Kitabı oku: «By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects», sayfa 8
THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE
I make no allusion here to the heroine of Mr. Haggard’s well-known romance. What I am thinking of at the moment is not the impossible ‘She’ of recent fiction, but the ‘not impossible She’ of Master Richard Crashaw – the ‘perfect monster,’ in female form, who was to ‘command his heart and him,’ and whom he was good enough to sketch for us in advance within the limits of some forty verses – the damsel whose beauty was to
‘Owe not all its duty
To gaudy tire or glistering shoe-tye;’
whose face was to be
‘Made up
Out of no other shop
Than what Nature’s white hand sets ope;’
who was to have ‘a well-tamed heart,’
‘Sidneian showers
Of sweet discourse,’
and so on, and of whom the poet was so kind as to say that, if Time knew of anyone who answered the description,
‘Her that dares be
What these lines wish to see —
I seek no further – it is She.’
Master Crashaw is not the only man by many who in the past has been seduced into putting into words and verse the aspirations, on this subject, which filled his soul. It would probably be found, if anyone had the requisite patience to go through with it, that there has been scarcely a poet who has not thus given expression to his conception of an ideal woman and to his desire for her companionship. Much more numerous, to be sure, are the rapturous tributes which have been paid to actual persons of the other sex: the poetry of praise, as written by men of women, has not yet been exhausted, and probably never will be. But the ideal description has generally come first, and very notable it has usually been. Sir Thomas Wyatt declared that
‘A face that should content me wondrous well
Should not be fair, but lovely to behold;
Of lively look, all grief for to repel;
With right good grace,’
et cætera. He further asserted that ‘her tress also should be of crispèd gold,’ and intimated graciously that
‘With wit, and these, perchance I might be tied,
And knit again with knot that should not slide.’
His contemporary, Lord Surrey, included among ‘the means to attain happy life,’ ‘the faithful wife, without debate’ – that is, I suppose, a lady without forty-parson-power of talk – a not impossible, nay, fairly common, She.
In a lyric by Beaumont and Fletcher, we find the supposed speaker giving utterance to a series of such wishes. ‘May I,’ he says, ‘find a woman fair, And her mind as clear as air!’
‘May I find a woman rich,
And of not too high a pitch!..
May I find a woman wise,
And her falsehood not disguise!..
May I find a woman kind,
And not wavering like the wind!..’
And, in truth, he talks throughout as if he did not expect to discover any such rarity. Everyone knows the little poem in which Ben Jonson details his preferences in women’s dress, declaring that ‘a sweet disorder’ does more bewitch him ‘than when art Is too precise in every part.’ But elsewhere he paints for us, not a perfect feminine attire, but the faultless maid herself, as he would have her:
‘I would have her fair and witty,
Favouring more of Court than City,
A little proud, but full of pity,
Light and humorous in her toying,
Oft building hopes and soon destroying…
Neither too easy nor too hard,
All extremes I would have barr’d.’
That, it would seem, was rare Ben’s ideal.
Carew, it is notorious, professed to despise ‘lovely cheeks or lips or eyes,’ if they were not combined with ‘A smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.’ A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even star-like eyes, as he sagely said, would waste away. And in this somewhat priggish, and perhaps not wholly sincere, vein, he finds a rival in the anonymous bard who declared that he did not demand
‘A crystal brow, the moon’s despair,
Nor the snow’s daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid’s yellow pride of hair,’
and so on, but instead,
‘A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I would trust,
Yet never link’d with error find —
‘One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthen’d honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose.’
So Bedingfield, conceding to friend Damon ‘the nymph that sparkles in her dress,’ avows his own fondness for the maid ‘whose cheeks the hand of Nature paints.’ Of this young person he says:
‘No art she knows or seeks to know;
No charm to wealthy pride will owe;
No gems, no gold she needs to wear;
She shines intrinsically fair.’
Cowley, it will be remembered, in sketching his notion of true happiness, included in it the picture of
‘A mistress moderately fair,
And good as guardian angels are,
Only beloved and loving me!’
