Chapter II: Part 2

Gibbon set the example of this common lax grammar: ‘Instead of receiving with manly resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing cries and entreaties disgraced the last moments of his life’; and ‘The election of Carus was decided without expecting the approval of the Senate’; and ‘A peasant and a soldier, his nerves yielded not easily to the impressions of sympathy’. And there is nothing that (Gibbon always says ‘which’) illiterate politeness is so fond of as this unconstructed and decorated phrase. Gibbon’s literature was scholarly, and these errors of his alter little or nothing of the honour due to his eminent elegance of style. But it was these laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it was the ‘corrupt following’ of this apostle that set the fashion of an animated strut of style—a strut that was animated in its day and soon grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon never does. His own narrative never fails to reply to a perpetual stimulation.

But to deal with the rest of the grammatical ill-example, left to unlucky generations from the very middle of the century of propriety, and made so much our own. It is very modern to have ‘either’ or ‘neither’ followed by more than two things, and it is pure Gibbon; all the more conspicuous as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of three: ‘The policy of the senate, the active emulation of the consuls, and the martial enthusiasm of the people’; ‘The undertaking became more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious.’ But the three go ill with ‘either’: ‘either food, plunder, or glory;’ ‘either salt, or oil, or wood’. ‘The generals were either respected by their troops, or admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and generosity.’

Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what is more modern and current and popular than this: ‘Magnus, with four thousand of his supposed accomplices, were put to death’? And even this is Gibbon.

To have done with mere grammar, there is surely no author in the history of our literature who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon an admiring people. He changed a hundred years of English prose. The dregs of his style have encumbered the nation. Changes that have been ascribed to Johnson were his doing and not Johnson’s.

He belonged to the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth century belonged to him, because he possessed it. That is why he and his English are thus modern; the times became conformed to him; and he was himself not his own age, but that which succeeded and admired him.

It was to the broad face of astonishment, and with the self-conscious face of novelty, that Gibbon addressed his prose. That shortened sentence (for it was he who shortened the sentence, and Macaulay did but imitate his full stops for the pauses of historical surprise) was to strike and to demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly renewed. ‘Suspicion was equivalent to proof. Trial to condemnation.’ ‘The strict economy of Vespasian was the source of his magnificence. The works of Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.’ His, too, is the full ceremony of the ushering phrase: ‘It is easier to deplore the fate, than to describe the actual condition, of Corsica.’ His, too, the ‘the latter and the former’, which became a favourite fashion. ‘Oh, do not condemn me to the latter!’ exclaims a lover in one of Mrs. Inchbald’s stories, after a statement of his hopes and fears; and this phrase of emotion was a debt to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady does not condemn him to the latter; she permits some prospect of the former. ‘Peruse’ is Gibbon’s verb, and ‘extensive’ a favourite adjective. To him we owe ‘the mask of hypocrisy’ and ‘the voice of flattery’. It is not his fault that posterity divided this property so lavishly among themselves.

And yet is there no fault in his own frigid prodigality? Take this sentence in all its splendour: ‘The Tyber rolled at the foot of the seven hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the Latins, and the Volsci, from that river to the frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of her infant victories.’ And this: ‘A distant hope, the child of a flattering prophecy.’ This all-inhuman image reminds us, by contrast, of Shelley, who often has this figure of a child, and never, however remote the thought, without a sense of childhood. So cold is Gibbon that when the incessant stimulation of his rhetorical intention spurs him to describe a murder thus: ‘A thousand swords were plunged at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus,’ we are moved to tell him trivially that he exaggerates. When Burke said ‘A thousand swords’ he meant a thousand, and had a right to mean them, but Gibbon did not, obviously, mean a thousand.

‘The unfortunate Probus’ is the model of a sentence that sometimes becomes monotonous even with the carefully various Gibbon: ‘The prudent Atticus’ begins a phrase, and ‘the equitable Nerva’ passes it on to ‘the cautious Athenian’, and then again to ‘the generous Atticus’. His is a frigidity that deals broadly with massacre and the sack of cities. And from amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless viewed from afar, he suddenly plucks us this man’s ‘smile’, or that man’s ‘blush’. Whatever Gibbon’s race, there never was a writer so exceedingly Latin in spirit.

‘To view’, by the way, is one of his favourite verbs: ‘Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar ... and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.’ Readers with a sense of humour may remember under what conditions Zenobia ‘reiterated the experiment’; and the fatal manner in which the tradesman’s circular of to-day has ‘diffused’ (as Gibbon would say) the last ruins of his prose by post, is rather curiously illustrated thus: a little while ago some infamous face-wash was described in advertisements as a mixture of drugs brought across the desert by fleet dromedaries. And here is Gibbon’s Zenobia ‘mounting her fleetest dromedary’.

