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The Spirit Of Place And Other Essays

12 Temmuz 2007

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

Contents:

The Spirit of Place

Mrs. Dingley

Solitude

The Lady of the Lyrics

July

Wells

The Foot

Have Patience, Little Saint

The Ladies of the Idyll

A Derivation

A Counterchange

Rain

Letters of Marceline Valmore

The Hours of Sleep

The Horizon

Habits and Consciousness

Shadows

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets

have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too

much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her

inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The

bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake

together a nightingale’s notes, or strike or drive them into haste,

nor can you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your

turn, whereas wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere

movement and hustling. I have known some grim bells, with not a

single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human

festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop

of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry

highwayman.

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the

bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed time to fly–wild

prisoners–by twos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives–

one or twelve taking wing–they are sudden, they are brief, they are

gone; they are delivered from the close hands of this actual

present. Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the

sky; they are away, hours of the past.

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most

surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of

France when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be

forgotten than the bells in “Parsifal.” They mingle with the sound

of feet in unknown streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower;

they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, which is

to be seen in the shapes of the fields and the manner of the crops,

to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the breath of the earth,

overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith,

calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks its local

tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and

greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you

know how familiar, how childlike, how lifelong it is in the ears of

the people. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they

must be. Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a

dialect.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its

subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place,

seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents,

its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime,

having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one

living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place–not to

be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never

absent, without variation–lurks in the by-ways and rules over the

towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always

in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within

its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Long white

roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give

promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular

and unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy

to be made. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay

such a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the

pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for

antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know

one another; nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality than

a child. He is well used to words and voices that he does not

understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when

those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as

homely and as old as lullabies.

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in

gay measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a

wedding–bells that would step to quite another and a less agile

march with a better grace–there are belfries that hold far sweeter

companies. If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a

most curious local immemorial music in many a campanile on the

heights. Their way is for the ringers to play a tune on the

festivals, and the tunes are not hymn tunes or popular melodies, but

proper bell-tunes, made for bells. Doubtless they were made in

times better versed than ours in the sub-divisions of the arts, and

better able to understand the strength that lies ready in the mere

little submission to the means of a little art, and to the limits–

nay, the very embarrassments–of those means. If it were but

possible to give here a real bell-tune–which cannot be, for those

melodies are rather long–the reader would understand how some

village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for

the bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy,

and what effect of liberty.

These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the

world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.

The belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century,

the time when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But,

needless to say, this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy.

At that time they must have had foundries for bells of tender

voices, and pure, warm, light, and golden throats, precisely tuned.

The hounds of Theseus had not a more just scale, tuned in a peal,

than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send

them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the order of the game

of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by man this is by

far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from the great

churches. Giotto’s coloured tower in Florence, that carries the

bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi’s silent dome, does

not ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness,

depth, and dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly

fills the country.

The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble

bells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can

therefore hear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no

other bells in earshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set

open to the cloud, on a festa morning, to let fly those soft-voiced

flocks, but the nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our

local tune is uninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little,

secluded, sequestered art of composing melodies for bells–charming

division of an art, having its own ends and means, and keeping its

own wings for unfolding by law–dwells in these solitary places. No

tunes in a town would get this hearing, or would be made clear to

the end of their frolic amid such a wide and lofty silence.

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own;

the custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the

nervous tourist complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact

he is made to hear an honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous

tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of

place does not signal to him to go and find it among innumerable

hills, where one by one, one by one, the belfries stand and play

their tunes. Variable are those lonely melodies, having a differing

gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air is played for the burial

of a villager.

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that

seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten

when the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in

thought to earth’s untethered sounds. This is Milton’s curfew, that

sways across one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry–

“the wide-watered.”

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to

call her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to

Stella, with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved “better a

thousand times than life, as hope saved.” MD, without full stops,

Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing

it. “MD sometimes means Stella alone,” says one of many editors.

