Chapter I: Part 1

THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY

ALICE MEYNELL

SECOND IMPRESSION

HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE
TOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI PEKING

1922

TO CELIA CLARK

CONTENTS

PAGE
SUPERFLUOUS KINGS 7
STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST 12
‘A MODERN POETESS’ 18
TO ITALY WITH EVELYN 25
WATERFALLS 31
A TOMB IN BAYSWATER 37
A CORRUPT FOLLOWING 42
THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD 49
JOANNA BAILLIE 56
THE CLASSIC NOVELIST 62
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 68
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 75
GEORGE DARLEY 82
SYDNEY DOBELL 87
COVENTRY PATMORE 94
POETRY AND CHILDHOOD 110
GEORGE MEREDITH 117
PESSIMISM IN FICTION 122
GIACINTO GALLINA 127
THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR 133

_The papers which follow have been chosen from those of Mrs. Meynell’s literary essays that have not yet been reprinted in book-form. The selection has been made at the instance of the Oxford University Press._

SUPERFLUOUS KINGS

Which had superfluous kings for messengers
Not many moons gone by.
_Antony and Cleopatra._

As the kings lag, and then pass away from the stage of the world, many men will ask what there is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty in the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time probably forget or deny that there was ever anything in the life of the world answering to Shakespeare’s royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in Arviragus and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in Lear, or to his glory in Cleopatra. It may be so, as to the world; there may have been nothing thus answerable. But there was Shakespeare.

And our regrets in regard to him cover all his regalities—the hidden and hereditary and unconscious, and the conscious and braggart and manifest: Perdita’s dignity among the romps, and her sportive disputes as to Art and Nature among the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the junketings, and also Lear’s loud and indignant death. The splendour of Shakespeare’s veneration for kings is perhaps deeper where the kingliness—the blood of it—is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess of _The Winter’s Tale_, for here it is matter of Shakespeare’s faith. So with the brothers of Imogen who, by the way—and not merely by the way—like her, discuss flowers—‘Then to arms!’ They too have the implicit distinction, unknown to the world of their exile, but known to Shakespeare, who is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in _The Winter’s Tale_, Shakespeare makes his resolute and implicit act of belief in the blood of kings.

In _Lear_ that faith suffers outrage and defies it. Many years ago the great actor, Rossi, who did not gain in England such honour as was rendered to Salvini—I fear because his physical personal dignity was not so obvious as Salvini’s—played King Lear in Italian. But there was one cry, one royal proclamation, that could not be removed from the English. So Rossi said ‘every inch’ in English. It needed Shakespeare’s word to vindicate Shakespeare’s royalism. (One might make sport of any kind of translation: say ‘_ogni centimetro_’—‘every centimetre a king’ is good farce.) No Italian will serve; the Latin mind has not this degree of imaginative reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty of giving sudden greatness to a customary word.

But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only ‘the beauteous Majesty of Denmark’, and the ‘courteous action’ of the dead—‘being so majestical’—and the dignity of Hermione’s daughter, and the tempest of Lear’s elemental tragedy, will not consent to touch us with nothing more than pity and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of pride of life in the royalty he sings; confronts us—no, rather brings us to our knees before the arrogant splendour he conceives:

Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.

It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only hand in hand with a queen does Antony venture on the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to him are given the most surprising lines in any of the tragedies, it is only as the lover of a queen that he has the right to them. To him is assigned that startling word, the incomparable word of amorous and tender ceremony—‘Egypt’.

I am dying, Egypt, dying.

That territorial name, murmured to his love in the hour of death, and in her arms—I know not in the records of all genius any other such august farewell. Lear’s word is outdone here. Lear a king in every inch of his aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in every league of her ancient realm. Has not majesty spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of such a lover?

Superfluous kings—Shakespeare’s irony could find no other adjective so overcharged with insolence as this. Kings must be as he conceived them in order to that antithesis:

Superfluous kings for messengers.

But an antithesis more complete than that of downfall and of servitude is that of mortality. The humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face with the mere fortunes of war; the derision of the word ‘superfluous’ implies, in reversal, an inalienable dignity; so in the act of dying, the visible act, done in life; so with ‘sad stories of the death of kings’. The final contradiction is not here; but in the grave itself, in the hidden burial, out of the sight of the populace: it needs the utmost of Shakespeare’s passion of royalty to answer to that depth. And here is poetry, not by him, but wonderfully worthy of him, that tells us of

High-born dust
In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings.

Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have written this.

Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with this glory this humiliation. Who will say which is greater, the thesis or the antithesis? But they cannot be parted to be compared. There they are, in our national literature, and cannot be effaced. But who shall hinder their becoming, for the student, first a matter of mere literary interest, then a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter of some new derision? (We need no new derisions: our wits are apt to mockery.) Is it well that any one of Shakespeare’s many passions should come under our frigid inspection, to be examined so?

When kings are in fact superfluous, Shakespeare’s great word ‘superfluous’ will be cancelled out; when kings are no longer flattered, Young’s great word ‘unflattered’ will be a futile word; when there are no full assiduous courts, the ‘thin courts’ will suggest no spectres. Regret is for Shakespeare, as has been said; not for Saul, or Louis the Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But, short of Shakespeare’s devotion, there will be some sentiment damaged. When the mortality of kings is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all inherit, then the lamps and the gold that enshrine the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathedrals, with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who preceded the kings to the manger.

Shakespeare’s greatest splendour, then, that so shines down the splendour of history and the world, is under sentence, and under sentence his greatest compassion, and under sentence his greatest terror, and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have placed at the head of these pages a word of neither terror nor compassion, because the word of irony implies the rest.

STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST

England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and who were themselves England, having history in common with their country.

But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man and boy. He was born in the year of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was dancing, an old man of thirty-four, dropsical and horrible, full of repentance, as were then all of his manner of life when they had an illness sufficiently long to give them time. Greene died from too much banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, but his sorry death-bed gave him room for ample self-reproach, and doubtless Christopher Marlowe also would have left a record of his repentance had the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age than his friend’s, been less violent. In later years Carew asked pardon, with many cries, for the greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during these two bright centuries you may hear, if you turn your ear that way, the loud lamentation of poet after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not a death-bed without the clamour that closed the song. It is a parting cry, so poignant and sudden that the air rings with it even while the succeeding singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the present. Greene had not a little to repent of in his actions, but nothing to retract in his songs; therefore, the reader who has not beheld his life—his wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it, and certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the grief, pain, and fear of the closing scene, and may well be content with the sweetness of the songs. They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized. Without following the fashion of using the terms of one art to describe another, we may permit ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of music to represent the sixteenth-century lyric, harmonics for the seventeenth, counterpoint for the nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in which so much as two notes are to be heard; and the double string makes the sound more human.

It is not human to be single as the songs of Greene are single; the fading of pleasure, the cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each thing, one at a time, is so unaccompanied that you wonder how a primitive poet should have had time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying thoughts together. For it is hardly youth, hardly inexperience that this simplicity suggests, but rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating other conditions than those which govern an actual world of which the poet has somewhat grown tired.

‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of sweetly jarring notes in the lines that tell the parting of father and mother over their laughing child—lines that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the mind, of Blake in his own song of birth. Blake’s verse has a tempestuous and threatening spiritual wildness of which Greene did not know the language; and it is only in the leaping metre, the clamour of the rhymes that seem striving to be heard above a deafening childish noise, that the two songs have so much likeness.

The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt;
More he crowed, more we cried.

There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling of the child, and you hear also the crying that the mother is seeking to still with her recital of that late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.

Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes, perhaps, ‘The Praise of Faunia’:

Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,
Or but as mild as she is seeming so,

is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less strong, and less masculine Shakespeare sonnet. There is sweet line after line in this poem, and many such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling throat’ and ‘When she sings, all singers else be still!’ But the poem is famous chiefly, it may be guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible beauty:

O glorious sun, imagine me the west!
Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast!

Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in Dianam’, which is to be praised not as a whole, but for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep a golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’, and from nymphs in white. There never was any scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain is cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow through, but the sense of outer sunshine is intense and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame blackly, as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the way, is a familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is a presence hardly removed in the southern summer.

This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is caused by the most careless of verses. As a lyrist, he never leant hard upon anything; he has the lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to sing his tunes upon the way. So lightly is the verse given to the wind that you are apt to read it as carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of the Fountain, for instance, should be read with more leisure than at a glance it seems to merit.

