorated by his publication, as joint-executor to Ruskin’s will, of the best fruits of the latter’s sustained correspondence with him; his numerous English friendships, in especial—to say nothing of his native—all with persons of a highly representative character: these things give in part the measure of his finest curiosities and of his appetite, in all directions, for the best sources and examples and the best company. But it is probable that if his Harvard lectures are in form for publication, and if his general correspondence, and above all his own easily handsomest show in it, comes to be published, as most emphatically it should be, they will testify not in the least to any unredeemed contraction of life, but to the largest and happiest and most rewarded energy. An exhilarated invocation of close responsibility, an absolute ease of mind about one’s point of view, a thorough and never-failing intellectual wholeness, are so far from weakening the appeal to young allegiances that, once they succeed at all, they succeed the better for going all their length. So it was that, with admirable urbanity of form and uncompromising straightness of attack, the Professor of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard for a quarter of a century let himself go; thinking no trouble wasted and no flutter and no scandal other than auspicious if only he might, to the receptive and aspiring undergraduate mind, brand the ugly and the vulgar and the inferior wherever he found them, tracking them through plausible disguises and into trumpery strongholds; if only he might convert young products of the unmitigated American order into material for men of the world in the finer sense of that term; if only in short he might render more supple their view, liable to obfuscation from sights and sounds about them, of the true meaning of a liberal education and of the civilised character and spirit in the civilised State.

What it came to thus was that he availed himself to the utmost of his free hand for sowing and planting ideals—ideals that, though they might after all be vague and general things, lacking sometimes a little the clearer connections with practice, were yet a new and inspiring note to most of his hearers, who could be trusted, just so far as they were intelligent and loyal, not to be heavily embarrassed by them, not to want for fields of application. It was given him, quite unprecedentedly, to be popular, to be altogether loved and cherished, even while “rubbing it into” whomever it might concern that such unfortunates were mainly given over to mediocrity and vulgarity, and that half the crude and ugly objects and aspects, half the low standards and loose ends surrounding them and which they might take for granted with a facility and a complacency alike deplorable, represented a platitude of imagination that dishonoured the citizen on whom a University worthy of the name should have left its stamp. Happy, it would thus in fact seem, beyond any other occasion for educative influence, the immense and delightful opportunity he enjoyed, the clear field and long reach attached to preaching an esthetic crusade, to pleading for the higher amenities in general, in a new and superficially tutored, yet also but superficially prejudiced, country, where a consequently felt and noted rise of the tide of manners may be held to have come home to him, or certainly to have visited his dreams. His effect on the community at large, with allowances of time, was ever indubitable—even though such workers have everywhere to take much on trust and to remember that bushels of doctrine, and even tons of example, make at the most ounces and grains of responsive life. It can only be the very general and hopeful view that sustains and rewards—with here and there, at wide intervals, the prized individual instance of the sown seed actively emerging and flowering.

If not all ingenious disciples could give independent proof, however, all could rally and feel the spirit; all could crowd to a course of instruction which, largely elective and optional, yet united more listeners than many others put together, and in which the subject itself, the illustration of European artistic endeavour at large, or in other words the record of man’s most comprehensive sacrifice to organised beauty, tended so to take up on familiar ground the question of manners, character, conscience, tone, to bristle with questions addressed to the actual and possible American scene. That, I hasten to add, was of course but one side of the matter; there were wells of special science for those who chose to draw from them, and an inner circle of pupils whose whole fruitful relation to their philosopher and friend—the happy and easy privilege of Shady Hill in general, where other charming personal influences helped, not counting as least in this—can scarce have failed to prepare much practical evidence for observation still to come. The ivory tower of study would ever, by his natural bent, I think, have most solicited Charles Norton; but he liked, as I say, he accepted without a reserve, the function of presiding over young destinies; he believed in the personal and the social communication of light, and had a gift for the generous and personal relation that perhaps found its best issue, as I have already hinted, in his admirable letters. These were not of this hustled and hustling age, but of a cooler and steadier sphere and rhythm, and of a charming mannerly substantial type to which he will have been, I think, among correspondents truly animated by the social spirit and a due cosmopolite ideal, one of the last systematically to sacrifice. With the lapse of years I ceased to be, I admit, a near spectator of his situation; but my sense of his activity—with more intimate renewals, besides, occasionally taking place—was to be, all along, so constantly fed by echo and anecdote and all manner of indirect glimpses, that I find myself speak quite with the confidence and with all the attachment of a continuous “assistant.”