“The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley,”

says another, “but it does not require to be said that it was really

for Stella’s sake alone that they were penned.” Not so. “MD” never

stands for Stella alone. And the editor does not yet live who shall

persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift

loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most

delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the

“she” and “her” of every letter. And this shall be a paper of

reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her

honours. In love “to divide is not to take away,” as Shelley says;

and Dingley’s half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any

whole, and takes nothing from the whole of Stella’s half. But the

sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He

has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her.

Sly sentimentalist–he finds her irksome. Through one of his most

modern representatives he has but lately called her a “chaperon.” A

chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been

pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this

respect been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were “saucy

charming MD,” “saucy little, pretty, dear rogues,” “little monkeys

mine,” “little mischievous girls,” “nautinautinautidear girls,”

“brats,” “huzzies both,” “impudence and saucy-face,” “saucy noses,”

“my dearest lives and delights,” “dear little young women,” “good

dallars, not crying dallars” (which means “girls”), “ten thousand

times dearest MD,” and so forth in a hundred repetitions. They are,

every now and then, “poor MD,” but obviously not because of their

own complaining. Swift called them so because they were mortal; and

he, like all great souls, lived and loved, conscious every day of

the price, which is death.

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with

his summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately

put them asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than

foolishly play havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most

secluded thing in the world. “I am weary of friends, and

friendships are all monsters, except MD’s;” “I ought to read these

letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle

little Dingley to read, for I think I mend: but methinks,” he adds,

“when I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all

the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD.”

Again: “I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you must know,

are not women.” “God Almighty preserve you both and make us happy

together.” “I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may

never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives.”

“Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has

not had one happy day since he left you, as hope saved.”

With them–with her–he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the

bar of St. James’s coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-

day, and was “in pain except he saw MD’s little handwriting.” He

hid with them in the long labours of these exquisite letters every

night and morning. If no letter came, he comforted himself with

thinking that “he had it yet to be happy with.” And the world has

agreed to hide under its own manifold and lachrymose blunders the

grace and singularity–the distinction–of this sweet romance.

“Little, sequestered pleasure-house”–it seemed as though “the many

could not miss it,” but not even the few have found it.

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella

should be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from

Swift. But day and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD’s

little letters; he waits upon “her” will: “I shall make a sort of

journal, and when it is full I will send it whether MD writes or

not; and so that will be pretty.” “Naughty girls that will not

write to a body!” “I wish you were whipped for forgetting to send.

Go, be far enough, negligent baggages.” “You, Mistress Stella,

shall write your share, and then comes Dingley altogether, and then

Stella a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with something

handsome and genteel, as `your most humble cumdumble.’” But Scott

and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly sorry for Stella.

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task:

“Here is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must

be writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!” “I must go write idle

things, and twittle twattle.” “These saucy jades take up so much of

my time with writing to them in the morning.” Is it not a stealthy

wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley that she should be stripped of all

these ornaments to her name and memory? When Swift tells a woman in

a letter that there he is “writing in bed, like a tiger,” she should

go gay in the eyes of all generations.

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will

not let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry

come up! Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages

(taken very seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes,

then? That would have been no ill share for Dingley. But no,

forsooth, Dingley is allowed nothing.

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from

her. For now and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he

invariably drops those initials and writes “Stella” or “Ppt” for the

one, and “D” or “Dingley” for the other. There is no exception to

this anywhere. He is anxious about Stella’s “little eyes,” and

about her health generally; whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he

thinks, will not catch the “new fever,” because she is not well;

“but why should D escape it, pray?” And Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for

her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford. “I doubt, Madam

Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not so bad as

Stella; she tells thumpers.” Stella is often reproved for her

spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is

a puzzle-headed woman, like another. “What do you mean by my fourth

letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth,

goody Blunder?” “Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent

slut to except a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No,

little Dingley, I am always in bed by twelve, and I take great care

of myself.” “You are a pretending slut, indeed, with your `fourth’

and `fifth’ in the margin, and your `journal’ and everything. O

Lord, never saw the like, we shall never have done.” “I never saw

such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything.” Swift is

insistently grateful for their inquiries for his health. He pauses

seriously to thank them in the midst of his prattle. Both women–

MD–are rallied on their politics: “I have a fancy that Ppt is a

Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer.”

