The Rhythm of Life Part 2

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy, temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man of letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the 'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the seventies and onwards. He represented the little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--an excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in words. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an a.s.sumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the reader. The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think of my country?'

Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a delicacy of selection not surpa.s.sed in the critical work of this critical century. Those small volumes, _Among My Books_ and _My Study Windows_, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism is the rarest thing in them. I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr.

Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one.

. . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art,' and so forth. One wonders how Lowell read the pa.s.sage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English writer's supreme art--art that declares itself and would not be hidden.

But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in sentencing. His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is famous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A Good Word for Winter.' His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich. The birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but his paris.h.i.+oners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does he become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile. And all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil somewhat n.o.ble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, he has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word new for the day's work. He gave to the language, and did not take from it; it gained by him, and lost not. There are writers of English now at work who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them on that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they are glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them.

Nevertheless Lowell was no poet. To accept his verse as a poet's would be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in a lover of poetry. Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of his poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for having trusted to reason and to criticism. His trust was justified--if such justification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people who apparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the second place, and an essayist incidentally. It is hard to believe that he failed in instinct about himself. More probably he was content to forego it when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so willing. They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we reluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded? Such reluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap sanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may live; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched the present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of literature, with a studiousness full of heart.

DOMUS ANGUSTA

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well explained has it ever been.

'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm That I have to be hurt,'

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.

Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain capacity we may a.s.suredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do. Who, for instance, but trusts more n.o.bly for knowing the full word of his confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate syllable of his tenderness? There is a 'pledging of the word,' in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar sanction. And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united as thought and the word. Almost--not quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power.

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the familiar. It is destructive because it not only closes but contradicts life. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the one improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a true destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.

It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion. Mrs.

Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is predurable because he is not completed. His humours are strangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die; for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I thank my fellow-mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at. But the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the book.

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.

Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid--wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world? Not I, by this heavenly light.

REJECTION

Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a penitential or a vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique world in which life, art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; for us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things.

We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not let even a master's work pa.s.s unfanned and unpurged. Even among his phrases one shall be taken and the other left. For he may unawares have allowed the habitualness that besets this mult.i.tudinous life to take the pen from his hand and to write for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our refusals. Or he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to force a sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully pausing, would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of its own in human history. By depreciating our language it has stimulated change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise. Our rejection must be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it. It makes us shrewder than we wish to be. And, indeed, the whole endless action of refusal shortens the life we could desire to live. Much of our resolution is used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision.

Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say with what loss to our treasury of quietness? We are defrauded of our interior ignorance, which should be a place of peace. We are forced to confess more articulately than befits our convention with ourselves. We are hurried out of our reluctances. We are made too much aware. Nay, more: we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes almost inevitable. As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of refusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear! 'We live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in the iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy there hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other.

If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves to joy. We withhold, we close. Having denied many things that have approached us, we deny ourselves to many things. Thus does _il gran rifiuto_ divide and rule our world.

Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice. Rejection has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured. When we garnish a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more various, than might haunt the dreams of decorators. There is no limit to our rejections. And the unconsciousness of the decorators is in itself a cause of pleasure to a mind generous, forbearing, and delicate. When we dress, no fancy may count the things we will none of. When we write, what hinders that we should refrain from Style past reckoning? When we marry--. Moreover, if simplicity is no longer set in a world having the great and beautiful quality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality of refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection.

One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative has offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement is not negative, because it must be compa.s.sed by many negations. It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exacts experience. No slight or easy charge, then, is committed to such of us as, having apprehension of these things, fulfil the office of exclusion.

Never before was a time when derogation was always so near, a daily danger, or when the reward of resisting it was so great. The simplicity of literature, more sensitive, more threatened, and more important than other simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax the good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.

THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE

The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itself formed under too luxurious ideals. This is the evil work of that _little more_ which makes its insensible but persistent additions to styles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when unluckily man becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and too deliberate in his arrangement of it. The landscape has need of moderation, of that fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and, in short, of a return towards the ascetic temper. The English way of landowning, above all, has made for luxury. Naturally the country is fat. The trees are thick and round--a world of leaves; the hills are round; the forms are all blunt; and the gra.s.s is so deep as to have almost the effect of snow in smoothing off all points and curving away all abruptness. England is almost as blunt as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victorian cast-iron work. And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by our invention of the country park. There all is curves and ma.s.ses. A little more is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest glade, and for increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to idleness. Not a tree that is not impenetrable, inarticulate. Thick soil below and thick growth above cover up all the bones of the land, which in more delicate countries show brows and hollows resembling those of a fine face after mental experience. By a very intelligible paradox, it is only in a landscape made up for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved. Much beauty there must needs be where there are vegetation and the seasons. But even the seasons, in park scenery, are marred by the _little too much_: too complete a winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, an autumn too demonstrative.