With which, if I reflect on this, I see how interesting a _case_ above all my distinguished friend was ever to remain to me—a case, I mean, of such a mixture of the elements as would have seemed in advance, critically speaking, quite anomalous or at least highly incalculable. His interest was predominantly in Art, as the most beneficial of human products; his ostensible plea was for the esthetic law, under the wide wing of which we really move, it may seem to many of us, in an air of strange and treacherous appearances, of much bewilderment and not a little mystification; of terribly fine and complicated issues in short, such as call for the highest interpretative wisdom. But if nothing was of a more delightful example than Professor Norton’s large and nourished serenity in all these connections, a serenity seasoned and tempered, as it were, by infinite interest in his “subject,” by a steadying faith in exact and extensive knowledge, so to a fond and incorrigible student of character the case, as I have called it, and the long and genial career, may seem to shine in the light of quite other importances, quite other references, than the presumed and the nominal. Nothing in fact _can_ be more interesting to a haunter of other intellectual climes and a worshipper at the esthetic shrine _quand même_ than to note once more how race and implanted quality and association always in the end come by their own; how for example a son of the Puritans the most intellectually transmuted, the most liberally emancipated and initiated possible, could still plead most for substance when proposing to plead for style, could still try to lose himself in the labyrinth of delight while keeping tight hold of the clue of duty, tangled even a little in his feet; could still address himself all consistently to the moral conscience while speaking as by his office for our imagination and our free curiosity. All of which vision of him, however, is far from pointing to a wasted effort. The great thing, whatever turn we take, is to find before us perspectives and to have a weight to throw; in accordance with which wisdom the world he lived in received for long no firmer nor more gallant and generous impress than that of Charles Eliot Norton.

LONDON NOTES
_January_ 1897

I am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to curiosity. There is indeed no reason why we should forbear to say in advance what we are certain, every time, to say after (after the heat has cooled I mean:) namely, that nothing is easier to concede than that Ibsen—contentious name!—would be much less remarked if he were one of a dozen. It is impossible, in London at least, to shut one’s eyes to the fact that if to so many ingenious minds he is a kind of pictorial monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least partly because his form has a monstrous rarity. It is one of the odd things of our actual esthetics that the more theatres multiply the less any one reads a play—the less any one cares, in a word, for the text of the adventure. That no one ever _does_ read a play has long been a commonplace of the wisdom of booksellers. Ibsen, however, is a text, and Ibsen is read, and Ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the prejudice; with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of being doubly an exotic. His violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form; it is not (as would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes the substance. Mr. William Archer has just published his version of “John Gabriel Borkman,” of which, moreover, French and German versions reach us at the same moment. There are therefore all the elements of a fresh breeze in the wind—one has already a sense as of a cracking of whips and a girding of loins. You may by this time be terribly tired of it all in America; but, as I mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had very recent evidence that languor here, in this connection, is by no means as yet the dominant note. It is not the dispute itself, however, that most interests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what it still may be, the mere superficial tribute of saying that it constitutes one of the very few cases of contagious discussion of a matter not political, a question not of mere practice, of which I remember to have felt, in a heavy air, the engaging titillation. In London generally, I think, the wandering breath of criticism is the stray guest at the big party—the shy young man whom nobody knows. In this remarkable instance the shy young man has ventured to pause and hover, has lighted on a topic, introduced himself and, after a gasp of consternation in the company, seen a little circle gather round him. I can only speak as one of the little circle, testifying to my individual glee.

The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns out “John Gabriel” is frankly for me so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source of the same kind of emotion. For Ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the miracle to my perception is renewed. I call it a miracle because it is a result of so dry a view of life, so indifferent a vision of the comedy of things. His idea of the thing represented is never the comic idea, though this is evidently what it often only can be for many of his English readers and spectators. Comedy moreover is a product mainly of observation, and I scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven’t the _signs_. The answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven’t the English, but have the Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian must be in truth this very lack of signs.