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in

his lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in

Ireland. “He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible

litter; but I say nothing; I am as tame as a clout.”

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the

ignominy, in a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to

Swift as an unclaimed wife; so far so good. But two hundred years

is long for her to have gone stripped of so radiant a glory as is

hers by right. “Better, thanks to MD’s prayers,” wrote the immortal

man who loved her, in a private fragment of a journal, never meant

for Dingley’s eyes, nor for Ppt’s, nor for any human eyes; and the

rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all the credit of those

prayers, and all the thanks of that pious benediction.

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom

civilization has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom

civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its

chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to

them solitude is a right foregone or a luxury unattained; a right

foregone, we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a

luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined. These has the

movement of the world thronged together into some blind by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded,

and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed,

unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their

kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have

not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a place

of unhidden liberty and of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not

claim even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy of the

lock and key; nor could they command so much. For the solitude that

has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,

landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the

woods, and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be

measured by miles; they are to be numbered by days. They are

freshly and freely the dominion of every man for the day of his

possession. There is loneliness for innumerable solitaries. As

many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there

for men. This is the open house of the earth; no one is refused.

Nor is the space shortened or the silence marred because, one by

one, men in multitudes have been alone there before. Solitude is

separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days,

but by men themselves. Every man of the living and every man of the

dead might have had his “privacy of light.”

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country;

and a thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult

to get for a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude

be enclosed, it is still an open solitude, so there be “no cloister

for the eyes,” and a space of far country or a cloud in the sky be

privy to your hiding-place. But the best solitude does not hide at

all.

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live

whole lives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation

of even the solitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never

have a whole hour alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent

companionship, as people may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical

choice, familiar with one another and not intimate. They live under

careless observation and subject to a vagabond curiosity. Theirs is

the involuntary and perhaps the unconscious loss which is futile and

barren.

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their

solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or

the hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple,

visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication

and practice of action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or

futile loss, and they have a conviction, and they bestow the

conviction, of solitude deferred.

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone

and inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in

many a drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof.

The girl stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the

sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she

looks, out of sight.

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate

possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural

solitude of a woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed

and talked about, handled and jolted and carried about by aliens,

and there is so much importunate service going forward, that a woman

is hardly alone long enough to become aware, in recollection, how

her own blood moves separately, beside her, with another rhythm and

different pulses. All is commonplace until the doors are closed

upon the two. This unique intimacy is a profound retreat, an

absolute seclusion. It is more than single solitude; it is a

redoubled isolation more remote than mountains, safer than valleys,

deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea.

That solitude partaken–the only partaken solitude in the world–is

the Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a

betrayal of that confidence might well be held to be the least

pardonable of all crimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as

sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying

beside the longer, as a child’s foot runs. But the favourite crime

of the sentimentalist is that of a woman against her child. Her

power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers,

are held to excuse her. She gains the most slovenly of indulgences

and the grossest compassion, on the vulgar grounds that her crime

was easy.

Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by

the way, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from

common opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the

situation. He was master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was

his secret, and the public was not privy to his artistic conscience.

He does violence to the obligations of which he is aware, and which

the world does not know very explicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he

is lawless in a more literal sense, but only hopes the world will

believe that he has a whole code of his own making. It would,

nevertheless, be less unworthy to break obvious rules obviously in

the obvious face of the public, and to abide the common rebuke.

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the

preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and

wide and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial

of the accessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or

so aside, is enough to lead thither.

