claims that you have in it "the only published, perhaps the only
existing record of the life of an English girl, written of herself, in
the eighteenth century." I believe that to be true. It is a record, and
a faithful and very charming record of the externals of such a life.
As such it is, to me at least, a valuable thing. If it does not unfold
the amiable, brisk, and happy Fanny herself, there are two simple
reasons why it could not. First, she was writing her journal for the
entertainment of old Mr. Crisp of Chessington, the "Daddy Crisp" of her
best pages; secondly, it is not at all likely that she knew of anything
to unfold. Nor, for that matter, was Fanny herself of the kind that can
unfold to another person. Yet there is a charm all over the book, which
some may place here, some there, but which all will confess. For me it
is not so much that Fanny herself is a charming girl, and a girl of
shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and an admirable gift of mimicry.
She has all that and more--she has a good heart. Her sister Susan is
as good as she, and there are many of Susan's letters. But the real
charm of the book, I think, is in the series of faithful pictures it
contains of the everyday round of an everyday family. Dutch pictures
all--passers-by, a knock at the front door, callers--Mr. Young, "in
light blue embroidered with silver, a bag and sword, and walking in the
rain"; a jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home--the Agujari in one of
her humours; a masquerade--"a very private one, and at the house of Mr.
Laluze ... Hetty had for three months thought of nothing else ... she
went as a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist. Nothing
could look more simple, innocent, and pretty. My dress was a close pink
Persian vest covered with a gauze in loose pleats...." What else? Oh, a
visit to Teignmouth--Maria Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester;
quiet days at King's Lynn, where "I have just finished _Henry and
Frances_ ... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry,
and on the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful
to our thoughts, Eternal Misery...." Terrific novel: but need I go on?
There may be some to whom a description of the nothings of this our
life will be as flat as the nothings themselves--but I am not of that
party. The things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm. It
is the charm of innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words.
The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral
dew. They cannot reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed
reassurance for themselves.
Where, then, shall we turn? So far as I am aware, to two only, except
for two others whom I leave out of account. Rousseau is one, for it is
long since I read him, but my recollection is that the _Confessions_ is
a kind of novel, premeditated, selective, done with great art. Marie
Bashkirtseff is another. I have not read her at all. Of the two who
remain I leave Pepys also out of account, because, though it may be
good for us to read Pepys, it is better to have read him and be through
with it. There, under the grace of God, go a many besides Pepys, and
among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a stump of
pencil. We are left then with one whom it is ill to name in the same
fill of the inkpot, "Wordsworth's exquisite sister," as Keats, who saw
her once, at once knew her to be.
In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals you may have the delight of daily
intercourse--_famigliarmente discorrendo_--with one of the purest
and noblest souls ever housed in flesh; to that you may add the
reassurance to be got from word and implication beyond doubt. She tells
us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she
sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not
only that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour and
lovely living; it is to learn that human life can so be lived, and to
conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.
These journals are for fragments only of the years which they cover,
and as such exist for Jan.-May, 1798 (Alfoxden), May-Dec., 1800,
Oct.-Dec., 1801, Jan.-July, 1802: all these at Grasmere. They have been
printed by Professor Knight, and I have the assurance of Mr. Gordon
Wordsworth that what little has been omitted is unimportant. Nothing is
unimportant to me, and I wish the whole had been given us; but what we
have is enough whereby to trace the development of her extraordinary
mind and of her power of self-expression. The latter, undoubtedly,
grew out of emotion, which gradually culminated until the day of
William Wordsworth's marriage. There it broke, and with it, as if by
a determination of the will, there the revelation ceased. A new life
began with the coming of Mary Wordsworth to Dove Cottage, a life of
which Dorothy records the surface only.
The Alfoxden fragment (20 Jan.-22 May, 1798), written when she was
twenty-seven, is chiefly notable for its power of interpreting
landscape. That was a power which Wordsworth himself possessed in a
high degree. There can be no doubt, I think, that they egged each other
on, but I myself should find it hard to say which was egger-on and
which the egged. This is the first sentence of it:
"20 Jan.--The green paths down the hillsides are channels for
streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running
between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes.
After the wet dark days the country seems more populous. It peoples
itself in the sunbeams."
Here is one of few days later:
"23rd.--Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o'cl. The sea perfectly calm
blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or
points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The
crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly
heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer.
We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to
the absence of the singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless
noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by
beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road."
