majesty and in those with whom eloquence is infrequent, in the graceful
and the ungainly, in the magisterial and the familiar, this thing
is to be discerned: that their prose is least personal when at its
highest flights. The observation is common that we have in England no
standard and accepted prose style, but a medley of manners which are
continually increasing in number. This is true. But it has not been
generally noticed that amongst those passages of English prose, drawn
from authors of all our literary ages, which are received as being
the most sublime and the most musical--passages which have been, and
must be, the first resort of all anthologists of our prose who are
in search of those attributes of power and beauty--there is a strong
likeness of form and feature. There is more: the resemblance is often
so close that the differences, normally marked, between the styles of
writers divided by a great gulf of time are in such sentences not to
be distinguished. Styles so various on the lower plane meet, as it
were, on the higher: there is an established, an inevitable, manner
into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into
grandeur. It is the style of the Authorised Version, a style in process
of formation long before the date of that Parthenon of our prose, but
reaching in that its perfection, and by means of that made an element
of the air we breathe, and many generations before us have breathed, in
childhood. Even in writers who never entirely lose the marks of their
eccentricity the most eloquent "purple patches" are always reminiscent.
Emotion deepens suddenly, or reaches an expected climax; the results
of reflection are summarised; by whatever route, the author comes to
a place at which his expression assumes a sublimity of imagery and a
perfection of rhythm; and with the emotion he communicates is always
mingled the throe of recognition. The note has been struck and a
hundred neighbouring strings respond. The writer has stepped off the
common road and into that chapel where there is one ritual and one mode
of incantation. "Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time
to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a
flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one
stay." It is the Prayer-Book of 1549. "Thou hast drawn together all the
far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man,
and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacit_." It
is Sir Walter Raleigh. "These wait upon the shore of death, and waft
unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star that
they might be led to his place; wooing the remorseless Sisters to wind
down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour."
It is Bacon. "A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's
dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine
eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles
me in my prayer." It is John Donne. "Methusalem, with all his hundreds
of years, was but a mushroom of a night's growth to this day; and all
the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the
powerful Kings, and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but
as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at
eight--all in one morning in respect of this day." That too is Donne,
and his subject Eternity. "Since the brother of Death daily haunts
us with dying Mementoes, and Time that grows old itself bids us hope
no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation."
That is Sir Thomas Browne. "They that three thousand years agone died
unwillingly, and stopped death two days, or stayed it a week, what is
their gain? Where is that week?" That is Jeremy Taylor. "When all is
done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward
child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet,
till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." That is Sir William
Temple. "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and
our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." That is Gibbon. "The
stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native
country and their natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their
arrival." The argument to the _Ancient Mariner_ needs no specification.
"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.
It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late;
better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under
us, and to protract an inevitable fall." That is from a dialogue of
Landor's. "And it would not taste of death, by reason of its adoption
into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and
the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in
its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness."
That is Charles Lamb. "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was
heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her,
breathing balm into my heart: for a little while I had sat with the
gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss." They
have quoted that passage from Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_ a thousand
times. "Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure
not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in
heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries
painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the
brain." That is de Quincey. "And again the sun blinks out, and the poor
sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs
and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet
another summer added for us and another harvest." That is Carlyle. "To
what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such
poor weather tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or
who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle
from far." It is from Emerson. "Not to discriminate every moment some
passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their
gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short
day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." That, if modern in
conception, altogether traditional in cadence and in the phrasing of
its close, is from Pater's _Renaissance_. "We can therefore be happy
in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the
fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and
hands unstained by hatred and wrong." A peroration: the peroration
from the Poet Laureate's _Spirit of Man_. "And in the autumn before
the snows come they have all gone--of all that incalculable abundance
of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness
there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a
dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather." Mr. H. G. Wells, never a
careful artist or fully aware of what language can be, permits himself
some looseness in the phraseology of the passage from which that
sentence comes, but he too falls, as it were unwittingly, into the old
music. And here, from another living author is a piece of declamation
which contains, indeed, sentiments and words which would have been
foreign to the seventeenth century, but is a true child of its loins:
We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears,
of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence,
of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a
period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed
compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the
energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be
dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate
the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will
go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy
consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space
broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter
will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal
deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though
they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse
for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have
striven through countless generations to effect.
This passage, summarising the conclusions that natural science unaided
has been able to reach, is detached from a longer one: it occurs in Mr.
