Keats--John Keats, sir--and Shelley were his favourite bards. I cannot

remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair,

and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him was

a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the

moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in

the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest

head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he

read his favourite authors, he can almost never have understood what he

was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I

tried in vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for

nothing but romantic language that he could not understand. The case may

be commoner than we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the

next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital, and who was no sooner

installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence) for a cheap

Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk with

his new neighbour, and was ready, when the book arrived, to make a

singular discovery. For this lover of great literature understood not

one sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he

understood the least--the inimitable, mouth-filling rodomontade of the

ghost in _Hamlet_. It was a bright day in hospital when my friend

expounded the sense of this beloved jargon: a task for which I am

willing to believe my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it

as an easy one. I know indeed a point or two, on which I would gladly

question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit the

glimpses of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to the spacious

days of Elizabeth. But, in the second case, I should most likely

pretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in the pit at

the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite part, playing up to

Mr. Burbage, and rolling out--as I seem to hear him--with a ponderous

gusto--

"Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd."

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party! and what a

surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received the honours of the

evening!

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is long

since dead; and now lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite

forgotten, in some poor city graveyard.--But not for me, you brave

heart, have you been buried! For me, you are still afoot, tasting the

sun and air, and striding southward. By the groves of Comiston and

beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters' Tryst, and where the

curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you,

stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully discoursing of

uncomprehended poets.

II

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his

counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a

dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped with his

wife and children and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird.

To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and daily the

knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to

interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and

plucked grass and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children

were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His

wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but

she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent

was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had

the fine self-sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the

savage; he did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the

day before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am

proud to remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint. Unlike

him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; scarce flying higher than the

story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly seeking none,

between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or

music, adequately embodied in that somewhat obvious ditty,

"Will ye gang, lassie, gang

To the braes o' Balquhidder":

--which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and to

him, in view of his experience, must have found a special directness of

address. But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he felt with

a deep joy the poetry of life. You should have heard him speak of what

he loved; of the tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars

overhead at night; of the blest return of morning, the peep of day over

the moors, the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long

winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at the return of the

spring, he once more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors. But we

were a pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a

consistent first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have laid

himself so open;--to you, he might have been content to tell his story

of a ghost--that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived--whom he

had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and that would have

been enough, for that would have shown you the mettle of the man. Here

was a piece of experience solidly and livingly built up in words, here

was a story created, _teres atque rotundus_.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literary bards! He

had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave; encountered men more

terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in that

incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War; played his part with the

field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared in that

enduring, savage anger and contempt of death and decency that, for long

months together, bedevil'd and inspired the army; was hurled to and fro

in the battle-smoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, where Nicholson

fell; was there when the attacking column, with hell upon every side,

found the soldier's enemy--strong drink, and the lives of tens of

thousands trembled in the scale, and the fate of the flag of England

staggered. And of all this he had no more to say than "hot work, sir,"

or "the army suffered a great deal, sir," or, "I believe General Wilson,

sir, was not very highly thought of in the papers." His life was naught

to him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank: in words his pleasure

lay--melodious, agitated words--printed words, about that which he had

never seen and was connatally incapable of comprehending. We have here

two temperaments face to face; both untrained, unsophisticated,

surprised (we may say) in the egg; both boldly charactered:--that of the

artist, the lover and artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeer,

the lover and forger of experience. If the one had a daughter and the

other had a son, and these married, might not some illustrious writer

count descent from the beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder?

III

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. The

burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my silver

plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew receiver. The

bandit sells the traveller an article of prime necessity: that

traveller's life. And as for the old soldier, who stands for central

mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specialty; for he

was the only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure for my money.

He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the sense to

cling to it, accosting strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking

patrons with a merely regimental difference, sparing you at once the

tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not

one hint about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting

gratitude, the rant and cant, the "God bless you, Kind, Kind gentleman,"

which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence,

which is so notably false, which would be so unbearable if it were true.

I am sometimes tempted to suppose this reading of the beggar's part a

survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and

mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept

these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of life;

nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. They wound us,

I am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening (as it yet

lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a buffet; and the rant

and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the

fact disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar lives by his knowledge

of the average man. He knows what he is about when he bandages his head,

and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with "Poor Mary Ann" or

"Long, long ago"; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical

ear and sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know

what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of

cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.