She handles words, phrases, like notes or chords of music, and never
gets her landscape by direct description. One more picture and I must
leave it:
"26.-- ... Walked to the top of a high hill to see a fortification.
Again sat down to feed upon the prospect; a magnificent scene,
_curiously_ spread out for even minute inspection, though so
extensive that the mind is afraid to calculate its bounds...."
Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him. Here is a curious
point to note. Dorothy records:
"March 7th.--William and I drank tea at Coleridge's.... Observed
nothing particularly interesting.... One only leaf upon the top of
a tree--the sole remaining leaf--danced round and round like a rag
blown by the wind."
And Coleridge has in _Christabel_:
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
William, Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Hamburg at the end of that
year, but in 1800 the brother and sister were in Grasmere; and the
journal, which opens with May 14, at once betrays the great passion of
Dorothy's life:
"William and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at half-past
two o'clock, cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning
of the Low-Wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full I could
hardly speak to W. when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long
time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of
tears my heart was easier. The lake looked to me, I know not why,
dull and melancholy, and the weltering on the shore seemed a heavy
sound.... I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and
J. return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not
quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it
when he comes again...."
"Because I will not quarrel with myself!" She is full of such
illuminations. Here is another:
"Sunday, June 1st.--After tea went to Ambleside round the lakes.
A very fine warm evening. Upon the side of Loughrigg _my heart
dissolved in what I saw_."
Now here is her account of a country funeral which she reads into, or
out of, the countryside:
"Wednesday, 3rd Sept.-- ... a funeral at John Dawson's ... I was
affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying
before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out
of the dark house the sun was shining, and the prospect looked as
divinely beautiful as I ever saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had
ever seen it, _and yet more allied to human life_.... I thought she
was going to a quiet spot, and I could not help weeping very much...."
The italics are mine. William was pleased to call her weeping "nervous
blubbering."
* * * * *
And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the last
year of the five in which those two had lived as one soul and one
heart. They were at Dove Cottage, on something under £150 a year. Poems
were thronging thick about them; they were living intensely. John was
alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge,
not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy,
she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the
third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite
finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a
deal to do, pens to make, poems to put in order for writing, to settle
for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at half-past eleven (it
is now two) I have been putting the drawers into order, laid by his
clothes, which he had thrown here and there and everywhere, filed two
months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two boiled eggs and two apple
tarts.... The robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I _will_
be busy. I _will_ look well, and be well when he comes back to me. O
the Darling! Here is one of his bitter apples. I can hardly find it in
my heart to throw it into the fire.... I walked round the two lakes,
crossed the stepping-stones at Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always
sit. I was full of thought of my darling. Blessings on him." Where
else in our literature will you find mood so tender, so intimately, so
delicately related?
A week later, and William returned. With him, it seems, her descriptive
powers. "Monday morning--a soft rain and mist. We walked to Rydale for
letters. The Vale looked very beautiful in excessive simplicity, yet,
at the same time, uncommon obscurity. The church stood alone, mountains
behind. The meadows looked calm and rich, bordering on the still lake.
Nothing else to be seen but lake and island." Exquisite landscape. For
its like we must go to Japan. Here is another. An interior. It is the
23rd of March, "about ten o'clock, a quiet night. The fire flickers,
and the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my beloved as
he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf...." No
more, but the peace of it is profound, the art incomparable.
In April, between the 5th and 12th, William went into Yorkshire upon
an errand which she knew and dreaded. Her trouble makes the words
throb. "Monday, 12th.... The ground covered with snow. Walked to T.
Wilkinson's and sent for letters. The woman brought me one from William
and Mary. It was a sharp windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came with me to
Barton and questioned me like a catechiser all the way. Every question
was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart. I was so full
of thought of my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he
left me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking of
my own thoughts. The moon travelled through the clouds, tinging them
yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger than
the other.... At this time William, as I found the next day, was riding
by himself between Middleham and Barnard Castle." I don't know where
else to find the vague torment of thought, its way of enhancing colour
and form in nature, more intensely observed. Next day: "When I returned
_William_ was come. _The surprise shot through me_." This woman was not
so much poet as crystal vase. You can see the thought cloud and take
shape.
