Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 12

and--

If some poor wandering child of Thine Have spurned to-day the Voice Divine, Now Lord, the gracious work begin: Let him no more lie down in sin.

have the true note of pure directness; how, in the middle of so sweet and low a strain, such a stanza as--

The Rulers of this Christian land, 'Twixt Thee and us ordained to stand-- Guide Thou their course, O Lord, aright, Let all do all as in Thy sight.

could be intruded, shows us how uncritical, how helpless Keble could be.

Again, consider such a poem as that for the "Second Sunday after Easter," quoted above,

O for a sculptor's hand, &c.

and some of the stanzas on "St. Matthew's Day":

There are in this loud stunning tide Of human care and crime, With whom the melodies abide Of the everlasting chime, Who carry music in their heart Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, Plying their daily task with busier feet, Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat;

and again for "Septuagesima":

There is a book who runs may read, &c.

and what is perhaps the finest of all his lyrics, that for "Whitsunday":

When G.o.d of old came down from Heaven, In power and wrath He came: Before His feet the clouds were riven, Half darkness and half flame.

Around the trembling mountain's base The prostrate people lay, A day of wrath and not of grace, A dim and dreadful day.

These have the authentic note of grandeur. They are lines that take the heart and imagination captive, and linger in the memory unbidden. It may be, of course, that some of them are consecrated by familiar use, by being connected with moments of emotion and resolution. What an immense, what a sacred power, these writers of liturgical poems wield!

but, on the other hand, such familiarity is apt to blind us also to excellence of style. No, the claim of genuine, severe simplicity may be sustained for Keble.

(2) Propriety.--I am using the word, of course, in the extended sense of delicate appositeness, not as the reverse of impropriety.--Keble has a wonderful power, without tricks of rhetoric, of touching in some natural homely feeling with exquisite grace. How could the instinctive dislike of change in familiar surroundings be more pathetically described than in the poem for Whit Monday?

Since all that is not Heaven must fade, Light be the hand of Ruin laid Upon the home I love.

With lulling spell let soft decay Steal on, and spare the giant sway, The crash of tower and grove.

In such a mood it is so easy to be jealous, to be vindictive, to lose the central thought in invective or unconvincing particularisation.

Again, in a frame of mind that easily drifts into morbidity and despondency, with what pure patience he delineates the vague languors, the unutterable discontents of the soft days of early spring, in the poem for the third Sunday after Easter:

Well may I guess and feel Why autumn should be sad, But vernal airs should sorrow heal, Spring should be gay and glad.

Yet as along this violet bank I rove, The languid sweetness seems to choke my breath, I sit me down beside the hazel grove, And sigh, and half could wish my weariness were death.

And what could be more supremely delicate, more touched with a loving humiliation, than the exquisite line (in the poem on Gunpowder Treason, of all places!),

Speak gently of our sister's fall.

(3) Gravity.--This may be held perhaps to be almost a defect of quality; but in Keble it has a positive value. He, a clerical Wordsworth, so to speak, moved through the world, not indeed without some simple merriment, but without a suspicion of the existence of that deeper and larger mood that we name humour. He never cared to note the odd, bewildering contradictions of humanity, its reckless absurdities, its profound and intimate mirth. Keble's smile, and he is said to have had one, was the grave, bright smile of the contented and joyful spirit, not the secret and refreshing twinkle of the humourist. Indeed, the spirit sickens to recall the pieces resolutely labelled humorous, which have been shamefully made public among his miscellaneous poems. If these were specimens of the wit in which his talk is said to have abounded, it is a matter for deep thankfulness that so few reminiscences of his conversation have survived.