Greene is dull to any reader who does not take the pains to cancel all the conventions of the times that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy green, must be simply forgotten; and the task is not difficult. Greene has all the good luck by his Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was neither to be repeated by others, nor to be taken from his own head upon whom it alighted first. We, who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need not be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and this not because his were best, but because his were first.

See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, wild, and dear:

Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
His wings were wet with ranging in the rain.

But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat dull, especially when he is not at his best, because he has so little to say. There never was a poet who said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his own estimation, not important enough to be written for their own sake; they were but snatches of songs in his prose writings—novels and what not; and poems so set flying at any other time and in any other English could not have kept their motion and their spirit so long. They never cost him a thought; and the only sign of attention is in the versification. This is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon in Dianam’ it is very good indeed; the foot is elastic and moves with a rebound.

But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take his charming description of ‘A Shepherd and His Wife’. As though in the idleness of an empty mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly matter for verse—the way, for example, in which the flaps of the shepherd’s coat were turned over. It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail as that. But in the same poem are some lively verses about the wife which seem not only to set her up for admiration and delight, but to dance about her in a round when that is done.

Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’, in which the happiest shepherdess in Thessaly compares her love and state with those of queens, and makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt refrain. But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has a weakness and listlessness that spoil its grace; and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was a small poet among the minor poets; but his hour struck in the cool of the morning, and, whatever kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic simplicity was in his English.

‘A MODERN POETESS’

The cruel places of history are for ever emptied of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the guard. Every martyrdom of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one how sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There is no living pain now in all the universe to continue it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or perhaps to regret it. And if we complain that the past is not to be revoked or undone, we might rather confess the complete consolation of the passing of time, the undoing, the effacement, and the more than death. It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is to be past, or that we perceive how clean is natural oblivion; the uneasy human retrospection stirs nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing now on earth remembers.

The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the thing is over and done; but it afflicts me to think of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no trouble but in the present, and that though our minds seem to travel into the past, in truth they do not budge; and we, prisoners of our own moment, are fluttered with the present sympathy, and not with the vanished sorrow, for this is not.

By far the greater number of human sufferings have been forgotten by man as purely and freshly as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory which is history and tradition renews the report with so much attention as to preserve something like the dramatic unity of time. To read of them and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to endure them. But of others again we have the brief record that shows long hollow spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is the bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by our popular historians in a short paragraph that ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style and making the page conspicuous to childish learners.

Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, although she is not in the catalogue of those whom he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the Duchess of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the young Plinie, Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’ and Lucretia Marinella, who is not mentioned as any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a work _Dell’ excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e mancamenti degli Huomini_—with the inferiority of these and such as these does he flatter the surpassing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart would have made her name too sad a sacrifice for such a train. The other ladies are presented gaily and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but that divided which your Grace retaines in one.’

Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when women of station were well taught, notable for her education. Her Latin letters are still there to attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by Mr. Philips, who was Milton’s nephew. These secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions are in touching disproportion with her original, immediate, and authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp edging that a more or less literary training gives to the natural human mind, making it aware, had been given to hers; and she was so prepared by delicate erudition that the loss of all she loved was complete to her, the suspense of imprisonment inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. She lost better than her life, for the prison ruined her reason before it released her body, twice rifled and destitute, and dismissed it to Westminster Abbey and the grave.

It is in her letters to her husband, and only in these, that Arabella Stuart is perceptible as she lived. The letters of entreaty to King James are the letters of those abject times. They declare her to be in despair, not because of the separation from her husband and only friend, and not because of her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence, and by reason of the remorse and contrition of one who had disobeyed him, even unwittingly. By these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, not their phrases only, but, apparently, their very thoughts. Such declarations were much more than a courtesy due to kings or the decorum of a style in letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most grotesque tune; those were real self-reproaches; they banished real sleep, human sleep, afflicted real consciences, set the tears of men running, and squandered and scattered to waste that human treasure, humility.

