It might have been such but for two reasons—counting only the principal

ones; one of these our fact that we see it so, I repeat, in Browning’s

inordinately-coloured light, and the other—which is indeed perhaps but

another face of the same—that, with whatever limitations, it gives us

in the rarest manner three characters of the first importance. I hold

three a great many; I could have done with it almost, I think, if there

had been but one or two; our rich provision shows you at any rate what I

mean by speaking of our author’s performance as above all a preparation

for something. Deeply he felt that with the three—the three built up at

us each with an equal genial rage of reiterative touches—there couldn’t

eventually not be something done (artistically done, I mean) if someone

would only do it. There they are in their old yellow Arezzo, that

miniature milder Florence, as sleepy to my recollection as a little

English cathedral city clustered about a Close, but dreaming not so

peacefully nor so innocently; there is the great fretted fabric of the

Church on which they are all swarming and grovelling, yet after their

fashion interesting parasites, from the high and dry old Archbishop,

meanly wise or ignobly edifying, to whom Pompilia resorts in her woe and

who practically pushes her way with a shuffling velvet foot; down

through the couple of Franceschini cadets, Canon Girolamo and Abate

Paul, mere minions, fairly in the verminous degree, of the overgrown

order or too-rank organism; down to Count Guido himself and to Canon

Caponsacchi, who have taken the tonsure at the outset of their careers,

but none too strictly the vows, and who lead their lives under some

strangest profanest pervertedest clerical category. There have been

before this the Roman preliminaries, the career of the queer Comparini,

the adoption, the assumption of the parentship, of the ill-starred

little girl, with the sordid cynicism of her marriage out of hand,

conveying her presumptive little fortune, her poor handful of even less

than contingent cash, to hungry middle-aged Count Guido’s stale “rank”;

the many-toned note or turbid harmony of all of which recurs to us in

the vivid image of the pieties and paganisms of San Lorenzo in Lucina,

that banal little church in the old upper Corso—banal, that is, at the

worst, with the rare Roman _banalité_; bravely banal, or banal with

style—that we have all passed with a sense of its reprieve to our

sight-seeing, and where the bleeding bodies of the still-breathing

Pompilia and her extinct companions are laid out on the greasy marble of

the altar-steps. To glance at these things, however, is fairly to be

tangled, and at once, in the author’s complexity of suggestion, to which

our own thick-coming fancies respond in no less a measure; so that I

have already missed my time to so much even as name properly the

tremendous little chapter we should have devoted to the Franceschini

interior as revealed at last to Comparini eyes; the sinister scene or

ragged ruin of the Aretine “palace,” where pride and penury and, at

once, rabid resentment show their teeth in the dark and the void, and

where Pompilia’s inspired little character, clear silver hardened,

effectually beaten and battered, to steel, begins to shine at the

blackness with a light that fairly outfaces at last the gleam of wolfish

fangs—the character that draws from Guido, in his, alas, too boundless

harangue of the fourth volume, some of the sharpest specifications into

which that extraordinary desert, that indescribable waste of

intellectual life, as I have hinted at its being, from time to time

flowers.

“None of your abnegation of revenge!

Fly at me frank, tug where I tear again!

Away with the empty stare! Be holy still,

And stupid ever! Occupy your patch

Of private snow that’s somewhere in what world

May now be growing icy round your head,

And aguish at your foot-print—freeze not me!”

I have spoken of the enveloping consciousness—or call it just the

struggling, emerging, comparing, at last intensely living conscience—of

Caponsacchi as the indicated centre of our situation or determinant of

our form, in the matter of the excellent novel; and know of course what

such an indication lets me in for, responsibly speaking, in the way of a

rearrangement of relations, in the way of liberties taken. To lift our

subject out of the sphere of anecdote and place it in the sphere of

drama, liberally considered, to give it dignity by extracting its finest

importance, causing its parts to flower together into some splendid

special sense, we supply it with a large lucid reflector, which we find

only, as I have already noted, in that mind and soul concerned in the

business that have at once the highest sensibility and the highest

capacity, or that are, as we may call it, most admirably agitated. There

is the awkward fact, the objector may say, that by our record the mind

and soul in question are not concerned till a given hour, when many

things have already happened and the climax is almost in sight; to which

we reply, at our ease, that we simply don’t suffer that fact to be

awkward. From the moment I am taking liberties I suffer _no_

awkwardness; I should be very helpless, quite without resource and

without vision, if I did. I said it to begin with: Browning works the

whole thing over—the whole thing as originally given him—and we work

_him_; helpfully, artfully, boldly, which is our whole blest basis. We

therefore turn Caponsacchi on earlier, ever so much earlier; turn him

on, with a brave ingenuity, from the very first—that is in Rome if need

be; place him there in the field, at once recipient and agent, vaguely

conscious and with splendid brooding apprehension, awaiting the

adventure of his life, awaiting his call, his real call (the others have

been such vain shows and hollow stopgaps), awaiting, in fine, his

terrible great fortune. His direct connection with Pompilia begins

certainly at Arezzo, only after she has been some time hideously

mismated and has suffered all but her direst extremity—that is of the

essence; we _take_ it; it’s all right. But his indirect participation is

another affair, and we get it—at a magnificent stroke—by the fact that

his view of Franceschini, his fellow-Aretine sordidly “on the make,” his

measure of undesired, indeed of quite execrated contact with him,

brushed against in the motley hungry Roman traffic, where and while that

sinister soul snuffs about on the very vague or the very foul scent of

_his_ fortune, may begin whenever we like. We have only to have it begin

right, only to make it, on the part of two men, a relation of strong

irritated perception and restless righteous convinced instinct in the

one nature and of equally instinctive hate and envy, jealousy and latent

fear, on the other, to see the indirect connection, the one with

Pompilia, as I say, throw across our page as portentous a shadow as we

need. Then we get Caponsacchi as a recipient up to the brim—as an

agent, a predestined one, up to the hilt. I can scarce begin to tell you

what I see him give, as we say, or how his sentient and observational

life, his fine reactions in presence of such a creature as Guido, such a

social type and image and lurid light, as it were, make him

comparatively a modern man, breathed upon, to that deep and interesting

agitation I have mentioned, by more forces than he yet reckons or knows

the names of.

The direct relation—always to Pompilia—is made, at Arezzo, as we know,

by Franceschini himself; preparing his own doom, in the false light of

his debased wit, by creating an appearance of hidden dealing between his

wife and the priest which shall, as promptly as he likes—if he but work

it right—compromise and overwhelm them. The particular deepest

damnation he conceives for his weaker, his weakest victim is that she

shall take the cleric Caponsacchi for her lover, he indubitably

willing—to Guido’s apprehension; and that her castigation at his hands

for this, sufficiently proved upon her, shall be the last luxury of his

own baseness. He forges infernally, though grossly enough, an imputed

correspondence between them, as series of love-letters, scandalous

scrawls, of the last erotic intensity; which we in the event see

solemnly weighed by his fatuous judges, all fatuous save the grave old

Pope, in the scale of Pompilia’s guilt and responsibility. It is this

atrocity that at the _dénouement_ damns Guido himself most, or

well-nigh; but if it fails and recoils, as all his calculations do—it

is only his rush of passion that doesn’t miss—this is by the fact

exactly that, as we have seen, his wife and her friend are, for our

perfect persuasion, characters of the deepest dye. There, if you please,

is the finest side of our subject; such sides come up, such sides flare

out upon us, when we get such characters in such embroilments. Admire

with me therefore our felicity in this first-class value of Browning’s

beautiful critical genial vision of his Caponsacchi—vision of him as

the tried and tempered and illuminated _man_, a great round smooth,

though as yet but little worn gold-piece, an embossed and figured ducat

or sequin of the period, placed by the poet in my hand. He gives me that

value to spend for him, spend on all the strange old experience, old

sights and sounds and stuffs, of the old stored Italy—so we have at

least the wit to spend it to high advantage; which is just what I mean

by our taking the liberties we spoke of. I see such bits we can get with

it; but the difficulty is that I see so many more things than I can have

even dreamed of giving you a hint of. I see the Arezzo life and the

Arezzo crisis with every “i” dotted and every circumstance presented;

and when Guido takes his wife, as a possible trap for her, to the

theatre—the theatre of old Arezzo: share with me the tattered vision

and inhale the musty air!—I am well in range of Pompilia, the

tragically exquisite, in her box, with her husband not there for the

hour but posted elsewhere; I look at her in fact over Caponsacchi’s

shoulder and that of his brother-canon Conti, while this light

character, a vivid recruit to our company, manages to toss into her lap,

and as coming in guise of overture from his smitten friend, “a

papertwist of comfits.” There is a particular famous occasion at the

theatre in a work of more or less contemporary fiction—at a petty

provincial theatre which isn’t even, as you might think, the place where

Pendennis had his first glimpse of Miss Fotheringay. The evening at the

Rouen playhouse of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” has a relief not elsewhere

equalled—it is the most _done_ visit to the play in all

literature—but, though “doing” is now so woefully out of favour, my

idea would be to give it here a precious _pendant_; which connection,

silly Canon Conti, the old fripperies and levities, the whole queer

picture and show of manners, is handed over to us, expressly, as inapt

for poetic illustration.