Life was far too serious and momentous to Keble for him to have enjoyed its pitiful contrasts. The only consolations indeed that can prevent a spirit, bounded by so petty a horizon, from becoming sullen or bitter, are perennial humour or intense seriousness. And Keble was as serious as Sh.e.l.ley or Wordsworth. It is not a quality that needs defining by quotation, for every single poem in the _Christian Year_ is penetrated with it from the first line to the last. But in these days, when the issues of life and death, the intricacies of character, the logical truth of fatalism, are matters of after-dinner conversation, it is well to live a little with a mind to whom they were absorbing and fearful realities, too deep for laughter or tears. Keble's inmost instinct was not love, or the sense of beauty, but a resolute and puritanical sternness. He made the mistake, so common to religious spirits, of supposing that the religious instinct is universally implanted, and that whatever the varying quant.i.ties of intellect and capacity in an individual, the spiritual faculties are evenly distributed.

Well, such an att.i.tude, if unsympathetic and statuesque, is n.o.ble and admirable. It is the temper in which great deeds are done and heroic resolutions formed. It seals Keble one of that honourable minority who clearly see the force of a moral ideal, maintain it in themselves, and demand it from others; and if it is difficult to sympathise with it, it is impossible not to admire it.

It may be urged, then, that on these three grounds Keble may be reckoned among English poets. It will not be on these grounds that he will be most read, but for his pure and sober religious spirit, about which indeed much might be said that would be foreign to the purpose of this essay. But it may be granted that he had a strong perception of beauty, moral and physical, in spite of a certain rigidity of tone; and that he had style, the gift of expression, an artistic ideal, without which no purity of outlook, no exultant sense of beauty, can make a poet. But even if his claim cannot be sustained, even if his writings were not poetry, we may be thankful that for more than half a century there have been spirits so high, so refined, so devoted, as to have been misled by his spiritual ardour, the lofty sublimity of his ideal, as to mistake his refined and enthusiastic utterance for the voice of the genuine bard.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

IT is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs.

Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, but this from the nature of things could not be much more than a record. In the series of _Eminent Women_, Mr. Ingram has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book."

When Horne in the _New Spirit of the Age_ gave some biographical particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as follows:--"My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. _A bird in a cage_ could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have pa.s.sed in thoughts." And again later, when the paper had appeared:--"You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a consequence of personal interest.... I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness.... I want kindness, the rarest of all nearly--which is truth."

Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting--"he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs.

Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office, with the a.s.siduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a n.o.ble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain--a _sc.r.a.ping_ of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of _a bird in a cage_. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid--but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a pa.s.sionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the pa.s.sionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave-owners. In fact the Jamaica Emanc.i.p.ation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and pa.s.sionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and enn.o.bling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day." And again in the preface: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. _I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry_, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work--not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being--but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain."

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken: and, from a human point of view, we cannot help regretting that she did not a little more fall into that error which she so indignantly repudiates: if she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematised in any way. All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often--may we say?--so unsatisfactory. Mr.

Ingram's biography, abounding as it does in details of what we may call the interviewer's type, is almost entirely silent on these points. We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs.

Browning's habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, princ.i.p.ally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as _Goethe_ and _duty, Bettine_ and _between ye_) because she held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. If Elizabeth Browning's, or indeed Robert Browning's, dissyllabic rhymes are the best defence that can be urged for this position, we must affirm that the general instinct on the whole has been right: such rhymes give a sense of fantastic elaborateness, and tend to concentrate the reader's attention too closely upon the _technique_ of the composition. This is, however, a minor point. But it is interesting to observe that this very detail, which const.i.tutes a blemish in the eyes of even indulgent critics, was a subject upon which Mrs. Browning had not only definite ideas, but enthusiastic convictions.

One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous _tour de force_. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the _limae labor_, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.

Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets ent.i.tled "From the Portuguese"--strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circ.u.mstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have pa.s.sed on to a lower level, to have lost originality--like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her--coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:

How dreary 'tis for women to sit still On winter nights by solitary fires And hear the nations praising them far off.

And again:

To sit alone And think, for comfort, how that very night Affianced lovers, leaning face to face, With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath Are reading haply from some page of ours To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched When such a stanza level to their mood Seems floating their own thoughts out--"So I feel For thee"--"And I for thee: this poet knows What everlasting love is."

To have our books Appraised by love, a.s.sociated with love While we sit loveless.

Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.

The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty pa.s.sage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,--such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."