Lady Arabella’s remorse, as she took leave to remind the King, was poignant for her offence in having bestowed herself in marriage _upon the King’s permission_. He seems to have either forgotten or silently rescinded his consent, and for this she overwhelmed herself in professions of regret and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which, she said, had beguiled the time ‘for her whose serious mind must invent some relaxation’. ‘Womanish toys’, she called them, conscious of her education, and she thanked the gentleman who was her gaoler for consenting to present them. Her way of submission was even approved by the tyrant. One of her letters to the King, said Montford, ‘was penned by her in the best terms, as she can do right well. It was often read without offence; nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with the applause of Prince and Council.’ The best terms are of course the most reverent. The clergy exhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping, to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill of fear, was that of the Bishop of Durham.

She had the heart to deny her commended letters so far as to practise some secret disobedience, heaping up self-reproach for the vigils of her solitude. The letters to her husband, from whom she had been parted after but a few months of marriage, were contraband. Even in these, her allusions to the King were most dutiful, but her husband was her theme. ‘Rachel wept,’ she wrote, ‘and would not be comforted, because her children were no more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow, and none else! And, therefore, God bless us from that, and I will hope well for the rest, though I see no apparent hope.’ Her husband was ill, as she heard from others. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am exceeding sorry to hear that you have not been well. I am not satisfied with the reason Smith gives for it; but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sympathy betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a cold. For God’s sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your body. You may see by me what inconvenience it will bring one to; and no fortune, I assure you, daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find in myself; for “si nous vivons l’âge d’un veau”, as Marot says, we may, by God’s grace, be happier than we look for, in being suffered to enjoy ourself with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not able to live it, I, for my part, shall think myself a pattern of misfortune, in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little while.’

Again, she reminded him that he had not written to her ‘this good while’. ‘You see when I am troubled, I trouble you with tedious kindness, for so I think you will account so long a letter. But, sweet Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with writing but when you please. Be well, and I shall account myself happy in being your faithful and loving wife.’

As soon as these letters were discovered the writing was stopped. Enough was written, and enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous, worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief, of this unfortunate. A graver revolt against her tyrants was her escape to join her husband in flight from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times, tides, and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She would not save herself without him. She was brought back, and from the new imprisonment there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied justice by refusing another little offering of her needlework. In her appeal to the Queen she had entreated that the gloves she had made might be accepted ‘in remembrance of the poor prisoner that wrought them, in hopes her royal hands will vouchsafe to wear them, which, till I have the honour to kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow’.

‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate creature that ever lived prostrates itselfe at the feet of the most merciful King that ever was.’ These are among the last ‘best terms’ that Arabella Stuart penned.

Her King and Queen and country sent her civilization into solitude, gagged her classics, disproved her poetry, and thrust her ‘expanded mind’ into the inner darkness.

TO ITALY WITH EVELYN

Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse of the city and the landscape of the future, two centuries and a half hence? Even if so, he can hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted desires the sight of the past. At any rate, if there be any scene that we would willingly be admitted to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy.

Thither would we willingly journey not later than in the day of John Evelyn, when he travelled in his youthful dignity, provided with letters, and spent some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the University of Padua. Every one knows his journal of the English Church under the Commonwealth, of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of Charles II. But not the least charming part of one of the most readable of books—a book written in an English prose that had not yet undergone much manipulation, but was still a little rigid, but rigid with vitality—is somewhat neglected; it is the part that records this progress through France to the Coast, and thence into Italy as far as Naples, and home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and Switzerland. The happy man! When he drew near, after peril of shipwreck, to the port of Genoa, he ‘perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy’. This was off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now you may smell the odour of factories—soap-boiling and other things—for it has lately come to be stifled with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are dying with their blackened arbours. Only of late have those ancient, coloured terraces, coloured as a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that a little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might be set in a ring and worn as a jewel—only of late have the gardens, once in rich and fortunate neglect, ceased to breathe their ancient breath.

‘We recovered the shore, which we now kept in view within half a league, in sight of those pleasant villas, and within scent of those fragrant orchards which are on this coast, full of princely retirements for the sumptuousnesse of their buildings and noblesse of the plantations, from whence, the wind blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jasmine flowers for divers leagues seaward.’ And Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of this coast as to record it again in the dedication of his ‘Fumifugium’ to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpierdarena—that one place precisely, of all others—in the years just past makes the whole incident of this welcoming message from the cultivated lands, and of the ensuing treatise and its title, sound somewhat cruel in irony.