This trade can scarce be called an imposition; it has been so blown upon

with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we

pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our

drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay

them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And

truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's

thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for

a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars? And the answer is,

Not one. My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged boots

were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him again

and again, and always gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on

the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were his method; they

were the man's trade; without his boots he would have starved; he did

not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public,

which loves the limelight on the actor's face, and the toes out of the

beggar's boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a false and

merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives, and

above all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does

not go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a

penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; never

from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear

canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose

that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a

scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the working

classes, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long

there will be a knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without

stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,

in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich

stand unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was

always the poor who helped him; get the truth from any workman who has

met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or

only with such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the

course of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he

trails his passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even

to the attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable state of things

in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be asked to

give.

IV

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who was

taxed with ingratitude: "_Il faut savoir garder l'independance du

coeur_," cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude without familiarity,

gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a friendship, is a

thing so near to hatred that I do not care to split the difference.

Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shall

continue to question the tact of those who are eager to confer them.

What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends! and what a test

of manners, to receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the

obligation, blushing for each other; how bluff and dull we make the

giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an act of

such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed we can

perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful

emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an

obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be

deceived: unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his

inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In

real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is

received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too

proud to take a naked gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else,

then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of

the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the

days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:

that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money

acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich

to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his

turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His

friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends,

they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where to find--note this

phrase--the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised;

offices are hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid:

the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will

take more than a merely human secretary to disinter that character.

What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet

greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable,

and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most

delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of

man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:--and all

this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye!

Oh, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust;

and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin

to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of

man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no

salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel

of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!

V

And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He

may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial

and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were

a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket

of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But, alas!

there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere

demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues.

V

THE LANTERN-BEARERS

I

These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly

fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of

existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion

of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of

them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the

kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little

gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and

fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial

smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops

with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks

(that remarkable cigar) and the _London Journal_, dear to me for its

startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names:

such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.

These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and

sparsely flanked with villas--enough for the boys to lodge in with their

subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a

haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of grey islets: to

the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes,

alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of

seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and

ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between--now charmed into

sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting

surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and

southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of

the sea--in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful

bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round

its summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of

seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye

of fancy, still flew the colours of King James; and in the ear of fancy

the arches of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to

the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that

part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted;

but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in

the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by

the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side

with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for

life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even

common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single

penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew

the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing

parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of little

anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to the much

entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill

recrimination--shrill as the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been

all, you might have done this often; but though fishing be a fine

pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table;

and it was a point of honour that a boy should eat all that he had

taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone

stood landmark in the buzzing wind, and behold the face of many

counties, and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the sails of

distant ships. You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that

we pathetically call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand

scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath

their guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you

headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the tidal

rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills

were for the nonce discovered; following my leader from one group to

another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in

pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye

cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your

retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all

extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the

margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples

there--if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant

must have played us off with some inferior and quite local fruit,

capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and

smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on

sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the

crumbling turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans[17] (the

worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree

that had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of

east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among

its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in

itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of

the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and

of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and

beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound

in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody--horror!--the

fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts,

and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged

in the little old gaol in the chief street; but whether or no she died

there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been

tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that,

after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on

her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a

certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman

continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman

conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour

of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window

in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a

marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins that

fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a

more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil

of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the

boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where

danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east in it; the

wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was

against them) they might see boat and husband and sons--their whole

wealth and their whole family--engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw

but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and

she squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a

tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells

upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport

peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months'

holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys

and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so

that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun

and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the

Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in

its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself

to introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm

being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this:--

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the

nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective

villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so

well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and

the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our

particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a

cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned

top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned

aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught;

the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye

under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns

about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the

hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being

fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly

copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars,

indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly

an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain

story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take

it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be

a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got

your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and very

needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none

could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the

smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man

lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them--for the cabin was

usually locked--or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind

might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the

bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge

windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting

tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the

cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and

delight themselves with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not

give some specimens--some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries

into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so

innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the

talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves

only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this

bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut; the

top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps

or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and

all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know

you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the

knowledge.

