A good friend of mine, poet and scholar, was recently approached by
the President, or other kind of head of a Working Men's Association,
for a paper. A party of them was to visit Oxford, where, after an
inspection, there should be a feast, and after the feast, it was
hoped, a paper from my friend--upon Addison. The occasion was not to
be denied: I don't doubt that he was equal to it. I wish that I had
heard him; I wish also that I had seen him; for he had determined on
a happy way of illustrating and pointing his discourse. He had the
notion of providing himself with a full-bottomed wig, a Ramillies; at
the right moment he was to clothe the head of the President with
it; and--Bless thee, Bottom, how art thou translated! In that woolly
panoply, if one could not allow for _Cato_ and the balanced antitheses
of the grand manner, or condone rhetoric infinitely remote from life
past, present or to come--well, one would never understand Addison, or
forgive him. This, for instance:--
CATO (_loq._): Thus am I doubly arm'd; my death and life,
My bane and antidote are both before me:
_This_ in a moment brings me to an end;
But _this_ informs me I shall never die.
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger....
Ten pages more sententious and leisurely comment; then:
Oh! (_dies_).
There is much to be said for it, in a Ramillies wig. It is stately, it
is dignified, it is perhaps noble. If, as I say, it is not very much
like life, neither are you who enact it. But be sure that out of sight
or remembrance of the wig such a tragedy were not to be endured.
That is very well. The wig serves its turn, inspiring what without it
would be intolerable. I am sure my friend had no trouble in accounting
for Addison in full dress and his learned sock. Nor need he have had
with Addison the urbane, Addison of the _Spectator_ condescending to
Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb. There is in that, the very
best gentlemanly humour our literature possesses, nothing inconsistent
with the full-bottomed wig and an elbow-chair. But when the right
honourable gentleman set himself to compose _Rosamond: an Opera_, and
disported himself thus:
PAGE:
Behold on yonder rising ground
The bower, that wanders
In meanders
Ever bending,
Never ending,
Glades on glades,
Shades in shades,
Running an eternal round.
QUEEN:
In such an endless maze I rove,
Lost in the labyrinths of love,
My breast with hoarded vengeance burns,
While fear and rage
With hope engage,
And rule my wav'ring soul by turns--
then I do not see how the wig can have been useful. I feel that
Addison must have left it on the bedpost and tied up his bald pate
in a tricky bandana after the fashion of Mr. Prior or Mr. Gay, one of
whom, if I remember rightly, did not disdain to sit for his picture in
that frolic guise. The wig, which adds age and ensures dignity, would
have been out of place there; nor is it possible that _The Beggar's
Opera_ owes anything to it. To explain the Addison of _Rosamond_
or _The Drummer_, my friend would have had to shave the head of his
victim and clap a nightcap upon it.
The device was ingenious and happy. You yoke one art to serve another.
It can be extended in either direction, working backwards from the
Ramillies, or forwards, as I propose to show. Skip for a moment
the Restoration and the perruque, skip the cropped polls of the
Roundheads; with this you are in full Charles I.
Go, lovely Rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
What vision of what singer does that evoke? What other than that of
a young gallant in a lace collar, with lovelocks over his shoulders,
pointed Vandyke fingers, possibly a peaked chin-beard? There is
accomplishment enough, beauty enough, God knows; but there is
impertinence too; it is _de haut en bas_--
Tell her that wastes her time and me!
Lovelocks and pointed fingers all over it. It is witty, but does not
bite. If you bite you are serious, if you bite you are in love; but
that is elegant make-believe. He will take himself off next minute,
and encountering a friend, hear himself rallied:
Quit, quit, for shame I This will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can her make:
The D----l take her!
Laughter and a shrug are the end of it. With the Carolines it was not
music that was the food of love, but love that was a staple food
of music. A man who lets his hair down over his shoulders may be as
sentimental as you please, or as impudent. He cannot nourish both a
passion and a head of hair. He won't have time.
There, then, again, is a clear congruity established between your
versifying and your clothes; they will both be in the mode, and the
mode the same. One feels about the Cavalier fashion that it was
not serious either one way or the other. It had not the Elizabethan
swagger; it had not the Restoration cynicism; it had not the Augustan
urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as
a law unto himself, which is the right of genius--for the sonnets
have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real
love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could
possibly survive--avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two snatches in
order. Take first--
Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white,
For all those rosy ornaments in thee,--
Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight,
Nor fair nor sweet--unless thou pity me!
That first; and then this:
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain--
and consider them for what they are: unapproachably beautiful,
passionate, serious, on the edge of cynicism, but never over it. There
you have the love of a young age of the world, when young men, hard
hit, could be sharp-tongued, bitter, and often (though not in those
two) too much in earnest not to be shameless. Agree with me, and see
the men who sang and the women they sang of in preposterous stuffed
and starched clothes which made them unapproachable except at the
finger-tips, and yet burning so for each other that by words alone and
the music in them they could rend all the buckram and whalebone and
make such armour vain! You may see in Elizabethan dress a return
to Art, as in Elizabethan poetry you see a return to Learning; but
neither was designed to prevent a return to Nature; rather indeed to
stimulate it. And so you come back to this:
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head ...
which is the perfectly-clothed utterance of an Elizabethan longing to
be rid of his clothes.
