The Spirit of Place and Other Essays Part 3

Who sing and singing in their glory move--

by this, and by many and many another so divine--Milton justified also the cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one group of blank verse lines in his greatest poem. Manifestly the sanction is a matter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found in Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.

Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry. But he came into possession of a metrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-cla.s.s dignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather than of imitation, to the state and n.o.bility of Pope at his best--the couplet.

The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum it possessed to the mechanical defences and props--the exclusions especially--of this manner of versification. The grievous thing was that, being moved to write simply of simple things, he had no more supple English for his purpose. His effort to disengage the phrase--long committed to convention and to an exposed artifice--did but prove how surely the ancient vitality was gone.

His preface to "The Borough, a Poem," should be duly read before the "poem" itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own. Everything is conceived with the most perfect moderation, and then presented in a form of reasoning that leaves you no possible ground of remonstrance. In proposing his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology with a composure that is almost sweet. For instance, at some length and with some n.o.bility he antic.i.p.ates a probable conjecture that his work was done "without due examination and revisal," and he meets the conjectured criticism thus: "Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with more than common severity those writers who have been led into presumption by the approbation bestowed upon their diffidence, and into idleness and unconcern by the praises given to their attention." It would not be possible to say a smaller thing with greater dignity and gentleness. It is worth while to quote this prose of a "poet" who lived between the centuries, if only in order to suggest the chastening thought, "It is a pity that no one, however little he may have to say, says it now in this form!" The little, so long as it is reasonable, is so well suited in this ant.i.thesis and logic. Is there no hope that journalism will ever take again these graces of unanswerable argument? No: they would no longer wear the peculiar aspect of adult innocence that was Crabbe's.

A COUNTERCHANGE

"Il s'est trompe de defunte." The writer of this phrase had his sense of that portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine; but--the paradox must be risked--because he was French he was not able to possess all its grotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the English reader. The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching his wife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur." "Monsieur," again; the French reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place; it says little or nothing to him, whereas the Englishman, who has no word of the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but who must use one of two English words of different allusion--man or I gentleman--knows the exact value of its commonplace. The serious Parisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there had been a divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is not yet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"

in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte."

The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with national character is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking author who was debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his own comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishman does possess it. Your official, your professional Parisian has a vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelist perceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words are the only words in use. Take an author at his serious moments, when he is not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and then touches a word that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English.

"L'Histoire d'un Crime," of Victor Hugo, has so many of these touches as to be, by a kind of reflex action, a very school of English. The whole incident of the omnibus in that grave work has unconscious international comedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus had been, it will be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of the Coup d'Etat, but each had his official scarf. Scarf--pis.h.!.+--"l'echarpe!"

"Ceindre l'echarpe"--there is no real English equivalent. Civic responsibility never was otherwise adequately expressed. An indignant deputy pa.s.sed his scarf through the window of the omnibus, as an appeal to the public, "et l'agita." It is a pity that the French reader, having no simpler word, is not in a position to understand the slight burlesque.

Nay, the mere word "public," spoken with this peculiar French good faith, has for us I know not what untransferable gravity.

There is, in short, a general international counterchange. It is altogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with its extremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make a phrase, and another should have and enjoy it. And, in fact, there are certain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literary German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all severity to be deprived. For Germans often tell you of words in their own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not be translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands. There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with the thought it secures, would find also their advantage.

So with French humour. It is expressly and signally for English ears. It is so even in the commonest farce. The unfortunate householder, for example, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory "pour retablir la circulation," and the other who describes himself "sous-chef de bureau dans l'enregistrement," and he who proposes to "faire hommage"

of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"--these and all their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their own country the perfection of their dulness. We only, who have the alternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it. It is not the least of the advantages of our own dual English that we become sensible of the mockery of certain phrases that in France have lost half their ridicule, uncontrasted.

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in all Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, either majestic or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no longer detects. A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter" for a whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to the less practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist.

One of the phrases always used in the business of charities and subscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the farce- writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitors in the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouons cinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses integralement a la souscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notre maison d'ecole."

"Fletrir," again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly common word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well aware of the spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's "fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as some of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it.

The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman.