II

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.

It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost

every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice

is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's

imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;

there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells

delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will

have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of

Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a prey to

the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by

his hired man, his house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and he

himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against

these pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly

prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to

memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have

been freed at once from these trials, and might have built himself a

castle and gone escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite

joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the

man had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration. "His mind to

him a kingdom was"; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems

at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must

have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble

character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is

commonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait

of mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another element of virtue; and at

the back of all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a

cur, swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or

thereabout) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait

to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne

either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us

that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast

arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a

god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser,

consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more,

indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that

mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable

house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with

others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and

perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye,

and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens;

who have not one virtue to rub against another in the field of active

life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the

saints. We see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but

heaven knows in what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have

set their treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable

of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song,

hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger

at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his

comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the

woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He

sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and

the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling

lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not

merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and

hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and

the delight of each so incommunicable; and just a knowledge of this, and

a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us,

that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist.

There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of

mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are

ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget;

but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been

boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,

who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat

before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of

congested poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked

alone in the woods, they have walked in cities under the countless

lamps; they have been to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they

have longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life

has stung their palate. Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure

at least they have tasted to the full--their books are there to prove

it--the keen pleasure of successful literary composition. And yet they

fill the globe with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with

despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity to all I care to

call existence, with despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to

continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be

moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate

their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of

mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway

junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some

grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances

seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very

true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons of (what

they call) the artistic temperament that in this we were exceptional,

and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must

deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a

prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest

considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by

ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does

not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable

of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just

like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped

a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew

very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys

and full of poetry of his own. And this harping on life's dulness and

man's meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two

things: the cry of the blind eye, _I cannot see_, or the complaint of

the dumb tongue, _I cannot utter_. To draw a life without delights is to

prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of

poetry--well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may

have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded,

impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and

probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer

as ... the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming

modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not

suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in a book:

and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the same

romance--I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of giving

pain--say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take

shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow

boys; and say that I came on some such business as that of my

lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat

upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they

were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I

might upon these lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or

so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of

a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and

when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and

dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied

the boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and

indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is

highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of

the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask

themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the

ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

III

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may

hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside,

like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist

with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has

so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his

note-book) that it may even touch them not; and the man's true life, for

which he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The

clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer

sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading

another life, plying another trade from that they chose; like the poet's

housebuilder, who, after all, is cased in stone,

"By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts,

Rebuilds it to his liking."

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul,

with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to

court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his

nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of

foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the

true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a

squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And

the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find

out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the

sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one

who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is

meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of

realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the

incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the

submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing

sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his

whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief

in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of

middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the

hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every

description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal

poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that

clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life

falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the

colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man

lives in external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm,

phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the

storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far

better--Tolstoi's "Powers of Darkness." Here is a piece full of force

and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a

situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in

part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint

of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life,

and, even when Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are

not understood; they saw their life in fairer colours; even the deaf

girl was clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so,

once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of

poetry and lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks

with fairy tales.

IV

In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;

and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine

labours on the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Richard

Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, "not

cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying

Lear, when, in Dostoieffsky's "Despised and Rejected," the uncomplaining

hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please

the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright

face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly

supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them,

we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes

also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door,

here is the open air.

_Itur in antiquam silvam._

FOOTNOTE:

[17] Wild cherries.

LATER ESSAYS

LATER ESSAYS

I

FONTAINEBLEAU

VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS

I

The charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that people

love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence,

the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the

great age and dignity of certain groves--these are but ingredients, they

are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative; the air, the

light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.

The artist may be idle and not fear the "blues." He may dally with his

life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of

the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most

smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the

plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of

fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in

the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria.

There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their

youth, or the old better contented with their age.

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country

to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still

raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art--Millet who

loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped

in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day of that

strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the

culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures--that voluntary

aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful

effects--that disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter

Bells to paint the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its

proximity to Paris. And for the same cause, and by the force of

tradition, the painter of to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.

There is in France scenery incomparable for romance and harmony.