How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the nobler habits of his language: ‘The veteran legions of the Rhine and the Danube.’ What armies! what time! what space! what war! ‘Give back my legions, Varus!’ Give back our legions, Gibbon! We may count our regiments, but thou hast named, not counted, multitudes.

And when Gibbon ‘gratifies’ these legionaries, the polite word does but make them more historical: ‘After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the rebellious city.’ So that we do not forgive the corrupters who so scattered the word that burlesque was necessary for sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber confesses his ‘gratifying emotions of no common description’, Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon.

Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and of Johnson in the nearer, past, was the first writer of pure prose—the first by a long tale of years—to reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils of Gibbon; yet even he has one little patch of them: ‘A steep bank of earth that has been at all exposed to the weather contains in it ... features capable of giving high gratification to a careful observer.’ It is solitary in _Modern Painters_; it is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon.

But now I spoke of burlesque; and Dickens’s burlesque of style is admirable; there is also a burlesque of another and more innocent kind: when the author of a recent English work on the _Divine Comedy_ says that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante ‘such alleviation as circumstances would allow’, that also is a distant, a shattered Gibbon, a drift of Gibbon.

THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD

Miss Anna Seward should not be made answerable for the poetry of the late eighteenth century but that no office or responsibility could be conferred upon a more willing recipient; the honour is hardly more than she demanded from the respect of the age to come; and when she bequeathed her works to this great man for editing, her letters to that, and her name to posterity, she would have heard with the satisfaction of her conscious hopes, rather than with elation or surprise, that another century would charge her with all the accumulated opinions of 1799.

It is Mr. Lucas’s witty commentary[1] that recalls the name of Anna Seward and her claim to speak for those days—the time between two ages. I have no intention whatever to write of her with irony. Neither has Mr. Lucas yielded to the obvious temptation. There is something worthy of no slight respect in the justified security of her representative attitude. To deride her would be to deride that age, almost the latest that had full confidence, that took its historic place absolutely, without reluctance, suffered no misgiving, and did not disturb the order and course of history.

Footnote 1:

_A Swan and her Friends._

The centuries before our own have resembled a river whereof the direction is known, for it is still far from the tidal regions of its journey; so was the course of things in 1799; but in another fifty years the stream of the modern age had, as it were, begun to feel the tides. Waves have set in towards the head of the waters, or they double the current of the ebb. Waters breast waters, and travel against the journey of the stream, making brief excursions foot to foot with Time. Or there is a swing that sends the river turning with the tide, outstripping the pace of the natural pilgrimage.

So was the mind of the nineteenth century lifted and cradled, in suspense like the pause of a vehement heart; so did it tend to the past and set to the future, a tidal flux and influx that flew from the end, flowed from the goal, filled and brimmed upper reaches, revisited pastures of yesterday with eager waves, or ebbed with a run and made haste to leave them twice.

If this, then, was the tidal surge of the stream of letters and the arts, the end of the eighteenth century was almost the last date before the tides began to be perceptible. Almost—for perhaps the days when Walter Savage Landor was seriously discussing the merits of a poem by Miss Chose upon the Queen were really the last of the stream above tides. It may be that the perturbing shock first interrupted the onward flowing just after him. Smooth days, those—there were no doubts as to the way of the wave, and no need to watch the hour in order to know whether backward or forward its course was shaped. A stream is a stately stream above the tidal influence. And in Miss Anna Seward’s years the historic river of the mind was unchecked: it glided.

I think there never was a day of more orderly confidence. The ‘taste’, the laws, that had come to pass were the only laws and the only taste that were timely or possible. From the later Milton to Dryden, from Dryden to Addison, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Cowper, Crabbe—the way is a way that has no turning. We mark it with some mingled feelings, but surprise is not one of them. It is much the same in the matter of town architecture. The brick box that came to pass in the building of London streets, in the course of the same age, followed the time of dignity, beauty, and fancy which was Wren’s, and all the degrees thereto were in a kind of order. Doubtless, this is why we have learnt, in the fluttering centre of a renewed architectural town, to look with some degree of esteem upon the black brick box, if only it be truly of that time. And this not because it has a quiet civic majesty of approach to its door _à deux battants_, and passages and rooms proportionate within, but because that very exterior, which was the negation of architecture, was the last truly punctual style of building. And before its day they might be classical, but they were classical in a manner that was of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an intense spirit of the time. Perhaps the clearest sign of the times before the beating tides is this—their secure self-confidence; for they never doubted that their taste was the best and their criticism the result of accumulated judgement. Nay, in the dregs of times—in 1840—they had faith in their romances, Italian landscape, steel engraving, portraits with large eyes, in a word, in their ‘finish’ (the word is ominous); and because of their good faith we may deride even these with good humour.