They have no tone but their moral tone. They are highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming when represented at once more abstract and more living. If the spirit is a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass shade, then such pictures as Little Eyolf and John Gabriel are each a _chassez-croisez_ of lamps burning, as in tasteless parlours, with the flame practically exposed. There are no shades in the house, or the Norwegian ground-glass is singularly clear. There is a positive odour of spiritual paraffin. The author nevertheless arrives at the dramatist’s great goal—he arrives for all his meagreness at intensity. The meagreness, which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into the hands of his rare mastery of form. The contrast between this form—so difficult to have reached, so “evolved,” so civilised—and the bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy is the source of half the hard frugal charm that he puts forth. In the cold fixed light of it the notes we speak of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the picture. There is no small-talk, there are scarcely any manners. On the other hand there is so little vulgarity that this of itself has almost the effect of a deeper, a more lonely provincialism. The background at any rate is the sunset over the ice. Well in the very front of the scene lunges with extraordinary length of arm the Ego against the Ego, and rocks in a rigour of passion the soul against the soul—a spectacle, a movement, as definite as the relief of silhouettes in black paper or of a train of Eskimo dogs on the snow. Down from that desolation the sturdy old symbolist comes this time with a supreme example of his method. It is a high wonder and pleasure to welcome such splendid fruit from sap that might by now have shown something of the chill of age. Never has he juggled more gallantly with difficulty and danger than in this really prodigious “John Gabriel,” in which a great span of tragedy is taken between three or four persons—a trio of the grim and grizzled—in the two or three hours of a winter’s evening; in which the whole thing throbs with an actability that fairly shakes us as we read; and in which, as the very flower of his artistic triumph, he has given us for the most beautiful and touching of his heroines a sad old maid of sixty. Such “parts,” even from the vulgarest point of view, are Borkman and Ella Rentheim.

LONDON NOTES
_June_ 1897

I am afraid there are at this moment only two notes for a communication from London to strike. One is that of the plunge into the deep and turbid waters of the Jubilee; the other is that of the inevitable retreat from them—the backward scramble up the bank and scurry over its crest and out of sight. London is in a sorry state; nevertheless I judge that the number of persons about to arrive undaunted will not fall substantially short of the number of horror-stricken fugitives. Not to depart is practically to arrive; for there is little difference in the two kinds of violence, the shock you await or the shock that awaits you. Let me hasten, however, to declare that—to speak for the present only of the former of these—the prospect is full of suggestion, the affair promises a rare sort of interest. It began a fortnight since to be clear—and the certitude grows each day—that we are to be treated to a revelation really precious, the domestic or familiar vision, as it were, the back-stairs or underside view, of a situation that will rank as celebrated. Balzac’s image of _l’envers de l’histoire contemporaine_ is in fact already under our nose, already offered us in a big bouncing unmistakable case. We brush with an irreverent hand the back of the tapestry—we crawl on unabashed knees under the tent of the circus. The commemoration of the completed sixtieth year of her Majesty’s reign will figure to the end of time in the roll of English wonders and can scarcely fail to hold its own as an occasion unparalleled. And yet we touch it as we come and go—we feel it mainly as a great incommodity. It has already so intimate, so ugly, so measurable a side that these impressions begin to fall into their place with a kind of representative force, to figure as a symbol of the general truth that the principal pomps and circumstances of the historic page have had their most intense existence as material and social arrangements, disagreeable or amusing accidents, affecting the few momentary mortals at that time in the neighbourhood. The gross defacement of London, the uproarious traffic in seats, the miles of unsightly scaffolding between the West End and the City, the screaming advertisements, the sordid struggle, the individual questions—“Haven’t we been cheated by the plausible wretch?” or “How the devil shall we get _to_ our seats after paying such a lot, hey?”—these things are actually the historic page. If we are writing that page every hour let us at any rate commend ourselves for having begun betimes, even though this early diligence be attended with extraordinary effects. The great day was a week ago still a month off, but what we even then had full in view, was, for the coming stretch of time, a London reduced to such disfigurement as might much better seem to consort with some great national penance or mourning. The show, when the show comes off, is to last but a couple of hours; and nothing so odd surely ever occurred in such a connection as so huge a disproportion between the discipline and the joy. If this be honour, the simple may well say, give us, merciful powers, the rigour of indifference! From Hyde Park Corner to the heart of the City and over the water to the solid south the long line of thoroughfares is masked by a forest of timber and smothered in swaggering posters and catchpenny bids, with all of which and with the vociferous air that enfolds them we are to spend these next weeks in such comfort as we may. The splendour will have of course to be great to wash down the vulgarity—and infinitely dazzling no doubt it will be; yet even if it falls short I shall still feel that, let the quantity of shock, as I have ventured to call it, be what it must, it will on the whole be exceeded by what I have ventured to call the quantity of suggestion. This, to be frank, has even now rolled up at such a rate that to deal with it I should scarce know where to take it first. Let me not therefore pretend to deal, but only glance and pass.