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very

sincerely. In order to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep

the published promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover

of long seclusion or of a very life of loneliness. He should have

gained the state of solitariness which is a condition of life quite

unlike any other. The traveller who may have gone astray in

countries where an almost life-long solitude is possible knows how

invincibly apart are the lonely figures he has seen in desert places

there. Their loneliness is broken by his passage, it is true, but

hardly so to them. They look at him, but they are not aware that he

looks at them. Nay, they look at him as though they were invisible.

Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in the wild degree.

They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are curious, and

turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone. Now, no

one ever found that attitude in a squire’s figure, or that look in

any country gentleman’s eyes. The squire is not a life-long

solitary. He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He

never had the impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter

Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling.

Millet would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in

the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes of France. And yet nothing

but a life-long, habitual, and wild solitariness would be quite

proportionate to a park of any magnitude.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness,

so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual

crowds. It is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris

expression. It is the quickly caught, though not interested, look,

the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their

forfeited place apart; who have neither the open secret nor the

close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse of

flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the street, no hope

of news from solitary counsels.

THE LADY OF THE LYRICS

She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding. But the sixteenth century

took her for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a

state, a sex. It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist’s time-

-time that went so gaily to metre as not to brook delays–in making

her out too clearly. She had no more of what later times call

individuality than has the rose, her rival, her foil when she was

kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her ever fresh and ever

conventional paragon. She needed not to be devised or divined; she

was ready. A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist’s never grew

weary. Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other daily

things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.

The lady of the lyrics was not loved in mortal earnest, and her

punishment now and then for her ingratitude was to be told that she

was loved in jest. She did not love; her fancy was fickle; she was

not moved by long service, which, by the way, was evidently to be

taken for granted precisely like the whole long past of a dream.

She had not a good temper. When the poet groans it seems that she

has laughed at him; when he flouts her, we may understand that she

has chidden her lyrist in no temperate terms. In doing this she has

sinned not so much against him as against Love. With that she is

perpetually reproved. The lyrist complains to Love, pities Love for

her scorning, and threatens to go away with Love, who is on his

side. The sweetest verse is tuned to love when the loved one proves

worthy.

There is no record of success for this policy. She goes on dancing

or scolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of

his constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day. The situation

has variants, but no surprise or ending. The lover’s convention is

explicit enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the

lady’s. Pride in her beauty, at any rate, is hers–pride so great

that she cannot bring herself to perceive the shortness of her day.

She is so unobservant as to need to be told that life is brief, and

youth briefer than life; that the rose fades, and so forth.

Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived. But

taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how

is it she did not discover these things unaided? Why does the lover

invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own

praise and poetry? Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any

of these matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of

truth in one whose truth would be of little moment? And why was the

convention so pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age–

nay, two great ages–of literature?

Music seems to be principally answerable. For the lyrics of the

lady are “words for music” by a great majority. There is hardly a

single poem in the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that

has what would in our day be called a tone of sentiment. Music had

not then the tone herself; she was ingenious, and so must the words

be. She had the air of epigram, and an accurately definite limit.

So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who might be called the lady of the

stanzas, so strictly does she go by measure. When she is

quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when she dances, she does it by

a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily sung to such grave

notes.

So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books

is allowed to be kind enough for a “melody,” except one lady only.

She may thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that

she is “brown.” She is brown and kind, and a “sad flower,” but the

song made for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without

an antithesis. The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her

even less lovely than the brown.

Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for

innumerable verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal,

and inconstant with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with

the arts of that day; and neither verse nor music will ever make

such another lady. She refused to observe the transiency of roses;

she never really intended–much as she was urged–to be a

shepherdess; she was never persuaded to mitigate her dress. In

return, the world has let her disappear. She scorned the poets

until they turned upon her in the epigram of many a final couplet;

and of these the last has been long written. Her “No” was set to

counterpoint in the part-song, and she frightened Love out of her

sight in a ballet. Those occupations are gone, and the lovely

Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something less than mortal.

But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady

of the unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these

exquisite little talents. She was not set for singing, but poetry

spoke of her; sometimes when she was sleeping, and then Fletcher

said -

None can rock Heaven to sleep but her.