Provence, and the valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one

succession of masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is not

merely beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and

surprises while it charms. Here you shall see castellated towns that

would befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like

cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers of

every precious colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by the grace

of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the modern painter;

yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to Fontainebleau, to the

eternal bridge of Grez, to the watering-pot cascade in Cernay valley.

Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in Fontainebleau he shrinks

from what is sharply charactered. But one thing, at least, is certain:

whatever he may choose to paint and in whatever manner, it is good for

the artist to dwell among graceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but

quiet scenery, is classically graceful; and though the student may look

for different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate

his hand and eye.

But, before all its other advantages--charm, loveliness, or proximity to

Paris--comes the great fact that it is already colonised. The

institution of a painters' colony is a work of time and tact. The

population must be conquered. The innkeeper has to be taught, and he

soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to

welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and

with little baggage beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must

learn to preserve his faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink

of the best, borrow money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver

for a year. A colour merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue

must be given to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of

animals, should find himself alone. And no sooner are these first

difficulties overcome than fresh perils spring up upon the other side;

and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is the

crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing, they

not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of their long

purses, they will have undone the education of the innkeeper; prices

will rise and credit shorten; and the poor painter must fare farther on

and find another hamlet. "Not here, O Apollo!" will become his song.

Thus Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts.

Curious and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student

uses to defend his lair; like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken

the waters of his chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a

purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and

credit are not threatened, he will do the honours of his village

generously. Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may

seek expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as

he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at home.

And when that essentially modern creature, the English or American

girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if into a

drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself defenceless; he

submitted or he fled. His French respectability, quite as precise as

ours, though covering different provinces of life, recoiled aghast

before the innovation. But the girls were painters; there was nothing to

be done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for the time at least,

was practically ceded to the fair invader. Paterfamilias, on the other

hand, the common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the cheap young

gentleman upon the spree, he hounded from his villages with every

circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads

are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they

are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too

much occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter;

and this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at

the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing

else, is, for a while at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in

England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded,

among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely

indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of

art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of

all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new

discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical

events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque,

properly speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the

artist; he first plays with his material as a child plays with a

kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when he begins to use

his pretty counters for the end of representation. In that, he must

pause long and toil faithfully; that is his apprenticeship; and it is

only the few who will really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully

equipped, to do the business of real art--to give life to abstractions

and significance and charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell

much among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest

in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone

can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this

polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and

insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why

do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian

angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to

one, his hand is coarsened and his style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art

is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in

the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest

scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not

appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in

the domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a man should cease

prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon his will, and, for

better or worse, begin the business of creation. This evil day there is

a tendency continually to postpone: above all with painters. They have

made so many studies that it has become a habit; they make more, the

walls of exhibitions blush with them; and death finds these aged

students still busy with their horn-book. This class of man finds a

congenial home in artist villages; in the slang of the English colony at

Barbizon we used to call them "Snoozers." Continual returns to the city,

the society of men further advanced, the study of great works, a sense

of humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or

philosophy, are the means of treatment. It will be time enough to think

of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch it is the

very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the painters' village.

"Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education; and the rudiments must

be learned stupidly, all else being forgotten, as if they were an object

in themselves.

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very

air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, clarity,

the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling,

apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere

residence; or, if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated.

The air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave

that airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but

to change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes

from the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that

are still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives

to be decorative in its emptiness.

II

In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau

is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western side of it with

what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to

testify that there is no square mile without some special character and

charm. Such quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau,

and the Reine Blanche might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a

point in common beyond the silence of the birds. The two last are really

conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived

a thousand political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper

placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air

and the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In the other

the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one

upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss

clings in the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes spiring and

casting forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church architecture,

canopies this rugged chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the

broad white causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue; a road

conceived for pageantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an

army; but, its days of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun

between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising

tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A

little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and

boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all

juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of

pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be

forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a

hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an

unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing; and at

last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with the night a

new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. There are few things

more renovating than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of the

Carrousel, and the long alignment of the glittering streets, and to

bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a

changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as your

foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted

in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of

forests on the mind of man, who still remembers and salutes the ancient

refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage

corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in the

most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with

conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has

countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you are never

surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the

centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing,

thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness; it is rather

a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit's

cavern. In the midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with

the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and

peopled by historic names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug

who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad,

he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family

Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope

ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a

Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly

stupid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small

change; for that he had a great avidity. In the course of time he proved

to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from

the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,

theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only

stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to

indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be

discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie

unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct

you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock. But

your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks,

if there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I

may suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me

for aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted

with a hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A

confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for

water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest

pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get

gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of

junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and

although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it

literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and

offers some of the repose of natural forests. And the solitary, although

he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with

his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands

of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon

by windows; others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that

meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of

their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an

adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem but

an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the plain man

it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for

company.