What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing

for which we feel “The Ring and the Book” preponderantly done—it is at

least what comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strongest

and finest, from Browning’s genius—the exhibition of the great

constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and

as the relation most worth while in life for either party; an exhibition

forming quite the main substance of our author’s message. He has dealt,

in his immense variety and vivacity, with other relations, but on this

he has thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing of which his

own rich experience most convincingly spoke to him. He has testified to

it as charged to the brim with the burden of the senses, and has

testified to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sublimated,

for traceable application or fair record; he has figured it as never too

much either of the flesh or of the spirit for him, so long as the

possibility of both of these is in each, but always and ever as the

thing absolutely most worth while. It is in the highest and rarest

degree clarified and disengaged for Caponsacchi and Pompilia; but what

their history most concludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever

happened, worth while. Worth while most then for them or for us is the

question? Well, let us say worth while assuredly for us, in this noble

exercise of our imagination. Which accordingly shows us what we, for all

our prose basis, would have found, to repeat my term once more, prepared

for us. There isn’t a detail of their panting flight to Rome over the

autumn Apennines—the long hours when they melt together only _not_ to

meet—that doesn’t positively plead for our perfect prose transcript.

And if it be said that the mere massacre at the final end is a lapse to

passivity from the high plane, for our pair of protagonists, of

constructive, of heroic vision, this is not a blur from the time

everything that happens happens most effectively to Caponsacchi’s life.

Pompilia’s is taken, but she is none the less given; and it is in his

consciousness and experience that she most intensely flowers—with all

her jubilation for doing so. So that _he_ contains the whole—unless

indeed after all the Pope does, the Pope whom I was leaving out as too

transcendent for _our_ version. Unless, unless, further and further, I

see what I have at this late moment no right to; see, as the very end

and splendid climax of all, Caponsacchi sent for to the Vatican and

admitted alone to the Papal presence. _There_ is a scene if we will; and

in the mere mutual confrontation, brief, silent, searching, recognising,

consecrating, almost as august on the one part as on the other. It

rounds us off; but you will think I stray too far. I have wanted, alas,

to say such still other fond fine things—it being of our poet’s great

nature to prompt them at every step—that I almost feel I have missed

half my points; which will doubtless therefore show you these remarks in

their nakedness. Take them and my particular contention as a pretext and

a minor affair if you will only feel them at the same time as at the

worst a restless refinement of homage. It has been easy in many another

case to run to earth the stray prime fancy, the original anecdote or

artless tale, from which a great imaginative work, starting off after

meeting it, has sprung and rebounded again and soared; and perhaps it is

right and happy and final that one should have faltered in attempting by

a converse curiosity to clip off or tie back the wings that once have

spread. You will agree with me none the less, I feel, that Browning’s

great generous wings are over us still and even now, more than ever now;

and also that they shake down on us his blessing.

-----

Footnote 8:

Address delivered before the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of

Literature in Commemoration of the Centenary of Robert Browning, May 7,

1912.

AN AMERICAN ART-SCHOLAR: CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

1908

I gladly embrace the occasion to devote a few words to the honoured

memory of my distinguished friend the late Charles Eliot Norton, who,

dying at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of October last, after

having reached his eightieth year, had long occupied—and with an

originality of spirit and a beneficence of effect all his own—the chair

of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard University, as well as, in

the view of the American world surrounding that seat of influence, the

position of one of the most accomplished of scholars and most efficient

of citizens. This commemorative page may not disclaim the personal tone,

for I can speak of Charles Norton but in the light of an affection which

began long years ago, even though my part in our relation had to be, for

some time, markedly that of a junior; of which tie I was to remain ever

after, despite long stretches of material separation, a conscious and

grateful beneficiary. I can speak of him therefore as I happened myself

to see and know him—with interest and sympathy acting, for considerable

periods together, across distances and superficial differences, yet with

the sense of his extremely individual character and career suffering no

abatement, and indeed with my impression of the fine consistency and

exemplary value of these things clear as never before.

I find this impression go back for its origin very far—to one autumn

day when, an extremely immature aspirant to the rare laurel of the

critic, I went out from Boston to Cambridge to offer him a contribution

to the old, if I should not rather say the then middle-aged, “North

American Review,” of which he had recently undertaken the editorship. I

already knew him a little, enough to have met casual kindness at his

hands; but my vision of his active presence and function, in the

community that had happily produced and that was long to enjoy him,

found itself, I think, completely constituted at that hour, with scarce

an essential touch to be afterwards added. He largely developed and

expanded as time went on; certain more or less local reserves and

conservatisms fell away from him; but his temper and attitude, all his

own from the first, were to give a singular unity to his life. This

intensity of perception on his young visitor’s part may perhaps have

sprung a little from the fact that he accepted on the spot, as the

visitor still romantically remembers, a certain very first awkward essay

in criticism, and was to publish it in his forthcoming number; but I

little doubt whether even had he refused it the grace of the whole

occasion would have lost anything to my excited view, and feel sure that

the interest in particular would have gained had he charmingly put

before me (as he would have been sure to do) the ground of his

discrimination. For his eminent character as a “representative of

culture” announced itself exactly in proportion as one’s general sense

of the medium in which it was to be exerted was strong; and I seem

verily to recall that even in the comparative tenderness of that season

I had grasped the idea of the precious, the quite far-reaching part such

an exemplar might play. Charles Norton’s distinction and value—this was

still some years before his professorate had taken form—showed early

and above all the note and the advantage that they were to be virtues of

American application, and were to draw their life from the signal

American opportunity; to that degree that the detailed record of his

influence would be really one of the most interesting of American social

documents, and that his good work is best lighted by a due acquaintance

with the conditions of the life about him, indispensable for a founded

recognition of it. It is not too much to say that the representative of

culture—always in the high and special sense in which he practised that

faith—had before him in the United States of those days a great and

arduous mission, requiring plentiful courage as well as plentiful

knowledge, endless good humour as well as assured taste.

What comes back to me then from the early day I have glanced at is

exactly that prompt sense of the clustered evidence of my friend’s

perfect adaptation to the civilising mission, and not least to the

needfully dauntless and unperturbed side of it. His so pleasant old

hereditary home, with its ample acres and numerous spoils—at a time

when acres merely marginal and, so to speak, atmospheric, as well as

spoils at all felicitously gathered, were rare in the United

States—seemed to minister to the general assurance, constituting as

they did such a picture of life as one vaguely supposed recognisable,

right and left, in an old society, or, otherwise expressed, in that

“Europe” which was always, roundabout one, the fond alternative of the

cultivated imagination, but of which the possible American copy ever

seemed far to seek. To put it in a nutshell, the pilgrimage to the Shady

Hill of those years had, among the “spoils,” among pictures and books,

drawings and medals, memories and relics and anecdotes, things of a

remote but charming reference, very much the effect of a sudden rise

into a finer and clearer air and of a stopgap against one’s own coveted

renewal of the more direct experience. If I allude to a particular, to a

personal yearning appreciation of those matters, it is with the

justified conviction—this justification having been all along

abundantly perceptible—that appreciation of the general sort only

waited to be called for, though to be called for with due authority. It

was the sign of our host, on the attaching spot, and almost the

principal one, that he spoke, all round and with the highest emphasis,

as under the warrant of authority, and that at a time when, as to the

main matter of his claim and his discourse, scarce anyone pretended to

it, he carried himself valiantly under that banner. The main matter of

his discourse offered itself just simply as the matter of

_civilisation_—the particular civilisation that a young roaring and

money-getting democracy, inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with

“business success,” most needed to have brought home to it. The New

England air in especial was no natural conductor of any appeal to an

esthetic aim, but the interest of Professor Norton’s general work, to

say nothing of the interest of his character for a closer view, is

exactly that the whole fruitful enterprise was to prove intimately a New

England adventure; illustrating thus at the same time and once more the

innate capacity of New England for leavening the great American mass on

the finer issues.