The foremost, the immense impression is of course the constant, the permanent, the ever-supreme—the impression of that greatest glory of our race, its passionate feeling for trade. I doubt if the commercial instinct be not, as London now feels it throb and glow, quite as striking as any conceivable projection of it that even our American pressure of the pump might, at the highest, produce. That is the real tent of the circus—that is the real back of the tapestry. There have long, I know, been persons ready to prove by book that the explanation of the “historical event” has always been somebody’s desire to make money; never, at all events, from the near view, will that explanation have covered so much of the ground. No result of the fact that the Queen has reigned sixty years—no sort of sentimental or other association with it—begins to have the air of coming home to the London conscience like this happy consequence of the chance in it to sell something dear. As yet that chance is the one sound that fills the air, and will probably be the only note audibly struck till the plaudits of the day itself begin to substitute, none too soon, a more mellifluous one. When the people are all at the windows and in the trees and on the water-spouts, house-tops, scaffolds and other ledges and coigns of vantage set as traps for them by the motive power, _then_ doubtless there will be another aspect to reckon with—then we shall see, of the grand occasion, nothing but what is decently and presentably historic. All I mean is that, pending the apotheosis, London has found in this particular chapter of the career of its aged sovereign only an enormous selfish advertisement. It came to me the other day in a quoted epigram that the advertisement shows as far off as across the Channel and all the way to Paris, where one of the reflections it has suggested—as it must inevitably suggest many—appears to be that, in contrast, when, a year ago, the Russian sovereigns were about to arrive no good Parisian thought for a moment of anything but how he could most work for the adornment of his town. I dare say that in fact from a good Parisian or two a window or a tree was to be hired; but the echo is at least interesting _as_ an echo, not less than as a reminder of how we still wait here for the outbreak of the kind of enthusiasm that shall take the decorative form. The graceful tip of its nose has, it must be admitted, yet to show. But there are other sides still, and one of them immense—the light we may take as flooding, I mean, the whole question of the solidity of the throne. It is impossible to live long in England without feeling that the monarchy is—below-ground, so to speak, in particular—a rock; but it was reserved for these days to accentuate the immobility of even that portion of the rock which protrudes above the surface. It is being tested in a manner by fire, and it resists with a vitality nothing short of prophetic. The commercial instinct, as I say, perches upon it with a security and a success that banish a rival from the field. It is the biggest of all draws for the biggest of all circuses; it will bring more money to more doors than anything that can be imagined in its place. It will march through the ages unshaken. The coronation of a new sovereign is an event, at the worst, well within the compass of the mind, and what will that bring with it so much as a fresh lively market and miles of new posters and new carpentry? Then, who knows?—coronations will, for a stretch and a change perhaps, be more frequent than anniversaries; and the bargains struck over the last will, again at the worst, carry an hilarious country well on to the next. Has not the monarchy moreover—besides thus periodically making trade roar—the lively merit, for such an observer as I fancy considering these things, of helping more than anything else the answers to the questions into which our actual curiosity most overflows; the question for instance of whether in the case before us the triumph of vulgarity be not precisely the flushed but muscular triumph of the inevitable? If vulgarity thrones now on the house-tops, “blown” and red in the face, is it not because it has been pushed aloft by deep forces and is really after all itself the show? The picturesque at any rate has to meet the conditions. We miss, we regret the old “style” of history; but the style would, I think, be there if we let it: the age has a manner of its own that disconcerts, that swamps it. The age is the loudest thing of all. What has altered is simply the conditions. Poor history has to meet them, these conditions; she must accommodate herself. She must accept vulgarity or perish. Some day doubtless she _will_ perish, but for a little while longer she remembers and struggles. She becomes indeed, as we look up Piccadilly in the light of this image, perhaps rather more dramatic than ever—at any rate more pathetic, more noble in her choked humiliation. Then even as we pity her we try perhaps to bring her round, to make her understand a little better. We try to explain that if we are dreadful to deal with it is only, really, a good deal because we so detestably grow and grow. There is so horribly much of us—that’s where _our_ style breaks down. Small crowds and paltry bargains didn’t matter, and a little vulgarity—just a very little—could in other times manage to pass. Our shame, alas, is our quantity.

