Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

choly or deliberately cultivate it should be well whipped to some honest, wholesome task; a few earnest things to do, a little subordination of their diseased egotism, some small control over their appetites, would send their affectations and their whims to the winds. But undoubtedly there is a great deal of genuine sadness in the world. Is this sadness increased by knowledge and culture? Is it a necessary product of intellectual development? Has the world grown graver because it has grown wiser? These are the questions which have recently been asked by many observers; so, putting aside all manufactured melancholy, and that which arises from either idle or dissipated habits, let us consider the aspects of genuine melancholy and the effect of culture upon it.

It is well known that melancholia is a common form of insanity, and one which physicians set down among the most obstinate and difficult of cure. Is this recognized mental disease anything more than an intense form of melancholy? Are not all people suffering under habitual depression of mind simply victims to a constitutional disorder? Our own answer to these questions is in the affirmative. We believe that with all truly healthful persons-healthful in mind as well as in body—joyousness is the natural, spontaneous, inevitable expression of their being. To breathe, to move, to live, are in themselves pleasure and happiness with all well-organized persons. There may be trials, sorrows, sufferings, misfortunes, even bitter experiences; but, so long as a healthful balance is maintained throughout the being, the spirit rebounds from these sufferings, and begins to weave hopeful promises for the future. No outward circumstance determines the cheerfulness or the sadness of men-the rich may be sad and the poor cheerful, the fortunate may be gloomy and the unfortunate full of hope, the sick may be full of the spirit of joy and the strong wrapped up in morbid gloom. Some persons are victims of dyspepsia, the most joy-killing of all ailments; some are victims of diseases that cast shadows upon the soul; some are cursed with a constitutional inclination to sadness. The causes are various, but every case of melancholy is the product of some defect in the organization. Melancholy is the absolute sign of disease, and a capacity for cheerfulness hence is nothing more than supreme good health-good health of mind even more than of body. Cheerfulness ought to be placed among the cardinal virtues, and its cultivation made incumbent upon every one as a duty. We are all bound to make the most of our faculties and our opportunities, and we can not do so with the mind clouded with apprehensions and sicklied o'er with melancholy, which, while so often the product of dyspepsia or kindred evils, is a potent cause of them. There is nothing that has so bad an effect on the general health as a melancholy state of mind; it is indeed often impossible for physicians to effect cures of bodily infirmities until the mind becomes elastic and hopeful. "Every power, bodily and mental," says Herbert Spencer, "is increased by good spirits. There is no such tonic," he adds, "as hap

piness." Here we have an indisputable reason, our correspondent must admit, why cheerfulness should be cultivated, and cultivated specially as the distinct means of cultivating other powers.

Melancholy, then, is a mental disorder, and joyousness the natural and healthful state of the mind. Has this disorder been increased by intellectual culture, or, if increased by the increase of intellectual habits, is this effect at all a necessary one? It is perhaps true that the intellectual classes have greater tendency to melancholy than other people; but this is partially due, we suspect, to their sedentary habits, to a low order of physical health, to indigestion and other diseases that always come of neglect of exercise, and additionally to a fondness for introspective, subjective study of passions, and to the general hot-house atmosphere of our emotional literature. It is not evident that philosophers, historians, or jurists have exhibited a special tendency to melancholy. Indeed, the great lights in all literature for the most part have been men of serene and happy natures. If Dante and Cowper and Dr. Johnson were melancholy men, Shakespeare and Goethe and Scott and a vast number of others, eminent in all branches of letters, were not. It is certain, we think, that every form of healthful mental occupation brings to the mind joy rather than gloom or sorrow; and that melancholy, excepting for the moment all who are constitutionally afflicted with it, so far as it is the product at all of intellectualism, is the result of unhealthful forms of it. Every strain upon the emotions produces a morbid reaction; and this is why certain poets and all writers who force themselves into ecstasies of feeling suffer when the mental intoxication is over. Severe occupations that employ but do not excite the mind-whether low or high in degree-leave no taint of melancholy behind. It is not those persons who think most, nor those who are most keenly alive to the sorrows and misfortunes that befall mankind, that are overcome by sadness, but commonly the minds that work upon their sensibilities and feelings, that cultivate melancholy by the literature of the emotions. No doubt all such persons have at the beginning a tendency to melancholy, but, instead of cultivating cheerfulness, they have cultivated disease. Naturalists and men of science may not be free from melancholy, but their pursuits are certain to correct rather than promote whatever natural tendency they may have that way.

Matthew Arnold tells us that the cause of the greatness of Wordsworth's poetry "is simple, and may be told quite simply. It is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple elementary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it." Here is a supreme test of the worth of all poetry, of all literature of the imagination, and of all art. There is really no reason for the existence of anything within the scope designated that does not fill the heart with

joy, that does not counteract the whole array of evils that make melancholy. We do not hesitate to make this assertion, hard and uncompromising as it may seem. Carried into effect, such an edict would sweep out of existence some very beautiful fables, no doubt, but as our sympathy for the sad fate of the Leanders and Romeos of story is really born of our previous joy in their being, we need not deprive the world of imagination of these pathetic legends. But romance and poetry and art that do not awaken in us thrills of pleasure, that do not deepen our delight in the world and in mankind, that do not afford us sweet morsels for meditation and appropriation, should be shut out from the light altogether, thrust back into the domains of darkness and unhealthful passion whence they came. What other possible mission should poetry and the arts have than to increase the happiness of mankind? If they fail to do this, if they cause unrest rather than rest, pain rather than delight, disease rather than health, they are simply an enemy of the race. We realize very well the sweetness of a sad strain in music and the righteous sympathy that sorrow awakens; these are things that soften and subdue our grosser passions and fill up the true measure of our being, but they are quite different from the gloom in which melancholy people enshroud themselves, which is commonly selfish rather than sympathetic, full of bitterness rather than sweetness. But, however this may be, inasmuch as happiness is the legitimate end of existence, the sole thing that makes it desirable or endurable, the worth of everything is determinable by its contribution to this end, and by this test alone should knowledge, progress, culture, literature, and art be measured.