To have grown up as the accomplished man at large was in itself at that

time to have felt, and even in some degree to have suffered, this hand

of differentiation; the only accomplished men of the exhibited New

England Society had been the ministers, the heads of the

congregations—whom, however, one docks of little of their credit in

saying that their accomplishments and their earnestness had been almost

wholly in the moral order. The advantage of that connection was indeed

what Norton was fundamentally to have enjoyed in his descent, both on

his father’s and his mother’s side (pre-eminently on the latter, the

historic stock of the Eliots) from a long line of those stalwart

pastoral worthies who had notably formed the aristocracy of

Massachusetts. It was largely, no doubt, to this heritage of character

and conscience that he owed the strong and special strain of confidence

with which he addressed himself to the business of perfect candour

toward his fellow-citizens—his pupils in particular; they, to whom this

candour was to become in the long run the rarest and raciest and most

endearing of “treats,” being but his fellow-citizens in the making. This

view of an urgent duty would have been a comparatively slight thing,

moreover, without the special preoccupations, without the love of the

high humanities and curiosities and urbanities in themselves, without

the conception of science and the ingrained studious cast of mind, which

had been also an affair of heredity with him and had opened his eyes

betimes to educative values and standards other than most of those he

saw flourish near at hand. He would defer to dilettantism as little as

to vulgarity, and if he ultimately embraced the fine ideal of taking up

the work that lay close to him at home, and of irrigating the immediate

arid tracts and desert spaces, it was not from ignorance of the

temptation to wander and linger where the streams already flowed and the

soil had already borne an abiding fruit.

He had come to Italy and to England early in life; he had repeated his

visits to these countries with infinite relish and as often as

possible—though never, as a good New Englander, without certain firm

and, where they had to be, invidious discriminations; he was attached to

them by a hundred intellectual and social ties; but he had been from the

first incapable of doubting that the best activity and the liveliest

interest lay where it always, given certain conditions, lies in

America—in a measure of response to intellectual and esthethic

“missionary” labour more traceable and appreciable, more distinguishably

attested and registered, more directly and artlessly grateful, in a

word, than in the thicker elemental mixture of Europe. On the whole side

of taste and association his choice was thus betimes for conscious exile

and for a considerably, though doubtless not altogether irremediably,

deprived state; but it was at the same time for a freedom of exhortation

and a play of ironic comment less restricted, after all, in the clear

American air, than on ground more pretentiously enclosed—less

restricted, that is, from the moment personal conviction might be

absolute and indifference to every form of provincial bewilderment

equally patient and complete. The incontestable _crânerie_ of his

attitude—a thing that one felt to be a high form of sincerity—always

at last won success; the respect and affection that more and more

surrounded him and that finally made his situation sole of its kind and

pre-eminently happy, attest together the interesting truth that

unqualified confidence in one’s errand, the serenest acceptance of a

responsibility and the exercise of a critical authority never too apt to

return critically upon itself, only require for beneficent action that

they be attended at once with a fund of illustration and a fund of good

humour.

Professor Norton’s pre-eminent work in the interpretation of Dante—by

which I mean his translation, text and notes, of the “Divine Comedy” and

the “New Life,” an achievement of infinite piety, patience and resource;

his admirable volume on Church-Building in the Middle Ages (to say

nothing of his charming earlier one, “Study and Travel in Italy,”

largely devoted to the cathedral of Orvieto); his long and intimate

friendship with Ruskin, commemorated by his publication, as

joint-executor to Ruskin’s will, of the best fruits of the latter’s

sustained correspondence with him; his numerous English friendships, in

especial—to say nothing of his native—all with persons of a highly

representative character: these things give in part the measure of his

finest curiosities and of his appetite, in all directions, for the best

sources and examples and the best company. But it is probable that if

his Harvard lectures are in form for publication, and if his general

correspondence, and above all his own easily handsomest show in it,

comes to be published, as most emphatically it should be, they will

testify not in the least to any unredeemed contraction of life, but to

the largest and happiest and most rewarded energy. An exhilarated

invocation of close responsibility, an absolute ease of mind about one’s

point of view, a thorough and never-failing intellectual wholeness, are

so far from weakening the appeal to young allegiances that, once they

succeed at all, they succeed the better for going all their length. So

it was that, with admirable urbanity of form and uncompromising

straightness of attack, the Professor of the History of the Fine Arts at

Harvard for a quarter of a century let himself go; thinking no trouble

wasted and no flutter and no scandal other than auspicious if only he

might, to the receptive and aspiring undergraduate mind, brand the ugly

and the vulgar and the inferior wherever he found them, tracking them

through plausible disguises and into trumpery strongholds; if only he

might convert young products of the unmitigated American order into

material for men of the world in the finer sense of that term; if only

in short he might render more supple their view, liable to obfuscation

from sights and sounds about them, of the true meaning of a liberal

education and of the civilised character and spirit in the civilised

State.

What it came to thus was that he availed himself to the utmost of his

free hand for sowing and planting ideals—ideals that, though they might

after all be vague and general things, lacking sometimes a little the

clearer connections with practice, were yet a new and inspiring note to

most of his hearers, who could be trusted, just so far as they were

intelligent and loyal, not to be heavily embarrassed by them, not to

want for fields of application. It was given him, quite unprecedentedly,

to be popular, to be altogether loved and cherished, even while “rubbing

it into” whomever it might concern that such unfortunates were mainly

given over to mediocrity and vulgarity, and that half the crude and ugly

objects and aspects, half the low standards and loose ends surrounding

them and which they might take for granted with a facility and a

complacency alike deplorable, represented a platitude of imagination

that dishonoured the citizen on whom a University worthy of the name

should have left its stamp. Happy, it would thus in fact seem, beyond

any other occasion for educative influence, the immense and delightful

opportunity he enjoyed, the clear field and long reach attached to

preaching an esthetic crusade, to pleading for the higher amenities in

general, in a new and superficially tutored, yet also but superficially

prejudiced, country, where a consequently felt and noted rise of the

tide of manners may be held to have come home to him, or certainly to

have visited his dreams. His effect on the community at large, with

allowances of time, was ever indubitable—even though such workers have

everywhere to take much on trust and to remember that bushels of

doctrine, and even tons of example, make at the most ounces and grains

of responsive life. It can only be the very general and hopeful view

that sustains and rewards—with here and there, at wide intervals, the

prized individual instance of the sown seed actively emerging and

flowering.

If not all ingenious disciples could give independent proof, however,

all could rally and feel the spirit; all could crowd to a course of

instruction which, largely elective and optional, yet united more

listeners than many others put together, and in which the subject

itself, the illustration of European artistic endeavour at large, or in

other words the record of man’s most comprehensive sacrifice to

organised beauty, tended so to take up on familiar ground the question

of manners, character, conscience, tone, to bristle with questions

addressed to the actual and possible American scene. That, I hasten to

add, was of course but one side of the matter; there were wells of

special science for those who chose to draw from them, and an inner

circle of pupils whose whole fruitful relation to their philosopher and

friend—the happy and easy privilege of Shady Hill in general, where

other charming personal influences helped, not counting as least in

this—can scarce have failed to prepare much practical evidence for

observation still to come. The ivory tower of study would ever, by his

natural bent, I think, have most solicited Charles Norton; but he liked,

as I say, he accepted without a reserve, the function of presiding over

young destinies; he believed in the personal and the social

communication of light, and had a gift for the generous and personal

relation that perhaps found its best issue, as I have already hinted, in

his admirable letters. These were not of this hustled and hustling age,

but of a cooler and steadier sphere and rhythm, and of a charming

mannerly substantial type to which he will have been, I think, among

correspondents truly animated by the social spirit and a due cosmopolite

ideal, one of the last systematically to sacrifice. With the lapse of

years I ceased to be, I admit, a near spectator of his situation; but my

sense of his activity—with more intimate renewals, besides,

occasionally taking place—was to be, all along, so constantly fed by

echo and anecdote and all manner of indirect glimpses, that I find

myself speak quite with the confidence and with all the attachment of a

continuous “assistant.”

With which, if I reflect on this, I see how interesting a _case_ above

all my distinguished friend was ever to remain to me—a case, I mean, of

such a mixture of the elements as would have seemed in advance,

critically speaking, quite anomalous or at least highly incalculable.