With that ‘one dear She’ – and a few other things – he thought he could get on pretty comfortably. But probably at once the most obliging and most exigent of modern lovers was the sentimental gentleman to whose feelings Mrs. Bowen-Graves (‘Stella’) gave appropriate voice in the over-familiar ‘My Queen.’
‘I will not dream of her tall and stately —
She that I love may be fairy light;’
nay, more:
‘I will not say she should walk sedately —
Whatever she does, it will sure be right.
‘And she may be humble or proud, my lady,
Or that sweet calm which is just between’
(as if anyone could be a ‘sweet calm’!); moreover:
‘Whether her birth be noble or lowly,
I care no more than the spirit above;’
but there is at least one point upon which this gentleman insists:
‘She must be courteous, she must be holy,
Pure in her spirit, that maiden I love’ —
and, being that, she may depend upon the stars falling, and the angels weeping, ere he ceases to love her, his Queen, his Queen!
Ah! the poets have much to answer for. Here is Mr. Longfellow assuring his readers that
‘No one is so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own;’
and here is Sir Edwin Arnold declaring, with equal confidence, that
‘Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For one lone soul another lonely soul’ —
et cætera, et cætera. Is it any wonder that, in the face of such encouragement, young men go on dreaming, each of the dimidium suæ animæ whom he is to meet by-and-by, and framing to that end all sorts of beautiful ideals? It may be that the Shes thus dreamed of are ‘not impossible’ – they may ‘arrive;’ but it is as well not to be too sanguine. And, above all, it is as well not to draw too extravagant a picture, if only because you may not be worthy of the original when you see it. Corydon is too disposed to expect in Phyllis charms and virtues for which he might find it difficult to show counterparts in himself. If the lady is to be the pattern of beauty and of goodness, ought not the gentleman to bring an equal amount of capital into the matrimonial firm?
NONSENSE VERSES
When Bunthorne has recited his ‘wild, weird, fleshly thing,’ called ‘Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!’ the Duke of Dunstable remarks that it seems to him to be nonsense. ‘Nonsense, perhaps,’ replies the Lady Saphir, ‘but oh, what precious nonsense!’ And there really is a sense in which nonsense – genuine, diverting nonsense – is precious indeed. There is so little of it. The late Edward Lear bubbled over with true whimsicality. His ‘Book of Nonsense’ is what it professes to be – the most delightful non-sense possible. But of how much of that sort of thing does English literature boast? There is plenty of unconscious nonsense, of course, but it is not of the right quality. Dryden said of Shadwell that he reigned, ‘without dispute, throughout the realms of nonsense absolute’ – he ‘never deviated into sense’ – and yet he was the dullest of dull dogs. The fact is, that nothing is more difficult than to write amusing nonsense, and it is worth noting how few people, comparatively speaking, have ever attempted to produce it.
One of the earliest efforts of the kind in the language is a certain passage in Udall’s ‘Ralph Roister Doister,’ where Dame Christian receives from the hero a letter which seems, on the face of it, insulting:
‘Sweete mistresse, where as I love you nothing at all,
Regarding your substance and richesse chief of all,
To your personage, beauty, demeanour, and wit,
I commend me unto you never a whit,’
and so on – the joke lying, of course, in the incorrectness of the punctuation adopted. In general, the Elizabethans were too much in earnest to write absolute nonsense. Nonsense is to be found in Shakespeare, but usually in parody of the euphemists of his time. Some of the personæ are made to talk sad stuff, but it has not the merit of being ‘precious’ in the Lady Saphir’s sense. It is very tedious indeed, and one likes to think that Shakespeare, perhaps, did not write it, after all. Drummond, in his ‘Polemo-Middinia,’ gave an early example of a kind of jeu d’esprit which has since been frequently imitated – a species of dog-Latin in extremis:
‘Hic aderunt Geordy Akinhedius and little Johnus,
Et Jamy Richæus, et stout Michel Hendersonus,
Qui jolly tryppas ante alios dansare solebat,
Et bobbare bene, et lassas kissare boneas.’
