Galgenberg, Sept. 24th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki's woes
that I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It's that book
I found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I bought
it, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with my
illusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of the
lives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too
far away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growing
bigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti, and
FitzGerald, and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that I
bought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I was
going to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, and
Shelley. One of my dreams has been to go to that National Portrait
Gallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, and
gaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don't
want to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessed
state it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-out
best of him, and to have lived so far from his country and from
biographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about his
private life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, great
examples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiant
materials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship.
Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need
altars--anyhow we women do--and they were mine--I have not been able to
be religious in the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place of
religion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and the rest, do
not appeal to me in the same way. Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves you
sitting somehow in a cold place from which you call out at intervals
with conviction that he is immense the while you wish he would keep the
feet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats his patriotic drum,
his fine eyes rolling continually toward the gallery, too
unintermittently for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the cunning
worker in gems, the stringer of pearls on frailest golden threads, is
too mischievous, too malicious, to be set up in a temple; and then you
can't help laughing at his extraordinary gift for maddening the
respectable, at the extraordinary skill and neatness with which he
deposits poison in their tenderest places, and how can he worship who is
being made to laugh? If I knew little about our poets' lives--inevitably
I know more than I want to--I still would feel the same. There is, I
think, in their poetry nothing heavenly. It is true I bless God for
them, thank Him for having let them live and sing, for having given us
such a noble heritage, but I can't go all the way Papa goes, and melt in
a bath of rapture whenever Goethe's name is mentioned. I remember what
you said about Goethe. It has not influenced me. I do think you were
wrong. But I do, too, think that everything really heavenly in our
nation, everything purely inspired, manifestly immortal, has gone, not
into our poetry but into our music. That has absorbed our whole share of
divine fire, and left our poets nothing but the cool and conscious
exercise of their intellects.
Well, I am preaching. I would make a very arrogant parson, wouldn't I,
laying down the law more often than the prophets from that safe citadel,
a pulpit; but please have patience, for I want you to comfort me. The
book really has made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you must go on
reading,--angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it till
you've reached the last word. Then you throw it as hard as you can into
the furthest corner of the room, and shake yourself as a dog does, come
up out of muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily as he does
his mud; but you can't, because it has burned itself into your soul. I
don't suppose you will understand what I feel. When a person possesses
very few things those few things are terribly precious. See the mother
of the only child, and compare her conduct when it coughs with the
conduct of the mother of six, all coughing. See how one agonizes; and
see with what serenity the other brings out her bottle of mixture and
pours it calmly down her children's throats. Well, I'm like the first
mother, and you are like the second. I expect you knew long ago, and
have never minded knowing, the littlenesses of my gods; but I, I felt as
unsettled while I read about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened,
as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which knows that every minute
the lash will come down in some fresh place. Think: I knew nothing about
Harriet Westbrook and her tragic life and death; I had never heard of
Emilia Viviani; of Mary; of her whose name was Eliza, but who soared
aloft in the sunshine of Shelley's admiration re-christened Portia, only
presently to descend once more into the font and come out luridly as the
Brown Demon. I never knew that Keats loved somebody called Brawne, and
that she was unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion the
godlike, the divinely gifted, and that he was so persistent, so
unworthily persistent, that the only word I can find that at all
describes it is the German _zappelnd._ I had never heard of Jean Armour,
of the headlong descent from being 'him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plough along the mountain-side' to hopeless black years
spent in public-houses at the beck and call--think of it, think of the
divine spirit forced to it by its body--of any one who would pay for a
drink. I never knew about Coleridge's opium, or that to Carlyle he
appeared as a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs,
as a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I never knew that
Wordsworth's greeting was a languid handful of numb, unresponsive
fingers, that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. I never
knew that Milton had three wives, that the first one ran away from him a
month after their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, so hard
that they wished him dead. All these things I never knew; and for years
I have been walking with glorious spirits, and have been fed on
honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. When first I saw Wordsworth's
portrait I turned cold. Don't laugh; I did actually turn cold. He had
been so much in my life. I had pictured him so wonderful. Calm;
beautiful, with the loftiest kind of beauty; faintly frosty at times,
and detached, yet gently cheery and always dignified. It is the picture
from a portrait by some one called Hancock. Very bitterly do I dislike
Hancock. It is a profile. It would, if I had seen it in the flesh,
completely have hidden from my silly short sight the inner splendors.
