Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte was subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she suffered what in Italian is called soggezione in their presence. When she had met six minor contemporary writers—by-products of literature—at dinner, she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend that these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And what nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting? Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time and oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? The others, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in still further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in and out of two or three negatives, but wrote—about this very Charlotte Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no consciousness of anything amiss.

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—that Miss Austen ignores."

When the author of Jane Eyre faltered before six authors, more or less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?—and therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There can be little doubt. The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a world long corrupted by "one good custom"—the good custom of Gibbon's Latinity grown fatally popular—could at any time hold up her head amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English, whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows—hold parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was doubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "The child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows her worse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrases fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached. Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back on, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were laid—in what narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, this foliage—the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength." And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence—"some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird."

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from such a mingled page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, softer and better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste"; and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange"; and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, and she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly—I gild thy dreams.'" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet."

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the friction—friction of water to the oar, friction of air to the pinion—friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of language. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of the daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and relaxed.

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of landscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later in the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zone sighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm." "The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon: something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an articulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from the dim wave."

Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have undergone the inevitable dream of mourners—the human dream of the Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the "Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.

In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is there any need to cite the passage of Jane Eyre that contains the avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten. Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and not of the recording words that are the author's means. And others again would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in Jane Eyre, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past. "Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved." "Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I again wept."

* * * * *

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches—the apparelled and arrayed approaches and ritual of literature—and so to go further and to be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.

Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery. In the passage of Jane Eyre that tells of the return to Thornfield Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to an image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke of but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual realities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling what happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But her characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and temples oracular, and to the vision of symbols.

You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention of similitudes.

Of many thousand kisses the poor last,

and

Now with his love, now in the colde grave

are lines on the yonder side of imagery. So is this line also:

Sad with the promise of a different sun,

and

Piteous passion keen at having found, After exceeding ill, a little good.

Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imagery is for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which must needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:

Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled, Even as a nest with birds, After the old ones by the hawk are killed.

I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a minor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery (which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery (which is the moment of his most beautiful lines).

The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last threshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.

Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of the delays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strength does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her greater work is no more. On the hither side—the daily side—of imagery she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has written some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And with what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let me alone, let me alone,' said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too . . . I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again, and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?' They were silent, their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears." "So much the worse for me that I am strong," cries Heathcliff in the same scene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—Oh God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of emotion that she had kept from her girlhood—the unavowed custom of the ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived—but the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing of stealth—to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen- portrait, so her "I" is not heard here. She lends her voice in disguise to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a young man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takes up the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediate presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but Emily Bronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)—to Isabella Linton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which has the rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amid terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers."

Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits of any other author's labour that she gathered these eminent words. But I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's—the disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been suggested, did Emily Bronte find her incident; she found it (but she made, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer Lytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emily showed no sign at all of admiration when she did him so much honour as to borrow the action of his studio-bravo.

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound surprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost—the ghost of the little girl—when she has been a dead adult woman twenty years that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the Heights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for. Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the tempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has a counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, the waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem so sweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the "heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird whose feathers she—delirious creature—plucks from the pillow of her deathbed ("This—I should know it among a thousand—it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt rain coming"); the only two white spots of snow left on all the moors, and the brooks brim-full; the old apple-trees, the smell of stocks and wallflowers in the brief summer, the few fir-trees by Catherine's window- bars, the early moon—I know not where are landscapes more exquisite and natural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than the window seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, when Heathcliff lay within, dead and drenched with rain?

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage wherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it here again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our literature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prose stands for appeal: "I lingered . . . under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviously unskilled reflection, and of her aspect no record worth having. Wild fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the neglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed by their contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was she as might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed by Coriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world from before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemned his Romans: "I banish you."



CHARMIAN

"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian," wrote Keats, conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the pageant of ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was not Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay, in which she mimicked, the Queen.

In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our appreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waiting gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not boast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty, who shall discern her.

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the "lurid," the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us take the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly port, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "O Eastern star!"

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all. The events of the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach and withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather look into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds.

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise, or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral, rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkins—a person of Dickens's earliest invention—calls his fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers, and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration anything other than a sign of derogation—in a word, a pleasure in the secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled, disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art. So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of art are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain, natural twilight before night, or natural twilight—Corot's—before day, than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, who praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a mystery; and must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Light is all mystery when you face the sun, and every particle of the innumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal shadow.

Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask for even natural veils. In California we may, not because the light is too luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender in California, tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greece is both tender and clear.

When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympathetic listener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electric light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is the one success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with natural things—villages, ancient streets of cities, where it makes the most beautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house to opposite house in Genoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the judicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine hamlet, find the electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over the little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop, and solitary and clear over the church portal.

Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, you denounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, calling up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah, yes—the electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, so disenchanting." It is, on the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be "harnessed," as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us electric light. For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovely lamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitation—the powerful fall of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" cried the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it?" He recognised the simplicity of that power. It is a second-rate passion—that for the waterfall, and often exacting in regard to visitors from town. "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, "and was not sorry to find it dry." It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer of scenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name to-day) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it, because it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of Milan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and so does now and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found his exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me a clean moonrise, and heavenly heavens.

There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the lady whom you serve." She has outlived her in every city in Europe; but only for the time of setting straight her crown—the last servility. She could not live but by comparison with the Queen.



THE CENTURY OF MODERATION

After a long literary revolt—one of the recurrences of imperishable Romance—against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, and it has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of the measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed it is well enough that we should compare—not necessarily check—some of our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfect propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all! But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certain genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for extreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth- century men stuck straws in their periwigs.

That time—surpassing and correcting the century then just past in "taste"—was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, in the chapter of the passions—nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where to rage." And in the later years of the same literary century Johnson himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a word as "madded"—"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for the noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you, Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

And dubious title shakes the madded land.

There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does not thus more or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to go to the bad poets; we need go no lower than the good.

And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain,

says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader). Also

There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires.

In the only passage of the Dunciad meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!

A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left anonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, never fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a vision of that deceased poet:

Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes Beheld the poet's awful form arise.

Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon some graver themes,

Envy to black Cocytus shall retire And howl with furies in tormenting fire.

"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a furious joy and pride of soul."

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls, Whose livid waves involve despairing souls; The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew, Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

And a war-horse!

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain, And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

And a demon!

Provoking demons all restraint remove.

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight. The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind, And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Again, from Nat Lee's Alexander the Great:

When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood; When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore, And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore.

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they "contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous:

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds, And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot, Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Again:

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll, Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common- sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious, common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady":

Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in closer—in slighter yet more significant—comparison with the eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse—the counterpart of a great melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why? Because it was "artificial," and the eighteenth century must have "nature"—nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity. As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry Barnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.

THE END