Or when she was singing, and Carew rhymed -

Ask me no more whither doth haste

The nightingale when May is past;

For in your sweet dividing throat

She winters, and keeps warm her note.

Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on her

monument -

And here the precious dust is laid,

Whose purely-tempered clay was made

So fine that it the guest betrayed.

But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics; one who will never

pass from the world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth

century and in the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her

inspiration never failed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the

inspiration of life. Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable

thought in those days, as it is in ours, and the phrase lost no

dignity by the integrity of use.

To every man it happens that at one time of his life–for a space of

years or for a space of months–he is convinced of death with an

incomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living

the life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death

was as often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in

their hands, but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts.

The discovery of death did not shake the poets from their composure.

On the contrary, the verse is never measured with more majestic

effect than when it moves in honour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir

Walter Raleigh is but a jerky writer when he is rhyming other

things, however bitter or however solemn; but his lines on death,

which are also lines on immortality, are infinitely noble. These

are, needless to say, meditations upon death by law and violence;

and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne, written after

his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife–”Now, Sweet-

cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy

deservings”–and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also are

Southwell’s words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more

dramatic than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.

It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle

business of life–not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a

darkness–that was the Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of

the act of dying. With this a much later and much more trivial

literature busied itself. Those two centuries felt with a shock

that death would bring an end, and that its equalities would make

vain the differences of wit and wealth which they took apparently

more seriously than to us seems probable. They never wearied of the

wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirely different emotion for

death as parting. It was not parting that the lyrists sang of; it

was the mere simplicity of death. None of our contemporaries will

take such a subject; they have no more than the ordinary conviction

of the matter. For the great treatment of obvious things there must

evidently be an extraordinary conviction.

But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be

the implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has

equally passed from before the eyes of poets.

JULY

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of

the green of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of

maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and

stand in their differences of character and not of mere date.

Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull. It has a

darkened and a daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony

with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as prosaic

after spring as eleven o’clock looks after the dawn.

Gravity is the word–not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as

at night. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty,

common freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and

day. In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and

summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also

a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings–a heartache

for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably

consoled.

But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find

daily things tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has

no great delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness

of the summer that has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere

day and of late summer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have

long ceased to be sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot

now find anything in nature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed,

lost sight of the further awe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer

see so much of the past in April twilight as they saw when they had

no past; but which look freshly at the dailiness of green summer, of

early afternoon, of every sky of any form that comes to pass, and of

the darkened elms.

Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting

close, unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it

looks alone to a late sun. But if one could go by all the woods,

across all the old forests that are now meadowlands set with trees,

and could walk a county gathering trees of a single kind in the

mind, as one walks a garden collecting flowers of a single kind in

the hand, would not the harvest be a harvest of poplars? A

veritable passion for poplars is a most intelligible passion. The

eyes do gather them, far and near, on a whole day’s journey. Not

one is unperceived, even though great timber should be passed, and

hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes a poplar day

of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for the

poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be all

various, but the poplars are separate.

All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with

them) shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest.

It is easy to gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay

them a flash of recognition of their gentle flashes; and as you

journey you are suddenly aware of them close by. Light and the

breezes are as quick as the eyes of a poplar-lover to find the

willing tree that dances to be seen.

No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for

oneself an oak day so well. The oaks would wait to be found, and

many would be missed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert

enough for a traveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do

not sleep. From within some little grove of other trees a single

poplar makes a slight sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep

the wind. They are salient everywhere, and full of replies. They

are as fresh as streams.

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars.

And yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much

mingled with a cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes

to recognize their unfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and

keep still, the poplar and the aspen do not darken–or hardly–and

the deepest summer will not find a day in which they do not keep

awake. No waters are so vigilant, even where a lake is bare to the

wind.

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair “with

fingers cool as aspen leaves,” he knew the coolest thing in the

world. It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the

breeze takes on both sides–the greenish and the greyish. The

poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as

little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs.