Now, Miss Seward has an incontestable right to speak in the name of her contemporaries. There is hardly any one else who had all her good faith and solemnity. But first let me pause upon the title given to her with so much dullness and elegance—the Swan of Lichfield. The Swan of Avon had at least a river; he was never the Swan of Stratford-on-Avon. But with all respect to the poet who devised the name for Shakespeare, we may hold that it was not well inspired to suit a poet who sang in his middle days and was silent some time before he died. Let this, however, pass as the perversity of a phrase not without charm. It is the perversity, perhaps, that has made the name so dear and a household word. But at any rate a Swan of Avon could swim, he was not placed on a high road, or in a street, or within the precincts of a cathedral close. The Swan of Lichfield must have been named with an agreeable intention to confer a sweet dignity, and something of that faded dignity remains. The episcopal palace was her home, and she was called a Swan when she was in full career; they did not wait for a swan-song.

So close was she to the first beginnings of the tides that she blundered when she left much of her poetry to Sir Walter Scott, not doubting his willingness to serve her as editor. He did the work, with some considerable excisions, and gave the volumes to the world, but in an ‘aside’ he has called her poems execrable. So that she was all too confident of the immediate future. Dying early in the nineteenth century, she continued a little too long the assurance of the eighteenth; that was her sole fault. In regard to her own day she had none.

It seems even that ‘execrable’ is an unjust word. Miss Seward did not attempt to describe a moonlight night without forgoing her bed to match it with a phrase. Her sincerity is not without its literary value, for it succeeds in a measure; if not fully communicated, it is suggested, and this is no small thing. Moreover, there is a poetic thought—an implicit thought, an inclusion—in her sonnet on ‘December Morning’:

... Then to decree
The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold
To friendship or the Muse.

This surely is not without subtlety; nor is the final line, in which the reader and student is said to fill his days so full that though he be not old he ‘outlives the old’. A poet capable of this sense of present time (for here is no mere commonplace as to future influence or literary immortality; she means that the outliving is present)—a poet who had this thought might have been a fine poet; she used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

This is so high a specimen that I will quote no more. Over Miss Seward’s criticism it would be but too easy to make merry. ‘For the magnificent,’ she says of her century, ‘we have Akenside, Thomson, Collins, Dr. Johnson, Mason, Gray, Chatterton, Darwin, and the sublime Joanna Baillie; in the _simpler_ style, Shenstone, Beattie, Cowper, Crowe, Bowles, Burns, Bloomfield, Walter Scott and his school; Coleridge, Southey, and _their_ school. Poetry can have no nobler models than these supply to her various styles.’ She must have read the ‘Ancient Mariner’; she names Coleridge with Southey!

She had the eighteenth-century love for something that was _not_ purity of style. I think that the critics of our own day have hardly perceived the violence of an age that wrote ‘taught the doubtful battle where to rage’; ‘red Arbela’; ‘gory horrors crowned each dreadful day’; ‘the madding crowd’; ‘maddened o’er the land’; and a thousand other things in tatters. Miss Seward rebuked a writer for stealing ‘gulphy’ from Pope. ‘Gulphy’, she thought, was too good to steal. ‘He stole the picturesque epithet “gulphy” from Pope’:

And gulphy Xanthus foams along the field.

‘Than which a more poetic line,’ she decides, ‘was _never_ written.’

JOANNA BAILLIE

Would Joanna Baillie’s _Plays on the Passions_ have been so shunned by later generations and then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary Histories had remembered to mention the ‘Comedies on the Passions’ as well as the ‘Tragedies’? For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan of dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular completeness, wrote also a comedy; and one at least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the limits of eighteenth-century wit, that a modern manager might surely do worse than try his luck with it.

If any man should desire to possess the full intention of Joanna Baillie in her undertaking, in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it in a great many pages of most explicit introduction, with her own decisions on all such controversies as those touching the individual and the type, in tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such matters. But her few readers are, perhaps, content to take as read this treatise, with its good sense and its very small charm. She knows well what she is about, this at any rate is certain: and when she addresses herself with a most simple sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation of Hatred, Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her good faith and gravity, and the admirable manner in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly quiet the reader’s natural resentment and inclination to revolt.

With average good will and a fair readerly spirit, you may take these resolute tragedies, with their enormous _parti pris_, as works of no despicable art. Joanna Baillie would by no means permit you to slight her art. She has a passage in which she disclaims the crude intention of setting up the image of a single passion as the whole nature of a man. If there were no conflict, she says, there would be no force, for the passion would have nothing to compel, to break or bend, within the passionate heart. But neither will she allow the units of humankind to puzzle us on the tragic stage with their asymmetry of nature. Her jealous man has other impulses for jealousy to grapple with, but they serve his jealousy so. She will not endure, as she tells us, eccentricity.

Add to this manner of planning an eighteenth-century blank verse of the second order, and you have the drama which seemed Shakespearian to many.