I'm afraid--oh, I'm afraid, and I shiver with shame to think it--that I
would have regarded him only as an elderly gentleman of irreproachable
character out of whose way it was as well to get because he showed every
sign of being a bore. Will you think me irretrievably silly when I tell
you that I cried over that picture? For one dreadful moment I stared at
it in startled horror; then I banged the book to and fled up into the
forest to cry. There was a smugness--but no, I won't think of it. I'll
upset all my theories about the face being the mirror of the soul. It
can't be. If it is, Peter Bell and The Thorn are accounted for; but who
shall account for the bleak nobility, the communings with nature on
lofty heights in the light of setting suns? Or, when he comes down
nearer, for that bright world he unlocks of things dear to memory, of
home, of childhood, of quiet places, of calm affections? And for the
tenderness with which it is done? And for its beautiful, simple
goodness?
Coleridge's picture was another disillusionment, but not so great a
shock, because I have loved him less. He was so rarely inspired. I don't
think you need more than the fingers of one hand for the doing of sums
with Coleridge's inspirations. Still, it saddened me to be told he was a
helpless Psyche. I didn't like to hear about his cobwebs. I hated being
forced to know of his weakness, of his wasted life growing steadily
dingier the farther he travelled from that East that had seen him set
out so bright with morning radiance. Really, the world would be a
peaceful place if we could only keep quiet about each other's weak
points. Why are we so restless till we have pulled down, belittled,
besmudged? You'll say that without a little malice talk would grow very
dull; you'll tell me it is the salt, the froth, the sparkle, the ginger
in the ginger-beer, the mustard in the sandwich. But you must admit that
it becomes only terrible when it can't leave the few truly great spirits
alone, when it must somehow drag them down to our lower level, pointing
out--in writing, so that posterity too shall have no illusions--the
spots on the sun, the weak places in the armor, and pushing us, who want
to be left alone praying in the fore-court of the temple, down the area
steps into the kitchen. Two nights and two days have I spent feverishly
with that book. I dare not hope that I shall forget it. I have never yet
forgotten undesirable, bad things. Now, when I take my poets up with me
into the forest, and sit on one of those dusky pine-grown slopes where
the light is subdued to a mysterious gray-green and the world is quieted
into a listening silence, and far away below the roofs of Jena glisten
in the sun, and the white butterflies, like white flowers come to life,
flutter after each other across the blue curtain of heat that hangs
beyond the trees, now when I open them and begin to read the noble,
familiar words, will not those other words, those anecdotes, those
personal descriptions, those suggestions, those button-holings, leer at
me between the lines? Shall I, straining my ears after the music, not be
shown now for ever only the instrument, and how pitifully the ivory has
come off the keys? Shall I, hungering after my spiritual food, not have
pushed upon my notice, so that I am forced to look, the saucepan,
tarnished and not quite clean, in which it was cooked? Please don't tell
me you can't understand. Try to imagine yourself in my place. Come out
of that gay world of yours where you are talking or being talked to all
day long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie Schmidt, alone in Jena, on a
hill, with books. Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day of your
life with nothing particular that you must do, that you have no
shooting, no hunting, no newspapers, no novels. Suppose you are
passionately fond of reading, and that of all reading you most love
poetry. Suppose you have inherited from a mother who loved them as much
as you do a precious shelf-full of the poets, cheap editions, entirely
free from the blight of commentaries, foot-notes, and introductory
biographies. And suppose these books in the course of years have become
your religion, your guide, the source of your best thoughts and happiest
moments--would you look on placidly while some one scrawled malicious
truths between their lines? Oh, you would not. You would feel as I do.
Think what the writers are to me, how I have built up their
personalities entirely out of the materials they gave me in their work.