The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine between. Poplars and

aspens let the sun through with the wind. You may have the sky

sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the woods are

close.

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,

beating with life. No fisher’s net ever took such glancing fishes,

nor did the net of a constellation’s shape ever enclose more

vibrating Pleiades.

WELLS

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or

unattractive secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and

perennial means of life. A very dull secret is made of water, for

example, and the plumber sets his seal upon the floods whereby we

live. They are covered, they are carried, they are hushed, from the

spring to the tap; and when their voices are released at last in the

London scullery, why, it can hardly be said that the song is

eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether earthly or

heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this capture of

streams–the company, the water-rate, and the rest–that is not a

sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For

style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a

gesture, as it were, in the doing of small things; it is the

ignorance of secret ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its

neatness seem to be secured by a system of little shufflings and

surprises.

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such

fittings; they form its very construction. Style does not exist in

modern arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for

all the successes–which are not to be denied–of their outer part;

the happy little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of

its absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath,

and the triumph and success of the present art of raiment–”fit”

itself–is but the result of a masked and lurking labour and device.

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of

the beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and

slighter actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the

way. In a word, the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is

the dexterous provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-

appointed, and decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his

hands; whereas the artist craftsman of other times made a

manifestation of his means. The first hides the streams, under

stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which we all must make haste to

call upon the earth to cover, and the second lifted up the arches of

the aqueduct.

The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way

to ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure

way. In all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed

by hidden means must needs, from the beginning, prepare the

abolition of dignity. This is easy to understand, but it is less

easy to explain the ill-fortune that presses upon the expert

workman, in search of easy ways to live, all the ill-favoured

materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them serviceable and

effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and inter them, turning

the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily world.

It is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to

explain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which

are, after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy

conditions, neither from the material, suggesting to the workman,

nor from the workman looking askance at his unhandsome material,

comes a first proposal to pour in cement and make fast the

underworld, out of sight. But fate spares not that suggestion to

the able and the unlucky at their task of making neat work of the

means, the distribution, the traffick of life.

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the

means of our lives those which we should wish to see open to the

sun, with their waters on their progress and their way to us; but,

no, they are lapped in lead.

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-

place that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of

wells are, at their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No

other mine is so visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible

there; and it is fine to think of the waters of this planet, shallow

and profound, all charged with shining suns, a multitude of waters

multiplying suns, and carrying that remote fire, as it were, within

their unalterable freshness. Not a pool without this visitant, or

without passages of stars. As for the wells of the Equator, you may

think of them in their last recesses as the daily bathing-places of

light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter fitful figures of the

sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those deeps.

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the

sun is shattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken

across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that

fall through chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile

figures of leaves. To all these waters the agile air has perpetual

access. Not so can great towns be watered, it will be said with

reason; and this is precisely the ill-luck of great towns.

Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have

the grace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every campo has

its circle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the

pavement, its soft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the

water below, and the cheerful work of the cable.

Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their

plain with the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the

watersheds in the hills to the and city; and having the waters

captive, they knew how to compel them to take part, by fountains, in

this Roman triumph. They had the wit to boast thus of their

brilliant prisoner.

None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a

more invincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the

leap of the heart of the waters have outlived their captors. They

have remained in Rome, and have remained alone. Over them the

victory was longer than empire, and their thousands of loud voices

have never ceased to confess the conquest of the cold floods,

separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the head and front

of the world.

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact

of Rome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to

the distance from the city without seeing the approach of those

perpetual waters–waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services.

This, then, was the style of a master, who does not lapse from

“incidental greatness,” has no mean precision, out of sight, to

prepare the finish of his phrases, and does not think the means and

the approaches are to be plotted and concealed. Without anxiety,

without haste, and without misgiving are all great things to be

done, and neither interruption in the doing nor ruin after they are

done finds anything in them to betray. There was never any disgrace

of means, and when the world sees the work broken through there is

no disgrace of discovery. The labour of Michelangelo’s chisel,

little more than begun, a Roman structure long exposed in disarray–

upon these the light of day looks full, and the Roman and the

Florentine have their unrefuted praise.

