Essays

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Essays by Alice Meynell


Contents:

WINDS AND WATERS

Ceres' Runaway
Wells
Rain
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Rushes and Reeds

IN A BOOK ROOM

A Northern Fancy
Pathos
Anima Pellegrina!
A Point of Biography
The Honours of Mortality
Composure
The Little Language
A Counterchange
Harlequin Mercutio

COMMENTARIES

Laughter
The Rhythm of Life
Domus Angusta
Innocence and Experience
The Hours of Sleep
Solitude
Decivilized

WAYFARING

The Spirit of Place
Popular Burlesque
Have Patience, Little Saint
At Monastery Gates
The Sea Wall

ARTS

Tithonus
Symmetry and Incident
The Plaid
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
Victorian Caricature
The Point of Honour

"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"

The Colour of Life
The Horizon
In July
Cloud
Shadows

WOMEN AND BOOKS

The Seventeenth Century
Mrs. Dingley
Prue
Mrs. Johnson
Madame Roland

"THE DARLING YOUNG"

Fellow Travellers with a Bird
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
The Unready
That Pretty Person
Under the Early Stars
The Illusion of Historic Time




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.




WELLS


The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they
are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
earthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this
capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For
style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as
it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret
ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be
secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;
they form its very construction. Style does not exist in modern
arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the
successes--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happy
little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence,
being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumph
and success of the present art of raiment--"fit" itself--is but the
result of a masked and lurking labour and device.

The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of the
beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighter
actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way. In a word,
the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterous
provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, and
decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas the
artist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means. The
first hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which
we all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the second
lifted up the arches of the aqueduct.

The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way to
ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way. In
all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden means
must needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity. This
is easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain the ill-fortune
that presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, all
the ill-favoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them
serviceable and effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and inter
them, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily
world. It is an added mischance. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to
explain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which are,
after all, only less expert ways of labour. In those happy conditions,
neither from the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from the
workman looking askance at his unhandsome material, comes a first
proposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight.
But fate spares not that suggestion to the able and the unlucky at their
task of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the traffick of
life.

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the means
of our lives those which we should wish to see open to the sun, with
their waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they are
lapped in lead.

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-place
that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, at
their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is so
visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to
think of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all charged
with shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying
that remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness. Not a
pool without this visitant, or without passages of stars. As for the
wells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as the
daily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter
fitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those
deeps.

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun is
shattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken across stones,
and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall through
chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves. To
all these waters the agile air has perpetual access. Not so can great
towns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely the
ill-luck of great towns.

Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have the
grace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every _campo_ has its
circle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the pavement, its
soft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the water below, and
the cheerful work of the cable.

Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their plain
with the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the watersheds
in the hills to the and city; and having the waters captive, they knew
how to compel them to take part, by fountains, in this Roman triumph.
They had the wit to boast thus of their brilliant prisoner.

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

Of such a transit is made no secret. It was the most manifest fact of
Rome. You could not look to the city from the mountains or to the
distance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetual
waters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services. This, then,
was the style of a master, who does not lapse from "incidental
greatness," has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish of
his phrases, and does not think the means and the approaches are to be
plotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without haste, and without
misgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption in
the doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray.
There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the work
broken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour of
Michelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure long
exposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and the
Roman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise.




RAIN


Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar
rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the
clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate
points.

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once,
being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression
is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. What
we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy,
unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things that
flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes
of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert
eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzles
them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowly
from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are
not theirs. There seems to be such a difference of instants as invests
all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, a
moment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies.

The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of
our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman's
stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the
impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and the
stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.
Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and
their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by
the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is
all our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and
beauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature
flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionist
to make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon
him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.

Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the
ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the
husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed in
the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the shower
withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His sense
of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as he
shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knows
approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is the
rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a
way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud
"outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and
to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.
The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's
waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up
street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling
unfruitfully.

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the
end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat
and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps
are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
battlements of heaven.




THE TOW PATH


A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must
have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird your
shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even
path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side of meadows.

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain," only
too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the
riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are
swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The line
drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it
makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easy
power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of
"feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a verse of
Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of
sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing,
is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy labourers with the
oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on
the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, you
need but to walk in your swinging harness, and so take your friends up-
stream.

You work merely as the mill-stream works--by simple movement. At lock
after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to the wheel
that turns by no greater stress, and you and the river have the same mere
force of progress.

There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the bright
Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing by so many
curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the
wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings the lighted
clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying high for
mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You will
not envy them for so brief a success. Did not Wordsworth want a "little
boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?
Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even
the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than you, walking
your effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps. Your
moderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you the
sufficient mastery of the tow-path.

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it
life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant
burden--the yielding check--than ever before. An unharnessed walk must
begin to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is
easier than towing? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the
arms than drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of
metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and the
line.

No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it depends
upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of
helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught
or charge you with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almost
anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so much as to give your
briskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to still
more nimble heels. All your haste, moreover, does but waken a more
brilliantly-sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to
carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure,
enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free. No
watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path. What little
outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothly towed.
Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch the
birds, or listen to them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem to
turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver for a
moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as
mountains are blue, and horizons. The days are so still that you do not
merely hear the cawing of the rooks--you overhear their hundred private
croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by
wings.

As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an end.
This year's robins are in full voice; and the only song that is not for
love or nesting--the childish song of boy-birds, the freshest and
youngest note--is, by a happy paradox, that of an autumnal voice.

Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist's
wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding note.
Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent, stealthy soles of
the barefooted in the south.




THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS


It is no small thing--no light discovery--to find a river Andromeda and
Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer night
around a pole-star in the waters. One star or two--delicate visitants of
streams--we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine
and so fleeting is that apparition. Or the southern waves may show the
light--not the image--of the evening or the morning planet. But this, in
a pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it
is the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in the
flood.

These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more
vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the
Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a
painter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movements
shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of
constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague
bats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.
Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and
returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, those
constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of
gleaming life. You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them
seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but
deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could
really show such altered stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as
Juliet's "wanton" with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At
moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-
set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars,
and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one
broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth
flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible,
mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else at once so keen and so
elusive.

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such
vanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft night are
reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and
vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the Pleiades.

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the
river Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on all
the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer. It is
a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the
wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not
flying. The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is
fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather. But it gets disabled
if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feet
are wet. On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the
waters.