But though this is not wholly unamusing, it is hardly, as nonsense, up to the standard instituted for us by Mr. Lear.
The real thing is more nearly visible in Swift’s macaronic lines about Molly – ‘Mollis abuti, Hasan acuti,’ etc. – another vein of fun which has been exceedingly well worked out by successive writers. But such inspirations as these have too much method in them to be quite admissible. Much better was Swift’s ‘Love Song in the Modern Taste,’ beginning:
‘Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,
Gentle Cupid, o’er my heart.’
Even this, however, has too much sense for it to pass muster. Nor can one receive Johnson’s
‘If a man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,’
and so on, as sufficiently nonsensical. It is simply a jeu de mots, and no more, though funny enough as it stands. One is better satisfied when one comes to the ‘Tom Thumb’ of Henry Fielding and the ‘Chrononhotonthologos’ of Henry Carey, though even in those diverting squibs it is rarely that the versifier surrenders himself wholly to ‘Divine Nonsensia.’ That charming goddess was saluted to more purpose in ‘The Anti-Jacobin,’ where she was invoked to make charming fun of ‘The Loves of the Plants.’ In ‘The Progress of Man’ (in the same delectable collection) occurs the inspired passage:
‘Ah, who has seen the mailèd lobster rise,
Clap her broad wings, and, soaring, claim the skies
When did the owl, descending from her bower,
Crop, ’mid the fleecy flocks, the tender flower?
Or the young heifer plunge, with pliant limb,
In the salt wave and, fish-like, strive to swim?’
But even this is too consistent in its grotesqueness to be perfect nonsense.
One becomes acquainted with better nonsense the nearer one gets to one’s own times. How clever, for instance, was that well-known ‘dream’ of Planché’s, in which he fancied that he
‘Was walking with Homer, and talking
The very best Greek I was able – was able —
When Guy, Earl of Warwick, with Johnson and Garrick,
Would dance a Scotch-reel on the table – the table;
When Hannibal, rising, declared ’twas surprising
That gentlemen made such a riot – a riot —
And sent in a bustle to beg Lord John Russell
Would hasten and make them all quiet – all quiet.’
It may be that Mr. W. S. Gilbert had this in his mind when, in ‘Patience,’ he pictured the processes by which to manufacture a heavy dragoon; but here, again, the design is too obvious, the incongruity a little too apparent. The late Shirley Brooks extracted much fun out of a mosaic of quotations from the poets, beginning:
‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
That to be hated needs but to be seen,
Invites my lay; be present, sylvan maids,
And graceful deer reposing in the shades.’
Very good nonsense is this, if not of the best; and it leads us up naturally to the more consummate performances of Mr. Calverley, whose exquisite mimicry of Mr. Browning and Miss Ingelow, in their most incomprehensible or most affected moods, is too well known to need description. Favourable mention may also be made of a certain ballad composed by the late Professor Palmer, in illustration of his inability to master nautical terms, which he furbishes up in mirth-provoking fashion.
But, putting aside Mr. Lear, the most successful, the most precious nonsense ever written has been supplied by writers still, happily, in our midst. And of these, of course, Mr. Lewis Carroll is obviously facile princeps– not only by reason of the immortal ‘Jabberwocky,’ but by reason, also, of ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ in which there are some very felicitous passages.
‘They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.’
It requires genius, of a kind, to conceive and execute such lines as these, easy as (no doubt) it seems to write them. Not that Mr. Carroll is unapproachable. There are probably many who think that his ‘Jabberwocky’ is at least equalled by Mr. Gilbert’s ‘Sing for the Garish Eye,’ in which the invented words are truly ‘Carrollian’:
‘Sing for the garish eye,
When moonless brandlings cling;
Let the froddering crooner cry,
And the braddled sapster sing!’ —
though, to be sure, Mr. Gilbert could hardly be expected to do anything better than that lovely quatrain of Bunthorne’s about ‘The dust of an earthy to-day’ and ‘The earth of a dusty to-morrow.’
