Part 8
The most striking characteristic of our Quaker diarist is precisely this clear, cold, unbiased judgment, this sanity of a well-ordered mind. What she lacks, what the journal lacks from beginning to end, is some touch of human and ill-repressed emotion, some word of pleasant folly, some weakness left undisguised and unrepented. The attitude maintained throughout is too judicial, the repose of heart and soul too absolute to be endearing. Here is a significant entry, illustrating as well as any other this nicely balanced nature, which gave to all just what was due, and nothing more:--
“There has been a disorder lately among ye cats. Our poor old Puss, who has been for some time past unwell, died this morning, in ye 13th year of her age. Peter dug a grave two feet deep on ye bank in our garden, under ye stable window, where E. S., Peter and I saw her decently interred. _I had as good a regard for her as was necessary._”
Was ever affection meted out like this? Was there ever such Quaker-like precision of esteem? For thirteen years that cat had been Elizabeth Drinker’s companion, and she had acquired for her just as good a regard as was necessary, and no more. It was not thus Sir Walter spoke, when Hinse of Hinsdale lay dead beneath the windows of Abbotsford, slain by the great staghound, Nimrod. It was not thus that M. Gautier lamented the consumptive Pierrot. It is not thus that the heart mourns, when a little figure, friendly and familiar, sits no longer by our desolate hearth.
FRENCH LOVE-SONGS
Quand on est coquette, il faut être sage; L’oiseau de passage Qui vole à plein cœur Ne dort pas en l’air comme une hirondelle, Et peut, d’un coup d’aile, Briser une fleur.
--ALFRED DE MUSSET.
The literature of a nation is rooted in national characteristics. Foreign influences may dominate it for a time; but that which is born of the soil is imperishable, and must, by virtue of tenacity, conquer in the end. England, after the Restoration, tried very hard to be French, and the “happy and unreflecting wantonness” of her earlier song was chilled into sobriety by the measured cadences of Gallic verse; yet the painful and perverse effort to adjust herself to strange conditions left her more triumphantly English than before. We are tethered to our kind, and the wisest of all wise limitations is that which holds us well within the sphere of natural and harmonious development.
It is true, however, that nationality betrays itself less in lyrics, and, above all, less in love lyrics, than in any other form of literature. Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients; and though love-songs--like battle-songs and drinking-songs--are seldom legitimate offsprings of experience, they are efforts to express in words that sweet and transient pain. “_Les âmes bien nées_”--without regard to birthplace--clearly of their passion, and seek their “_petit coin de bonheur_” under Southern and Northern skies. The Latin races have, indeed, depths of reserve underlying their apparent frankness, and the Saxons have a genius for self-revelation underlying their apparent reticence; but these traits count for little in the refined duplicity of the love-song.
Garde bien ta belle folie!
has been its burden ever since it was first chanted by minstrel lips.
M. Brunetière frankly admits the inferiority of the French lyric, an inferiority which he attributes to the predominance of social characteristics in the literature, as in the life of France. When poetry is compelled to fulfil a social function, to express social conditions and social truths, to emphasize fundamental principles and balance contrasted forces, the founts of lyrical inspiration are early dried. Individualism is their source,--the sharp, clear striking of the personal note; and the English, says M. Brunetière, excel in this regard. “To Lucasta. Going to the Warres,” has no perfect counterpart in the love-songs of other lands.
Even the eager desire of the Frenchman to be always intelligible (“That which is not lucid is not French”) militates against the perfection of the lyric. So too does his exquisite and inborn sense of proportion. “Measure,” says Mr. Brownell, “is a French passion;” but it is a passion that refuses to lend itself to rapturous sentiment.
Et veut que l’on soit sage avec sobriété
is hardly a maxim to which the genius of the love-song gives willing ear. Rather is she the _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the Elfin Lady who rode through the forests of ancient France.
My sire is the nightingale, That sings, making his wail, In the wild wood, clear; The mermaid is mother to me, That sings in the salt sea, In the ocean mere.
“What,” asks Mr. Brownell hopelessly, “has become of this Celtic strain in the French nature?”--a strain which found vent in the “_poésie courtoise_,” playful, amorous, laden with delicate subtleties and fond conceits. This poesie--once the delight of Christendom--echoes still in Petrarch’s sonnets and in Shakespeare’s madrigals; but it is difficult to link its sweet extravagances with the chiselled verse of later days, and critics forget the past in their careful contemplation of the present. “French poetry,” says Mr. Zangwill, “has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical,--in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn.”
