"On the Quantocks I feel fairies all round me, the good folk, meet
companions for young poets. How Coleridge, more especially, fits in to
such surroundings! 'Fairies?' say you. Well, there's odds of fairies,
and of the sort I mean Coleridge was the absolute Puck. 'Puck?' says
you. 'For shame!' says you. No, d--n it! I'll stick to that. There's
odds o' fairies, and often enough I think the world is nothing else;
troops, societies, hierarchies--S.T.C., a supreme hierarch; look at his
face; think of meeting him at moonlight between Stowey and Alfoxden,
like a great white owl, soft and plumy, with eyes of flame!"
I confess that such passages simply make me blush, leave me with a kind
of mental nausea. What makes it worse is that there is something in
what he says, if he would only say it better. It makes me feel as I
should feel if I saw an elderly, heavily-built clergyman amusing
himself in a public place with a skipping-rope, to show what a child of
nature he was.
I cannot help feeling that the man was a poseur, and that his
affectations were the result of living in a small and admiring coterie.
If, when one begins to write and talk in that jesting way, there is
some one at your elbow to say, "How refreshing, how original, how
rugged!" I suppose that one begins to think that one had better indulge
oneself in such absurdities. But readers outside the circle turn away
in disgust.
The pity of it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit--the
melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but
it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster's humour--cheap
and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. When he was quite serious
and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep
things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to
cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the
fool. I wish with all my heart that these letters had not been
published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick
imagination.
Pose, affectation--what a snare they are to the better kind of minds. I
declare that I value every day more and more the signs of simplicity,
the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don't think
what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who
don't pretend to enjoy what they don't enjoy, or to understand what
they don't understand.
I may be all wrong about Brown, of course, for the victory always
remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who
criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use
to quench enthusiasm by saying, "When you are older and wiser you will
think differently." The result of that kind of snub is only to make
people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant. I
sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at
all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the
accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the
good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the
majority.
I am sure, however, you would not like the book; though I don't say
that you might not extract, as I do to my shame, a kind of bitter
pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is--the pleasure one
gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the
remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person. But that is not
an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done!
"We get no good,
By being ungenerous, even to a book!"
as Mrs. Browning says. . . .--Ever yours.