The example set by Mr. Lear has been followed by many versifiers, who have sought to create their effects after a manner now sufficiently familiar. Thus, we have had multitudinous efforts like the following:
‘There was an old priest in Peru
Who dreamt he’d converted a Jew:
He woke in the night
In a deuce of a fright,
And found it was perfectly true.’
Performances of that sort are, however, easy; and more merit attaches to such studies in unintelligibility as Bret Harte’s ‘Songs without Sense,’ of which the ‘Swiss Air’ is a good example:
‘I’m a gay tra, la, la,
With my fal, lal, la, la,
And my bright —
And my light —
Tra, la, le. [Repeat.]
Then laugh, ha, ha, ha,
And ring, ting, ling, ling,
And sing fal, la, la,
La, la, le.’ [Repeat.]
Probably, however, the poetry of pure nonsense has never been better represented than in these contemporary verses on the suitable topic of ‘Blue Moonshine’:
‘Ay! for ever and for ever
Whilst the love-lorn censers sweep,
Whilst the jasper winds dissever,
Amber-like, the crystal deep;
Shall the soul’s delirious slumber,
Sea-green vengeance of a kiss,
Teach despairing crags to number
Blue infinities of bliss.’
SINGLE-SPEECH HAMILTONS
Most people have heard of that Mr. Gerard Hamilton who, suddenly and unexpectedly making in the House of Commons an oration which ‘threw into the shade every other orator except Pitt,’ was henceforth known by the nickname of ‘Single-Speech’ – not because he never addressed the House again, but because those who so nicknamed him chose to regard this performance as the distinguishing feature of his career. He continued to be known by that one discourse, and it is by virtue of it that he has a place in history. The fact is notable, and yet by no means uncommon. The world is, and always has been, full of Single-Speech Hamiltons – male and female – who have gained and maintained their notoriety by one special effort. Human nature is so constituted that the man or woman who is unable to produce a series of successes may yet have the capacity to compass one – may possess the energy and the ability to make at least one strong impression before retiring wholly into the background.
The truth of this is observable, for example, in the sphere of poetry. How many are the excellent versifiers whose reputation is based wholly upon a solitary effusion! They have been inspired once, and the outcome is literary immortality. They cannot always be regarded strictly as poets, and yet they have a vogue which any poet might envy. They reign and shine by virtue of what may be called a happy accident. Thus, Lady Ann Barnard is known, in the world of verse, only by her ‘Auld Robin Gray,’ just as Miss Elliott and Mrs. Cockburn are known only by their respective ‘Flowers of the Forest.’ We remember Oldys merely by his ‘Busy, curious, thirsty fly,’ Sir William Jones by his ‘What constitutes a State?’ Blanco White by his one Sonnet upon Night, Charles Wolfe by his ‘Burial of Sir John Moore,’ John Collins by his ‘In the Downhill of Life,’ and Herbert Knowles by his ‘Lines in a Churchyard.’ As Artemus Ward said of the oil-painting achieved by the Old Masters: ‘They did this, and then they expired.’ Some of them wrote other things, but the world received them not. It took count only of the single occasion on which they had been influenced by the divine afflatus– of the one thing which they had done ‘supremely’ well.
Authors themselves are, no doubt, surprised at the caprices of the public, and somewhat piqued by the preferences of their patrons. Some are Single-Speech Hamiltons only because their readers have taken a special fancy to particular performances – not always because the achievements were obviously the best, but simply because circumstances brought them to the fore. It is, one may assume, to the charm of Haydn’s musical setting that Mrs. Hunter owes the fame and popularity of ‘My mother bids me bind my hair’: it is to the composer, in that case, that the acceptance of the words are owing. Obvious causes, again, have given precedence to Heber’s ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’ over all his other work in verse; just as the fact of having got into the extract books has accorded to Blake’s ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ a pre-eminence in the public mind over all his other efforts. In these matters the world will have its own way. It still extends recognition to Young’s ‘Night Thoughts,’ but is apparently indifferent to his ‘Universal Passion.’ It thinks of Bloomfield only in connection with ‘The Farmer’s Boy,’ and ignores the rest; just as it faintly recollects ‘The Sabbath’ of James Grahame, but has forgotten even the titles of ‘Biblical Pictures’ and ‘The British Georgics.’