His interest was predominantly in Art, as the most beneficial of human

products; his ostensible plea was for the esthetic law, under the wide

wing of which we really move, it may seem to many of us, in an air of

strange and treacherous appearances, of much bewilderment and not a

little mystification; of terribly fine and complicated issues in short,

such as call for the highest interpretative wisdom. But if nothing was

of a more delightful example than Professor Norton’s large and nourished

serenity in all these connections, a serenity seasoned and tempered, as

it were, by infinite interest in his “subject,” by a steadying faith in

exact and extensive knowledge, so to a fond and incorrigible student of

character the case, as I have called it, and the long and genial career,

may seem to shine in the light of quite other importances, quite other

references, than the presumed and the nominal. Nothing in fact _can_ be

more interesting to a haunter of other intellectual climes and a

worshipper at the esthetic shrine _quand même_ than to note once more

how race and implanted quality and association always in the end come by

their own; how for example a son of the Puritans the most intellectually

transmuted, the most liberally emancipated and initiated possible, could

still plead most for substance when proposing to plead for style, could

still try to lose himself in the labyrinth of delight while keeping

tight hold of the clue of duty, tangled even a little in his feet; could

still address himself all consistently to the moral conscience while

speaking as by his office for our imagination and our free curiosity.

All of which vision of him, however, is far from pointing to a wasted

effort. The great thing, whatever turn we take, is to find before us

perspectives and to have a weight to throw; in accordance with which

wisdom the world he lived in received for long no firmer nor more

gallant and generous impress than that of Charles Eliot Norton.

LONDON NOTES

_January_ 1897

I am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this

moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to

curiosity. There is indeed no reason why we should forbear to say in

advance what we are certain, every time, to say after (after the heat

has cooled I mean:) namely, that nothing is easier to concede than that

Ibsen—contentious name!—would be much less remarked if he were one of

a dozen. It is impossible, in London at least, to shut one’s eyes to the

fact that if to so many ingenious minds he is a kind of pictorial

monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least partly

because his form has a monstrous rarity. It is one of the odd things of

our actual esthetics that the more theatres multiply the less any one

reads a play—the less any one cares, in a word, for the text of the

adventure. That no one ever _does_ read a play has long been a

commonplace of the wisdom of booksellers. Ibsen, however, is a text, and

Ibsen is read, and Ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the

prejudice; with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of being doubly an

exotic. His violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form;

it is not (as would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes the

substance. Mr. William Archer has just published his version of “John

Gabriel Borkman,” of which, moreover, French and German versions reach

us at the same moment. There are therefore all the elements of a fresh

breeze in the wind—one has already a sense as of a cracking of whips

and a girding of loins. You may by this time be terribly tired of it all

in America; but, as I mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had very recent

evidence that languor here, in this connection, is by no means as yet

the dominant note. It is not the dispute itself, however, that most

interests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what it still may

be, the mere superficial tribute of saying that it constitutes one of

the very few cases of contagious discussion of a matter not political, a

question not of mere practice, of which I remember to have felt, in a

heavy air, the engaging titillation. In London generally, I think, the

wandering breath of criticism is the stray guest at the big party—the

shy young man whom nobody knows. In this remarkable instance the shy

young man has ventured to pause and hover, has lighted on a topic,

introduced himself and, after a gasp of consternation in the company,

seen a little circle gather round him. I can only speak as one of the

little circle, testifying to my individual glee.

The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns

out “John Gabriel” is frankly for me so much one of the peculiar

pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect

as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking

of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source

of the same kind of emotion. For Ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary

curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the miracle to my

perception is renewed. I call it a miracle because it is a result of so

dry a view of life, so indifferent a vision of the comedy of things. His

idea of the thing represented is never the comic idea, though this is

evidently what it often only can be for many of his English readers and

spectators. Comedy moreover is a product mainly of observation, and I

scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven’t the

_signs_. The answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven’t the

English, but have the Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian

must be in truth this very lack of signs.

They have no tone but their moral tone. They are highly animated

abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming

when represented at once more abstract and more living. If the spirit is

a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of

us as through a ground-glass shade, then such pictures as Little Eyolf

and John Gabriel are each a _chassez-croisez_ of lamps burning, as in

tasteless parlours, with the flame practically exposed. There are no

shades in the house, or the Norwegian ground-glass is singularly clear.

There is a positive odour of spiritual paraffin. The author nevertheless

arrives at the dramatist’s great goal—he arrives for all his meagreness

at intensity. The meagreness, which is after all but an unconscious, an

admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into

the hands of his rare mastery of form. The contrast between this

form—so difficult to have reached, so “evolved,” so civilised—and the

bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy is the source of

half the hard frugal charm that he puts forth. In the cold fixed light

of it the notes we speak of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the

picture. There is no small-talk, there are scarcely any manners. On the

other hand there is so little vulgarity that this of itself has almost

the effect of a deeper, a more lonely provincialism. The background at

any rate is the sunset over the ice. Well in the very front of the scene

lunges with extraordinary length of arm the Ego against the Ego, and

rocks in a rigour of passion the soul against the soul—a spectacle, a

movement, as definite as the relief of silhouettes in black paper or of

a train of Eskimo dogs on the snow. Down from that desolation the sturdy

old symbolist comes this time with a supreme example of his method. It

is a high wonder and pleasure to welcome such splendid fruit from sap

that might by now have shown something of the chill of age. Never has he

juggled more gallantly with difficulty and danger than in this really

prodigious “John Gabriel,” in which a great span of tragedy is taken

between three or four persons—a trio of the grim and grizzled—in the

two or three hours of a winter’s evening; in which the whole thing

throbs with an actability that fairly shakes us as we read; and in

which, as the very flower of his artistic triumph, he has given us for

the most beautiful and touching of his heroines a sad old maid of sixty.

Such “parts,” even from the vulgarest point of view, are Borkman and

Ella Rentheim.

LONDON NOTES

_June_ 1897

I am afraid there are at this moment only two notes for a communication

from London to strike. One is that of the plunge into the deep and

turbid waters of the Jubilee; the other is that of the inevitable

retreat from them—the backward scramble up the bank and scurry over its

crest and out of sight. London is in a sorry state; nevertheless I judge

that the number of persons about to arrive undaunted will not fall

substantially short of the number of horror-stricken fugitives. Not to

depart is practically to arrive; for there is little difference in the

two kinds of violence, the shock you await or the shock that awaits you.

Let me hasten, however, to declare that—to speak for the present only

of the former of these—the prospect is full of suggestion, the affair

promises a rare sort of interest. It began a fortnight since to be

clear—and the certitude grows each day—that we are to be treated to a

revelation really precious, the domestic or familiar vision, as it were,

the back-stairs or underside view, of a situation that will rank as

celebrated. Balzac’s image of _l’envers de l’histoire contemporaine_ is

in fact already under our nose, already offered us in a big bouncing

unmistakable case. We brush with an irreverent hand the back of the

tapestry—we crawl on unabashed knees under the tent of the circus. The

commemoration of the completed sixtieth year of her Majesty’s reign will

figure to the end of time in the roll of English wonders and can

scarcely fail to hold its own as an occasion unparalleled. And yet we

touch it as we come and go—we feel it mainly as a great incommodity. It

has already so intimate, so ugly, so measurable a side that these

impressions begin to fall into their place with a kind of representative

force, to figure as a symbol of the general truth that the principal

pomps and circumstances of the historic page have had their most intense

existence as material and social arrangements, disagreeable or amusing

accidents, affecting the few momentary mortals at that time in the

neighbourhood. The gross defacement of London, the uproarious traffic in

seats, the miles of unsightly scaffolding between the West End and the

City, the screaming advertisements, the sordid struggle, the individual

questions—“Haven’t we been cheated by the plausible wretch?” or “How

the devil shall we get _to_ our seats after paying such a lot,

hey?”—these things are actually the historic page. If we are writing

that page every hour let us at any rate commend ourselves for having

begun betimes, even though this early diligence be attended with

extraordinary effects. The great day was a week ago still a month off,

but what we even then had full in view, was, for the coming stretch of

time, a London reduced to such disfigurement as might much better seem

to consort with some great national penance or mourning. The show, when

the show comes off, is to last but a couple of hours; and nothing so odd

surely ever occurred in such a connection as so huge a disproportion

between the discipline and the joy. If this be honour, the simple may

well say, give us, merciful powers, the rigour of indifference! From

Hyde Park Corner to the heart of the City and over the water to the

solid south the long line of thoroughfares is masked by a forest of

timber and smothered in swaggering posters and catchpenny bids, with all

of which and with the vociferous air that enfolds them we are to spend

these next weeks in such comfort as we may. The splendour will have of

course to be great to wash down the vulgarity—and infinitely dazzling

no doubt it will be; yet even if it falls short I shall still feel that,

let the quantity of shock, as I have ventured to call it, be what it

must, it will on the whole be exceeded by what I have ventured to call

the quantity of suggestion. This, to be frank, has even now rolled up at

such a rate that to deal with it I should scarce know where to take it

first. Let me not therefore pretend to deal, but only glance and pass.

