Part 2

“Wit is useful for everything, but sufficient for nothing,” says Amiel, who probably felt he needed some excuse for burying so much of his Gallic sprightliness in Teutonic gloom; and dullness, it must be admitted, has the distinct advantage of being useful for everybody, and sufficient for nearly everybody as well. Nothing, we are told, is more rational than _ennui_; and Mr. Bagehot, contemplating the “grave files of speechless men” who have always represented the English land, exults more openly and energetically even than Carlyle in the saving dullness, the superb impenetrability, which stamps the Englishman, as it stamped the Roman, with the sign-manual of patient strength. Stupidity, he reminds us, is not folly, and moreover it often insures a valuable consistency. “‘What I says is this here, as I was a-saying yesterday,’ is the average Englishman’s notion of historical eloquence and habitual discretion.” But Mr. Bagehot could well afford to trifle thus coyly with dullness, because he knew it only theoretically and as a dispassionate observer. His own roof-tree is free from the blighting presence; his own pages are guiltless of the leaden touch. It has been well said that an ordinary mortal might live for a twelvemonth like a gentleman on Hazlitt’s ideas; but he might, if he were clever, shine all his life long with the reflected splendor of Mr. Bagehot’s wit, and be thought to give forth a very respectable illumination. There is a telling quality in every stroke; a pitiless dexterity that drives the weapon, like a fairy’s arrow, straight to some vital point. When we read that “of all pursuits ever invented by man for separating the faculty of argument from the capacity of belief, the art of debating is probably the most effective,” we feel that an unwelcome statement has been expressed with Mephistophelian coolness; and remembering that these words were uttered before Mr. Gladstone had attained his parliamentary preëminence, we have but another proof of the imperishable accuracy of wit. Only say a clever thing, and mankind will go on forever furnishing living illustrations of its truth. It was Thurlow who originally remarked that “companies have neither bodies to kick nor souls to lose,” and the jest fits in so aptly with our every-day humors and experiences that I have heard men attribute it casually to their friends, thinking, perhaps, that it must have been born in these times of giant corporations, of city railroads, and of trusts. What a gap between Queen Victoria and Queen Bess, what a thorough and far-reaching change in everything that goes to make up the life and habits of men; and yet Shakespeare’s fine strokes of humor have become so fitted to our common speech that the very unconsciousness with which we apply them proves how they tally with our modern emotions and opportunities. Lesser lights burn quite as steadily. Pope and Goldsmith reappear on the lips of people whose knowledge of the “Essay on Man” is of the very haziest character, and whose acquaintance with “She Stoops to Conquer” is confined exclusively to Mr. Abbey’s graceful illustrations. Not very long ago I heard a bright school-girl, when reproached for wet feet or some such youthful indiscretion, excuse herself gayly on the plea that she was “bullying Nature;” and, knowing that the child was but modestly addicted to her books, I wondered how many of Dr. Holmes’s trenchant sayings have become a heritage in our households, detached often from their original kinship, and seeming like the rightful property of every one who utters them. It is an amusing, barefaced, witless sort of robbery, yet surely not without its compensations; for it must be a pleasant thing to reflect in old age that the general murkiness of life has been lit up here and there by sparks struck from one’s youthful fire, and that these sparks, though they wander occasionally masterless as will-o’-the-wisps, are destined never to go out.

Are destined never to go out! In its vitality lies the supreme excellence of humor. Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands. It is an old trick with dull novelists to describe their characters as being exceptionally brilliant people, and to trust that we will take their word for it, and ask no further proof. Every one remembers how Lord Beaconsfield would tell us that a cardinal could “sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee;” and how utterly destitute of sparkle or blaze were the specimens of his eminence’s conversation with which we were subsequently favored. Those “lively dinners” in “Endymion” and “Lothair,” at which we were assured the brightest minds in England loved to gather, became mere Barmecide feasts when reported to us without a single amusing remark; such waifs and strays of conversation as reached our ears being of the dreariest and most fatuous description. It is not so with the real masters of their craft. Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us that Dr. Folliott is witty. The reverend gentleman opens his mouth and acquaints us with the fact himself. There is no need for George Eliot to expatiate on Mrs. Poyser’s humor. Five minutes of that lady’s society is amply sufficient for the revelation. We do not even hear Mr. Poyser and the rest of the family enlarging delightedly on the subject, as do all of Lawyer Putney’s friends, in Mr. Howells’s story, “Annie Kilburn;” and yet even the united testimony of Hatboro’ fails to clear up our lingering doubts concerning Mr. Putney’s wit. The dull people of that soporific town are really and truly and realistically dull. There is no mistaking them. The stamp of veracity is upon every brow. They pay morning calls, and we listen to their conversation with a dreamy impression that we have heard it all many times before, and that the ghosts of our own morning calls are revisiting us, not in the glimpses of the moon, but in Mr. Howells’s decorous and quiet pages. That curious conviction that we have formerly passed through a precisely similar experience is strong upon us as we read, and it is the most emphatic testimony to the novelist’s peculiar skill. But there is none of this instantaneous acquiescence in Mr. Putney’s wit; for although he does make one very nice little joke, it is hardly enough to flavor all his conversation, which is for the most part rather unwholesome than humorous. The only way to elucidate him is to suppose that Mr. Howells, in sardonic mood, wishes to show us that if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness. How many of us know these exceptionally brilliant lawyers, doctors, politicians, and journalists, who bear a charmed reputation, based exclusively upon their inebriety, and who take good care not to imperil it by too long a relapse into the mortifying self-revelations of soberness! And what wrong has been done to the honored name of humor by these pretentious rascals! We do not love Falstaff because he is drunk; we do not admire Becky Sharp because she is wicked. Drunkenness and wickedness are things easy of imitation; yet all the sack in Christendom could not beget us another Falstaff,--though Seithenyn ap Seithyn comes very near to the incomparable model,--and all the wickedness in the world could not fashion us a second Becky Sharp. There are too many dull topers and stupid sinners among mankind to admit of any uncertainty on those points.

Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, tells us, with thinly veiled disapprobation, that he was “a man of fine and ready wit, full of life, and very pleasant, but much turned to satire. His imagination was too hard for his judgment, and a severe jest took more with him than all arguments whatever.” Yet this was the first statesman of his age, and one whose clear and tranquil vision penetrated so far beyond the turbulent, troubled times he lived in, that men looked askance upon a power they but dimly understood. The sturdy “Trimmer,” who would be bullied neither by king nor commons, who would “speak his mind and not be hanged as long as there was law in England,” must have turned with infinite relief from the horrible medley of plots and counterplots, from the ugly images of Oates and Dangerfield, from the scaffolds of Stafford and Russell and Sidney, from the Bloody Circuit and the massacre of Glencoe, from the false smiles of princes and the howling arrogance of the mob, to any jest, however “severe,” which would restore to him his cold and fastidious serenity, and keep his judgment and his good temper unimpaired. “Ridicule is the test of truth,” said Hazlitt, and it is a test which Halifax remorselessly applied, and which would not be without its uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in whom this adjusting sense is lamentably lacking. For humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh! What healthy exultation, what genial warmth, what loyal brotherhood of mirth, attends the friendly sound! Yet in labeling our life and literature, as the Danes labeled their Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, “Not for amusement merely,” we have pushed one step further, and the legend too often stands, “Not for amusement at all.” Life is no laughing matter, we are told, which is true; and, what is still more dismal to contemplate, books are no laughing matters, either. Only now and then some gay, defiant rebel, like Mr. Saintsbury, flaunts the old flag, hums a bar of “Blue Bonnets over the Border,” and ruffles the quiet waters of our souls by hinting that this age of Apollinaris and of lectures is at fault, and that it has produced nothing which can vie as literature with the products of the ages of wine and song.

ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS.

In a fair and far-off country, hidden to none, though visited by few, dwell a little band of lovely ladies, to whose youth and radiance the poets have added the crowning gift of immortality. There they live, with faint alluring smiles that never fade; and at their head is Helen of Troy, white-bosomed, azure-eyed, to whom men forgave all things for her beauty’s sake. There, too, is Lesbia, fair and false, laughing at a broken heart, but holding close and tenderly the dead sparrow

“That, living, never strayed from her sweet breast.”

She kisses its ruffled wings and weeps, she who had no tears to spare when Catullus sung and sued. And there is Myrto, beloved by Theocritus, her naked feet gleaming like pearls, a bunch of Coan rushes pressed in her rosy fingers; and the nameless girl who held in check Anacreon’s wandering heart with the magic of dimples, and parted lips, and thin purple floating garments. With these are later beauties: Fiammetta the ruddy-haired, whom death snatched from Boccaccio’s arms, and the gentle Catarina, raising those heavy-lidded eyes that Camoens loved and lost; Petrarch’s Laura, robed in pale green spotted with violets, one golden curl escaping wantonly beneath her veil; the fair blue-stocking, Leonora d’Este, pale as a rain-washed rose, her dress in sweet disorder; and Beatrice, with the stillness of eternity in her brooding eyes. If we listen, we hear the shrill laughter of Mignonne, a child of fifteen summers, mocking at Ronsard’s wooing; or we catch the gentler murmur of Highland Mary’s song. She blushes a little, the low-born lass, and sinks her graceful head, as though abashed by the fame her peasant lover brought her. Barefooted, yellow-haired, she passes swiftly by; and with her, hand in hand, walks Scotland’s queen, sad Jane Beaufort, “the fairest younge floure” that ever won the heart of royal captive and suffered the martyrdom of love. England sends to that far land Stella, with eyes like stars, and a veil of gossamer hiding her delicate beauty, and Celia, and false Lucasta, and Castara, tantalizingly discreet, in whose dimples Cupid is fain to linger sighing, exiled, poor frozen god, from the

“Chaste nunnery of her breasts.”