But long before Boileau lay in his urn--or in his cradle--the poets of France, like the poets of Albion, sang with facile grace of love, and dalliance, and the glory of youth and spring. The fact that Boileau ignored and despised their song, and taught his obedient followers to ignore and despise it also, cannot silence those early notes. When he descended frigidly to his grave, Euterpe tucked up her loosened hair, and sandalled her bare white feet, and girdled her disordered robes into decent folds. Perhaps it was high time for these reforms. Nothing is less seductive in middle age than the careless gayety of youth. But once France was young, and Euterpe a slip of a girl, and no grim shadow of that classic urn rested on the golden days when Aucassin--model of defiant and conquering lovers--followed Nicolette into the deep, mysterious woods.
Jeunesse sur moy a puissance, Mais Vieillesse fait son effort De m’avoir en sa gouvernance,
sang Charles d’Orléans, embodying in three lines the whole history of man and song. Youth was lusty and folly riotous when Ronsard’s mistress woke in the morning, and found Apollo waiting patiently to fill his quiver with arrows from her eyes; or when Jacques Tahureau watched the stars of heaven grow dim before his lady’s brightness; or when Vauquelin de la Fresnaye saw Philis sleeping on a bed of lilies, regardless of discomfort, and surrounded by infant Loves.
J’admirois toutes ces beautez Égalles à mes loyautez, Quand l’esprit me dist en l’oreille: Fol, que fais-tu? Le temps perdu Souvent est chèrement vendu; S’on le recouvre, c’est merveille.
Alors, je m’abbaissai tout bas, Sans bruit je marchai pas à pas, Et baisai ses lèvres pourprines: Savourant un tel bien, je dis Que tel est dans le Paradis Le plaisir des âmes divines.
With just such sweet absurdities, such pardonable insincerities, the poets of Elizabeth’s England fill their amorous verse. George Gascoigne “swims in heaven” if his mistress smiles upon him; John Lyly unhesitatingly asserts that Daphne’s voice “tunes all the spheres;” and Lodge exhausts the resources of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms in searching for comparisons by which to set forth the beauties of Rosalind. The philosophy of love is alike on both sides of the Channel, and expressed in much the same terms of soft insistence. _Carpe diem_ is, and has always been, the lover’s maxim; and the irresistible eloquence of the lyric resolves itself finally into these two words of warning, whether urged by Celt or Saxon. Herrick is well aware of their supreme significance when he sings:--
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying.
Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry.
Ronsard, pleading with his mistress, strikes the same relentless note:--
Donc, si vous me croyez, Mignonne, Tandis que vostre âge fleuronne En sa plus vert nouveauté, Cueillez, cueillez vostre jeunesse; Comme à cette fleur, la vieillesse Fera ternir vostre beauté.
May-day comes alike in England and in France. Herrick and Jean Passerat, poets of Devonshire and of Champagne, are equally determined that two fair sluggards, who love their pillows better than the dewy grass, shall rise from bed, and share with them the sparkling rapture of the early dawn. Herrick’s verse, laden with the freshness of the Spring, rings imperatively in Corinna’s sleepy ears:--
Get up, get up, for shame! The blooming Morn Upon her wings presents the god unshorn. See how Aurora throws her fair Fresh-quilted colours through the air. Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see The dew bespangling herb and tree.
And then--across the gayety of the song--the deepening note of persuasion strikes a familiar chord:--
Come, let us go, while we are in our prime; And take the harmless folly of the time! We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty.
Passerat is no less insistent. The suitors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have dedicated the chill hours of early morning to their courtship. Nor was the custom purely pastoral and poetic. When Lovelace makes his appointments with Clarissa Harlowe at five A. M., the modern reader--if Richardson has a modern reader--is wont to think the hour an unpropitious one; but to Herrick and to the Pléiade it would have seemed rational enough.
Laissons le lit et le sommeil Ceste journée: Pour nous, l’Aurore au front vermeil Est desjà née
sings the French poet beneath his lady’s window; adding, to overcome her coyness--or her sleepiness--the old dominant argument:--
Ce vieillard, contraire aus amans, Des aisles porte, Et en fuyant, nos meilleurs ans Bien loing emporte. Quand ridée un jour tu seras, Mélancholique, tu diras: J’estoy peu sage, Qui n’usoy point de la beauté Que si tost le temps a osté De mon visage.
No less striking is the similarity between the reproachful couplets in which the singers of England and of France delight in denouncing their unfaithful fair ones, or in confessing with harmonious sighs the transient nature of their own emotions. Inconstancy is the breath of love’s nostrils, and the inspiration of love’s songs, which enchant us because they express an exquisite sentiment in its brief moment of ascendency. The tell-tale past, the dubious future, are alike discreetly ignored. Love in the drama and in the romance plays rather a heavy part. It is too obtrusively omniscient. It is far too self-assertive. Yet the average taxpayer, as has been well remarked, is no more capable of a grand passion than of a grand opera. The utmost he can achieve is some fair, fleeting hour, and with the imperative gladness of such an hour the love-song thrills sympathetically. It is not _its_ business to
recapture That first fine careless rapture.