Balfour's _The Foundations of Belief_.
* * * * *
There is one music and one speech in all these extracts. It is not the
result of deliberation, but it is not an accident, that they have so
much else in common, that their very subjects are analogous. Chosen,
however genuinely, at random and without afterthought, if they are
chosen from the best, they will be variations on but a few related
themes and half of them will be inspired by the direct contemplation of
death. There are innumerable subjects which engage the attention, and
they may be seen in countless aspects; but that large utterance comes
chiefly to English lips when things, of whatever nature they may be,
are regarded _sub specie æternitatis_. Whatever a man's philosophy and
whatever his mood, when he speaks with this music, he speaks with the
voice of mankind, awed and saddened by its inscrutable destiny. Time,
Death, Eternity, Mutability: those words, the most awful that we know,
insistently recur. It is they, unuttered yet present, which give their
grandeur to pronouncements of many kinds which do not relate directly
to the general operations of Time or of Death: to Burke's passage on
Marie Antoinette, to Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, to Gibbon's
moonlight reverie on the conclusion of his History. Those names, those
figures with their skirts of thunder and doom, trail through all our
literature with a majesty that no others possess. Apostrophising those
our shadowy tyrants, celebrating them, rebelling against them, we may
clothe our conceptions in many images, though even here, for the most
part, we must observe a tendency, natural and spontaneous, to choose
as tokens and ornaments a few, in the earthly sense, universal and
perennial things. But those shapes tower over our whole world. Anything
we look at in the sunlight, a wave, a weed, a travelling insect, may
be like a window opening out to them; and at night, under the dark
sky, so actual and so symbolical, the reflective man is always aware
of them. We have our activities and our distractions. We must satisfy
our carnal cravings, eat, drink, and sleep; between birth and death,
under that immense and unresponsive heaven, we build and dig, hunt and
dance, carve and paint, intrigue, copulate and kill. But whenever the
moment comes that we turn round from our toys it is one spectacle that
we see: life proceeding from darkness to darkness, change, dissolution,
and death. And the greatest utterance of our tongue is a chronicle,
again and again resumed and repeated, of the wonder and dread, the
certain regret and the wavering hope which that spectacle arouses in
hearts which have immortal longings but have loved transient things:
a chronicle of grass that withers, leaves that fall, of girls like
flowers who fade like flowers, of conquerors who are dust, blown about,
of tough oaks that decay, of stone temples and pyramids that as surely,
after a few more years, fall into dust, of the world's past, and the
past of the individual which cannot be recovered, the innocence and
the illusions of childhood, the loss of which typifies all loss and
their beauty that Eden to which, with the shadow approaching, we
pitifully aspire: all framed by the most abiding things that our senses
know, the sea and the wind and the hills, the seasons which come for
all generations in their order, the stars, constant, silent, vigilant
over all: those also transitory after their own kind, arching to their
fall in epochs beyond our computation or guessing, but in relation to
us steadfast and immutable.
They say (though I do not believe it) that an age, even if it be still
far distant, is coming in which the present preoccupations of man, both
physical and mental, will have vanished and new passions and new hopes
will have taken their place. Our contact with each other is as yet
imperfect; psychological discovery is only beginning; the gates between
mind and mind will all be broken down; it will not be a question of
universal candour but of automatic communication and sympathy. The
individual will be identified with the race, will live only in the life
of the race, will not merely not fear but will not even think about
any death which does not involve the death of the race. The race will
be one animal; its members, sloughed and replaced, will want no more
immortality than that qualified perpetuation which the race can give;
no two persons will be more to each other than any other two; Man will
really be Man and will cease to be men. Should that time come (which,
speaking diffidently, it will not) the voice of Man may change. His
most eloquent words may be other than they are now, and even though,
in his corporate form, he is still most deeply stirred by frustrations
that we cannot conjecture, the range of his imagery will have altered,
he will have new symbols for his regrets, and new comparisons for his
ideas. Pending that change there is no reason to suppose that the
essential, or to a large extent the incidental, material of our poetry,
or of such of our prose as aspires to the condition of poetry, will
substantially alter. We speak most sublimely of what moves us most
deeply.