Sacharissa, too, stands near, with a shade of listlessness in her sweet eyes, as though she wearied a little of Master Waller’s courtly strains. A withered rose droops from her white fingers, preaching its mute sermon, and preaching it all in vain; for rose and lady live forever, linked to each other’s fame. And by her side, casting her fragile loveliness in the shade, is one of different mould, a sumptuous, smiling woman, on whom Sacharissa’s blue eyes fall with a soft disdain. We know this indolent beauty by the brave vibration of her tempestuous silken robe, by the ruby carcanet that clasps her throat, the rainbow ribbon around her slender waist, the jewels wedged knuckle-deep on every tapering finger, and even--oh, vanity of vanities!--on one small rosy thumb. We know her by the scented beads upon her arm, and by the sweet and subtle odors of storax and spikenard and galbanum that breathe softly forth from her brocaded bodice, and from her hair’s dark meshes caught in a golden net. It is she to whom the glow-worms lent their eyes, and the elves their wings, and the stars their shooting fires, as she wandered through the dewy woods to meet her lover’s steps. It is Herrick’s Julia whom we see so clearly through the mist of centuries, that cannot veil nor dim the brightness of her presence.

To ask how many of these fair dames have gone through the formality of living, and how many exist only by the might of a poet’s breath, is but a thankless question. All share alike in that true being which may not be blown out like the flame of a taper; in that true entity which Cæsar and Hamlet hold in common, and which reveals them side by side. Mr. Gosse, for example, assures us that Julia really walked the earth, and even gives us some details of her mundane pilgrimage; other critics smile, and shake their heads, and doubt. It matters not; she lives, and she will continue to live when we who dispute the matter lie voiceless in our graves. The essence of her personality lingers on every page where Herrick sings of her. His verse is heavy with her spicy perfumes, glittering with her many-colored jewels, lustrous with the shimmer of her silken petticoats. Her very shadow, he sighs, distills sweet odors on the air, and draws him after her, faint with their amorous languor. How lavish she is with her charms, this woman who neither thinks nor suffers; who prays, indeed, sometimes, with great serenity, and dips her snowy finger in the font of blessed water, but whose spiritual humors pale before the calm vigor of her earthly nature! How kindly, how tranquil, how unmoved, she is; listening with the same slow smile to her lover’s fantastic word-play, to the fervid conceits with which he beguiles the summer idleness, and to the frank and sudden passion with which he conjures her, “dearest of thousands,” to close his eyes when death shall summon him, to shed some true tears above the sod, to clasp forever the book in which he writes her name! How gently she would have fulfilled these last sad duties had the discriminating fates called her to his bier; how fragrant the sighs she would have wafted in that darkened chamber; how sincere the temperate sorrow for a remediable loss! And then, out into the glowing sunlight, where life is sweet, and the world exults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, and, underneath the scattered primrose blossoms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their graves.

What gives to the old love-songs their peculiar felicity, their undecaying brightness, is this constant sounding of a personal note; this artless candor with which we are taken by the hand and led straight into the lady’s presence, are bidden to admire her beauty and her wit, are freely reminded of her faults and her caprices, and are taught, with many a sigh and tear, and laughter bubbling throughout all, what a delicious and unprofitable pastime is the love-making of a poet.

“I lose but what was never mine,”

sings Carew with gay philosophy, contemplating the perfidious withdrawal of Celia’s kindness; and after worshiping hotly at her shrine, and calling on all the winds of heaven to witness his desires, he accepts his defeat with undimmed brow, and with melodious frankness returns the false one her disdain:--

“No tears, Celia, now shall win My resolved heart to return; I have searched thy soul within, And find naught but pride and scorn. I have learned thy arts, and now Can disdain as much as thou.”

From which heroic altitude we see him presently descending to protest with smiling lips that love shall part with his arrows and the doves of Venus with their pretty wings, that the sun shall fade and the stars fall blinking from the skies, that heaven shall lose its delights and hell its torments, that the very fish shall burn in the cool waters of the ocean, if he forsakes or neglects his Celia’s embraces.