They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il s'est trompe de defunte." In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there is enough humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; for the author who perceives the comedy as well as custom will permit, and for the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if not so keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same quality of language. When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor, for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on p.r.o.nounces: "Il s'est empetre dans les futurs." But for a reader who has a full sense of the several languages that exist in English at the service of the several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of official France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and uncovenanted smile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French literature has not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circ.u.mstance makes it so. A very little of the mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the "sixieme et septieme arron-diss.e.m.e.nts," in the twinkling of an eye. So is it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of the burlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal"

becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "a domicile"

merely--the word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of the speakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only an Englishman hears it; so is the advice of the police that you shall "circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you shall not, in the churches.

So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale," "maison mortuaire," and the still more serious "repos dominical," "oraison dominicale." There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspicious gravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at, the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to the credit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, through this general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors of comedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar thing, and compels that most elaborate dulness to amuse us. _Us_, above all, by virtue of the custom of counterchange here set forth.

Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the English poets that so persist in France may not reveal something within the English language--one would be somewhat loth to think so--reserved to the French reader peculiarly? Byron to the mult.i.tude, Edgar Poe to the select? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has. .h.i.therto satisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, _patatras_! Who can say?

RAIN

Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate points.

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once, being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. What we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things that flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzles them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowly from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are not theirs. There seems to be such a difference of instants as invests all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, a moment old, to be written, vanis.h.i.+ng, upon the skies.

The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman's stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and the stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.

Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is all our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and beauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionist to make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.

Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed in the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the shower withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His sense of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as he shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knows approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is the rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud "outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and to enforce his c.u.mulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.

The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling unfruitfully.

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled breast to make all the mult.i.tude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and battlements of heaven.

THE LETTERS OF MARCELINE VALMORE

"Prends garde a moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!" Marceline Desbordes- Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy as was expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and both articulate in tenderness. Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, had preceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother's side"; and in another age Mme. de Sevigne had suffered, in the course of long posts and through infrequent letters--a protraction of conjectured pain--within the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased her plight in much the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child that had effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life.

Is not what we call a life--the personal life--a separation from the universal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound? For these women, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, and cured. Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind. Did these three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their children were indeed the signs of a new and universal health--the prophecy of human unity?

The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had this union of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Except at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sevigne, all three--far more sensitive than the rest of the world--were yet not sensitive enough to feel equally the less sharp communication of joy. They claimed, owned, and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent. Or if not only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sense which human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they were apprehensive of what they feared. "Are you warm?" writes Marceline Valmore to her child. "You have so little to wear--are you really warm?

Oh, take care of me--cover me well." Elsewhere she says, "You are an insolent child to think of work. Nurse your health, and mine. Let us live like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her own fervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine. If this living and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, was the story. Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and Marceline was to lose this daughter and another.

But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, this life without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and to portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, in fact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of the world. If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother into her child, and from that child into her children again, then incalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that seem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience. The love of such a mother pa.s.ses unchanged out of her own sight. It drops down ages, but why should it alter? What in her daughter should she make so much her own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn? There are no lapses.

Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the cla.s.sic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women in want. Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that the sadness of her poems is a habit--a matter of metre and rhyme, or, at most, that it is "temperament." But others take up the cause of those whose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon.

Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty political offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor. "He never has any socks," said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Beranger."

"He gives them with a different accent," added the literary Marceline.

Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, but loved--her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap, and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosy with the reflected colour of its animating wine"--she was taken away from the country of her verse. The field and the village had been dear to her, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when they come among winds, birds, bells, and waves. They fly with the whole volley of a summer morning. She loved the sun and her liberty, and the liberty of others. It was apparently a horror of prisons that chiefly inspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reduced to peace. The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote, and pet.i.tioned. She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyons gaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.

During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from her contemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art of French verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praised her as one of the poets of France. The later critics--from Verlaine onwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight irregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for upon this liberty they themselves have largely improved. The old rules in their completeness seemed too much like a prison to her. She was set about with importunate conditions--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings in strange towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she took only a little gentle liberty.

THE HOURS OF SLEEP

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a tide's, and they do return.

In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper her influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real day persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity.

This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length.

The child, not asleep, but pa.s.sing through the hours of sleep and their dominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts off his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state, by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftener in a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think of it in the day- time." By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, not to be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope.

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is to miss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine the rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, and tempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance and expectancy.

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium, would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the loss of him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence of the hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night, or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the more natural, he would be rash who should make too sure.