John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approaching smoke, as he tried also—by an application to the same monarch—to avert the course of fashion in the then important dress of men. The East he thought better worth following than France, and he proposed a whole revision of the Western mode, and presented the King with a plan whereby the trivial fashions of ‘the monsieurs’ were to be exchanged for an Oriental ‘noblesse’. Charles accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to wear a Persian robe; but he rather shabbily left Evelyn to conjecture, in silence, that it was his advice that had been taken. In the end, the King slid back, and ‘the monsieurs’ had it. If John Evelyn had had that glimpse into the future which few of us desire to-day, how could he have endured those French inventions to which the East has now been partly converted, and the fumes of that ash-strewn piece of coast? ‘But a soap-factory!’ cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy national sarcasm in the industry that, among others, has brought about this special local change. It happens, however, pat to this matter of soap, that Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought, in one of the towns of North Italy, certain ‘wash-balls’ which seemed to be new to him; he speaks of them as a useful invention. Before the factory had taken the place of the fragrant orchards the people of that coast had the constant custom of washing all their clothes. It is much to be feared that the smoke of the soap-factory has already put an end to that habit by making it too difficult, or impossible.

Some consolation is to be found in this—that if a mile of that incomparable coast is spoilt, there remain scores of miles all untouched, differing only in the lesser majesty of the houses and gardens with their great sea-walls. The ‘sumptuousnesse’ admired by Evelyn will never be restored; but of the mere walls of those rougher houses too, in their place in the landscape, pieces might be set as jewels. It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn wrote. Otherwise the general modern complaint as to the insensibility of the older writers to the daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his case. He, without noting, saw the change of skies that sets alight the world when you have crossed the Alps; and of the further illumination of a southern spring he says nothing; but he makes mention of the ‘extraordinary long’ tail of a horse, which he saw in a collection of curiosities, nor do two horns of as many unicorns go unrecorded, for he had a grave and simple admiration of such things as petrifactions, flies in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor does he cease to be a learned and most responsible man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to see nothing contrary to the dignities of State and office. The false air of childishness which this kind of English gives to the style of Pepys always makes his public functions and honours seem to us incongruous. In Evelyn’s _Diary_, by the way, we meet Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty business, with so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.

It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an air of childishness in our eyes to-day. I have to confess that when I hear an Italian say something to the purpose I always cry inwardly ‘How intelligent!’ But in those days England took frankly a lower place. It could not be otherwise, seeing that the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe. Evelyn had nothing whatever to be proud of at home, inasmuch as he was ashamed of York Minster, Lincoln, Durham, and the rest; inasmuch, too, as Shakespeare’s name occurs not once in his book. He never doubts that modern art had reached its culmination in St. Peter’s and the Lateran, in Guido Reni and Domenichino.

He found all those splendours new, and it is no wonder if he was convinced that all this art in course of progress, as it was visibly, must be better integrally than what had gone before. He took no notice of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but admired precisely as Horace Walpole admired, and on the same scale and according to the same order. He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of to-day is dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down the page, and to find the polite English traveller in rapture before the blatant Bernini.

Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great compliment of taking her at the highest estimation as she was at the moment. There was no painful comparison with any period of the past, for we have evidence in his works that Bernini was not afraid of antiquity itself. In arts, in letters, in arms, in science especially, Italy was foremost in present action—_there_ was her splendour, as we may find it hard to realize. Evelyn sent home preparations from her schools of anatomy to the Royal Society, to which such things were new.

And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller, who was soon after to plan the hedges and alleys of Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a school of gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the perpetual inequalities which have hardly been sufficiently recognized as distinctive of our plains. In Italy he found the plains to be flat with that peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight. Most beautiful with the mountains for a distance—but he hardly had eyes for the mountains. It is rather difficult to forgive him for calling the rocks and bays of the coast ‘horrid gaps’ and ‘dreadful mountains’; but ‘Oh, the sweet Paradise!’ he cries among the fountains and the vines.

His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed he went upright; and if we desire to travel with him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his Italy but for the sake of himself. Something we would have from him in exchange for our better information on the ‘Gotiq ordonance’.

