The Glory of English Prose Part 13

This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections, and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever possible with the older restrained writers.

But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.

"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, G.o.d means us to acknowledge His own immediate Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the presence of G.o.d,' 'He doth set His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows of the firmament, G.o.d would seem to set forth the stooping of His own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.

"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.

'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is G.o.d's throne; nor by earth, for it is His footstool.'

"And all those pa.s.sings to and fro of fruitful showers and grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"

The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--

"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village, where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be antic.i.p.ated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting place than a new arrangement of gla.s.s roofing and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the ca.n.a.l of Mestre.

"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling l.u.s.tre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the ma.s.ses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet subdued into a strange s.p.a.cious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St George of the Sea-weed.'

"As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows; but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua rose in a dark cl.u.s.ter of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.

"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circ.u.mference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow ca.n.a.l, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-gla.s.s as well as of the sea."

It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.

In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so enchanting and unsurpa.s.sable! May you live to see it, Antony, before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.

Your loving old G.P.

29

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to b.u.t.tress some prejudice or contention of his own.

But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--

"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. G.o.d forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful.

"There is another life, hard, rough, and th.o.r.n.y, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave; which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man.

"Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."

Another pa.s.sage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the pa.s.sing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the pageantry of faith:--

"The great trading companies were not inst.i.tuted for selfish purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.

They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of apprentices.h.i.+p. But in time the companies lost their healthy vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on Elizabeth herself.

"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were pa.s.sing away, and the faith and life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were pa.s.sing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable s.p.a.ce; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.

"In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they

"Begin and cease, and then again begin With tremulous cadence slow, and bring, The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago Heard it on the aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery."

So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees, and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.

Your loving old G.P.

30

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of them,--he wrote excellent English prose.

It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless, unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the language of the ma.s.s of the world."

The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light." "Culture hates hatred: culture has one great pa.s.sion--the pa.s.sion for sweetness and light."

This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm, and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things, fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.

Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade, or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of s.h.i.+ps.

We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and light.

It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.

I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.

After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a "pa.s.sion for sweetness and light."

A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever you can.

As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best pa.s.sage is to be found in the Preface to his _Essays in Criticism_:--

"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

"There are our young barbarians, all at play!

"And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?--nearer perhaps than all the science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?"

As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the wrong, although in his poem "The Last Word," while not partic.i.p.ating himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his "body by the wall."