It is not too much to say that any other drama—Antiquity and Shakespeare apart—would have had grave reason to be proud of Joanna Baillie. Her plays seem to be built up and locked together soundly; they close with a conventional but not obtrusive dignity. Knowing the Passion that has been the theme, you are apt to turn to the final speech over the hero’s long-vexed body, the comment that proclaims an impartial sentence in tragic peace, and you find no weaknesses; the silence follows upon no manifest failure. Vivacity among the smaller characters, and some of the strength of the ages (being the strength of tradition) in the greater, leave her tragedies in no mean place; leave them there too literally, for few are the readers to put them to any test or question. In their day they and the ‘metaphysical preface’, as Mrs. Thrale calls it, were the occasion of some sayings hard to our ears. ‘A masculine performance’ is the expected opinion, duly expressed, but we are not so well prepared for Sir Walter Scott’s reply to Lockhart: ‘If you wish to speak of a real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest genius of our country.’

It is the comedy following the tragedy of ‘Basil’ that takes my fancy. Love seems to be the passion in hand, and Joanna Baillie makes such pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme (her hero keeping the fine sensibilities, expressed with impassioned elegance, of Steele’s _Conscious Lovers_) that it is not easy to realize that she passed the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit in extreme old age. Of the preceding tragedy I will say merely that one may detect in it a fancy of Antiquity, as the eighteenth century dressed it, which is wonderfully pleasing: a little boy, Mirando, vexes the capricious heroine by naming her lovers; he creeps into her arms and begins to trouble her free heart, making guesses for sugar-plums. The reader likes to think that by a candid allegory, fit for Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of a gold-headed boy and a brown-eyed maid, Miss Joanna Baillie had given the name of Mirando to none other than Love himself, Cupid the bee.

But to the comedy. It is called ‘The Trial’, and turns upon the device, since repeated, perhaps, more than once, of shuffling a couple of heroines, so that she who is the heiress may disguise herself in the dresses of her penniless cousin, and receive impertinences, suffer neglect, and also test the true heart proffered in intention to her as a girl without wealth. It is the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp) that makes the charm of this happy play. They exchange names upon the wildest impulse consistent with their Georgian manners. They are audacious and decorous; confess their quest, which is for a ‘sensible lover’; busy themselves therein, make inquiries, hide behind screens, plot together the exposure of the fortune-hunter, acknowledge the full value of their own beauty, and this with a propriety all of its own time.

Agnes has the better wit as well as the gold, but the lesser beauty. She it is who lays the plot, and persuades the uncle, when he would fall out with her and her cousin, to second their game. He would not, he avers, make a holiday mummery for their pleasure, and his wig is too old for a ball. ‘Nay, don’t lay the fault upon the wig, good sir, for it is as youthful and as sly, and as saucy-looking as the best head of hair in the county. As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much curmudgeon-like austerity about it that young people fled before it, as, I daresay, the birds do now.’ As for the unlucky ‘fops’—the fops whom Joanna Baillie brings forward and overthrows in incredible effigy, after the fashion of the other satirists—Agnes, or, rather, her cousin Mariane, is troubled by many. Each one is mimicked in the dressing-room dialogues of these two enterprising rogues, and the appropriate humiliation is prepared for each with all precision. ‘Such a man must be laughed at, not scorned; contempt must be his portion.’ Mariane falls in: ‘He shall have it then. And as for his admirer and imitator ... any kind of bad treatment, I suppose, that happens to come into my head will be good enough for him.’ This last is pretty wit. So is this gipsy’s reply to her uncle’s reproof in regard to her dealings with yet another: ‘He would not let me have time to give a civil denial, but ran on planning settlements.... I could just get in my word with a flat refusal as he was about to provide for our descendants to the third generation.... He is only angry that he can’t take the law of me for laughing at him.’

Even when you hear of the ‘genteel young man, with dark grey eyes, and a sensible countenance’, and are at once aware that it is indeed _he_, this charming Agnes is hard to capture. As he walks backwards before her with a play of homage (for he too can be light) she mocks him with her dance, and dances him up the stage and out at the door. And if there were any living actress who had the eighteenth-century propriety it would be pretty to see her do it. The eighteenth-century baggages! They called their admirers by their surnames _tout court_, and their breeding was admirable.

Hardly less pleasant is the comedy on ‘Hatred’, in which a candidate for a parliamentary election hears good news about his detested rival: ‘Art thou sure that they laughed at him? In his own inn and over his own liquor? Ha, ha! ungrateful merry varlets!’

She, who had this humour, to be called ‘the highest genius in our country’, and to be so taken up with ‘the passions of human kind’! One of the eulogists of her tragic power calls her ‘undeviating’; yet she deviated delightfully.

