The Spirit of Place and Other Essays Part 2

None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a more invincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the leap of the heart of the waters have outlived their captors. They have remained in Rome, and have remained alone. Over them the victory was longer than empire, and their thousands of loud voices have never ceased to confess the conquest of the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the head and front of the world.

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact of Rome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to the distance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetual waters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services. This, then, was the style of a master, who does not lapse from "incidental greatness," has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish of his phrases, and does not think the means and the approaches are to be plotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without haste, and without misgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption in the doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray.

There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the work broken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour of Michelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure long exposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and the Roman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise.

THE FOOT

Time was when no good news made a journey, and no friend came near, but a welcome was uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling feet of the wayfarer or the herald. The feet, the feet were beautiful on the mountains; their toil was the price of all communication, and their reward the first service and refreshment. They were blessed and bathed; they suffered, but they were friends with the earth; dews in gra.s.s at morning, shallow rivers at noon, gave them coolness. They must have grown hard upon their mountain paths, yet never so hard but they needed and had the first pity and the readiest succour. It was never easy for the feet of man to travel this earth, shod or unshod, and his feet are delicate, like his colour.

If they suffered hardship once, they suffer privation now. Yet the feet should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us. It is their calling; and the hands might be glad to be stroked for a day by gra.s.s and struck by b.u.t.tercups, as the feet are of those who go barefoot; and the nostrils might be flattered to be, like them, so long near moss. The face has only now and then, for a resting-while, their privilege.

If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they have inevitably lost life and strength by the separation. It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch a peasant who never wears shoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may see the play of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic as his hands. Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy from the field, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot of the _contadino_ is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that is prim, and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it has forgotten liberty. It is more active now than it lately was--certainly the foot of woman is more active; but whether on the pedal or in the stirrup, or clad for a walk, or armed for a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds.

It is, at any rate, inarticulate.

It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is visible and sensible. Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with every nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them of old that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone, unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life. It is as though a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely painted with the blank--blank, not simple--generalities of a vulgar hand.

Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a wholesale fashion, not "turning the hours to moments," which joy can do to the full as perfectly as pain.

The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language confused. When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, and her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not a boot. Yet Amarantha's foot is as lovely as her hand. It, too, has a "tender inward"; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything but delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night of dances; it does, in fact, but balance her. It is fit to cling to the ground, but rather for springing than for rest.

And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. It is a part of vital design and has a history; and man does not go erect but at a price of weariness and pain. How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pa.s.s a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow.

The vintager is not heard among the vines, nor the harvester on his threshing-floor of stone. There is a kind of simple stealth in their coming and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out of the rows of harvest when you thought yourself alone. The lack of noise in their movement sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter floats.

But we shall not praise the "simple, sweet" and "earth-confiding feet"

enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time of song. If Poetry was first divided by the march, and next varied by the dance, then to the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought, the instruction, and the dream that could not speak by prose. Out of that little physical law, then, grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things we know; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate test of the thinker: "Is it accepted of Song?"

The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial rules of time and exact.i.tude, not to be broken, laws that are made secure against the restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificant liberties--trivial laws to restrain from a trivial freedom. And within the gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world of mystic virtue. They enclose, they imply, they lock, they answer for it. Lesser virtues may flower in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; but infinite virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry, and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell. It is no wonder that every poet worthy the name has had a pa.s.sion for metre, for the very verse. To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior range immeasurable.

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle; there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office; a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or sign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it. But the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in his direction, and never a word to excuse you.

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning." When complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To the simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. An elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral _palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.

It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect "familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere in the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can hardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly well known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the rich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be some dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by travellers.

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there; but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appeals vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does not seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, a scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a simply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of intercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress those conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, because fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in the indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint," is a phrase that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among the most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among the stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. The people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted figure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth while to remember--is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to the violence of the rich.

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar is still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort us to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardly intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of the road. He no longer trusts the world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholehearted mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby an unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind. The merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible to the seated and stable social world.

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led underground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seems that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the subject of a Spanish song.

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it is not a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling note of a man who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takes it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand of unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force. It seems, therefore, the song of an indomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyr chance.

THE LADIES OF THE IDYLL

Little Primrose dames of the English cla.s.sic, the wife and daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady. It is given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to them in the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reason that he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom he marries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen.

Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, but certainly fit for membership of that large cla.s.s of various fortune within which the name makes a sufficient equality.

He, their author, thought them sufficient. Having amused himself ingeniously throughout the story with their nameless vulgarities, he finally hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the convention of heroes in love. He plays with their coa.r.s.eness like a perfectly pleased and clever showman, and then piously and happily shuts up his couples--the gentle Dr. Primrose with his abominable Deborah; the excellent Mr. Burch.e.l.l with the paltry Sophia; Olivia--but no, Olivia is not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready for her in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere in the background--the unhappy man whom, with her father's permission, this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing might pluck forward the lagging suit of the squire.

Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, her father conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstration of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal of the squire be not after all forthcoming. But it is so evident her author knew no better, that this matter may pa.s.s. It involves a point of honour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone he made--is aware. What is better worth considering is the fact that Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters of a scholar. The education of women had sunk into a degradation never reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.

It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the gooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberal business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.

Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of that century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is the new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent, foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost innocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is all this. He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly humorous pa.s.sage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy, and obedience." Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her husband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!" This is done, for example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unlucky schemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her by the sallies of a kitchen sarcasm.

She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt. She has given them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest the paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burch.e.l.l, who had saved her life; for he has no fortune. Mrs. Primrose begins grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and she ends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regard to securing the head of the table. Upon these feminine humours the author sheds his Vicar's indulgent smile. What a smile for a self-respecting husband to be p.r.i.c.ked to smile! A householder would wince, one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its tolerance upon his cook.

Between these two housewifely appearances, Mrs. Primrose potters through the book; plots--always squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takes the lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend; crushes her repentant daughter with reproaches that show envy rather than indignation, and kisses that daughter with congratulation upon hearing that she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a valid marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everything she touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through the story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman we find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in d.i.c.kens, and _un peu partout_.

Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youth and beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one. The author, in making them simple, has not abstained from making them cunning. Their vanities are well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so envious as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law--one who is their rival in no way except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty. "Miss Arabella Wilmot," says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except my two daughters) to be completely pretty."

They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to be instantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour. They have no pretty or sensitive instincts. "The jests of the rich," says the Vicar, referring to his own young daughters as audience, "are ever successful." Olivia, when the squire played off a dullish joke, "mistook it for humour. She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman." The powders and patches for the country church, the ride thither on Blackberry, in so strange a procession, the face-wash, the dreams and omens, are all good gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of the tedium of Mrs. Primrose's dreams, which she told every morning. But there are other points of comedy that ought not to precede an author's appeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched by the tragic scenes of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.

In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks himself to give his princ.i.p.al heroine a shadow of the virtues he has not bestowed upon her. When the unhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used in vain by Olivia, and the squire has not declared himself, and she is on the point of keeping her word to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation out of it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise: "I frequently applauded her resolution in preferring happiness to ostentation." The good Goldsmith! Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as to her exceedingly sincere preference for ostentation, and as to her stratagem to try to obtain it at the expense of honour and of neighbour Williams; her mind is as well known to her father as her father's mind is known to Oliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith's, Dr. Primrose's, and Olivia's minds are known to the reader. And in spite of all, your Goldsmith and your Vicar turn you this phrase to your very face. You hardly know which way to look; it is so disconcerting.

Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered virtue) and Sophia may both be expected to grow into the kind of matronhood represented by their mother, it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround the close of their love-affairs with the least semblance of dignity. Nor, in fact, can it be said that the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errs by too much dignity. The scene is that in which Burch.e.l.l, revealed as Sir William Thornhill, feigns to offer her in marriage to the good-natured rogue, Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in order that, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may surprise her agreeably by crying, "What? Not have him? If that be the case, I think I must have you myself." Even for an avowedly eccentric master of whims, this is playing with forbidden ironies. True, he catches her to his breast with ardour, and calls her "sensible." "Such sense and such heavenly beauty," finally exclaims the happy man. Let us make him a present of the heavenly beauty. It is the only thing not disproved, not dispraised, not disgraced, by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll.

A DERIVATION

By what obscure cause, through what ill-directed industry, and under the constraint of what disabling hands, had the language of English poetry grown, for an age, so rigid that a natural writer at the end of the eighteenth century had much ado to tell a simple story in sufficient verse? All the vital exercise of the seventeenth century had left the language buoyant; it was as elastic as deep and mobile waters; then followed the grip of that incapacitating later style. Much later, English has been so used as to become flaccid--it has been stretched, as it were, beyond its power of rebound, or certainly beyond its power of rebound in common use (for when a master writes he always uses a tongue that has suffered nothing). It is in our own day that English has been so over-strained. In Crabbe's day it had been effectually curbed, hindered, and hampered, and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was a master who takes natural possession of a language that has suffered nothing. He was evidently a man of talent who had to take his part with the times, subject to history. To call him a poet was a mere convention.

There seems to be not a single moment of poetry in his work, and a.s.suredly if he had known the earlier signification of the word he would have been the last man to claim the incongruous t.i.tle of poet. But it is impossible to state the question as it would have presented itself to Crabbe or to any other writer of his quality entering into the same inheritance of English.

It is true that Crabbe read and quoted Milton; so did all his contemporaries; and to us now it seems that poetry cannot have been forgotten by any age possessing _Lycidas_. Yet that age can scarcely be said to have in any true sense possessed _Lycidas_. There are other things, besides poetry, in Milton's poems. We do not entirely know, perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader in Crabbe's late eighteenth century, looking in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily and vainly admired, would well find it. He would find the approval of Young's "Night Thoughts" did he search for it, as we who do not search for it may not readily understand. A step or so downwards, from a few pa.s.sages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop in the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, from Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered, legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity. Milton, therefore, who might have kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry by lines like these--