Ceres\' Runaway

A >> Alice Meynell >> Ceres\' Runaway

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays


Contents:

Ceres' Runaway
A Vanquished Man
A Northern Fancy
Laughter
Harlequin Mercutio
The Little Language
Anima Pellegrina!
The Sea Wall
The Daffodil
Addresses
The Audience
Tithonus
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Popular Burlesque
Dry Autumn
The Plaid
Two Burdens
The Unready
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult




CERES' RUNAWAY


One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a
Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the charming
quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does not exist that
would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high
places of the city. It is true that there have been the famous
captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover
a less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in
some miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed in
weeding the roadside. They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the
ancient stones--rows of little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper
Tooting; one wonders why. The governors of the city will not succeed in
making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a
thriving commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and
shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,"
says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a
couple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring--not
that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, but
because flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessible
places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success and
victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun,
swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and blooms
aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, of the seventeenth, and
of the eighteenth. As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike.
The flagrant flourishing statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment
(and Rome is chiefly the city of the broken pediment) are the
opportunities of this vagrant garden in the air. One certain church,
that is full of attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon
of great stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest
summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fair
middle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of
accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the
Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds its
account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and
stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea-wind,
sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a
little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry,
this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot catch it.
And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of the
agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the place
of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a twelfth-century tower, and
in any case inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet.
It actually casts a flush of green over their city _piazza_--the wide
light-grey pavements so vast that to keep them weeded would need an army
of workers. That army has not been employed; and grass grows in a small
way, but still beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway
circles. Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly
prompts the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the _piazza_
into a square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of the
pavement as of the importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--and
the weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes
its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears,
to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the "third" (which
is in truth the fourth) Rome.

When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf; it is
full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer scents throng
each other, close and warm, than these from a little hand-space of the
grass one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine or
the Alban hills. Moreover, under the name I will take leave to include
lettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of the
Vatican. That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as
it were house upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but with
nothing pretentious and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window
on a ledge to the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad.
Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one
cannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any
parapet it may have round a corner.

Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness, a
suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the tilling.
Wildish peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which seems to have
disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his
manifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than half-way
from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent
of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost--these are
all Italian things of savage savour and simplicity. The most cultivated
of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but
something better, as her city is yet not a town but something better, and
her wilderness something better than a desert. In all the three there is
a trace of the little flying heels of the runaway.




A VANQUISHED MAN


Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event, until
1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as
he wished, but by Tom Taylor. Turning over these familiar and famous
volumes, often read, I wonder once more how any editor was bold to "take
upon himself the mystery of things" in the case of Haydon, and to assign
to that venial moral fault or this the ill-fortune and defeat that beset
him, with hardly a pause for the renewal of the resistance of his
admirable courage.

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowly and
lofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself to answer
to Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its reproach, to
bear its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is all his history.
There was no fault of the intellect in his apprehension of the thing he
thought to stand possessed of. He conceived it aright, and he was just
in his rebuke of a world so dull and trivial before the art for which he
died. He esteemed it aright, except when he deemed it his.

His editor, thinking himself to be summoned to justify the chastisement,
the destruction, the whole retribution of such a career, looks here and
there for the sins of Haydon; the search is rewarded with the discovery
of faults such as every man and woman entrusts to the common generosity,
the general consciousness. It is a pity to see any man conning such
offences by heart, and setting them clear in an editorial judgement
because he thinks himself to hold a trust, by virtue of his biographical
office, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but
satisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever must be
with him who yields to--," or whatever else may be the manner of
ratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon, we hear,
omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his course
thereby unless it pleased him. Haydon was self-willed; he had a wild
vanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers that include the
powers of man to prosper the work of which he himself was sure. He did
not wait upon the judgement of the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He was
foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when there was
a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the
possession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake. There he
was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, the
first, the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle blow that sent him
on his career so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the mere
course and action of life must ruin him--this judgement, in art, directed
him in the decision of the most momentous of all public questions. Haydon
admired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it
seems, we owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which
are the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon
trusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction. Into the
presence especially of those seated figures, commonly called the Fates,
we habitually bring our arts for sentence. He lent an effectual hand to
the setting-up of that Tribunal of headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused,
neglected, forgot him--and by chance-medley was right, was right!--had no
possible authority for anything that it did against him, and that he
might have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover,
that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battle by
this ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Houses of
Parliament with fresco, he was not one. This affront he took at the
hands of men who had no real distinctions in their gift. He might well
have had, by mere chance, some great companion with whom to share that
rejection. The unfortunate man had no such fortuitous fellowship at
hand. How strange, the solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst,
and capable of making common cause indomitably with the good, had there
been any such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none. There were ranged the unjust judges with their blunders
all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and there was no
artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better than their
favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned, and a
man besides through whose heart the public reproach was able to cut
keenly.

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon? It has always
seemed to me that he was not without greatness--yet he was always without
dignity--in those most cruel passages of his life, such as that of his
defeat, towards the close of his war, by the show of a dwarf, to which
all London thronged, led by Royal example, while the exhibition of his
picture was deserted. He was not betrayed by anger at this end of hopes
and labours in which all that a man lives for had been pledged. Nay, he
succeeded in bearing what a more inward man would have taken more hardly.
He was able to say in his loud voice, in reproach to the world, what
another would have barred within: one of his great pictures was in a
cellar, another in an attic, another at the pawnbroker's, another in a
grocer's shop, another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames and
colours and the rent were unpaid. Some solace he even found in stating a
few of these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic visitor
to London, interested in the condition of the arts. Well, who shall live
without support? A man finds it where he can.