THE CLASSIC NOVELIST

Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without a deliberate chapter—generally a family chapter. A masterly consciousness of her own authority gives her the right of control over her reader’s impatience or slovenliness. The order of things is hers, not his, and he must wait her time for wit. Hers are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls ‘measures of address’. Her openings imply a firmer hold upon narrative than later novelists, with their verbless first sentences, their ‘he’ and ‘she’ for persons to be named later, thought to grasp at. The moderns would be much depressed were they required to open thus: ‘The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.’ We consent to read the dismal opening; we endure the pother of the unmusical words; we tolerate it all because we know that in a page or two the respectable Dashwoods will be deprived of some of the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We know that Miss Austen will make of her personages good sport for her reader, her sense of derision being equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines. For another example, would any later author, having a Mrs. Bennet to deride for our delight, consent to introduce her thus: ‘Mrs. Bennet was a woman of mean understanding’? But in this case Miss Austen’s art loses nothing, even by the chill of that presentation.

That Jane works upon very small matters is hardly worth saying, and certainly not worth complaining of. Things are not trivial merely because they are small; but that which makes life, art, and work trivial is a triviality of relations. Mankind lives by vital relations; and if these are mean, so is the life, so is the art that expresses them because it can express no more. With Miss Austen love, vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice, are infinitely trivial. There is also a constant relation of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people in her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen seem to be watching them, and her curiosity is intense indeed; she realizes their colds—her female characters take a great many colds—so that one seems to hear her narrate the matter in a muffled voice, but not precisely because of her sympathy. That such close observation can work on without tenderness must be a proof of this author’s exceeding cynicism.

Triviality of relations among Miss Austen’s personages does not prevent a certain kind of intensity. Lying and spite among her women work at close quarters. With the men we hear of a somewhat wider range; there is, in the case of one justly rejected suitor, a suspicion, a rumour of ‘Sunday travelling’; the accusation is not precisely brought home.

No one who has not read _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Emma_ is able to say that he knows worldliness in its own proper home. There, ‘engaging the general good opinion of surrounding acquaintance’ (the mouthful of thick words!) worldliness keeps its dowdy and hopeless state and ceremony. There is, in almost every second page of Miss Austen, a detestable thing called, in the language of the day, ‘consequence’. No slang of our own time, by the way, has ever misused a word more foolishly. To ‘consequence’, and to the heroine’s love of it, is promptly sacrificed all that might have seemed the beginnings or suggestions of spirituality. There is more that is spiritual in the heroines of to-day—in the ‘female animal’ herself—than in Anne, in Harriet, in Jane, in Fanny, or in any other of the young women who gossip through the pages of these famous novels. The men gossip, too; they are minutely occupied with the engagements, colds, arrowroot, tea-parties, and correspondence of the women.

All this, it may be said, relates to Miss Austen’s subjects and not to her perfect art. But Miss Austen’s art and her matter are made for one another. Miss Austen’s art is not of the highest quality; it is of an admirable secondary quality. Her gentle spinsterly manner prevents us from perceiving at first how much of her derision—for she is mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour—is caricature of a rather gross sort. ‘Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea with all the philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every day.’ Far finer is Miss Austen’s success when she gains her effect by delicate persistence in reiteration. This is the way in which she enjoys Mr. Woodhouse, the old gentleman in whose eyes every woman who has had the good luck to marry out of his tedious house is a ‘poor dear’. His compassion makes excellent sport, of a kind, by the effect of cumulation. The author’s patience and vigilance are, indeed, perfect, insomuch as they never neglect or fail to perceive an opportunity for giving the turn to his phrase, the tone to his word. And the whole thing would advance, by the slow degrees of this method, and close in a little masterpiece, but that something of the fineness, as well as something of the increase, of the result is now and then marred by Miss Austen’s own explanation. She prepares her reader deliberately; she instructs him at the outset in what he would have become convinced of at the end.

Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. ‘Who could tell’—Miss Austen is presenting the thoughts of Mrs. John Dashwood in regard to her unwelcome sisters-in-law—‘that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough.’ About the following little sentence there is something of the wit of surprise. It describes the joys of a young woman of the less admirable sort, lately married: ‘They passed some months in great happiness at Dawlish; for she had many relations and old acquaintances to cut.’ Miss Austen has a word in dismissing the inconstant Mr. Willoughby: ‘His wife was not always out of humour; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.’

The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest in Miss Austen’s indifference to children. They hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as children; they are her subjects as spoilt children, and as children through whom a mother may receive flattery from her designing acquaintance, and may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. The novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little girl of three. She sharpens her pen over the work. The passage is too long to quote, but the reader may refer to _Sense and Sensibility_. In this coldness or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.