THE FOOT

Time was when no good news made a journey, and no friend came near,

but a welcome was uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling

feet of the wayfarer or the herald. The feet, the feet were

beautiful on the mountains; their toil was the price of all

communication, and their reward the first service and refreshment.

They were blessed and bathed; they suffered, but they were friends

with the earth; dews in grass at morning, shallow rivers at noon,

gave them coolness. They must have grown hard upon their mountain

paths, yet never so hard but they needed and had the first pity and

the readiest succour. It was never easy for the feet of man to

travel this earth, shod or unshod, and his feet are delicate, like

his colour.

If they suffered hardship once, they suffer privation now. Yet the

feet should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of

flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does

anything else about us. It is their calling; and the hands might be

glad to be stroked for a day by grass and struck by buttercups, as

the feet are of those who go barefoot; and the nostrils might be

flattered to be, like them, so long near moss. The face has only

now and then, for a resting-while, their privilege.

If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they have

inevitably lost life and strength by the separation. It is only the

entirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch a peasant who never

wears shoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may

see the play of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic

as his hands. Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy

from the field, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot

of the contadino is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that

is prim, and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it

has forgotten liberty. It is more active now than it lately was–

certainly the foot of woman is more active; but whether on the pedal

or in the stirrup, or clad for a walk, or armed for a game, or

decked for the waltz, it is in bonds. It is, at any rate,

inarticulate.

It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is

visible and sensible. Whereas the whole living body has naturally

such infinite distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it

were, with every nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was

believed of them of old that each one had its angel, yet the modern

foot is, as much as possible, deprived of all that delicate

distinction: undone, unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of

indiscriminate life. It is as though a landscape with separate

sweetness in every tree should be rudely painted with the blank–

blank, not simple–generalities of a vulgar hand. Or as though one

should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a wholesale

fashion, not “turning the hours to moments,” which joy can do to the

full as perfectly as pain.

The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language

confused. When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin,

and her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with,

not a boot. Yet Amarantha’s foot is as lovely as her hand. It,

too, has a “tender inward”; no wayfaring would ever make it look

anything but delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her

through a night of dances; it does, in fact, but balance her. It is

fit to cling to the ground, but rather for springing than for rest.

And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular,

sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its

little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an

architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. It is a

part of vital design and has a history; and man does not go erect

but at a price of weariness and pain. How weak it is may be seen

from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and

unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a

season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so

much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes

her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is

naturally silent as snow. The vintager is not heard among the

vines, nor the harvester on his threshing-floor of stone. There is

a kind of simple stealth in their coming and going, and they show

sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out of the rows of harvest when

you thought yourself alone. The lack of noise in their movement

sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter floats.

But we shall not praise the “simple, sweet” and “earth-confiding

feet” enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time

of song. If Poetry was first divided by the march, and next varied

by the dance, then to the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the

thought, the instruction, and the dream that could not speak by

prose. Out of that little physical law, then, grew a spiritual law

which is one of the greatest things we know; and from the test of

the foot came the ultimate test of the thinker: “Is it accepted of

Song?”

The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial

rules of time and exactitude, not to be broken, laws that are made

secure against the restlessness of the heart fretting for

insignificant liberties–trivial laws to restrain from a trivial

freedom. And within the gate of these laws which seem so small,

lies the world of mystic virtue. They enclose, they imply, they

lock, they answer for it. Lesser virtues may flower in daily

liberty and may flourish in prose; but infinite virtues and

greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry, and obey the

constraint of an hourly convent bell. It is no wonder that every

poet worthy the name has had a passion for metre, for the very

verse. To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior

range immeasurable.