'Seek to have less rather than more.' It is a counsel of perfection in _The Imitation of Christ_. And here, undoubtedly, is the secret of all that is virile and cla.s.sic in the art of man, and of all in nature that is most harmonious with that art. Moreover, this is the secret of Italy. How little do the tourists and the poets grasp this latter truth, by the way--and the artists! The legend of Italy is to be gorgeous, and they have her legend by rote. But Italy is slim and all articulate; her most characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded with paint. Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf--these make keen lines of slender vegetation. And they own the seasons by a gentle confession.

Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous proclamation of summer in the English woods, we would follow June to this subtler South: even to the Campagna, where the cycle of the seasons pa.s.ses within such narrow limitations that insensitive eyes scarcely recognise it. In early spring there is a fresher touch of green on all the s.p.a.ces of gra.s.s, the distance grows less mellow and more radiant; by the coming of May the green has been imperceptibly dimmed again; it blushes with the mingled colours of minute and numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lines longer than those of ocean billows. This is the desert blossoming like a rose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the mult.i.tudinous and various flower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the wilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of harmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter. All this fine chromatic scale pa.s.ses within such modest boundaries that it is accused as a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have a still more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea.

The pa.s.sing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour to the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the sapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, so far from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary senses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all fulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that is lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions. He would find adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search for words for the white. A white Mediterranean is not in the legend.

Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea is the flower of the breathless midsummer. And in its clear, silent waters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucent living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl.

But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in agricultural Italy that the _little less_ makes so undesignedly, and as it were so inevitably, for beauty. The country that is formed for use and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a lesson in literature! How feelingly it persuades us that all except a very little of the ornament of letters and of life makes the dulness of the world.

The tenderness of colour, the beauty of series and perspective, and the variety of surface, produced by the small culture of vegetables, are among the charms that come unsought, and that are not to be found by seeking--are never to be achieved if they are sought for their own sake.

And another of the delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality.

The soil may be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own. He has embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat in the light shadows of olive leaves. Thanks to the metayer land-tenure, man's heart, as well as his strength, is given to the ground, with his hope and his honour. Louis Blanc's 'point of honour of industry' is a conscious impulse--it is not too much to say--with most of the Tuscan contadini; but as each effort they make for their master they make also for the bread of their children, it is no wonder that the land they cultivate has a look of life. But in all colour, in all luxury, and in all that gives material for picturesque English, this lovely scenery for food and wine and raiment has that _little less_ to which we desire to recall a rhetorical world.

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES

To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than praise of their imagery. Imagery is the natural language of their poetry. Without a parable she hardly speaks. But undoubtedly there is now and then a poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too vitally, too sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes for love of the beautiful image. Those rare moments are simple, and their simplicity makes one of the reader's keenest experiences. Other simplicities may be achieved by lesser art, but this is transcendent simplicity. There is nothing in the world more costly. It vouches for the beauty which it transcends; it answer for the riches it forbears; it implies the art which it fulfils. All abundance ministers to it, though it is so single.

And here we get the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of art at this perfection. All the faculties of the poet are used for preparing this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed.

The loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr.

Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, only to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be impossible were they less glorious--are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice and waste.

But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's work with praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human emotion has been in action. Thus _Departure_, _If I were Dead_, _A Farewell_, _Eurydice_, _The Toys_, _St. Valentine's Day_--though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group themselves apart as the innermost of the poet's achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images, and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray--the beauties of poetic art. Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes, never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos. If any other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know it. Love and sorrow are pure in _The Unknown Eros_; and its author has not refused even the cup of terror. Against love often, against sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts. It is only the approach of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for pa.s.sion defends himself in the twinkling of an eye. But through nearly the whole of Coventry Patmore's poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch.

Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch. That is, his capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is more than the capacity of other men. He endures therefore what they could but will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they cannot apprehend.

Thus, to have studied _The Unknown Eros_ is to have had a certain experience--at least the impa.s.sioned experience of a compa.s.sion; but it is also to have recognised a soul beyond our compa.s.sion.

What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon our knowing. He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader's error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading. That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable. It has the obscurity of profound clear waters. What the poet chiefly secures to us is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception, does but rehea.r.s.e the action of the union of G.o.d with humanity--that there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind. When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the truths of the love of G.o.d. The thought grows gay in the three _Psyche_ odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being somewhat reluctant.

How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to but a slow partic.i.p.ation. Perhaps because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.

But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine allusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is pa.s.sionate has much of the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of the great for the small is the pa.s.sionate love; the upward love hesitates and is fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the child is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses.' It might be drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.

The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in pa.s.sages of description, such as the landscape lines in _Amelia_ and elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary. The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects--we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the most modern of adjectives--and call them topical. Here a.s.suredly there is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--reluctance.

If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the musical time). Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time measures--if for no other reason, for this: that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed.

Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the irregular metre of _The Unknown Eros_ is happily used except for the large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called. _Lycidas_, the _Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, the _Intimations_, and Emerson's _Threnody_, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste. So with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr. Coventry Patmore's series. A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his versification. And what movement of words has ever expressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a celestial line--the eighth in the ode _To the Unknown Eros_? When we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with something of a jerk. And this adding--as, for instance, of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as _A Farewell_.

It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a boat. In _The Angel in the House_, and other earlier poems, Mr.