WATERFALLS

‘We then went out to see a cascade. I trudged unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry.’ Dr. Johnson was not often pleased, it seems, upon this tour in Wales in the company of ‘my mistress’ and her family, and the arid waterfall was no doubt a welcome incident, for the scenery had been tedious to his spirit. He made light of the mountains, and did not hesitate to propose a strange image to the fancy of his companions when he derided a river unlucky enough to come into the prospect: ‘Why, sir, I could clear any part of it by a leap.’ He rated very low the old house of Mrs. Thrale’s family, though as a house it amused him more than any view. ‘The addition of another storey would make an useful house, but it cannot be great.’ The old parish clerk who, seeing Mrs. Thrale again, ‘foolishly said that he was now willing to die,’ is no doubt justly rebuked; but so seems to be Mrs. Thrale herself: ‘He had only a crown given him by my mistress.’ Then there was that dispute on the Chester walls; and, first and last, Dr. Johnson was not found to be best of companions by the ‘pretty woman’ witty enough to ‘add something to the conversation’, with whom he himself would have been all content.

There is reason to think that scenery in those days was rather unfairly and dully insisted upon as a matter of taste. ‘Dispositions of wood and water’ were the subjects of a kind of expert study, and it is easy to understand what a bore a landscape might become under the eye of a judge. Miss Austen shows a distinct tendency to bring water, rising ground, and well-wooded slopes under review. If a modern mansion has been erected, with ignorance, in too low a situation, she has an instant eye for the barbarism. The shrubberies, the curving carriage drives, the conifers, the farm-buildings, if any, duly planted out, come under the rapid approval of an elegant mind, and so does the far prospect no less. The distance is declared to be in harmony with the demands of a lover of nature; and as you read you can hardly think of the scenery as thrilled with summer wind, or believe that its miles would mark human feet with dust, or would be measured by the wavering rods of human weariness, or subject to any incidents except those of a careful engraving. There is some charm in the false-classical landscape of that time, merely looked back upon; but it would be something less than interesting to be presently in the company of people who talked much of the dispositions of wood and water. There is a certain way of looking at a view that affects one almost with dismay to hear of. When a professor of scenery asks you to enjoy what he always calls a peep, with several kinds of fir-trees coyly betraying the way to it, there is little delight there; nor are cottages so pleasant when they, too, are said to peep; but this is a later and even a duller fancy. Landscape a hundred years ago had more dignity, though no more ‘spirit in the woods’.

If the dispositions of wood and water allowed of a waterfall, it is impossible to imagine a more welcome addition at that day to scenery constructed, like Mr. Pecksniff’s younger daughter, upon good principles. The cascade had not yet been made quite a common convention, for the ‘picturesque’ had not then come and gone, making dull in its passage, at least in art and in letters, the sallies of nature. To find a waterfall, in the right place, was in those days an elegant and natural joy; and it must have been no small disappointment to see Dr. Johnson trudging unwillingly. But no doubt there had been too much said.

Taste, always so nearly in peril of derogation, and, in fact, so quickly, according to all experience, dimmed by habit, has done wrong, by its weak preferences, to all the flowers of scenery—not to the actual flowers of vegetation only, though these have long been turned to the basest uses of all decoration—but to the other outbreaks of the movement and vitality of earth. The white tops of mountains and the climax of storms, forests in their utmost leaf, waves at the crest, the clouds of sunset newly on fire, waters in haste—what a gathering of blossoms is this from the summits of the world, whether on heights or on plains! Light and sound seem to be set free by the mere resounding thought of so much fruition. But, for their all-intelligible beauty, these crowns of things were long tossed together for the use of any one who so much as knew their names, and not the less cheaply because the language of description grew to be more subtle, more expert, and more poetic. Soon that expert quality also became, as it were, the waste and refuse of literature.

Waterfalls, then, have been too much in use. Not only by the travelling party of the Thrales have they been proposed too pressingly to admiration. They cannot be restored at second hand to their dignity. A very great man might restore them to his readers by a word, but no one of less authority than his need begin to take the trouble to look for it. The right course is to see them where they are, and to let the literature of the matter rest. Any phrase written here in praise of waterfalls—if such should escape—is not intended to do more than point the way whither the traveller may trudge if he will. Norway and the Pyrenees keep for us the surprise of perpetually new waters drawing to the ancient fall.

The Alps, even, have many a slender stream, perhaps bearing no name, and certainly known by no names out of sight of their nearest peaks, that are remembered in their solitude, or at least recognized at each return of the traveller, where they drop, hushed by their distance as much as by the noisy train. There is one, for instance, seen for but a moment, that has so long a fall as to grow weak and to swing in all the light winds. The strong stem of the cascade springs from the bed of its upland stream; and as from a strong stem a sapling wavers upwards, entangled at last in all breezes, so the dropping brook wavers downwards to its last and lighter motion.