This dependence of literary fame upon special public favourites is, perhaps, most strikingly represented in the field of fiction and the drama. Nothing is more common than that a novelist or a dramatist should remain in the popular memory by virtue of a single production. Beckford is for most people only the author of ‘Vathek’; it is only the bibliophile who troubles himself about ‘Azemia’ or ‘The Elegant Enthusiast.’ Miss Porter is remembered by her ‘Scottish Chiefs’ – scarcely at all, perhaps, by her ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw.’ Everybody knows how strongly ‘The Monk’ took the fancy of the reading world – so strongly that the writer was ‘Monk’ Lewis, and ‘Monk’ Lewis only, ever after. Mackenzie’s ‘Man of Feeling’ survives, but the ‘Man of the World’ and ‘Julia Roubigné’ are as if they had never existed. And look at the playwrights! ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ is a classic, but ‘The Good-Natured Man’ is not even good-naturedly tolerated. ‘The Road to Ruin’ has eclipsed ‘Duplicity’ and ‘The Deserted Daughter.’ We all know ‘The Honeymoon,’ but who has seen, how many have read, ‘The Curfew’ and ‘The School for Authors’? We flock to ‘Wild Oats,’ but alas for ‘The Agreeable Surprise’! ‘The Man of the World’ keeps Macklin’s name before us, but we have said good-bye to ‘Love à la Mode.’
In truth, it is not a bad thing thus to be associated with one definite, unmistakable success. Gerard Hamilton did more for himself by that single brilliant speech than if he had delivered a whole multitude of less striking orations. There is nothing more fatal to a man than middlingness – a sort of dead level of mediocre performance. The world loses count of merely respectable outcome. To obtain its regard you must take its imagination captive at least once. You may be a very excellent person, and do very useful work; but, if you desire to be kept in mind, you must achieve something to which your name can be popularly attached. It is thus that Beattie and ‘The Minstrel,’ Green and ‘The Spleen,’ Somerville and ‘The Chase,’ Blair and ‘The Grave,’ Falconer and ‘The Shipwreck,’ Pollok and ‘The Course of Time’ – to name no others – are inseparably associated the one with the other. The works in question, probably, are rarely opened, but their titles at any rate have stuck in the general memory. Even in our own time, for the great majority of people, Miss Braddon will always be the author of ‘Lady Audley’s Secret,’ Mrs. Oliphant always the author of ‘The Chronicles of Carlingford,’ Mrs. Henry Wood always the author of ‘East Lynne’ – and so on. That is the way in which they are remembered.
Generally speaking, versatility is undesirable when reputation is the object aimed at. The world has not a very good memory, or, rather, it has so much to think about that it desires not to be more encumbered than it can help. Such men as the late Lord Lytton, for example, are, in one respect, a nuisance to it. Bulwer was about equally distinguished as a novelist, as a dramatist, and as an essayist; and, ever since, the average man has been puzzled whether to think of him as the author of ‘Pelham,’ the author of ‘The Lady of Lyons,’ or the author of ‘Caxtoniana.’ Bulwer tried hard to establish a position as a poet, but, happily, there is no need to trouble one’s self greatly about ‘King Arthur.’ As it is, the fame of Bulwer’s dramas appears likely, by-and-by, to eclipse altogether the fame of his novels. And this, if it ever happens, will prove once more that a man can be the worst enemy of himself. Single-Speech Hamilton was not satisfied with his big success, but spoke again. Nothing could have been more unwise. He should have rested on his laurels – unless indeed, he could have been quite sure that he would surpass his former triumph. Unless one can be perfectly certain of that, it is, best, in general, to let well alone.