Most dully expressive are Miss Austen’s country houses. One description places her people in a few words in the scene that suits them with a quite subtle suitableness; and the thing is presented in words which, here again, by their very lack of music define mediocrity: ‘Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. The pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and, like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding round a plantation, led to the front.’ There, there in the modern-built mansion was the goal of the hopes of heroines. To the shrubbery they betook themselves, in a ‘hurry of spirits’, or other limited forms of emotion that might make them wish to escape remark. In and out pottered the men—the men of the period, the men of so strange a sex. In the tolerably extensive grounds walked ‘consequence’, and its wheels marked the smooth gravel that wound round the plantation.

Before quitting the noble subject of ‘consequence’ let it be noted that Emma had the following hesitation about a youth she was inclined to admire (Emma was not twenty-one): ‘Of pride, indeed, there was perhaps scarcely enough; his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, however, of the evil he was holding cheap.’ It is an unheavenly world.

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

An old book called _The Mirror of the Months_, published anonymously in 1826, seemed, at a glance, to a random reader, to contain little thin springs of thoughts that walked the world in volume and dignity fifty years later. There was nothing else to hint that the book was the work of the father of a poet, but the father of one among all poets was manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader found it attributed, in a bookseller’s catalogue, to P. G. Patmore.

The earliest or the directest spring is called the source of a river; but we know not how far apart and on what scattered watersheds rose the tributary waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning and gathering stream, and charged it with rains of the four courts of heaven. It need not dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be something so slight as—for example—a passage on the month of February in _The Mirror of the Months_ (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode on ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ of Coventry Patmore was the ultimate fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant to find a small thought, lying cold in a minor mind, to be the certain beginning of a great thought in an illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet insignificant origin of what we love is more surprising than would be a stranger beginning. Perhaps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we had been too ready to believe that what is original is strong, and what is original is warm. It was easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming more composed, of a passion gradually losing light and flame, than of this increase, kindling, and quickening. It is because the small source of ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ is really authentic that its inadequacy does little less than startle us. At any rate the incident is one that may instruct us in the history of that second step which is momentous in intellectual things.

Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of heredity seem thereby to gain in mystery; and some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation? And, in like manner, the bond of fathers and sons seems to become somewhat more intelligible if we add to the comparatively easy thought of the responsibility of a father for the mind of a child some confession of the retrospective answer to be exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the child is the fulfilment of what was but prophesied in the father, whom the son at last justifies.

In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly. _The Mirror of the Months_ would evidently have been graver, fresher, and more frank, in thought and in English alike, but for the example of the excessive amiability that makes Leigh Hunt’s poem of _Rimini_, among others, ridiculous. It was a mere fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult to imagine that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better simplicity than the simplicity of the universal literary smile he practised in his books. There is something that does but ape the humane, the liberal, the gracious. It is an early nineteenth-century attempt at the favour and prettiness of the Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the Elizabethan ‘horrors’.

Yet without ‘horrors’, without a real murder among the dances, without royal madness embowered, and noble distraction wearing flowers, without the wild convention, without the noble spirit, wilder than nature—a barbaric artifice outfacing nature—what were the Elizabethan favour and prettiness worth? Nay, they would never have been there but to adorn frightful deeds. The men of a hundred years ago took one part and left the other, and were delighted in the civilized choice they had the grace—as they held it—to make, in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal approval, of the great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not being fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read _Rimini_ until a year or two ago, and now already the most conspicuous memory I have of the story of that poem is the memory of an incidental picnic.

It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may have exaggerated the cause of its own derision—and that the event sung in the canto in question may have been some modification of a picnic; as it were a mitigated picnic; I have not the poem for reference. Nevertheless, there stands a picnic of some sort—a contribution of the English man of letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the antecedents of Dante’s Hell.

A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the trees, are there. I am quite certain, at any rate, that the place chosen therefor is called by Leigh Hunt, in so many words, ‘a rural spot’.

A far greater man than Leigh Hunt—nay, there is no common measure of comparison—has, by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment of our literary history, also made the same Francesca da Rimini the subject of some entirely nineteenth-century feeling. I speak of Walter Savage Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the _Imaginary Conversations_ (the _Pentameron_). What he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with genius; but—one must have the courage to say so—in error as complete as the little writer’s. The reader may be reminded of that tender page about Francesca: ‘She stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says, “Galeotto is the name of the book,” fancying by this timorous little flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her. “Galeotto is the name of the book.” “What matters that?” “And of the writer.” “Or that either?” At last she disarms him; but how? “_That_ day we read no more.” Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius.’ And this judgement, for greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of Boccaccio, because he loved him, and intended that he should speak from Landor’s heart; and so, indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not ours, and there is no possible exchange of hearts. Are we candid if we persuade ourselves to find these pauses in the speech of Francesca? I protest that I read the line in one cold breath of almost indifferent anger. ‘The name of the book’, as Landor has it, is not in Dante at all. ‘A pander was that book, and the writer thereof,’ is simply what the Francesca of Dante says.[2]

Footnote 2:

Francesca calls the book a Galeotto and him who wrote it a Galeotto,
because ‘Galeotto’ was then the synonym for ‘pander’. Galeotto
(Gallehault) was he who brought Lancilotto and Ginevra to their first
sin, according to the _Tavola Rotonda_, a romance popular in
Francesca’s time. Dante had none of the pretty and complex meanings
imputed to him by Landor. Dante, the insistent moralist, simply
intended a simple warning against dangerous reading; he was in this
obedient to a Bull (in 1313) whereby the Pope condemned _La Tavola
Rotonda_—one of the earliest books to be thus banned.