Waterfalls that are turned to torrents have not been so much the subject of the landscape of convention. Their wildness did not so take the general fancy when conventions were made; but they are the vitality of the mountains. Theirs is an expression of movement so great that all the Alpine region seems to manifest its life only by these noisy valleys. All communications, all signals and messages of the range, hasten in and out by these brilliant cataracts, one in the depth of every ravine.

They are not only the traffic and the mission of their mountains, the coursing of that cold blood and the pulse of the rock, but they carry the mountain spirit far out. There is no country under mountains but has its quietness awakened by wilder rivers than other lands are watered by. When the range is out of sight, the torrents are still hasty, cataract below cataract, shallow and clear, quick from the impulse of waterfalls. No loitering rivers in earthy beds keep level banks in those plains that have their horizon lifted by the line of great mountains; no silent rivers.

If the torrent runs dry, there is no one to be vexed by the silence. Dr. Johnson would not, perhaps, be asked to trudge for the sake of the rough charms of a mere torrent; but even if the disposition of wood and water comprised a torrent, he would have no revenge for his literary weariness in seeing his guide abashed. For a dry torrent is a most beautiful wreck, the ruin of a splendid progress and procession, of which the leader, when he went by, did not pass unknown. Such are the wide watercourses of the valleys in the Canton de Vaud, the colour of their innumerable stones a bright daylight grey, and the threads of water of their time of drought rippling just audibly by night.

Not all waterfalls make the conspicuous show of the cascades that take their leap from the rocks. In early autumn there is nothing fresher or sweeter than the minute, perpetual waterfall that hides in moss and undergrowth, and slips everywhere from the Alps. The air is nowhere silent, and hardly a blade of grass is unstirred by the delicate thrill of water. Without paths it drops minutely and invisibly into the lakes, the gentlest of all the signs of the barren and lofty snow.

A TOMB IN BAYSWATER

Not many Londoners, it seems, know where amongst them Sterne was buried; but his tomb stands where it did, duly tended, so that the superscription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound of the voices, of the feet, of the hootings, and of the wheels on the long westward road that starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the story told by the surgeon who thought he recognized a dead man anonymous upon a dissecting table, at the time of Sterne’s death in Bond-street, has discouraged the national and the local interest in an accessible London grave of the great. Yet it matters little whether the dust beneath this grey, Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous headstone be now mingled with the dust that was the body of Sterne; or at least it is a question that touches no more than the fancy.

The lapse of time might be important in our thoughts on Sterne’s tomb if we measured by the long years of childhood; but we do not, because it is the short mature years that are historical. Added together the adult two centuries since Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did garden, court, or house, remembered with the large remembrance of ancient and spacious infancy, so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man as the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp. Time is all depreciated, disproved. No device, such as Thoreau’s for reducing the past to its real brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old woman and had wondered at the date whereto her birth referred him, but bethought himself how few of such lives as hers outstride all history and the very life of the race. But to join long life to long life is to pass in fancy by so many consecutive childhoods, for then the time will seem not short but immeasurably long. The childish years prolong time; the adult years, a man’s middle years, the short years of life, make Time’s changes, doing Time’s work.

A mere score of such decades take us back through Wordsworth and Keats, the great English painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day when Sterne was born. What a trifle!

A score of our little adult decades have passed since the _Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus_, planned by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit and actual satire upon science; since a medical pedant—learned, not a simpleton—was to be rallied for relying upon dreams and certain prescriptions of Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires since Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the copyist.) It is the effect of the twenty poor decades that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of time. To unpack these years is somewhat like the unloading of a ripe bulrush, or of some other lately-closed house of seeds in autumn, whereof the wings were bound until they opened with a spring, never to close again; and the air is filled with the released burden of the slender rod.

