The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a "vain capacity," so well explained has it ever been.
Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,
discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement
makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks
that timorous heart.
We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right language
enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do. Who, for
instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his
confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate
syllable of his tenderness? There is a "pledging of the word," in
another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poet
pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar
sanction. And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it
not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and the
word are almost as closely united as thought and the word. Almost--not
quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and
sensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power.
But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know
it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is
great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and
to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the
indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the
familiar. It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradicts
life. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the one
improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature
that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a true
destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.
Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.
It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion. Mrs.
Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers,
by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly
inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to
an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the
audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the
grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more
significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of
rhetoric; he is perdurable because he is not completed. His humours are
strangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die;
for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I thank
my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the
French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at. But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in a
book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.
That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes
that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions
unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and
from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--"wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?"