I have no sooner, none the less, qualified it so ungraciously than I ask myself what after all we should do without it. If we have opened the floodgates we have at least opened them wide, and it is our very quantity that perhaps in the last resort will save us. It cuts both ways, as the phrase is—it covers all the ground; it helps the escape as well as produces the assault. If retreat for instance at the present juncture is, as I began by hinting, urgently imposed, it is thanks to our having so much of everything that we find a bridge for our feet. We hope to get off in time, but meanwhile even on the spot there are blessed alternatives and reliefs. I have been trying a number very hard, but I have expatiated so on the complaint that I have left little room for the remedy. London reminds one of nothing so often as of the help she gives one to forget her. One of the forms actually taken by this happy habit is the ingenious little exhibition, at the Grafton Galleries, of so-called Dramatic and Musical Art. The name is rather a grand one and the show has many gaps; but it profits, as such places in London so often profit, by the law that makes you mostly care less what you get into than what you get out of. With its Hogarths and Zoffanys—none too many, I admit—its other last-century portraits and relics, its numerous ghosts of Garrick, its old play-bills and prints, its echoes of dead plaudits and its very thin attendance, it happens to be for the moment a quiet bower in the bear-garden. It is a “scratch” company, but only—and I can scarce say why—in the portion in which the portraits of the day prevail is the impression vulgar. Even there indeed this suspicion receives a grand lift from Mr. Whistler’s exquisite image of Henry Irving as the Philip of Tennyson’s “Queen Mary.” To pause before such a work is in fact to be held to the spot by just the highest operation of the charm one has sought there—the charm of a certain degree of melancholy meditation. Meditation indeed forgets Garrick and Hogarth and all the handsome heads of the Kembles in wonder reintensified at the attitude of a stupid generation toward an art and a taste so rare. Wonder is perhaps after all not the word to use, for how _should_ a stupid generation, liking so much that it does like and with a faculty trained to coarser motions, recognise in Mr. Whistler’s work one of the finest of all distillations of the artistic intelligence? To turn from his picture to the rest of the show—which, of course, I admit, is not a collection of masterpieces—is to drop from the world of distinction, of perception, of beauty and mystery and perpetuity, into—well, a very ordinary place. And yet the effect of Whistler at his best is exactly to give to the place he hangs in—or perhaps I should say to the person he hangs for—something of the sense, of the illusion, of a great museum. He isolates himself in a manner all his own; his presence is in itself a sort of implication of a choice corner. Have we in this a faint foresight of the eventual turn of the wheel—of one of the nooks of honour, those innermost rooms of great collections, in which our posterity shall find him? Look at him at any rate on any occasion, but above all at his best, only long enough, and hallucination sets in. We are in the presence of one of the prizes marked with two stars in the guidebook; the polished floor is beneath us and the rococo roof above; the great names are ranged about, and the eye is aware of the near window, in its deep recess, that overhangs old gardens or a celebrated square.

LONDON NOTES
_July_ 1897

I continued last month to seek private diversion, which I found to be more and more required as the machinery of public began to work. Never was a better chance apparently for the great anodyne of art. It was a supreme opportunity to test the spell of the magician, for one felt one was saved if a fictive world would open. I knocked in this way at a dozen doors, I read a succession of novels; with the effect perhaps of feeling more than ever before my individual liability in our great general debt to the novelists. The great thing to say for them is surely that at any given moment they offer us another world, another consciousness, an experience that, as effective as the dentist’s ether, muffles the ache of the actual and, by helping us to an interval, tides us over and makes us face, in the return to the inevitable, a combination that may at least have changed. What we get of course, in proportion as the picture lives, is simply another actual—the actual of other people; and I no more than any one else pretend to say _why_ that should be a relief, a relief as great, I mean, as it practically proves. We meet in this question, I think, the eternal mystery—the mystery that sends us back simply to the queer constitution of man and that is not in the least lighted by the plea of “romance,” the argument that relief depends wholly upon the quantity, as it were, of fable. It depends, to my sense, on the quantity of nothing but art—in which the material, fable or fact or whatever it be, falls so into solution, is so reduced and transmuted, that I absolutely am acquainted with no receipt whatever for computing its proportion and amount.