To come back to _The Mirror of the Months_. This is a volume so full of charm that it is something less than just to reproach it so hastily with Leigh Hunt’s universal literary smile. Something of that it has, indeed, but it has also the smile of spirit and that of sweetness. Of two wits of yesterday two phrases, for example, are familiar in admiring quotation: ‘The age of indiscretion’, and ‘Yes, nature is creeping up’, or, in another form, ‘Not like his portrait? He _will_ be like it.’ Every one recognizes the phrases so well that there is perhaps not a reader in England who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now ‘the age of indiscretion’ is in _The Mirror of the Months_, where it got no fame, or little; and ‘Nature is creeping up’ is fairly anticipated in the passage: ‘Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water, and stand half the day there stock still, in exact imitation of Cuyp’s pictures.’ Take this description of the parent birds’ business of bringing out their young broods and dismissing them, ‘while they (the parents) proceed in their periodical duty of providing new flocks of the same kind of “fugitive pieces”, as regularly as the editors of a magazine.’ And this for a mere laugh: ‘The only specific reason why I object to March is that she drives hares mad; which is a great fault.’

Moreover, the procession and recession of the year is here noted in the garden and in the open field of England by senses full of spirit. The separate and atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other grain is well expressed in the phrase where the oats are said to hang ‘like raindrops in the air’. And the author has eyes for the scarcely perceptible and most slender growth that in July pricks through the short and level turf and makes the grassy downs live in the winds, as poplars make the woods. ‘April’, says this forgotten writer, ‘is worth two Mays, because it tells of May’—a subtlety somewhat like that of his son’s minor fancies.

And finally another small spring of the poetry to come in the following generation is in the mere phrase ‘The pomp of health and the lustre of loveliness’. Coventry Patmore, with the poet’s finer verbal art, had afterwards

So much simplicity of mind
In such a pomp of loveliness.

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

There are some writers whom the judicious reader forgets by name, with the express intention of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no slight care, and has regard to all the distinctive characteristics of the one to be forgotten, effacing him with every possible precision, good aim, and attention. Others, again, it is more convenient to forget in little companies, according to their ‘school’; and there is no great precision necessary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, ‘into the brown’, for they go close-ranked.

Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be virtually forgotten—and there is hardly a doubt as to that—the act has to be a single and separate one. And yet this measure of distinction is not quite fairly come by. He gains it chiefly because he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the early nineteenth century, and so gained a kind of isolation. But inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like Keats, and lyrics to be like Shelley, he might disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble. He was not without talent, and he should have our cordial pity for living in a time when the inspiration of English poetry was withdrawn. When—for a far longer period—this had befallen before, there had been no one living aware of the lapse. When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of what had happened, and knew all the conditions in which his own life had come to pass. He may remind you of a poor rabbit that came to consciousness in the midst of a physiological experiment. Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as the trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of being an Englishman during a pause of poetry that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary consciousness. We know the shortness of the time, but if the struggle of his dismay was violent, and if he caught at the past—the immediate past and the distant—with a frantic gesture, shall we deride him who did not know the future that is now our past? The gap hardly shows in our view of the mountain range of poets.

If Beddoes thought that he was called upon to live a citizen of an England with no present literature, it is not wonderful that he should have been a desperate man. It was desperate to be so unwilling to confess that Keats would write no more couplets as to make this after Keats was dead:

And none went near; none in his sweep would venture,
For you might feel that he was but the centre
Of an inspired round, &c.

It is not, perhaps, quite Keats’s rhyme; but the helpless leaning on the rhyme, the unbraced couplings, the slipping, the giving way of those two poor props of lines ill-built, are all proper to _Endymion_. So are the same things in this couplet, where the character of the words chosen for rhyming is also, almost subtly, a piece of Keats:

Thou know’st it not; it is a fearful coop—
Dark, cold, and horrible—a blinded loop
In Pluto’s, &c.

Here, again, is a passage so full of all the errors of this deplorable way of couplet writing that it shall be put upon record here as a final warning before it is finally forgotten. The passage begins in the course of a line (and therefore after another wretched couplet has fallen down just above), and the phrase, quite unable to stop itself, needs two and a half more couplets to come before it is precipitated, and reaches a stable equilibrium by coming to the bottom:

There sits,
Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits
Of this rag’s daughter, paper, &c.