I don't propose to linger over the perruque. The Restoration was a
time of carnival when, if the men were overdressed, the ladies were
underdressed; and the perruque was a part of the masquerade. In such a
figurehead you could be as licentious as you chose--and you were; you
could only be serious in satire. The perruque accounts for Dryden and
his learned pomp, for Rochester and Sedley, and for Congreve, who told
Voltaire that he desired to be considered as a gentleman rather than
poet, and was with a shrug accepted on that valuation: it accounts for
Timotheus crying Revenge, and not meaning it, or anything else except
display; it accounts for Pepys thinking _King Lear_ ridiculous. Let me
go on rather to the day of the tie-wig, of Pope's Achilles and Diomede
in powder; of Gray awaking the purple year; of Kitty beautiful and
young, of Sir Plume and his clouded cane; of Mason and Horace Walpole.
When ladies were painted, and their lovers in powder, poetry would be
painted too. It would be either for the boudoir or the alcove. I don't
call to mind a single genuine love-song in all that century among
those who dressed _à la mode_. There were, however, some who did not
so dress.
Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave
of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself,
never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the
poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before
he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before
Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was
born; twelve years before he died, Burns. It is strange to contrast
the _Elegy_ with _The Poplar Field:_
My fugitive years are all wasting away,
And I must ere long be as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.
Put beside that melodious jingle the ordered diction and ordered
sentiment of one of the best-known and most elegant poems in our
tongue. They were written within fifteen years of each other. Within
the same space of time, or near about it, there came this spontaneous
utterance of simplicity, tragedy and hopeless sorrow:
Young Jamie lo'ed me weel, and sought me for his bride;
But saving a croun he had naething else beside:
To make the croun a pund young Jamie gaed to sea;
And the croun and the pund they were baith for me.
The authoress of that was born twenty-one years before Gray died. I
speak, perhaps, only for myself when I say that reading that, or the
like of that in Burns or in Blake, my heart becomes as water, and
I feel that I would lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of
Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to
be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I
were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the
infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he
scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain
just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be
conceded that there was some putting off of the tie-wig, the hoop and
the red-heeled shoe about 1770.
In the time of Reform, say from 1795 to 1830, you could do much as
you pleased, and dress according to your fancy. You could smother your
neck in a stock, wear a high-waisted swallow-tail coat, kerseymere
continuations and silk stockings. So sat Southey for his portrait, and
so did Rogers continually. Or you could wear a curly _toupé_ with Tom
Moore and the Prince Regent, be as rough as a dalesman with Wordsworth
or as sleek as a dissenting minister with Coleridge, an open-throated
pirate with Byron, or a seraph with Shelley. If the rules lingered,
they were relaxed. I think there were none. Individuality was in the
air; schools were closing down. For the first time since the spacious
days men sang as they pleased, and some sang as they felt and were,
but with this difference added that you would no longer identify the
age with the utterance. There were many survivals: most of Coleridge,
all of Rogers, much of Byron, some of Wordsworth (_Laodamia_) is
eighteenth century; and then, for the first time, you could archaicize
or walk in Wardour Street--Macpherson had taught us that, and Bishop
Percy. But all of Shelley and Keats, the best of Coleridge and
Wordsworth belong to no age.
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
But where are ye?
That is like nothing on earth: music and diction are stark new. And
that was the way of it for a forty years of freedom.
Then came a reaction. With Queen Victoria we all went to church again
in our Sunday clothes. You cannot date Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth
by the fashions; but you can date Tennyson assuredly. He belongs
to the top-hat and the crinoline; to _Friends in Council_ and "nice
feelings." True, there was nothing dressy about Tennyson himself. I
doubt if he ever wore a top-hat. But is not _The Gardener's Daughter_
in ringlets? Did not Aunt Elizabeth and Sister Lilia wear crinolines?
And as for _Maud_--
Look, a horse at the door,
And little King Charley snarling:
Go back, my lord, across the moor,
You are not her darling.
That settles it. "Little King Charley's" name would have been Gyp.
I yield to no man in my admiration of _In Memoriam_; but when one
compares it with _Adonais_ it is impossible not to allocate the one
and salute the other as for all time and place:
When in the down I sink my head
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead.
And then:
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.
No: _In Memoriam_ is a beautiful poem, and technically a much better
one than _Adonais_. But the spirit is different; narrower, more
circumscribed; in a word, it dates, like the top-hat and the
crinoline.
In our day, clothes have lost touch with mankind, they cover the body
but do not express the soul. With the vogue of the short coat, short
skirt, slouch hat, and brown boots, style has gone out and ease come
in; and with ease, it would seem, easy, not to say free-and-easy,
manners. I speak not of the "nineties" when a young degenerate could
lightly say,