The only amount I can compute is the force of the author, for that is directly registered in my attention, my submission. A hundred things naturally go to make it up; but he knows so much better than I what they are that I should blush to give him a glimpse of my inferior account of them. The anodyne is not the particular picture, it is our own act of surrender, and therefore most, for each reader, what he most surrenders to. This latter element would seem in turn to vary from case to case, were it not indeed that there are readers prepared, I believe, to limit their surrender in advance. With some, we gather, it declines for instance to operate save on an exhibition of “high life.” In others again it is proof against any solicitation but that of low. In many it vibrates only to “adventure”; in many only to Charlotte Brontë; in various groups, according to affinity, only to Jane Austen, to old Dumas, to Miss Corelli, to Dostoievsky or whomever it may be. The readers easiest to conceive, however, are probably those for whom, in the whole impression, the note of sincerity in the artist is what most matters, what most reaches and touches. That, obviously, is the relation that gives the widest range to the anodyne.

I am afraid that, profiting by my license, I drag forward Mr. George Gissing from an antiquity of several weeks. I blow the dust of oblivion from M. Pierre Loti and indeed from all the company—they have been published for days and days. I foresee, however, that I must neglect the company for the sake of the two members I have named, writers—I speak for myself—always in order, though not, I admit, on quite the same line. Mr. Gissing would have been particularly in order had he only kept for the present period the work preceding his latest; all the more that “In the Year of Jubilee” has to my perception some points of superiority to “The Whirlpool.” For this author in general, at any rate, I profess, and have professed ever since reading “The New Grub Street,” a persistent taste—a taste that triumphs even over the fact that he almost as persistently disappoints me. I fail as yet to make out why exactly it is that going so far he so sturdily refuses to go further. The whole business of distribution and composition he strikes me as having cast to the winds; but just this fact of a question about him is a part of the wonder—I use the word in the sense of enjoyment—that he excites. It is not every day in the year that we meet a novelist about whom there is a question. The circumstance alone is almost sufficient to beguile or to enthrall; and I seem to myself to have said almost everything in speaking of something that Mr. Gissing “goes far” enough to do. To go far enough to do anything is, in the conditions we live in, a lively achievement.

“The Whirlpool,” I crudely confess, was in a manner a grief to me, but the book has much substance, and there is no light privilege in an emotion so sustained. This emotion perhaps it is that most makes me, to the end, stick to Mr. Gissing—makes me with an almost nervous clutch quite cling to him. I shall not know how to deal with him, however, if I withhold the last outrage of calling him an interesting case. He seems to me above all a case of saturation, and it is mainly his saturation that makes him interesting—I mean especially in the sense of making him singular. The interest would be greater were his art more complete; but we must take what we can get, and Mr. Gissing has a way of his own. The great thing is that his saturation is with elements that, presented to us in contemporary English fiction, affect us as a product of extraordinary oddity and rarity: he reeks with the savour, he is bowed beneath the fruits, of contact with the lower, with the lowest middle-class, and that is sufficient to make him an authority—_the_ authority in fact—on a region vast and unexplored.

The English novel has as a general thing kept so desperately, so nervously clear of it, whisking back compromised skirts and bumping frantically against obstacles to retreat, that we welcome as the boldest of adventurers a painter who has faced it and survived. We have had low life in plenty, for, with its sores and vices, its crimes and penalties, misery has colour enough to open the door to any quantity of artistic patronage. We have shuddered in the dens of thieves and the cells of murderers, and have dropped the inevitable tear over tortured childhood and purified sin. We have popped in at the damp cottage with my lady and heard the quaint rustic, bless his simple heart, commit himself for our amusement. We have fraternised on the other hand with the peerage and the county families, staying at fine old houses till exhausted nature has, for this source of intoxication, not a wink of sociability left. It has grown, the source in question, as stale as the sweet biscuit with pink enhancements in that familiar jar of the refreshment counter from which even the attendant young lady in black, with admirers and a social position, hesitates to extract it. We have recognised the humble, the wretched, even the wicked; also we have recognised the “smart.” But save under the immense pressure of Dickens we have never done anything so dreadful as to recognise the vulgar. We have at the very most recognised it as the extravagant, the grotesque. The case of Dickens was absolutely special; he dealt intensely with “lower middle,” with “lowest” middle, elements, but he escaped the predicament of showing them as vulgar by showing them only as prodigiously droll. When his people are not funny who shall dare to say what they are? The critic may draw breath as from a responsibility averted when he reflects that they almost always _are_ funny. They belong to a walk of life that we may be ridiculous but never at all serious about. We may be tragic, but that is often but a form of humour. I seem to hear Mr. Gissing say: “Well, dreariness for dreariness, let us try Brondesbury and Pinner; especially as in the first place I know them so well; as in the second they are the essence of England; and as in the third they are, artistically speaking, virgin soil. Behold them glitter in the morning dew.”