But this is not to say that we should wish that such speech, at the
cost of such experience, should be more than intermittent. Sun, sheep,
and children may take a sober colouring from the eye that has been much
busied with such watchings, but they were not put there solely for
that purpose; even if we profess ignorance of the reasons for their
existence, we shall employ ourselves better if we act on the assumption
that they were not. The last word, after so prolonged a meditation on
the incomprehensible, may lie with Stevenson who, not unaccustomed
to the thought of death and not incapable of poetry, wrote an essay
on the subject which might not supply passages "distilled" enough
for this book, but contains many so sensible that they might well be
reprinted in others. "The changes wrought by death," he said, "are in
themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and
has no parallel upon earth." That opening might have led to a piece
of great orchestral prose; but he turned on himself and wrote instead
some pages of cheerful colloquial prose, sprinkled with fine sentences.
In all views and situations "there is but one conclusion possible:
that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the
race that is set before him with a single mind"; and "as a matter of
fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings
than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under
healthy circumstances." But notice, even in this essay, the old lift,
the old attitude, the old accents, when momentarily he looks out over
the other wall: "Into what great waters, not to be crossed by any
swimmer, God's pale Prætorian throws us over in the end!"
A COLLECTION OF AUTOGRAPHS
By CANON N. EGERTON LEIGH
My collection of autographs was begun by Lady Sitwell, of Rempstone,
who married, 1798, Sir Sitwell Sitwell, Bt., M.P., who died in 1811.
She married secondly, as his second wife, my grandfather in 1821, and
died in 1860. Lady Sitwell knew everybody, and entertained a good
deal. She was a blue-stocking in the days of their power, and most of
the letters were written to her by the eminent men and women of the
day. But her friends supplied her with other autographs--for instance,
Longfellow sends her George Washington and Benjamin Franklyn. The
following remarks by Washington are interesting at the present time:
"At the beginning of the late war with Great Britain, when we thought
ourselves justifiable in resisting to blood, it was known to those best
acquainted with the different conditions of the combatants and the
probable cost of the prize in dispute that the expense in comparison
with our circumstances as Colonists must be enormous, the struggle
protracted, dubious, and severe. It was known that the resources of
Britain were, in a manner, inexhaustible, that her fleet covered the
Ocean, and that her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of
the globe. Not then organised as a nation, or known as a people upon
the earth, we had no preparation. Money, the nerve of war, was wanting.
The sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity: the treasury to
be created from nothing. If we had a secret resource unknown to our
enemy, it was in the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the
conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should
not be forsaken by Heaven. The people willingly offered themselves to
the battle, but the means of arming, clothing, and subsisting them,
as well as of procuring the implements of hostility, were only to be
found in anticipations of our future wealth. Paper bills of credit
were emitted, monies borrowed for the most pressing emergencies, and
our brave troops in the field unpaid for their services. In this
manner, Peace, attended with every circumstance that could gratify
our reasonable desires, or even inflate us with ideas of national
importance, was at length obtained. But a load of debt was left upon
us. The fluctuations of, and speculations in, our paper currency
had, but in too many instances, occasioned vague ideas of property,
generated licentious appetites, and corrupted the morals of men. To
these immediate consequences of a fluctuating medium of commerce may
be joined a tide of circumstances that flowed together from sources
mostly opened during and after the war. The ravage of farms, the
conflagrations of towns, the diminution----" Here the MSS. abruptly
stops, but we can imagine what would follow.
Mr. Herrick, of Beaumanor Park, gave Lady Sitwell the earliest
autograph in the collection, a letter of Robert Herrick from St.
John's, Cambridge, which I lent to the late Professor Moorman for his
life of Robert Herrick. A curious entry in his uncle's account books
discloses the fact that while the impecunious student was finding
infinite difficulty in obtaining his quarterly allowance of £10, the
wealthy uncle was borrowing hundreds of pounds from the nephew. I pass
on to a letter of Lord Byron's accepting an invitation to dinner with
Lady Sitwell. In it he says, "The song you have been good enough to
send had escaped my observation or my memory when in Greece. I will
endeavour to comply with your request. The copy has a few errors which
I will try to expunge, though I have nearly forgotten my Romaic. I
believe the words should be thus arranged." He arranges them, and then
sends her, doubtless knowing her penchant for autographs, the following
lines:
1
I wander near that fount of waters
Where throng my country's virgin daughters,
And yet that haunt I might forego
Will she--my Love be there? Ah! No!
2
All, all are there save her alone,
Yet once along that fountain shone
Her imaged eyes within the stream
That glittered with the borrowed beam.
3
Yet--yet that fount is calm and clear,
Nor less to Hellas' daughters dear,
But there Reflection ne'er shall grace
Those waters with so fair a face.