It was Carew, indeed, who first sounded these “courtly amorous strains” throughout the English land; who first taught his fellow-poets that to sing of love was not the occasional pastime, but the serious occupation of their lives. Yet what an easy, indolent suitor he is! What lazy raptures over Celia’s eyes and lips! What finely poised compliments, delicate as rose leaves, and well fitted for the inconstant beauty who listened, with faint blushes and transient interest, to the song! “He loved wine and roses,” says Mr. Gosse, “and fair florid women, to whom he could indite joyous or pensive poems about their comeliness, adoring it while it lasted, regretting it when it faded. He has not the same intimate love of detail as Herrick; we miss in his poetry those realistic touches that give such wonderful freshness to the verses of the younger poet; but the habit of the two men’s minds was very similar. Both were pagans, and given up to an innocent hedonism; neither was concerned with much beyond the eternal commonplaces of bodily existence, the attraction of beauty, the mutability of life, the brevity and sweetness of enjoyment.”

These things are quite enough, however, to make exceedingly good poets, Mrs. Browning to the contrary, notwithstanding. “I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet,” wrote the authoress of “Aurora Leigh,” and we quail before the deadly earnestness of the avowal. But pleasure and leisure between them have begotten work far more complete and artistic than anything Mrs. Browning ever gave to an admiring world. Pleasure and leisure are responsible for “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” for “Kubla Khan” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” for “Tam O’Shanter,” and “A Dream of Fair Women,” and “The Bells.” There is so much talk about Herrick’s paganism that it has become one of the things we credit without inquiry; shrugging our shoulders over Corinna and her May blossoms, and passing by that devout prayer of thanksgiving for the simple blessings of life, for the loaf and the cup, the winter hearthstone and the summer sun. There is such a widely diffused belief in the necessity for a serious and urgent motive in art that we have grown to think less of the outward construction of a poem than of the dominant impulse which evoked it. Mrs. Browning, with all her noble idealism and her profound sense of responsibility, was most depressingly indifferent about form, and was quite a law to herself in the matter of rhymes. Carew, whose avowed object was to flatter Celia and Celia’s fair rivals, proved himself “enamored of perfection,” and wrought with infinite care and delicacy upon his fragile little verses. If he only played at love-making, he was serious enough as a poet; and, amid the careless exuberance of his time, he came to be regarded, like Flaubert some generations later, as a veritable martyr to style. He brought forth his lyrical children, complained Sir John Suckling, with trouble and pain, instead of with that light-hearted spontaneity which distinguished his contemporaries, and which made their poetry so deliciously easy to write, and so generally unprofitable to read. Suckling himself, and Lovelace, and the host of courtly writers who toyed so gracefully and so joyously with their art, ignored for the most part all severity of workmanship, and made it their especial pride to compose with gentlemanly ease. The result may be seen in a mass of half-forgotten rubbish, and in a few incomparable songs, which are as fresh and lovely to-day as when they first rang the praises of Lucasta, or the fair Althea, or Chloris, the favorite daughter of wanton Aphrodite. They are the models for all love-songs and for all time, and, in their delicate beauty, they endure like fragile pieces of porcelain, to prove how light a thing can bear the weight of immortality. We cannot surpass them, we cannot steal their vivacious grace, we cannot feel ourselves first in a field where such delicious and unapproachable things have been already whispered.

“Ah! frustrés par les anciens hommes, Nous sentons le regret jaloux, Qu’ils aient été ce que nous sommes, Qu’ils aient eu nos cœurs avant nous.”

The best love-poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amply fulfill the requirements suggested by Southey: their sentiment is always “necessary, and voluptuous, and right.” They are no “made-dishes at the Muses’ banquet,” but each one appears as the embodiment of a passing emotion. In those three faultless little verses “Going to the Wars,” a single thought is presented us,--regretful love made heroic by the loyal farewell of the soldier suitor:--

“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I flee.

“True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field, And, with a stronger faith, embrace A sword, a horse, a shield.

“Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore,-- I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

In the still more beautiful lines, “To Althea from Prison,” passion, made dignified by suffering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, happy with his chains:--

“If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.”

In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, revealing the finer grain of that impetuous soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the stormy waters of life. Whether we think of Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptuous court, or as dying of want in a cellar; whether we picture him as sighing at the feet of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country and his king; whether he is winning all hearts by the resistless charms of voice and presence, or returning broken from battle to suffer the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we know that in his two famous lyrics we possess the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, of that troubled and many-sided existence. A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, has been preserved from oblivion by a little wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good-natured contentment and disbelief that we grow young and cheerful again in contemplating it. Should any long-suffering reader desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth century--Mr. Browning’s word-picture of “A Pretty Woman,” for example--back to those swinging and jocund lines where Phillis,

“Faithless as the winds or seas,”