The foremost, the immense impression is of course the constant, the

permanent, the ever-supreme—the impression of that greatest glory of

our race, its passionate feeling for trade. I doubt if the commercial

instinct be not, as London now feels it throb and glow, quite as

striking as any conceivable projection of it that even our American

pressure of the pump might, at the highest, produce. That is the real

tent of the circus—that is the real back of the tapestry. There have

long, I know, been persons ready to prove by book that the explanation

of the “historical event” has always been somebody’s desire to make

money; never, at all events, from the near view, will that explanation

have covered so much of the ground. No result of the fact that the Queen

has reigned sixty years—no sort of sentimental or other association

with it—begins to have the air of coming home to the London conscience

like this happy consequence of the chance in it to sell something dear.

As yet that chance is the one sound that fills the air, and will

probably be the only note audibly struck till the plaudits of the day

itself begin to substitute, none too soon, a more mellifluous one. When

the people are all at the windows and in the trees and on the

water-spouts, house-tops, scaffolds and other ledges and coigns of

vantage set as traps for them by the motive power, _then_ doubtless

there will be another aspect to reckon with—then we shall see, of the

grand occasion, nothing but what is decently and presentably historic.

All I mean is that, pending the apotheosis, London has found in this

particular chapter of the career of its aged sovereign only an enormous

selfish advertisement. It came to me the other day in a quoted epigram

that the advertisement shows as far off as across the Channel and all

the way to Paris, where one of the reflections it has suggested—as it

must inevitably suggest many—appears to be that, in contrast, when, a

year ago, the Russian sovereigns were about to arrive no good Parisian

thought for a moment of anything but how he could most work for the

adornment of his town. I dare say that in fact from a good Parisian or

two a window or a tree was to be hired; but the echo is at least

interesting _as_ an echo, not less than as a reminder of how we still

wait here for the outbreak of the kind of enthusiasm that shall take the

decorative form. The graceful tip of its nose has, it must be admitted,

yet to show. But there are other sides still, and one of them

immense—the light we may take as flooding, I mean, the whole question

of the solidity of the throne. It is impossible to live long in England

without feeling that the monarchy is—below-ground, so to speak, in

particular—a rock; but it was reserved for these days to accentuate the

immobility of even that portion of the rock which protrudes above the

surface. It is being tested in a manner by fire, and it resists with a

vitality nothing short of prophetic. The commercial instinct, as I say,

perches upon it with a security and a success that banish a rival from

the field. It is the biggest of all draws for the biggest of all

circuses; it will bring more money to more doors than anything that can

be imagined in its place. It will march through the ages unshaken. The

coronation of a new sovereign is an event, at the worst, well within the

compass of the mind, and what will that bring with it so much as a fresh

lively market and miles of new posters and new carpentry? Then, who

knows?—coronations will, for a stretch and a change perhaps, be more

frequent than anniversaries; and the bargains struck over the last will,

again at the worst, carry an hilarious country well on to the next. Has

not the monarchy moreover—besides thus periodically making trade

roar—the lively merit, for such an observer as I fancy considering

these things, of helping more than anything else the answers to the

questions into which our actual curiosity most overflows; the question

for instance of whether in the case before us the triumph of vulgarity

be not precisely the flushed but muscular triumph of the inevitable? If

vulgarity thrones now on the house-tops, “blown” and red in the face, is

it not because it has been pushed aloft by deep forces and is really

after all itself the show? The picturesque at any rate has to meet the

conditions. We miss, we regret the old “style” of history; but the style

would, I think, be there if we let it: the age has a manner of its own

that disconcerts, that swamps it. The age is the loudest thing of all.

What has altered is simply the conditions. Poor history has to meet

them, these conditions; she must accommodate herself. She must accept

vulgarity or perish. Some day doubtless she _will_ perish, but for a

little while longer she remembers and struggles. She becomes indeed, as

we look up Piccadilly in the light of this image, perhaps rather more

dramatic than ever—at any rate more pathetic, more noble in her choked

humiliation. Then even as we pity her we try perhaps to bring her round,

to make her understand a little better. We try to explain that if we are

dreadful to deal with it is only, really, a good deal because we so

detestably grow and grow. There is so horribly much of us—that’s where

_our_ style breaks down. Small crowds and paltry bargains didn’t matter,

and a little vulgarity—just a very little—could in other times manage

to pass. Our shame, alas, is our quantity.

I have no sooner, none the less, qualified it so ungraciously than I ask

myself what after all we should do without it. If we have opened the

floodgates we have at least opened them wide, and it is our very

quantity that perhaps in the last resort will save us. It cuts both

ways, as the phrase is—it covers all the ground; it helps the escape as

well as produces the assault. If retreat for instance at the present

juncture is, as I began by hinting, urgently imposed, it is thanks to

our having so much of everything that we find a bridge for our feet. We

hope to get off in time, but meanwhile even on the spot there are

blessed alternatives and reliefs. I have been trying a number very hard,

but I have expatiated so on the complaint that I have left little room

for the remedy. London reminds one of nothing so often as of the help

she gives one to forget her. One of the forms actually taken by this

happy habit is the ingenious little exhibition, at the Grafton

Galleries, of so-called Dramatic and Musical Art. The name is rather a

grand one and the show has many gaps; but it profits, as such places in

London so often profit, by the law that makes you mostly care less what

you get into than what you get out of. With its Hogarths and

Zoffanys—none too many, I admit—its other last-century portraits and

relics, its numerous ghosts of Garrick, its old play-bills and prints,

its echoes of dead plaudits and its very thin attendance, it happens to

be for the moment a quiet bower in the bear-garden. It is a “scratch”

company, but only—and I can scarce say why—in the portion in which the

portraits of the day prevail is the impression vulgar. Even there indeed

this suspicion receives a grand lift from Mr. Whistler’s exquisite image

of Henry Irving as the Philip of Tennyson’s “Queen Mary.” To pause

before such a work is in fact to be held to the spot by just the highest

operation of the charm one has sought there—the charm of a certain

degree of melancholy meditation. Meditation indeed forgets Garrick and

Hogarth and all the handsome heads of the Kembles in wonder

reintensified at the attitude of a stupid generation toward an art and a

taste so rare. Wonder is perhaps after all not the word to use, for how

_should_ a stupid generation, liking so much that it does like and with

a faculty trained to coarser motions, recognise in Mr. Whistler’s work

one of the finest of all distillations of the artistic intelligence? To

turn from his picture to the rest of the show—which, of course, I

admit, is not a collection of masterpieces—is to drop from the world of

distinction, of perception, of beauty and mystery and perpetuity,

into—well, a very ordinary place. And yet the effect of Whistler at his

best is exactly to give to the place he hangs in—or perhaps I should

say to the person he hangs for—something of the sense, of the illusion,

of a great museum. He isolates himself in a manner all his own; his

presence is in itself a sort of implication of a choice corner. Have we

in this a faint foresight of the eventual turn of the wheel—of one of

the nooks of honour, those innermost rooms of great collections, in

which our posterity shall find him? Look at him at any rate on any

occasion, but above all at his best, only long enough, and hallucination

sets in. We are in the presence of one of the prizes marked with two

stars in the guidebook; the polished floor is beneath us and the rococo

roof above; the great names are ranged about, and the eye is aware of

the near window, in its deep recess, that overhangs old gardens or a

celebrated square.

LONDON NOTES

_July_ 1897

I continued last month to seek private diversion, which I found to be

more and more required as the machinery of public began to work. Never

was a better chance apparently for the great anodyne of art. It was a

supreme opportunity to test the spell of the magician, for one felt one

was saved if a fictive world would open. I knocked in this way at a

dozen doors, I read a succession of novels; with the effect perhaps of

feeling more than ever before my individual liability in our great

general debt to the novelists. The great thing to say for them is surely

that at any given moment they offer us another world, another

consciousness, an experience that, as effective as the dentist’s ether,

muffles the ache of the actual and, by helping us to an interval, tides

us over and makes us face, in the return to the inevitable, a

combination that may at least have changed. What we get of course, in

proportion as the picture lives, is simply another actual—the actual of

other people; and I no more than any one else pretend to say _why_ that

should be a relief, a relief as great, I mean, as it practically proves.