III

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; _et ego in Arcadia vixi_;

it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among

the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot

in memory. The great Millet was just dead, the green shutters of his

modest house were closed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my

first visit was thus an epoch in the history of art: in a lesser way, it

was an epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The _Petit Cenacle_

was dead and buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all

at rest from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was

nearly lost; and the petrified legend of the _Vie de Boheme_ had become

a sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators. But if

the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still further

expurgated; honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I have said,

almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to depart,

to take all his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they

sometimes lost, it was by English and Americans alone. At the same time,

the great influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the life of the

studious. There had been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the

English and the Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel

pleasantry. It would be well if nations and races could communicate

their qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they

have an eye to nothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentially

dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we call

"Fair Play." The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and,

when that defender of innocence retired overseas and left his bills

unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes,

part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his judgment

upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore

rule at Grez--urbane, superior rule--his memory rich in anecdotes of the

great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed,

and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering

with Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole

fabric of his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback.

Cernay had Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of

youth, who, when a full-blown commercial traveller suddenly threw down

his samples, bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all

admired. Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only

Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth. Even

its secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger welcome,

have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has departed, carrying his

household gods; and long before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from

our midst by an untimely death. He died before he had deserved success;

it may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest

countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another--whom I

will not name--has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his

decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he still

retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious

importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, the occupant of several

chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon

great canvases that none would buy, still waiting the return of fortune.

But these days also were too good to last; and the former favourite of

two sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night. There was a time

when he was counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how

the whirligig of time brings in his revenges! To pity Millet is a piece

of arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it is

harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may pity

his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opulence

and momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault, was suffered step by

step to sink again to nothing. No misfortune can exceed the bitterness

of such back-foremost progress, even bravely supported as it was; but to

those also who were taken early from the easel, a regret is due. From

all the young men of this period, one stood out by the vigour of his

promise; he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.

"_Il faut faire de la peinture nouvelle_," was his watchword; but if

time and experience had continued his education, if he had been granted

health to return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I

must believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy

principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering

in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to

liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or

wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check

your inroads; only at the week's end a computation was made, the gross

sum was divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger's name

under the rubric: _estrats_. Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax

was levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the

easiness of your disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you

could get your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest. The

doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the

threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by

were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of

forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and

again at six o'clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron's table. The

whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the

_estrats_, cost you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you

until you asked it; and if you were out of luck's way, you might depart

for where you pleased and leave it pending.

IV

Theoretically, the house was open to all comers; practically, it was a

kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they

protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was

the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the

society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly

punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of

speech as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of

hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of

maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would

be difficult to say in words what they had done, but they deserved their

fate. They had shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate

freedoms; they had pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they

wanted tact to appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette.

And, once they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in

its cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Bailly of

our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose

exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from the

scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were never, in

my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I believe, have

been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were

never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of

these in Barbizon; and some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; but

one and all entered at once into the spirit of the association. This

singular society is purely French, a creature of French virtues, and

possibly of French defects. It cannot be imitated by the English. The

roughness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the

more ardent friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a

commonwealth. But this random gathering of young French painters, with

neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life of the

place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette upon

the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their edicts against the

unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder the more at the strange failure

of their race upon the larger theatre. This inbred civility--to use the

word in its completest meaning--this natural and facile adjustment of

contending liberties, seems all that is required to make a governable

nation and a just and prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of

laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who joined

us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We

returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by

the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the

Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the

natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent

pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and

laughter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life

for any naturally-minded youth; better yet for the student of painting,

and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was

saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the

disturbing currents of the world, he might forget that there existed

other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a

place, it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his

conscience, like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he

saw himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were

really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health and the

continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the

desire to work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness, full of visions, hearty

meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and, still

floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that

Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious

torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import. So in youth,

like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of

art which we shall never enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial;

visions of style that repose upon no base of human meaning; the last

heart-throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before

the artist can be born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory

that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison.