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us some
other little thing--I think it is inaccuracy. Poor Haydon says in one
phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in another soon
following that the money given or lent to him had been insufficient to
pay them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions,
after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a slip. His
editor says the discrepancy is "characteristic," but I protest I cannot
find another like it among those melancholy pages. If something graver
could but be sifted out from all these journals and letters of frank
confession, by the explainer! Here, then, is the last and least: Haydon
was servile in his address to "men of rank." But his servility seems to
be very much in the fashion of his day--nothing grosser; and the men who
set the fashion had not to shape their style to Haydon's perpetual
purpose, which was to ask for commissions or for money.

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this exercise
of historical morality, until a man in flourishing London is not afraid
to assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there is not a watering
place upon our coasts but is securely aware of merited misfortune on the
Adriatic.

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils, and
never a shilling in pay for teaching them. He painted a good thing--the
head of his Lazarus. He had no fault of theory: what fault of theory can
a man commit who stands, as he did, by "Nature and the Greeks"? In
theory he soon outgrew the Italians then most admired; he had an honest
mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to be
gained, the impossible pardon--pardon for that first and last mistake--the
mistake as to his own powers. If to pardon means to dispense from
consequence, how should this be pardoned? Art would cease to be itself,
by such an amnesty.




A NORTHERN FANCY


"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat Lee,
who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer
to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like a
madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a
madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.'" Nevertheless,
the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in
English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet
lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against the
crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made
the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy--may
have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and
this carol of liberty, to be held so dear. "I heard a maid in Bedlam,"
runs the old song. High and low the poets tried for that note, and the
singer was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love. Except for
the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now
deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story
plays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by
woe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may
have found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met
elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the treble
note astray.

At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast
Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high
note, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of words
might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed
at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the
strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out

Packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and
strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid called
Barbara.

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs of
the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is
nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have
died for love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this
poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,
it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in _Modern Painters_,
where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. It
is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara
died") who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of
the insane.

Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam entreats
the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could endure to
lose "the bliss, but not the place." (And although this dramatic
"Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except to be
scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought.) It is
nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of
English poets with such a wild recurrence. The Englishman of the far
past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and the
intricate life and customs of the little town, must have been generally a
home-keeper. No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him.
But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet
and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the
storm, free to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the
chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey
that had no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the
swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it was
one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English
Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they had a
name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow,
Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came the "Abram
men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to the fairs and
wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed like a
maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap." But after the Civil Wars they
vanished, and no man knew how. In time old men remembered them only to
remember that they had not seen any such companies or solitary wanderers
of late years.

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and not
singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring." Wordsworth,
who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes the crazed one a
wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by chance, rare as an
Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-

I too have passed her in the hills
Setting her little water-mills.

His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall in
such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization, _bourgeois_ in
the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after death to the
company of man, to the "holy bell," which Shakespeare's Duke remembered
in banishment, and to the congregation and their "Christian psalm."

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, than
Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the maid
crazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and she might be
drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her. She
might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her heart was light after
trouble. "Many light hearts and wings"--she had at least the bird's
heart, and the poet lent to her voice the wings of his verses.

There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant woman
of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer Elliott's fine
lines in "The Excursion"--

Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried!
Wife of my bosom, wedded to my soul!

Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She had no
child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had long forgotten
how it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she, with
a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "good-morrow" rings from
Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow. She knows that her love is dead, and
her perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of flowers than to the
old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange was
the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The world has
become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and
more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will
never recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more starry madness.
Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to the
legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful
but dull, and sings of her own "burning brow," as Herrick's wild one
never sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks of
flowers, or, rather, "the herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the
surest of all signs that the strange inspiration of the past centuries
was lost, vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been wholly
English, whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English.

It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example, could
so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligible
sentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into the
momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his disregard of this
northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was an alien upon earth,
what were she in the Inferno? What word can express her strangeness
there, her vagrancy there? And with what eyes would they see this dewy
face glancing in at the windows of that City?




LAUGHTER


Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain
nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not for
the paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere the joke
"emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to catch the
attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humour
wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the violent
personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance,
and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the vagrant
encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game. It
stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is
early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the
compliant jest.

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant
signalling, an endless recognition. Forms of approach are remitted. And
the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no
gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and
down the pages of the paper and the book. See, again, the theatre. A
somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our
present stage that little else can claim--paradox again apart--to be
taken seriously.

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away from
the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittest
for children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is everywhere and at
every moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and in
some degree distinctive of men, and no mean part of their prerogative and
privilege. The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are not
men are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation. They will not
refuse explanation. And there is little upon which a man will so value
himself as upon that sense, "in England, now."

Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like
rhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in some sort a habit when it
is not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must confess
that we laugh oftenest because--being amused--we intend to show that we
are amused. We are right to make the sign, but a smile would be as sure
a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but be changing the
convention; and the change would restore laughter itself to its own
place. We have fallen into the way of using it to prove something--our
sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but laughter should not thus
be used, it should go free. It is not a demonstration, whether in logic,
or--as the word demonstration is now generally used--in emotion; and we
do ill to charge it with that office.