Beddoes studied Elizabethan blank verse, and achieved no small measure of imitation, if hardly the astonishing success of these unheroic couplets. In _The Bride’s Tragedy_ he imitates more than the versification. The large passions, removed from the conditions of human life and yet closing in that human accident—madness—the playing with flowers and prettiness in the horrors of a murder, the curiously aloof appeal to the intimate replies of pity and terror; the state, the royalty; the barbaric convention, the savage and noble unnaturalness, where naturalness would seem to be the looked-for motive, justification, crown, and end—for the sake of these Elizabethan characters Beddoes wrote his tragedy, and, but for a wavering into sentimentalism (less than any of his contemporaries would have shown, no doubt), he would have made something wonderfully like his model. But sentimentalism was generally a vice of his time from which Beddoes was strangely free. It is in his imitation of that inimitable favour and prettiness, and in the kind of aristocratic madness of a song, that the mistake comes to pass—the mistake of this overwrought decoration for the sentiment that is so near and yet so unlike to it. When Hesperus, who has murdered his bride and is to die, lies down before his distraught father and covers himself with the loose earth, he undoubtedly does an Elizabethan action. And when his father, dying of grief, lies down beside him, that too is Elizabethan, more Elizabethan still than the other. But when Hesperus says:

But I shall die the better for this meeting,

then, it seems to me, the feeling is modern; and so it is elsewhere. Then it seems inconsistent to reproach Beddoes because he is not modern enough, and writes of dragons and not of men. But yet, who has not acknowledged the effect of Rossetti’s phrase, ‘lidless eyes in hell’? That human eyes should ever be lidless—that is Rossetti’s frightful thought. Beddoes also has ‘lidless eyes’, but he gives them to a dragon, and it matters less than nothing that a dragon should have lidless eyes. Coleridge, by the way, had ‘her lidless dragon eyes’.

Neither passion nor sweetness is frequent with Beddoes, but once or twice in the course of many lyrics on the subject of death he apprehends Shelley’s thought of death, and sometimes there is a Shelley-shyness, an escape in the moment of capture, or an alien nestling and murmuring, close and strange:

What hast caught, then? What hast caught?
Nothing but a poet’s thought!

There is something more than his customary fancy in his phrase for love, ‘Bee of hearts’; and in the almost tender song, _Dream-Pedlary_:

If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell,
Some a light sigh.

This, too, of a sad romantic story:

Like a ruffled nightingale
Balanced upon dewy wings,
Through the palace weeps the tale,
Leaving tears where’er she sings.

This is a strong image in a fragment, _Concealed Joy_:

Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;
But as I looked it sank into his eye,
Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
Into a darkening hole.

The poetry of madness is, needless to say, one of the peculiar choruses of English literature. To the centuries of wild conventions, of distracted majesties, of artifice outfacing nature and astonishing the untamed heart, to the greatness and the liberty of the English fancy, the world owes those musical light discords, from the song of Tom o’Bedlam, quoted by Isaac D’Israeli, to the mad song by Aubrey de Vere, and the stanzas added to the first-named by Francis Thompson; for he seems to be the latest of a long line of English poets to make music for the distracted. Beddoes addresses himself to the kind of resolute pathos that set all these singers to singing. For the pathos was most resolute; however sweetly it sounded at the full, it had cold origins. Imagination and simplicity, not passion, made all its virtue. I cannot think that Beddoes in _Emily’s Plaint_ has fancy or simplicity fine enough for the addition of this song to the heart-broken, heart-released lyrics of Ophelia and her sisters.

Beddoes’ lyrics of death are rather German than magical—I feel these adjectives to be somewhat antithetical in this connexion; and they call him ‘grim’. But he lacked humour. His reference to a place—

That’s not genteel to tell,
Where demonesses go to church,

is the best thing I can find in that temper.

GEORGE DARLEY

It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten poet, his contemporary, the name of violence. Being conscious of the brief and unimportant pause of poetic inspiration during which they lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering whether it were to the sentimental L.E.L. or to the violent George Darley that the trust of English poetry should be committed. It was, as we now confess with peace of mind, to neither; and there is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question—to the effect that all is not lost because an interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in the natural perspective, and the utterance of that anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon sounds of more moment.

George Darley’s violence, such as it was, had its way principally in a choice of words intended to retrieve the language from the Teutonism that began its fashion before he died in the middle of the century. He apparently did not hold the English language to be finally closed in, and in this he agreed with other and greater men who have used all their strength, at times with a single hand, to hold that door open. But perhaps Darley was not always careful enough of the difference between scholarly Latinisms and those whereof a poet in his haste might not stop to test the doubtful scholarship.