The twin life was resumed for yet a little while. In the same month
come her descriptions of the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, and of the
scene by Brothers Water, which prove to anybody in need of proof
that she was William's well-spring of poesy. Not that the journal is
necessarily involved. No need to suppose that he even read it. But
that she could make him see, and be moved by, what she had seen is
proved by this: "17th.... I saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly
this morning"; and "Sunday, 18th.... William wrote the poem on _The
Robin and the Butterfly_." No; beautiful beyond praise as the journals
are, it is certain that she was more beautiful than they. And what a
discerning illuminative eye she had! "As I lay down on the grass, I
observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the
sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them
look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of
another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world...." What a
woman to go a-gipsying through the world with!
Then comes the end.... "Thursday, 8th July.... In the afternoon, after
we had talked a little, William fell asleep. I read _The Winter's
Tale_; then I went to bed, but did not sleep. The swallows stole in
and out of their nest, and sat there, _whiles_ quite still, _whiles_
they sung low for two minutes or more at a time, just like a muffled
robin. William was looking at _The Pedlar_ when I got up. He arranged
it, and after tea I wrote it out--280 lines.... The moon was behind....
We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and
dull, but our own vale was very solemn--the shape of Helm Crag was
quite distinct, though black. We walked backwards and forwards on the
White Moss path; there was a sky like white brightness on the lake....
O beautiful place! Dear Mary, William. The hour is come.... I must
prepare to go. The swallows, I must leave them, the wall, the garden,
the roses, all. Dear creatures, they sang last night after I was in
bed; seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to
rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell."
Next day she set out with William to meet her secret dread, knowing
that life in Rydale could never be the same again. Wordsworth married
Mary Hutchinson on the 4th October, 1802. The secret is no secret now,
for Dorothy was a crystal vase.
BEN JONSON[7]
[7] _Ben Jonson. By G. Gregory Smith. (English Men of
Letters Series.) Macmillan, 1919. 3s. net._
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
It comes as something of a surprise to find that the niche reserved for
Ben Jonson in the "English Men of Letters" series has only now been
filled. One expected somehow that he would have been among the first of
the great ones to be enshrined; but no, he has had a long time to wait;
and Adam Smith, and Sydney Smith, and Hazlitt, and Fanny Burney have
gone before him into the temple of fame. Now, however, his monument has
at last been made, with Professor Gregory Smith's qualified version of
"O rare Ben Jonson!" duly and definitively carved upon it.
What is it that makes us, almost as a matter of course, number Ben
Jonson among the great? Why should we expect him to be an early
candidate for immortality, or why, indeed, should he be admitted to the
"English Men of Letters" series at all? These are difficult questions
to answer; for when we come to consider the matter we find ourselves
unable to give any very glowing account of Ben or his greatness. It
is hard to say that one likes his work; one cannot honestly call
him a good poet or a supreme dramatist. And yet, unsympathetic as
he is, uninteresting as he often can be, we still go on respecting
and admiring him, because, in spite of everything, we are conscious,
obscurely but certainly, that he was a great man.
He had little influence on his successors; the comedy of humours died
without any but an abortive issue. Shadwell, the mountain-bellied "Og,
from a treason tavern rolling home," is not a disciple that any man
would have much pride in claiming. No raking up of literary history
will make Ben Jonson great as a founder of a school or an inspirer of
others. His greatness is a greatness of character. There is something
almost alarming in the spectacle of this formidable figure advancing
with tank-like irresistibility towards the goal he had set himself to
attain. No sirens of romance can seduce him, no shock of opposition
unseat him in his career. He proceeds along the course theoretically
mapped out at the inception of his literary life, never deviating from
this narrow way till the very end--till the time when, in his old age,
he wrote that exquisite pastoral, _The Sad Shepherd_, which is so
complete and absolute a denial of all his lifelong principles. But _The
Sad Shepherd_ is a weakness, albeit a triumphant weakness. Ben, as he
liked to look upon himself, as he has again and again revealed himself
to us, is the artist with principles, protesting against the anarchic
absence of principle among the geniuses and charlatans, the poets and
ranters of his age.
"The true artificer will not run away from nature as he were afraid
of her: or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but speak to
the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from
the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them
but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them
to the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art, so to carry it
as none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is
called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious
word can come in their cheeks, by these men who without labour,
judgment, knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred
before him."
In these sentences from _Discoveries_ Ben Jonson paints his own
picture--portrait of the artist as a true artificer--setting forth,
in its most general form, and with no distracting details of the
humours or the moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist's
true function and nature. Jonson's theory was no idle speculation, no
mere thing of words and air, but a creed, a principle, a categorical
imperative, conditioning and informing his whole work. Any study of the
poet must, therefore, begin with the formulation of his theory, and
must go on, as Professor Gregory Smith's excellent essay does indeed
proceed, to show in detail how the theory was applied and worked out in
each individual composition.
