The Rhythm of Life Part 3

Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinly packed. Moreover those first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes. And even in his slightest work he proves himself the master--that is, the owner--of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in union or in ant.i.thesis. They a.s.suredly have an inseverable union in the art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the c.u.mulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forego Innocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other men's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and n.o.ble isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to forego that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.

Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a mult.i.tude of people to whom they have not even been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides s.e.x--could quite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the _praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common h.o.a.rd of erotic remembrances with all kinds of poets.

As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one Friar goes about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it. But these poets so triumph over their repugnance that it does not appear. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one's art in a motley of past pa.s.sions. Moreover, to utilise the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise and pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love: which is the vow. 'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least tolerable of ba.n.a.lities--that of other men's disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence. Not a pa.s.sage of cheapness, of greed, of a.s.sumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.

This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in public.

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the vulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial, _Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably considered good comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put one's-self at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the mid-century took their mirth princ.i.p.ally from the life of the _arriere boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.

Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a circ.u.mstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old _Punch_ volume a drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the letter-press. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time there was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarising of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned without restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of these ignominies is woman so common, foul, and foolish for d.i.c.kens as she is in child-bearing.

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, d.i.c.kens's contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly for her abas.e.m.e.nt. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he lived into a later and different time. He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost a whole career. There is one drawing in the _Punch_ of years ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a nightcap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common j.a.pe against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill- dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, 'No, never was.' In all these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that here is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they are not caricatures, and certainly in 'Robert,' the City waiter of _Punch_. But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ign.o.ble rights. If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace--has pa.s.sed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her s.e.x, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his s.e.x. But the vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. It was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.