It does not essay the impossible.
Now the old and nameless French poet who wrote--
Femme, plaisir de demye heure, Et ennuy qui sans fins demeure,
was perhaps too ungraciously candid. Such things, when said at all, should be said prettily.
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,-- Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.
Gay voices came bubbling with laughter from the happy days that are dead. Sir John Suckling, whose admirable advice to an overfaithful young suitor has been the most invigorating of tonics to suitors ever since, vaunts with pardonable pride his own singleness of heart:--
Out upon it! I have loved Three whole days together, And am like to love three more, If it prove fair weather.
Time shall moult away his wings Ere he shall discover In the whole wide world again Such a constant lover.
Sir John Sedley epitomizes the situation in his praises of that jade, Phillis, whose smiles win easy pardon for her perfidy:--
She deceiving, I believing,-- What need lovers wish for more?
And Lovelace, reversing the medal, pleads musically--and not in vain--for the same gracious indulgence:--
Why shouldst thou sweare I am forsworn, Since thine I vowed to be? Lady it is already Morn, And ’twas last night I swore to thee That fond impossibility.
Mr. Lang is of the opinion that no Gallic verse has equalled in audacity this confession of limitations, this “Apologia pro Vita Sua;” and perhaps its light-heartedness is well out of general reach. But the French lover, like the English, was made of threats and promises alike fruitless of fulfilment, and Phillis had many a fair foreign sister, no whit more worthy of regard. Only, amid the laughter and raillery of a Latin people, there rings ever an undertone of regret,--not passionate and heart-breaking, as in Drayton’s bitter cry,--
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,
but vague and subtle, linking itself tenderly to some long-ignored and half-forgotten sentiment, buried deep in the reader’s heart.
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
A little sob breaks the smooth sweetness of Belleau’s verse, and Ronsard’s beautiful lines to his careless young mistress are heavy with the burden of sighs:--
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, devisant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant: ‘Ronsard me célébroit du temps que j’estois belle.’
The note deepens as we pass into the more conscious art of later years, but it is always French in its grace and moderation. How endurable is the regret with which de Musset sings of Juana, who loved him for a whole year; how musical his farewell to Suzon, whose briefer passion lasted eight summer days:--
Que notre amour, si tu m’oublies, Suzon, dure encore un moment; Comme un bouquet de fleurs pâlies; Cache-le dans ton sein charmant! Adieu! le bonheur reste au gîte: Le souvenir part avec moi: Je l’emporterai, ma petite, Bien loin, bien vite, Toujours à toi.
In Murger’s familiar verses, so pretty and gay and heartsick, in the finer art of Gautier, in the cloudy lyrics of Verlaine, we catch again and again this murmur of poignant but subdued regret, this sigh for the light love that has so swiftly fled. The delicacy of the sentiment is unmatched in English song. The Saxon can be profoundly sad, and he can--or at least he could--be ringingly and recklessly gay; but the mood which is neither sad nor gay, which is fed by refined emotions, and tranquillized by time’s subduing touch, has been expressed oftener and better in France. Four hundred and fifty years ago François Villon touched this exquisite chord in his “Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis,” and it has vibrated gently ever since. We hear it echoing with melancholy grace in these simple lines of Gérard de Nerval:--
Où sont les amoureuses? Elles sont au tombeau! Elles sont plus heureuses, Dans un séjour plus beau.
Nerval, like Villon, had drunk deep of the bitterness of life, but he never permitted its dregs to pollute the clearness of his song:--
Et vent que l’on soit _triste_ avec sobriété.
In the opinion of many critics, the lyric was not silenced, only chilled, by the development of the classical spirit in France, and the corresponding conversion of England. Its flute notes were heard now and then amid the decorous couplets that delighted well-bred ears. Waller undertook the reformation of English verse, and accomplished it to his own and his readers’ radiant satisfaction; yet Waller’s seven-year suit of Lady Dorothy Sidney is the perfection of that poetic love-making which does not lead, and is not expected to lead, to anything definite and tangible. Never were more charming tributes laid at the feet of indifferent beauty; never was indifference received with less concern. Sacharissa listened and smiled. The world--the august little world of rank and distinction--listened and smiled with her, knowing the poems were written as much for its edification as for hers; and Waller, well pleased with the audience, nursed his passion tenderly until it flowered into another delicate blossom of verse. The situation was full of enjoyment while it lasted; and when the seven years were over, Lady Dorothy married Henry, Lord Spencer, who never wrote any poetry at all; while her lover said his last good-bye in the most sparkling and heart-whole letter ever penned by inconstant man. What would the author of “The Girdle,” and “Go, Lovely Rose,” have thought of Browning’s uneasy rapture?
O lyric love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire.