A good deal of nonsense has been talked at one time or another about
artistic theories. The artist is told that he should have no theories,
that he should warble native wood-notes wild, that he should "sing," be
wholly spontaneous, should starve his brain and cultivate his heart and
spleen; that an artistic theory cramps the style, stops up the Helicons
of inspiration, and so on, and so on. The foolish and sentimental
conception of the artist, to which these anti-intellectual doctrines
are a corollary, dates from the time of romanticism and survives
among the foolish and sentimental of to-day. A consciously practised
theory of art has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up
inspiration, but rather, and in most cases profitably, canalised
it. Even the Romantics had theories and were wild and emotional on
principle.
Theories are above all necessary at moments when old traditions are
breaking up, when all is chaos and in flux. At such moments an artist
formulates his theory and clings to it through thick and thin; clings
to it as the one firm raft of security in the midst of the surrounding
unrest. Thus, when the neo-Classicism, of which Ben was one of the
remote ancestors, was crumbling into the nothingness of _The Loves of
the Plants_ and _The Triumphs of Temper_, Wordsworth found salvation by
the promulgation of a new theory of poetry, which he put into practice
systematically and to the verge of absurdity in _Lyrical Ballads_.
Similarly in the shipwreck of the old tradition of painting we find
the artists of the present day clinging desperately to intellectual
formulas as their only hope in the chaos. The only occasions, in
fact, when the artist can afford entirely to dispense with theory
occur in periods when a well-established tradition reigns supreme and
unquestioned. And then the absence of theory is more apparent than
real; for the tradition in which he is working is a theory, originally
formulated by someone else, which he accepts unconsciously and as
though it were the law of nature itself.
The beginning of the seventeenth century was not one of these
periods of placidity and calm acceptance. It was a moment of growth
and decay together, of fermentation. The fabulous efflorescence of
the Renaissance had already grown rank. With that extravagance of
energy which characterised them in all things, the Elizabethans had
exaggerated the traditions of their literature into insincerity. All
artistic traditions end, in due course, by being reduced to the absurd;
but the Elizabethans crammed the growth and decline of a century into a
few years. One after another they transfigured and then destroyed every
species of art they touched. Euphuism, Petrarchism, Spenserism, the
sonnet, the drama--some lasted a little longer than others, but they
all exploded in the end, these beautiful iridescent bubbles blown too
big by the enthusiasm of their makers.
But in the midst of this unstable luxuriance voices of protest
were to be heard, reactions against the main romantic current were
discernible. Each in his own way and in his own sphere, Donne and
Ben Jonson protested against the exaggerations of the age. At a time
when sonneteers in legions were quibbling about the blackness of
their ladies' eyes or the golden wires of their hair, when Platonists
protested in melodious chorus that they were not in love with "red and
white" but with the ideal and divine beauty of which peach-blossom
complexions were but inadequate shadows, at a time when love-poetry had
become, with rare exceptions, fantastically unreal, Donne called it
back, a little grossly perhaps, to facts with the dry remark:
Love's not so pure and abstract as they use
To say, who have _no mistress_ but their muse.
There have been poets who have written more lyrically than Donne,
more fervently about certain amorous emotions, but not one who has
formulated so rational a philosophy of love as a whole, who has seen
all the facts so clearly and judged of them so soundly. Donne laid down
no literary theory. His followers took from him all that was relatively
unimportant--the harshness, itself a protest against Spenserian
facility, the conceits, the sensuality tempered by mysticism--but the
important and original quality of Donne's work, the psychological
realism, they could not, through sheer incapacity, transfer into their
own poetry. Donne's immediate influence was on the whole bad. Any
influence for good he may have had has been on poets of a much later
date.
The other great literary Protestant of the time was the curious subject
of our examination, Ben Jonson. Like Donne he was a realist. He had
no use for claptrap, or rant, or romanticism. His aim was to give his
audiences real facts flavoured with sound morality. He failed to be
a great realist, partly because he lacked the imaginative insight to
perceive more than the most obvious and superficial reality, and partly
because he was so much preoccupied with the sound morality that he was
prepared to sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of characters
he gives us humours, not minds, but personified moral qualities.