We meet in this question, I think, the eternal mystery—the mystery that

sends us back simply to the queer constitution of man and that is not in

the least lighted by the plea of “romance,” the argument that relief

depends wholly upon the quantity, as it were, of fable. It depends, to

my sense, on the quantity of nothing but art—in which the material,

fable or fact or whatever it be, falls so into solution, is so reduced

and transmuted, that I absolutely am acquainted with no receipt whatever

for computing its proportion and amount.

The only amount I can compute is the force of the author, for that is

directly registered in my attention, my submission. A hundred things

naturally go to make it up; but he knows so much better than I what they

are that I should blush to give him a glimpse of my inferior account of

them. The anodyne is not the particular picture, it is our own act of

surrender, and therefore most, for each reader, what he most surrenders

to. This latter element would seem in turn to vary from case to case,

were it not indeed that there are readers prepared, I believe, to limit

their surrender in advance. With some, we gather, it declines for

instance to operate save on an exhibition of “high life.” In others

again it is proof against any solicitation but that of low. In many it

vibrates only to “adventure”; in many only to Charlotte Brontë; in

various groups, according to affinity, only to Jane Austen, to old

Dumas, to Miss Corelli, to Dostoievsky or whomever it may be. The

readers easiest to conceive, however, are probably those for whom, in

the whole impression, the note of sincerity in the artist is what most

matters, what most reaches and touches. That, obviously, is the relation

that gives the widest range to the anodyne.

I am afraid that, profiting by my license, I drag forward Mr. George

Gissing from an antiquity of several weeks. I blow the dust of oblivion

from M. Pierre Loti and indeed from all the company—they have been

published for days and days. I foresee, however, that I must neglect the

company for the sake of the two members I have named, writers—I speak

for myself—always in order, though not, I admit, on quite the same

line. Mr. Gissing would have been particularly in order had he only kept

for the present period the work preceding his latest; all the more that

“In the Year of Jubilee” has to my perception some points of superiority

to “The Whirlpool.” For this author in general, at any rate, I profess,

and have professed ever since reading “The New Grub Street,” a

persistent taste—a taste that triumphs even over the fact that he

almost as persistently disappoints me. I fail as yet to make out why

exactly it is that going so far he so sturdily refuses to go further.

The whole business of distribution and composition he strikes me as

having cast to the winds; but just this fact of a question about him is

a part of the wonder—I use the word in the sense of enjoyment—that he

excites. It is not every day in the year that we meet a novelist about

whom there is a question. The circumstance alone is almost sufficient to

beguile or to enthrall; and I seem to myself to have said almost

everything in speaking of something that Mr. Gissing “goes far” enough

to do. To go far enough to do anything is, in the conditions we live in,

a lively achievement.

“The Whirlpool,” I crudely confess, was in a manner a grief to me, but

the book has much substance, and there is no light privilege in an

emotion so sustained. This emotion perhaps it is that most makes me, to

the end, stick to Mr. Gissing—makes me with an almost nervous clutch

quite cling to him. I shall not know how to deal with him, however, if I

withhold the last outrage of calling him an interesting case. He seems

to me above all a case of saturation, and it is mainly his saturation

that makes him interesting—I mean especially in the sense of making him

singular. The interest would be greater were his art more complete; but

we must take what we can get, and Mr. Gissing has a way of his own. The

great thing is that his saturation is with elements that, presented to

us in contemporary English fiction, affect us as a product of

extraordinary oddity and rarity: he reeks with the savour, he is bowed

beneath the fruits, of contact with the lower, with the lowest

middle-class, and that is sufficient to make him an authority—_the_

authority in fact—on a region vast and unexplored.

The English novel has as a general thing kept so desperately, so

nervously clear of it, whisking back compromised skirts and bumping

frantically against obstacles to retreat, that we welcome as the boldest

of adventurers a painter who has faced it and survived. We have had low

life in plenty, for, with its sores and vices, its crimes and penalties,

misery has colour enough to open the door to any quantity of artistic

patronage. We have shuddered in the dens of thieves and the cells of

murderers, and have dropped the inevitable tear over tortured childhood

and purified sin. We have popped in at the damp cottage with my lady and

heard the quaint rustic, bless his simple heart, commit himself for our

amusement. We have fraternised on the other hand with the peerage and

the county families, staying at fine old houses till exhausted nature

has, for this source of intoxication, not a wink of sociability left. It

has grown, the source in question, as stale as the sweet biscuit with

pink enhancements in that familiar jar of the refreshment counter from

which even the attendant young lady in black, with admirers and a social

position, hesitates to extract it. We have recognised the humble, the

wretched, even the wicked; also we have recognised the “smart.” But save

under the immense pressure of Dickens we have never done anything so

dreadful as to recognise the vulgar. We have at the very most recognised

it as the extravagant, the grotesque. The case of Dickens was absolutely

special; he dealt intensely with “lower middle,” with “lowest” middle,

elements, but he escaped the predicament of showing them as vulgar by

showing them only as prodigiously droll. When his people are not funny

who shall dare to say what they are? The critic may draw breath as from

a responsibility averted when he reflects that they almost always _are_

funny. They belong to a walk of life that we may be ridiculous but never

at all serious about. We may be tragic, but that is often but a form of

humour. I seem to hear Mr. Gissing say: “Well, dreariness for

dreariness, let us try Brondesbury and Pinner; especially as in the

first place I know them so well; as in the second they are the essence

of England; and as in the third they are, artistically speaking, virgin

soil. Behold them glitter in the morning dew.”

So he _is_ serious—almost imperturbably—about them, and, as it turns

out, even quite manfully and admirably sad. He has the great thing: his

saturation (with the visible and audible common) can project itself, let

him get outside of it and walk round it. I scarcely think he stays, as

it were, outside quite as much as he might; and on the question of form

he certainly strikes me as staying far too little. It is form above all

that is talent, and if Mr. Gissing’s were proportionate to his

knowledge, to what may be called his possession, we should have a larger

force to reckon with. That—not to speak of the lack of intensity in his

imagination—is the direction in which one would wish him to go further.

Our Anglo-Saxon tradition of these matters remains surely in some

respects the strangest. After the perusal of such a book as “The

Whirlpool” I feel as if I had almost to explain that by “these matters”

I mean the whole question of composition, of foreshortening, of the

proportion and relation of parts. Mr. Gissing, to wind up my reserves,

overdoes the ostensible report of spoken words; though I hasten to add

that this abuse is so general a sign, in these days, of the English and

the American novel as to deprive a challenge of every hope of credit. It

is attended visibly—that is visibly to those who can see—with two or

three woeful results. If it had none other it would still deserve

arraignment on the simple ground of what it crowds out—the golden

blocks themselves of the structure, the whole divine exercise and

mystery of the exquisite art of presentation.

The ugliest trick it plays at any rate is its effect on that side of the

novelist’s effort—the side of most difficulty and thereby of most

dignity—which consists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse

and accumulation of time. This is altogether to my view the stiffest

problem that the artist in fiction has to tackle, and nothing is more

striking at present than the blankness, for the most part, of his

indifference to it. The mere multiplication of quoted remarks is the

last thing to strengthen his hand. Such an expedient works exactly to

the opposite end, absolutely minimising, in regard to time, our

impression of lapse and passage. That is so much the case that I can

think of no novel in which it prevails as giving at all the sense of the

gradual and the retarded—the stretch of the years in which developments

really take place. The picture is nothing unless it be a picture of the

conditions, and the conditions are usually hereby quite omitted. Thanks

to this perversity everything dealt with in fiction appears at present

to occur simply on the occasion of a few conversations about it; there

is no other constitution of it. A few hours, a few days seem to account

for it. The process, the “dark backward and abysm,” is really so little

reproduced. We feel tempted to send many an author, to learn the

rudiments of this secret, back to his Balzac again, the most

accomplished master of it. He will learn also from Balzac while he is

about it that nothing furthermore, as intrinsic effect, so much

discounts itself as this abuse of the element of colloquy.