We were all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an

imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel;

small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is

a kind mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own

baselessness, others succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms

change, the amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the

House Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

V

Grez lies out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts a mill,

an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings. And the

bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on the

incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have

seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in

the last French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a

black-and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the

pages of the _Magazine of Art_. Long-suffering bridge! And if you visit

Grez to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom

of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly painting

it again.

The bridge taken for granted, Grez is a less inspiring place than

Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly in

the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing

in one corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the

early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under

the windows of the villagers. It is vastly different to awake in Grez,

to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the

bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals

are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars

and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the

jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is

"something to do" at Grez. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall

no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the

solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This "something to do"

is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high

spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone! But Grez

is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The

course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle

attractions for the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the

red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lilies,

and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of

roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours

between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Grez is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and

buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and the place

as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They,

indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening,

the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the company that

gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now

dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall

follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in

name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. "For remembrance of

the old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one

story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters

were left stranded and penniless in Grez; and there, until the war was

over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to

obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best, sat

down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals were

supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ. Madame

Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them. But they stood firm;

eat they must, but having no money they would soil no napkins.

VI

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been little

visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous; they have manners

of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation.

Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected; I never knew it

inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a

barrel of _piquette_, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis

above the weir, in sight of the green country and to the music of the

falling water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of

residence, just too rustic to be stagey; and from my memories of the

place in general, and that garden trellis in particular--at morning,

visited by birds, or at night, when the dew fell and the stars were of

the party--I am inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future

of Montigny. Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily

slumbering in the plain--the cemetery of itself. The great road remains

to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and,

like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room the paintings of

a former generation, dead or decorated long ago. In my time, one man

only, greatly daring, dwelt there. From time to time he would walk over

to Barbizon, like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and after

some communication with flesh and blood return to his austere hermitage.

But even he, when I last revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for

good, and closed the roll of the Chaillyites. It may revive--but I much

doubt it. Acheres and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of

the question, being merely Grez over again, without the river, the

bridge, or the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western

side, Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely know Marlotte,

and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it. It seems

a glaring and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie is

unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable enough,

is commonplace. Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I were the young

painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

VII

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good

conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day. Many of us

have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a portion of

our souls behind us buried in the woods. I would not dig for these

reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the

finder; and yet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered

along forest paths, stores of youth's dynamite and dear remembrances.

And as one generation passes on and renovates the field of tillage for

the next, I entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth

into the forest they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits

of their predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are the

sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field

of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer farther,

those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves, surely in

Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions? We are not

content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would

leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this memorable

forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when

the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also.

The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is

theirs indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at night in the

fondest of their dreams, and use it for ever in their books and

pictures. Yet when they made their packets, and put up their notes and

sketches, something, it should seem, had been forgotten. A projection of

themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a

natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares. Over the whole

field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like

indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved

spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget

their orphanage. If anywhere about that wood you meet my airy bantling,

greet him with tenderness. He was a pleasant lad, though now abandoned.

And when it comes to your own turn to quit the forest, may you leave

behind you such another; no Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful

whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in

which we figure, the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has

not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever

anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not

a copious spirit of enjoyment. Whether as man or artist, let the youth

make haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to

the spirit of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from

studies, although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart

the gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo

the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the

concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a

study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicable thrill

of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test the flatness of our

art. Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up to

further effort and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blushing at

our ignorant and tepid works; and the more we find of these inspiring

shocks the less shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions.

In all sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling

human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio pictures,

it is a lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young painter go to

Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach

him the mechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, and

be a servant of mirth, and not pick and botanise, but wait upon the

moods of Nature. So he will learn--or learn not to forget--the poetry of

life and earth, which, when he has acquired his track, will save him

from joyless reproduction.

II

A NOTE ON REALISM

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does

not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the

one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,

creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour

of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and

dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to

another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation

of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end

to end--these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are

to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.