Not because of the flight of time, then, is this solitude of brilliant sky, broad grass, and trees tossed by the summer wind, a place of interest; nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too easily forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a _Tristram Shandy_ purged (or _à peu près_), but the stealthy offence is so constant in Sterne’s intention that something like his own ignoble agility might be necessary for one who would at every point evade it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or so (apt action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy), and he seems to have done the work as well as an honest man ought to hope to be able to do it. Of that no honest man can be precisely apprised—it would need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for those who intend to read _Tristram Shandy_, or to read it again, Henry Morley’s (in the Universal Library Series) is an edition to be welcomed; to lose one page in ten is to lose nothing essential to the masterpiece.

What moves curiosity here is the question why this bullying headstone should have been erected at the will of two anonymous ‘Brother Masons’, inconsequently so called in their own inscription, inasmuch as Sterne was not of their craft. Here are the couplets, turned with the metrical ability of that day, and making slovenly thinking to move with precision. After announcing that in that place ‘lyes the body of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, A.M.’—‘Ah! molliter ossa quiescant!’—the lines run thus:

If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane,
Unsully’d worth, and soul without a stain;
If mental powers could ever justly claim
The well-won tribute of immortal fame;
Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride
Mow’d down luxuriant follies far and wide.
Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind,
Unseal’d to him the springs that move the mind;
What did it boot him? Ridicul’d, abus’d,
By fools insulted and by prudes accus’d.
In his, mild reader, view thy future fate:
Like him, despise what ’twere a sin to hate.

The confusion of images and of purposes in this composition needs no exposing. Its coherence is nevertheless invested with that virtue of propriety which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extraordinary gain of all its secondary literature, and of the less than secondary. Dignity is too lofty a name for a quality so inessential; but it must be owned that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning powers of the same order, and so angry as these two seem to have been, would to-day, or in any other day than that, have turned their verse with less self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with a single flourish that never delighted any human eye, classical and paltry at once, is the characteristic funereal stone that bears the lines.

Modern philanthropy—perhaps that of the mild reader himself so inconsequently threatened in the verse—has changed the old burial-ground into a place of recreation absolutely unnecessary in a road that has Hyde Park on the other side of its railings. The mild reader has levelled the grass and cleared all the tombstones—Sterne’s and one or two more excepted—from the wide square, ranging them against the four walls, two deep. The names will be but a little the later forgotten. One poor little name, because of the primness of the title, remains in the mind—that of ‘Miss Susannah Headlam, who departed this life March the 6th, 1819, aged three years’.

No one comes to the superfluous pleasure-ground. Under the beautiful plane-trees flocks of sparrows alight with the leaves of a crisp, dry London autumn having a sun of summer, and the cats look at them, knowing there is no cover to spring from. Cover or no cover, on the impulse, a happy dog would hunt these flocks at random; the cat contains the passion of his wish as he strolls. He makes no crouch or spring, except, now and then, upon some minute moth which he afterwards eats with much ado and working of the jaws.

At the entrance stands the Chapel of Rest with the frescoes offered by Shields to the meditation of whomsoever will pause to take advantage of the quiet hour; and hither, in fact, come a very few Londoners, out of the noise.

A CORRUPT FOLLOWING

During the whole nineteenth century our language underwent a certain derogation, notorious, different in kind from the corruptions of all other ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the architecture of stations—and apparently of yesterday, and to-day, and of a morrow seen in rather dull and discouraging prospect. But the truth is that this common speech is due to the enormous influence of a great author who was born in 1737, was for forty-seven years the contemporary of Dr. Johnson, and died well within the eighteenth century.

Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect’ for a conjecture referring to the past? It is Gibbon’s: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs were not expelled from the palace.’ What is the ‘and which’, ‘and who’ of the slovenly? and what the ‘whose’ applied to inanimate things by authors too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof’? Gear of Gibbon’s style, both: ‘Below the citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with precious stones, and whose value might be esteemed,’ &c.; and ‘A Menapian of the meanest origin, but who had long signalized his skill as a pilot’. There is, it is true, the inanimate ‘whose’ of a more illustrious and older author, but that claims the excuse of metre.

Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vulgarism, ‘so much per month’, instead of ‘so much a month’, or ‘per mensem’? From Gibbon. ‘And coal will be by the sack or per the scuttle,’ said a seaside landlady, in some one’s observant ear. In her innocence she would not have said it but for Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that cannot give the word ‘same’ its proper completion, but saddles it with a relative pronoun? Gibbon’s: ‘The Western countries were civilized by the same hands which subdued them.’ ‘The hands which subdued them’ would be correct, and certainly more majestic.