“Dialogue,” as it is commonly called, is singularly suicidal from the

moment it is not directly illustrative of something given us by another

method, something constituted and presented. It is impossible to read

work even as interesting as Mr. Gissing’s without recognising the

impossibility of making people both talk “all the time” and talk with

the needful differences. The thing, so far as we have got, is simply too

hard. There is always at the best the author’s voice to be kept out. It

can be kept out for occasions, it can not be kept out always. The

solution therefore is to leave it its function, for it has the supreme

one. This function, properly exercised, averts the disaster of the

blight of the colloquy really in place—illustrative and indispensable.

Nothing is more inevitable than such a blight when antecedently the

general effect of the process has been undermined. We then want the

report of the spoken word—want that only. But, proportionately, it

doesn’t come, doesn’t count. It has been fatally cheapened. There is no

effect, no relief.

I am writing a treatise when I meant only to give a glance; and it may

be asked if the best thing I find in Mr. Gissing is after all then but

an opportunity to denounce. The answer to that is that I find two other

things—or should find them rather had I not deprived myself as usual of

proper space. One of these is the pretext for speaking, by absolute

rebound, as it were, and in the interest of vivid contrast, of Pierre

Loti; the other is a better occasion still, an occasion for the

liveliest sympathy. It is impossible not to be affected by the frankness

and straightness of Mr. Gissing’s feeling for his subject, a subject

almost always distinctly remunerative to the ironic and even to the

dramatic mind. He has the strongest deepest sense of common humanity, of

the general struggle and the general grey grim comedy. He loves the

real, he renders it, and though he has a tendency to drift too much with

his tide, he gives us, in the great welter of the savourless, an

individual manly strain. If he only had distinction he would make the

suburbs “hum.” I don’t mean of course by his circulation there—the

effect Ibsen is supposed to have on them; I mean objectively and as a

rounded whole, as a great theme treated.

I am ashamed of having postponed “Ramuntcho,” for “Ramuntcho” is a

direct recall of the beauty of “Pêcheur d’Islande” and “Mon Frère

Yves”—in other words a literary impression of the most exquisite order.

Perhaps indeed it is as well that a critic _should_ postpone—and quite

indefinitely—an author as to whom he is ready to confess that his

critical instinct is quite suspended. Oh the blessing of a book, the

luxury of a talent, that one is only anxious not to reason about, only

anxious to turn over in the mind and to taste! It is a poor business

perhaps, but I have nothing more responsible to say of Loti than that I

adore him. I love him when he is bad—and heaven knows he has

occasionally been so—more than I love other writers when they are good.

If therefore he is on the whole quite at his best in “Ramuntcho” I fear

my appreciation is an undertaking too merely active for indirect

expression. I can give it no more coherent form than to say that he

makes the act of partaking one of the joys that, as things mainly go, a

reader must be pretty well provided to be able not to jump at. And yet

there are readers, apparently, who _are_ so provided. There are readers

who don’t jump and are cocksure they can do without it. My sense of the

situation is that they are wrong—that with famine stalking so abroad

literally no one can. I defy it not to tell somewhere—become a gap one

can immediately “spot.”

It is well to content one’s self, at all events, with affection; so

stiff a job, in such a case, is understanding or, still more,

explanation. There is a kind of finality in Loti’s simplicity—if it

even _be_ simplicity. He performs in an air in which, on the part of the

spectator, analysis withers and only submission lives. Has it anything

to do with literature? Has it anything to do with nature? It must be, we

should suppose, the last refinement either of one or of the other. Is it

all emotion, is it all calculation, is it all truth, is it all humbug?

All we can say as readers is that it is for ourselves all experience,

and of the most personal intensity. The great question is whether it be

emotion “neat” or emotion rendered and reduced. If it be resolved into

art why hasn’t it more of the chill? If it be sensibility pure why isn’t

it cruder and clumsier? What is exquisite is the contact of sensibility

made somehow so convenient—with only the beauty preserved. It is not

too much to say of Loti that his sensibility begins where that of most

of those who _use_ the article ends. If moreover in effect he represents

the triumph of instinct, when was instinct ever so sustained and so

unerring? It keeps him unfailingly, in the matter of “dialogue,” out of

the overflow and the waste. It is a joy to see how his looseness is

pervaded after all by proportion.

LONDON NOTES

_August_ 1897

I shrink at this day from any air of relapsing into reference to those

Victorian saturnalia of which the force may now be taken as pretty well

spent; and if I remount the stream for an instant it is but with the

innocent intention of plucking the one little flower of literature that,

while the current roared, happened—so far at least as I could

observe—to sprout by the bank. If it was sole of its kind moreover it

was, I hasten to add, a mere accident of the Jubilee and as little a

prominent as a preconcerted feature. What it comes to therefore is that

if I gathered at the supreme moment a literary impression, the literary

impression had yet nothing to do with the affair; nothing, that is,

beyond the casual connection given by a somewhat acrid aftertaste, the

vision of the London of the morrow as I met this experience in a woeful

squeeze through town the day after the fair. It was the singular fate of

M. Paul Bourget, invited to lecture at Oxford under university patronage

and with Gustave Flaubert for his subject, to have found his appearance

arranged for June 23. I express this untowardness but feebly, I know,

for those at a distance from the edge of the whirlpool, the vast

concentric eddies that sucked down all other life.

I found, on the morrow in question—the great day had been the 22nd—the

main suggestion of a journey from the south of England up to Waterloo

and across from Waterloo to Paddington to be that of one of those deep

gasps or wild staggers, losses of wind and of balance, that follow some

tremendous effort or some violent concussion. The weather was splendid

and torrid and London a huge dusty cabless confusion of timber already

tottering, of decorations already stale, of _badauds_ already bored. The

banquet-hall was by no means deserted, but it was choked with mere

echoes and candle-ends; one had heard often enough of a “great national

awakening,” and this was the greatest it would have been possible to

imagine. Millions of eyes, opening to dust and glare from the scenery of

dreams, seemed slowly to stare and to try to recollect. Certainly at

that distance the omens were poor for such concentration as a French

critic might have been moved to count upon, and even on reaching Oxford

I was met by the sense that the spirit of that seat of learning, though

accustomed to intellectual strain, had before the afternoon but little

of a margin for pulling itself together. Let me say at once that it made

the most of the scant interval and that when five o’clock came the bare

scholastic room at the Taylorian offered M. Bourget’s reputation and

topic, in the hot dead Oxford air, an attention as deep and as

many-headed as the combination could ever have hoped to command.

For one auditor of whom I can speak, at all events, the occasion had an

intensity of interest transcending even that of Flaubert’s strange

personal story—which was part of M. Bourget’s theme—and of the new and

deep meanings that the lecturer read into it. Just the fact of the

occasion itself struck me as having well-nigh most to say, and at any

rate fed most the all but bottomless sense that constitutes to-day my

chief receptacle of impressions; a sense which at the same time I fear I

cannot better describe than as that of the way we are markedly going. No

undue eagerness to determine whether this be well or ill attaches to the

particular consciousness I speak of, and I can only give it frankly for

what, on the whole, it most, for beguilement, for amusement, for the

sweet thrill of perception, represents and achieves—the quickened

notation of our “modernity.” I feel that I can pay this last-named

lively influence no greater tribute than by candidly accepting as an aid

to expression its convenient name. To do that doubtless is to accept

with the name a host of other things. From the moment, at any rate, the

quickening I speak of sets in it is wonderful how many of these other

things play, by every circumstance, into the picture.

That the day should have come for M. Bourget to lecture at Oxford, and

should have come by the same stroke for Gustave Flaubert to be lectured

about, filled the mind to a degree, and left it in an agitation of

violence, which almost excluded the question of what in especial one of

these spirits was to give and the other to gain. It was enough of an

emotion, for the occasion, to live in the circumstance that the author

of “Madame Bovary” could receive in England a public baptism of such

peculiar solemnity. With the vision of that, one could bring in all the

light and colour of all the rest of the picture and absolutely see, for

the instant, something momentous in the very act of happening, something

certainly that might easily become momentous with a little

interpretation. Such are the happy chances of the critical spirit,

always yearning to interpret, but not always in presence of the right

mystery.

There was a degree of poetic justice, or at least of poetic generosity,

in the introduction of Flaubert to a scene, to conditions of credit and

honour, so little to have been by himself ever apprehended or estimated:

it was impossible not to feel that no setting or stage for the crowning

of his bust could less have appeared familiar to him, and that he

wouldn’t have failed to wonder into what strangely alien air his glory

had strayed. So it is that, as I say, the whole affair was a little

miracle of our breathless pace, and no corner from which another member

of the craft could watch it was so quiet as to attenuate the small

magnificence of the hour. No novelist, in a word, worth his salt could

fail of a consciousness, under the impression, of his becoming rather

more of a novelist than before. Was it not, on the whole, just the

essence of the matter that had for the moment there its official

recognition? were not the blest mystery and art ushered forward in a

more expectant and consecrating hush than had ever yet been known to

wait upon them?