What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be

organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely

ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and

finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and

notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic

style continually re-arising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways

of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change of

the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was

inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic

Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a

duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more

ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it has

recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and

decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call

survival. With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to

fall a little back from these extremities; they begin to aspire after a

more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified,

and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of

this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling

story--once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable--begin

to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a

particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has

led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the

unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes.

To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady

current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to

the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this

tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to

degenerate into mere _feux-de-joie_ of literary tricking. The other day

even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible

sounds.

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of

the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All

representative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic and

ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of

externals. It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a mere

whim of veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon the larger,

more various, and more romantic art of yore. A photographic exactitude

in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands

it tells us no more--I think it even tells us less--than Moliere,

wielding his artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of

Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten.

Yet truth to the conditions of man's nature and the conditions of man's

life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us

in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene

may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the

mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is

any page of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must

be that "Troilus and Cressida" which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly

anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.

This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not

in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical

method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you

will be none the less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the risk of

being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and honest,

you may chance upon a masterpiece.

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period

of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists,

puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most

faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human

mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed.

The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the

artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate

Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the

scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his

whole design.

The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical

pre-occupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of life.

And with these the execution is but play; for the stylistic problem is

resolved beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully

foregone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, which we have

learnt to admire, with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr.

Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or

even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of

design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write "Esmond"

than "Vanity Fair," since, in the first, the style was dictated by the

nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of

mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the

case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been

conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the

author's mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one of

extreme perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy and an

imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort once

for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to it through life. But

those of a higher order cannot rest content with a process which, as

they continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate towards the

academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they embark is

the signal for a fresh engagement of the whole forces of their mind; and

the changing views which accompany the growth of their experience are

marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So

that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods

of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment when

execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that the

ideal and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for the

direction of the work. Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the needle,

and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences,

their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordination. It is the

work and it is a great part of the delight of any artist to contend with

these unruly tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to

drive and coax them to effect his will. Given these means, so laughably

inadequate, and given the interest, the intensity, and the multiplicity

of the actual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, the

artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in every case

and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much and omit

more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is

tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the main design,

subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly retain. And

it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven

exclusively of such. There, any fact that is registered is contrived a

double or a treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place

and a pillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such a

picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to

accentuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of distance,

and to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would be

allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time, expedite the

progress of the fable, build up the characters, and strike home the

moral or the philosophical design. But this is unattainable. As a rule,

so far from building the fabric of our works exclusively with these, we

are thrown into a rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a score

of them, to be the plums of our confection. And hence, in order that the

canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other

details must be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful

title; many without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds

towards completion, too often--I had almost written always--loses in

force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and

dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story

drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slipshod talk.

But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particulars which

we know we can describe; and hence those most of all which, having been

described very often, have grown to be conventionally treated in the

practice of our art. These we choose, as the mason chooses the acanthus

to adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the accustomed

hand. The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship

and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would long

have been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy; offer us ready-made but

not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises; and

wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art.

To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give

expression to facts which have not yet been adequately or not yet

elegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extreme

self-love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the artist

may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists, and consider

any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant

handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-painter,

who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed

can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of

art--charm. A little further, and he will regard charm in the light of

an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious

passage as an infidelity to art.

We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his

eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the

interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly

suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine

intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a

convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all

charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either

of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary

disabilities and dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to

sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity,

or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers under

facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as his energy declines, to

discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific

thoroughness, steadily to communicate matter which is not worth

learning. The danger of the idealist is, of course, to become merely

null and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is conceived

with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But though on

neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist

must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for each

succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may be generally said,

that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we

do the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err upon the

side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that theory it

may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always holding back

the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and

resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate,

dignified, happily mirthful, or at the last and least, romantic in

design.

III

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs

and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the

surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness,

and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness

and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar

way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an

abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from

any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is

the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem

so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious

and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist

to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs,

indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and hints

of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely

irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they

lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of

man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details

of method, which can be stated but can never wholly be explained; nay,

on the principle laid down in Hudibras, that

"Still the less they understand,

The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,"

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour

of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known character, the

general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most distasteful

business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking on the back;

and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.