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy

ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of

communication with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the

interior act most gentle; there may be a tacit apology, and a

profound misgiving unexpressed; a reluctance not only to refuse but

to be arbiter; a dislike of the office; a regret, whether for the

unequal distribution of social luck or for a purse left at home,

equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or sign, nothing

whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or a calf

in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and

breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes

to you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge

it. But the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a

question, no recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of

your eyelid in his direction, and never a word to excuse you.

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to

nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer

to the beggar’s remark than to leave a shop without “Good morning.”

When complaint is made of the modern social manner–that it has no

merit but what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from

courtesy with more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely

requires–the habit of manner towards beggars is probably not so

much as thought of. To the simply human eye, however, the prevalent

manner towards beggars is a striking thing; it is significant of so

much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the

intelligible act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity

that marks the caste answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere,

in Italy, for example. An elderly Italian lady on her slow way from

her own ancient ancestral palazzo to the village, and accustomed to

meet, empty-handed, a certain number of beggars, answers them by a

retort which would be, literally translated, “Excuse me, dear; I,

too, am a poor devil,” and the last word she naturally puts into the

feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local

dialect–a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms

as nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the

phrase to English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The

excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby,

and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other

manners, that one cannot recall it without a smile. To a mind

having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to

imagine an elderly lady of corresponding station in England replying

so to importunities for alms; albeit we have nothing answering to

the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently by rich and

poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all speakers–a

dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in

which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect “familiar,

but by no means vulgar.” Besides, even if our Englishwoman could by

any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, “Excuse me,

dear; I, too, am a poor devil,” she would still not have the

opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine,

which does so complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase

of excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And

everywhere in the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who

suddenly begins to beg from you when you least expected it, calls

you “my daughter,” you can hardly reply without kindness. Where the

tourist is thoroughly well known, doubtless the company of beggars

are used to savage manners in the rich; but about the byways and

remoter places there must still be some dismay at the anger, the

silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive haughtiness wherewith

the opportunity of alms-giving is received by travellers.

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so

emphatically as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so

manifestly put themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant

to see them there; but silence or a storm of impersonal protest–a

protest that appeals vaguely less to the beggars than to some not

impossible police–does not seem the most appropriate manner of

rebuking them. We have, it may be, a scruple on the point of human

dignity, compromised by the entreaty and the thanks of the

mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating that dignity

when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a simply

human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It is

not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal

of intercourse–the last outrage. How do we propose to redress

those conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we

deny the presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if,

because fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold

it in the indifference of the wise. “Have patience, little saint,”

is a phrase that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own

unintelligible fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a

hill-village among the most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts

of stone stand among the stones of an unclothed earth, and there is

no sign of daily bread. The people, albeit unused to travellers,

yet know by instinct what to do, and beg without the delay of a

moment as soon as they see your unwonted figure. Let it be taken

for granted that you give all you can; some form of refusal becomes

necessary at last, and the gentlest–it is worth while to remember–

is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the portent

of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of

ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is

made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed,

uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote,

thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent

to the violence of the rich.

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a

beggar is still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer

and comfort us to see; he practises not merely the conventional

seeming, which is hardly intended to convince, but a more subtle and

dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of

the road. He no longer trusts the world with a sight of his gaiety.

He is not a wholehearted mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty

of unstable balance whereby an unattached creature can go in a new

direction with a new wind. The merry beggar was the only adventurer

free to yield to the lighter touches of chance, the touches that a

habit of resistance has made imperceptible to the seated and stable

social world.

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our

literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have,

by tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has

been stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned,

led underground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of

the song of the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to

capture, have ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world’s

ears. But it seems that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy

beggar is still the subject of a Spanish song.

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw’s or a robber’s,

it is not a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling

note of a man who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-

fortune, but takes it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it

at the hand of unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own

choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems,

therefore, the song of an indomitable liberty of movement, light

enough for the puffs of a zephyr chance.

THE LADIES OF THE IDYLL

Little

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