4
She comes not there, yet linger still
My steps around that sacred rill,
Nor know I wherefore there I stray--
But cannot tear myself away.
_Albany, April 15th, 1814._
Another manuscript, to which an especial interest attaches at this
time, is the following letter from George Eliot:
16 Blandford Square, London, N.W.
My dear Friend--I was delighted to have your letter this morning
bringing me good news not only of a literary but of a personal kind.
It is pleasant to know that your labours on _Adam_ have been so far
appreciated; but I think it is pleasanter still to know that Maman
has had the comfort of seeing her son Charles this Christmas, and
that your prospects concerning him are hopeful. I begin, you know,
to consider myself an experienced matron, knowing a great deal about
parental joys and anxieties. Indeed I have rather too ready a talent
for entering into anxieties of all sorts.
Mr. Lewes is very much obliged to you for sending him the prospectus
and additional information, which he has already dispatched to Mr.
Trollope. It will be a valuable widening of his opportunities for
choosing a foreign school. I was not aware till I gathered the fact
from your letter that Emile Forgues had "analysed" the _Mill_ for
the _Revue des deux Mondes_, for Mr. Lewes, knowing that it would
vex me, had carefully concealed it. It is an impudent way of getting
money--this cool appropriation of other people's property without
leave asked--which seems to have become a regular practice with
him. Pray consider me responsible for nothing but what you find
in the Tauchnitz edition. I _never_ alter my books after they are
printed--never alter anything of importance even in the course of
printing, and _ce n'est point mon histoire que j'écris_, or whatever
else you may find in M. Forgues' edition that is not in the English
is due to the gratuitous exercise of his own talents in improving
my book. I can well imagine that you find the _Mill_ more difficult
to render than _Adam_, but would it be inadmissible to represent
in French, at least in some degree, those _intermédiaires entre le
style commun et le style élégant_ to which you refer? It seems to
me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in
Balzac, and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to
be thoroughly congenial, in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in
English this daring is far from being general: inferior writers are
hardly ever capable of it, and in the great mass of English fiction,
from Bulwer down to the latest young lady scribbler, you find
scarcely anything but impossible dialogue--the character speaking
as no man or woman ever spoke, except on the stage. The writers who
dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (when
he is representing the popular life with which he is familiar), and
indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in
his loftiest tragedies, in _Hamlet_, for example, Shakespeare is
intensely colloquial. One hears the very accent of living men. I am
not vindicating the practice, I know that is not necessary to _you_
who have so quick a sensibility for the real and the humorous, but I
want to draw your attention to what you may not have observed--the
timid elegance (_alias_ unnaturalness) of inferior English writers.
You may not have observed it, because naturally you don't read our
poorer literature. You, of course, have knowledge as to what is or
can be done in French literature beyond any that my reading can have
furnished me with. I am glad that you think there are any readers who
will prefer the _Mill_ to _Adam_. To my feeling there is more thought
and a profounder veracity in the _Mill_ than in _Adam_: but _Adam_ is
more complete and better balanced. My love of the childhood scenes
made me linger over them in epic fashion, so that I could not develop
as fully as I wished the concluding "Book" in which the tragedy
occurs, and which I had looked forward to with much intention and
preparation from the beginning. My books don't seem to belong to me
after I have once written them, so I find myself delivering opinions
about them as if I had nothing to do with them. I am not afraid that
you will be unable to distinguish that frankness from conceit. I
cannot write very boastfully about our health; both Mr. Lewes and
I are very middling, easily upset, easily put out of order. But in
all other respects our happiness grows daily. Our dear boy Charles
is more and more precious to us, and seems to delight in pouring all
his young affection out in tenderness to me. Thornton, the second, is
going on well and happily with his studies at Edinburgh, and seems
to have profited morally and physically by the change. I don't know
how to describe our locality otherwise than by saying that it lies
very near Regent's Park, _westward_. It is a quiet situation for
London--alas, not quiet for me, who dream of still fields! London is
hateful to me, and I sometimes think we shall hardly have come to
stay in it three years. Mr. Lewes and I constantly recall Geneva--and
for us Geneva means all that is associated with you and Maman. It was
a vivid pleasure to me that he felt his liking and admiration go out
to you both quite apart from the fact that you were _my_ friends. He
desires to share in all assurances of affection that I send you. But
I send you few assurances. Are they necessary?