One may perhaps take these things too hard and read into them foolish

fancies; but the hush in question was filled to my imagination—quite

apart from the listening faces, of which there would be special things

to say that I wouldn’t for the world risk—with the great picture of all

the old grey quads and old green gardens, of all the so totally

different traditions and processions that were content at last, if only

for the drowsy end of a summer afternoon, to range themselves round and

play at hospitality. What it appeared possible to make out was a certain

faint convergence: that was the idea of which, during the whole process,

I felt the agreeable obsession. From the moment it brushed the mind

certainly the impulse was to clutch and detain it: too doleful would it

have been to entertain for an instant the fear that M. Bourget’s lecture

could leave the two elements of his case facing each other only at the

same distance at which it had found them. No, no; there was nothing for

it but to assume and insist that with each tick of the clock they moved

a little nearer together. That was the process, as I have called it, and

none the less interesting to the observer that it may not have been, and

may not yet be, rapid, full, complete, quite easy or clear or

successful. It was the seed of contact that assuredly was sown; it was

the friendly beginning that in a manner was made. The situation was

handled and modified—the day was a date. I shall perhaps remain obscure

unless I say more expressly and literally that the particular thing into

which, for the perfect outsider, the occasion most worked was a lively

interest—so far as an outsider could feel it—in the whole odd

phenomenon and spectacle of a certain usual positive _want_ of

convergence, want of communication between what the seat and habit of

the classics, the famous frequentation and discipline, do for their

victims in one direction and what they do not do for them in another.

Was the invitation to M. Bourget not a dim symptom of a bridging of this

queerest of all chasms? I can only so denominate—as a most anomalous

gap—the class of possibilities to which we owe its so often coming over

us in England that the light kindled by the immense academic privilege

is apt suddenly to turn to thick smoke in the air of contemporary

letters.

There are movements of the classic torch round modern objects—strange

drips and drops and wondrous waverings—that have the effect of putting

it straight out. The range of reference that I allude to and that is

most the fashion draws its credit from being an education of the taste,

and it doubtless makes on the prescribed lines and in the close company

of the ancients tremendous tests and triumphs for that principle.

Nothing, however, is so singular as to see what again and again becomes

of it in the presence of examples for which prescription and association

are of no avail. I am speaking here of course not of unexpected

reserves, but of unexpected raptures, bewildering revelations of a

failure of the sense of perspective. This leads at times to queer

conjunctions, strange collocations in which Euripides gives an arm to

Sarah Grand and Octave Feuillet harks back to Virgil. It is the breath

of a madness in which one gropes for a method—probes in vain the hiatus

and sighs for the missing link. I am far from meaning to say that all

this will find itself amended by the discreet dose administered the

other day at the Taylorian of even so great an antidote as Flaubert; but

I come back to my theory that there is after all hope for a world still

so accessible to salutary shocks. That was apparent indeed some years

ago. Was it not at the Taylorian that Taine and Renan successively

lectured? Oxford, wherever it was, heard them even then to the end. It

is for the Taines, Renans and Bourgets very much the salting of the tail

of the bird: there must be more than one try.

It is possible to have glanced at some of the odd estimates that the

conversation of the cultivated throws to the surface and yet to say

quite without reserve that the world of books has suffered no small

shrinkage by the recent death of Mrs. Oliphant. She had long lived and

worked in it, and from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary

flood received a more copious tribute. I know not if some study of her

remarkable life, and still more of her remarkable character, be in

preparation, but she was a figure that would on many sides still lend

itself to vivid portraiture. Her success had been in its day as great as

her activity, yet it was always present to me that her singular gift was

less recognised, or at any rate less reflected, less reported upon, than

it deserved: unless indeed she may have been one of those difficult

cases for criticism, an energy of which the spirit and the form,

straggling apart, never join hands with that effect of union which in

literature more than anywhere else is strength.

Criticism, among us all, has come to the pass of being shy of difficult

cases, and no one, for that matter, practised it more in the hit-or-miss

fashion and on happy-go-lucky lines than Mrs. Oliphant herself. She

practised it, as she practised everything, on such an inordinate scale

that her biographer, if there is to be one, will have no small task in

the mere drafting of lists of her contributions to magazines and

journals in general and to “Blackwood” in particular. She wrought in

“Blackwood” for years, anonymously and profusely; no writer of the day

found a _porte-voix_ nearer to hand or used it with an easier personal

latitude and comfort. I should almost suppose in fact that no woman had

ever, for half a century, had her personal “say” so publicly and

irresponsibly. Her facilities of course were of her own making, but the

wonder was that once made they could be so applied.

The explanation of her extraordinary fecundity was a rare original

equipment, an imperturbability of courage, health and brain, to which

was added the fortune or the merit of her having had to tune her

instrument at the earliest age. That instrument was essentially a Scotch

one; her stream flowed long and full without losing its primary colour.

To say that she was organised highly for literature would be to make too

light of too many hazards and conditions; but few writers of our time

have been so organised for liberal, for—one may almost put it—heroic

production. One of the interesting things in big persons is that they

leave us plenty of questions, if only about themselves; and precisely

one of those that Mrs. Oliphant suggests is the wonder and mystery of a

love of letters that could be so great without ever, on a single

occasion even, being greater. It was of course not a matter of mere

love; it was a part of her volume and abundance that she understood life

itself in a fine freehanded manner and, I imagine, seldom refused to

risk a push at a subject, however it might have given pause, that would

help to turn her wide wheel. She worked largely from obligation—to meet

the necessities and charges and pleasures and sorrows of which she had a

plentiful share. She showed in it all a sort of sedentary dash—an

acceptance of the day’s task and an abstention from the plaintive note

from which I confess I could never withhold my admiration.

Her capacity for labour was infinite—for labour of the only sort that,

with the fine strain of old Scotch pride and belated letterless toryism

that was in her, she regarded as respectable. She had small patience

with new-fangled attitudes or with a finical conscience. What was good

enough for Sir Walter was good enough for her, and I make no doubt that

her shrewd unfiltered easy flow, fed after all by an immensity of

reading as well as of observation and humour, would have been good

enough for Sir Walter. If this had been the case with her abounding

history, biography and criticism, it would have been still more the case

with her uncontrolled flood of fiction. She was really a great

_improvisatrice_, a night-working spinner of long, loose, vivid yarns,

numberless, pauseless, admirable, repeatedly, for their full, pleasant,

reckless rustle over depths and difficulties—admirable indeed, in any

case of Scotch elements, for many a close engagement with these. She

showed in no literary relation more acuteness than in the relation—so

profitable a one as it has always been—to the inexhaustible little

country which has given so much, yet has ever so much more to give, and

all the romance and reality of which she had at the end of her pen. Her

Scotch folk have a wealth of life, and I think no Scotch talk in fiction

less of a strain to the patience of the profane. It may be less

austerely veracious than some—but these are esoteric matters.

Reading since her death “Kirsteen”—one of the hundred, but published in

her latest period and much admired by some judges—I was, though

beguiled, not too much beguiled to be struck afresh with that elusive

fact on which I just touched, the mixture in the whole thing. Such a

product as “Kirsteen” has life—is full of life, but the critic is

infinitely baffled. It may of course be said to him that he has nothing

to do with compositions of this order—with such wares altogether as

Mrs. Oliphant dealt in. But he can accept that retort only with a

renunciation of some of his liveliest anxieties. Let him take some early

day for getting behind, as it were, the complexion of a talent that

could care to handle a thing to the tune of so many pages and yet not

care more to “do” it. There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so

serene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a conviction that to

reflect is to be lost.

Mrs. Oliphant was never lost, but she too often saved herself at the

expense of her subject. I have no space to insist, but so much of the

essence of the situation in “Kirsteen” strikes me as missed, dropped out

without a thought, that the wonder is all the greater of the fact that

in spite of it the book does in a manner scramble over its course and

throw up a fresh strong air. This was certainly the most that the author

would have pretended, and from her scorn of precautions springs a gleam

of impertinence quite in place in her sharp and handsome physiognomy,

that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket, nor all her

imagination in service at once. There is scant enough question of “art”

in the matter, but there is a friendly way for us to feel about so much

cleverness, courage and humanity. We meet the case in wishing that the

timid talents were a little more like her and the bold ones a little

less.