He would probably have pointed out the exaggeration of the sentiment, and the corresponding looseness of the lines. He would certainly have agreed with the verdict of M. Sévelinges, had that acute critic uttered it in his day. “It is well,” says M. Sévelinges, “that passionate love is rare. Its principal effect is to detach men from all their surroundings, to isolate them, to render them independent of the relations which they have not formed for themselves; and a civilized society composed of lovers would return infallibly to misery and barbarism.”
Here is the French point of view, expressed with that lucidity which the nation so highly esteems. Who shall gainsay its correctness? But the Saxon, like the Teuton, is sentimental to his heart’s core, and finds some illusions better worth cherishing than truth. It was an Englishman, and one to whom the epithet “cynical” has been applied oftenest, and with least accuracy, who wrote,--
When he was young as you are young, When he was young, and lutes were strung, And love-lamps in the casement hung.
THE SPINSTER
The most ordinarie cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restriction, as they wil goe neere to thinke their girdles and garters to be bonds and shakles.--BACON.
In the Zend-Avesta, as translated by Anquetil-Duperron, there is a discouraging sentence passed upon voluntary spinsterhood: “The damsel who, having reached the age of eighteen, shall refuse to marry, must remain in Hell until the earth is shattered.”
This assurance is interesting, less because of its provision for the spinster’s future than because it takes into consideration the possibility of her refusing to marry;--a possibility which slipped out of men’s minds from the time of Zoroaster until our present day. A vast deal has been written about marriage in the interval; but it all bears the imprint of the masculine intellect, reasoning from the masculine point of view, for the benefit of masculinity, and ignoring in the most natural manner the woman’s side of life. The trend of argument is mainly in one direction. While a few cynics gibe at love and conjugal felicity, the mass of poets and philosophers unite in extolling wedlock. Some praise its pleasures, others its duties, and others again merely point out with Euripides that, as children cannot be bought with gold or silver, there is no way of acquiring these coveted possessions save by the help of women. Now and then a rare word of sympathy is flung to the wife, as in those touching lines of Sophocles upon the young girls sold in their “gleeful maidenhood” to sad or shameful marriage-beds. But the important thing to be achieved is the welfare and happiness of men. The welfare and happiness of women are supposed--not without reason--to follow as a necessary sequence; but this is a point which excites no very deep concern.
Catholic Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, and long afterwards, offered one practical solution to the problem of unmated and unprotected womanhood,--the convent. The girl robbed of all hope of marriage by bitter stress of war or poverty, the girl who feared too deeply the turmoil and violence of the world, found shelter in the convent. Within its walls she was reasonably safe, and her vows lent dignity to her maidenhood. Bride of the Church, she did not rank as a spinster, and her position had the advantage of being accurately defined; she was part of a recognized social and ecclesiastical system. No one feels this more solidly than does a nun to-day, and no one looks with more contempt upon unmarried women in the world. In her eyes there are but two vocations,--wifehood and consecrated virginity. She perceives that the wife and the religious are transmitters of the world’s traditions; while the spinster is an anomaly, with no inherited background to give repute and distinction to her rôle.
This point of view is the basis of much criticism, and has afforded scope for the ridicule of the satirist, and for the outpourings of the sentimentalist. A great many brutal jests have been flung at the old maid, and floods of sickly sentiment have been wasted on her behalf. She has been laughed at frankly as one rejected by men, and she has been wept over as a wasted force, withering patiently under the blight of this rejection. “Envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness” have been ascribed to her on one side, and a host of low-spirited and treacly virtues, on the other. The spinster of comedy is a familiar figure. A perfectly simple and ingenuous example is the maiden aunt in “Pickwick,” Miss Rachel Wardle, whom Mr. Tupman loves, and with whom Mr. Jingle elopes. She is spiteful and foolish, envious of youth and easy to dupe. She is utterly ridiculous, and a fair mark for laughter. She is pinched, and withered, and hopelessly removed from all charm of womanhood; and--it may be mentioned parenthetically--she is fifty years old. We have her brother’s word for it.
There is nothing in this straightforward caricature that could, or that should, wound anybody’s sensibilities. The fun is of a robust order; the ridicule has no subtlety and no sting. But the old maid of the sentimentalists, a creature stricken at heart, though maddeningly serene and impossibly unselfish, is every bit as remote from reality, and far less cheerful to contemplate. What can be more offensive than the tearful plea for consideration put forward by her apologists, who, after all, tolerate her only because, having no career of her own, she is expected to efface herself in the interests of other people. “The peculiar womanly virtues,” says a recent writer upon this fruitful theme, “the power of self-sacrifice, warm sympathies, compassion, patient endurance, represent an untold amount of suffering on the part of the weaker sex in past ages. It is to the world’s advantage that the fruit of such suffering be not lost.”