1. _Choice of Words_.--The art of literature stands apart from among its

sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the

dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and

immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to

understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The

sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the

modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with

finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the

nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase.

It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the

literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is

this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged

currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those

suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity and vigour;

no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in

painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase,

sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a

definite conventional import.

Now, the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or

the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice and

contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take

these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar,

and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and

distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to

another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the passions. But though

this form of merit is without doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is

far from being equally present in all writers. The effect of words in

Shakespeare, their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm, is

different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or,

to take an example nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified

into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved;

whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning,

harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like

undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class of

writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which

Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than

Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in

the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter;

it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three

first are but infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular

point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole. What is that

point?

2. _The Web_.--Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the

great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is

yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great

classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are

representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and

those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are

self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this

distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground

of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive

and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be,

of colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or

imitative lines; but still a pattern. That is the plane on which these

sisters meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they

should at times forget their childish origin, addressing their

intelligence to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that

necessary function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still

imperative that the pattern shall be made.

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of

sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication

may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with

substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the

true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,

involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive

phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment

of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly

constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so

that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to

welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an

element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the

antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first

suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely

in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence

there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often

disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared,

and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking

and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to

disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing,

as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious

neatness.

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him

springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or

sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the

supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the

demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies

of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the

artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no

form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases,

unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and

illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game.

The genius of prose rejects the _cheville_ no less emphatically than the

laws of verse; and the _cheville_, I should perhaps explain to some of

my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike

a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it

is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we

judge the strength and fitness of the first.

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait

about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more views of the

subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts them; and while, in

one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot, he

will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the meaning, or to

have transacted the work of two sentences in the space of one. In the

change from the successive shallow statements of the old chronicler to

the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is

implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we

clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and

stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and

affinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not

so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these

difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two oranges

kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not, afford

the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the

necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That style

is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most

natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the

chronicler; but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant

implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest

gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their

(so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the

means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be

most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most

perspicuously bound into one.

The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an

elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of

the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read, for the

interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly

represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how

many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only

merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention Cicero; and

since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the

mind, a very colourless and toothless "criticism of life"; but we enjoy

the pleasure of a most intricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a

model at once of elegance and of good sense; and the two oranges, even

if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace.

Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in

verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning beauty,

yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think that here was a

death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new

illustration of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not

bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has

been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the

essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely

alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi)

regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in

the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not

matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be

pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that we have a

right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the

writer, and that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too

hard. Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to

write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for in

prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the difficulties first

created before they can be solved. Hence, again, there follows the

peculiar greatness of the true versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton,

and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as versifier merely, not as

poet. These not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with

all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the

pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give

us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that

of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now

contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the

verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the

well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their

solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by

the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and

the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and

triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The

writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us

with a new series of triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival

followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as

that from melody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the juggler,

behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the spectators,

juggling with three oranges instead of two. Thus it is: added

difficulty, added beauty; and the pattern, with every fresh element,

becoming more interesting in itself.

Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition; something

is lost as well as something gained; and there remains plainly

traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse, a certain

broad distinction of method in the web. Tight as the versifier may draw

the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the

sentence floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a

pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness

like a puzzle. The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this return

and balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find

comparable passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the

superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more

delicate enterprise, he falls to be as widely his inferior. But let us

select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter;

let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of

_Henry IV._, a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's second

manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act

iv., scene 1; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by

Rosalind and Orlando, compare, for example, the first speech of all,

Orlando's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall please you to

select--the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of

nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to

perceive, if you have any ear for that class of music, a certain

superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the

parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing pendulum.

We must not, in things temporal, take from those who have little, the

little that they have; the merits of prose are inferior, but they are

not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an independent.

3. _Rhythm of the Phrase._--Some way back, I used a word which still

awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but what

is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, literature, being

a representative art, must look for analogies to painting and the like;

but in what is technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must

seek for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a

recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and

short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear.

And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down

laws. Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find

the secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those

phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless

and yet to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I

owe it all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however,

particularly interesting in the present connection. We have been

accustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and to be

filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious

schoolboy, we have heard our own description put in practice.

"All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,"[18]