They never told me horrid things about themselves. Their spirits, which
alone they talked about, were serene and white. I knew Milton was blind,
because he chose beautifully to tell me so. I knew he must have been an
appreciative and regretful husband, because no husband who did not
appreciate and regret would go so far as to talk of his deceased wife as
his late espoused saint. I knew he was a tender friend, a friend capable
of deepest love and sorrow, for in spite of Johnson's 'It is not to be
considered as the effusion of real passion,' I was convinced by the love
and sorrow of 'Lycidas.' I knew he was a man whose spirit was dissolved
continually into the highest ecstasies, who lived with all heaven before
his eyes,--briefly, I said Amen to Wordsworth's 'His soul was like a
star, and dwelt apart.' And now a series of sordid little pictures rises
up before me and chokes my Amen. I cannot bear to think of him having
two or three olives for supper and a little cold water, and then being
cross to his daughters. Of course he must be cross on such a supper. I
can't conceive it kind to drill the daughters so strictly in languages
they did not understand that they could read them aloud to him with
extraordinary correctness. I shrink from the thought of the grumbling
there was in that house of heavenly visions, grumbling and squabbling
stamped out, it is true, by the heavy parental foot wherever noticed,
but smouldering on from one occasion to the other. I cannot believe--I
wish I could--that a child will dislike a parent without cause; the
cause may be small things, a series of trifles each of little moment,
snubs too often repeated, chills too often applied, stern looks, short
words, sarcasms,--and these, as you and I both know, are quite ordinary
dulnesses, often daily ingredients of family life; but they sit with a
strange and upsetting grace on the poet of Paradise, and I would give
anything never to have heard of them.
And then you know I loved FitzGerald. He had one of my best altars. You
remember you read _Omar Khayyam_ twice aloud to me--once in the spring
(it was the third of April, a sudden hot day, blue and joyous, slipped
in to show God had not forgotten us between weeks of hopeless skies and
icy winds) and once last September, that afternoon we drifted down the
river past the town, away from houses and people and work and lessons,
out to where the partridges scuttled across the stubble and all the
world was golden. (That was the eleventh of September; I am rather good,
you see, at dates.) Well, now I call him Fitz, and laugh at the
description of him going about Suffolk lanes in a battered tall hat tied
on in windy weather by a handkerchief, and trailing behind him, instead
of clouds of glory, a shawl of green and black plaid. It isn't, of
course, in any way a bad thing to trail shawls after you on country
walks; there is nothing about it or him that shocks or grieves; he is
very lovable. But I don't want to laugh. I don't want to call him Fitz.
He is one of the gods in my temple, a place from which I rigorously
exclude the sense of humor. I don't like gods who are amusing. I cannot
worship and laugh simultaneously. I know that laughter is good, and I
know that even derision in small quantities is as wholesome as salt; but
I like to laugh and deride outside holy places, and not be forced to do
it while I am on my knees.
Now don't say What on earth does the woman want? because it seems to me
so plain. What the woman wants is that present and future poets should
wrap themselves sternly in an impenetrable veil of anonymity. They
won't, but she can go on praying that they will. They won't, because of
the power of the passing moment, because of the pleasantness of praise,
of recognition, of personal influence, and, I suppose, but I'm not sure,
of money. Do you remember that merry rhymer Prior, how he sang
'Tis long ago
Since gods came down incognito?
Well, I wish with all my heart they had gone on doing it a little
longer. He wasn't, I think, deploring what I deplore, the absence of a
sense for the anonymous in gods, of a sense of the dignity of
separation, of retirement, of mystery, wherever there is even one spark
of the Divine; I think he thought they had all been, and that neither
incognito nor in any other form would they appear again. He implied, and
so joined himself across the centuries to the Walrus and the Carpenter,
that there were no gods to come. Well, he has been dead over a hundred
and eighty years, and they have simply flocked since then. I'd like to
write the great names on this page, the names of the poets, first and
greatest of the gods, to raise it to dignity and confound the ghost of
Prior, but I won't out of consideration for you.
Does not my enthusiasm, my mountain energy, make you groan with the
deadly fatigue of him who has to listen and cannot share? I'll leave
off. My letter is growing unbecomingly fat. The air up here is so
bracing that my very unhappinesses seem after all full of zest, very
vocal, healthy griefs, really almost enjoying themselves. I'll go back
to my pots. I'm busy today, though you mightn't think it, making apple
jelly out of our very own apples. I'll go back to my pots and
forget--no, I won't make a feeble joke I was just going to make, because
of what I know your face would look like when you read it. After all, I
believe I'm more than a little bit frightened of you.
Yours sincerely,