THE POETRY OF THE FAMILIAR.

A DISTINGUISHED English writer on art-Mr. Comyns Carr-in commenting recently on some paintings of London scenes, pointed out a striking change in the conception of the picturesque that of late years has come about. It is but a little while since the landscape ideal first took possession of the artistic spirit, and at the beginning "the love of landscape implied a search for the wilder and more inaccessible kinds of scenery." Then, as the second stage in the movement, came a new perception of a more placid order of rural beauty, a race of painters arising "who deliberately abandoned the romantic grandeur of lake and mountain for the unobtrusive charm of quiet places; and, as the actual facts of the chosen scene grew to be less significant, an increasing importance was attached to the rendering of those fleeting realities of light and air which form the one enduring element of vitality in all landscape art." But even here the movement has not stopped, for, "as the full value of these truths of atmosphere became established, it was discovered that the principles of painting which their study had engendered were not necessarily confined to the country"-the life of the city, and even the human face, being only

so many accidents that serve to give interest and variety to a chosen scheme of light and shade, with its modifications of local color. In other words, the painter now finds conditions of atmosphere, of light, and shade, and color, which are the essential features of a painting, in the most familiar as well as in the most romantic scene, and even in the town as well as in the country.

There seems to us no little significance in the principle here set down, and it should be considered by those who think they must always go somewhere else than where they are in order to find scenes of beauty. We may be certain that the sensibility which needs the stimulus of strange or imposing scenery is in truth a very feeble sort of sensibility. Much as we talk about mountains, they really are beautiful only under certain conditions of light, without which being as uninteresting lumps as can be imagined. Light and atmosphere are the poetical facts in every landscape, and these may be found in all their evanescent, subtile, and exquisite beauties on the plains as well as among the mountains, and even in the streets of the city, although the pictorial resources of the town have not as yet been half guessed by our artists. The pictures which elicited the remarks by Mr. Carr that we have quoted illustrate, he tells us, some of the subtle and poetic possibilities of fogs, which are found to give refinement of form and delicacy of tone to the objects which they enshroud. Fogs, of course, are a famous feature of London street-scenes; but in all cities there are mists which the skillful painter can employ with telling effect in the delineation of his town-scenes. Sunsets and sunrises in the city are often very pictorial-the light irradiating gable, and roof, and chimney with a strange and mysterious beauty; but we recollect no instance of a painter making a study of them. If Mr. Carr's theory is right, we must believe that they soon will do so-will show us that, while we have all been longing for the pictorial beauty of woodland and meadow, there have been all about us hundreds of pictures full of charm had we only instructed our eyes to see them.

In this art movement we see just what has been going on in poetry and fiction. Poets and romancists began by believing that only romantic and picturesque scenes and incidents were worthy of their muse. They delighted in the supernatural; in the impossible, remote, and extravagant ; in the grand, heroic, and appalling; but we all know how the romantic gradually shifted into the merely picturesque, and then the picturesque into the familiar, until at last it has been discovered that even the most homely scenes and objects often possess every attribute of poetry. The daisy under our feet and the peasant-girl in the meadow have really evoked some of the most beautiful poems in existence. It is the art always that makes the picture or the poem or the narrative a delight; and this fact our painters who complain that they have nothing to paint, and our writers who deplore the absence of the picturesque and romantic in our familiar life, should comprehend and remember.

THE HONORS TO THE PRINCE IMPE-
RIAL.

ARE we all who read of the royal and distinguished honors paid in England to the remains of the hapless Prince Imperial in a dream? Can it be true that a Queen of England lays a wreath of flowers on the coffin of a Bonaparte? Is it a British public that exhibits such profound and tearful sympathy for the fate of a scion of the house of Napoleon? Is it possible that this once-hated name is to be commemorated in the jealously guarded national mausoleum? A monument to a Bonaparte in Westminster Abbey ! We may well rub our eyes in strange wonder, and ask what impossible revolution time may not bring about if these things are true? Let us go back in imagination some seventy years and picture to ourselves any one forecasting all that has just occurred in England-back to the time, within the memory of Englishmen now living, when the name of Napoleon Bonaparte was the most hated thing on earth. The whole nation was then united in a frenzy of detestation, and passionately bending all its resources and strength for the overthrow of the Corsican usurper. The unanimity of feeling against the Emperor of the French was something more than the ordinary passion which war evokes toward an enemy-it was deeper, broader, more intense, and more personal. Napoleon Bonaparte was not simply a soldier on the other side—a warlike enemy respected while feared; he was to the imagination of the British people nothing less than a ravenous monster, a usurper and adventurer ".... a Vice of kings:

A cutpurse of the empire and the rule;

That from a shelf the precious diadem stole

a being so bloodthirsty and satanic that it was the imperative duty of the nations to rise up and utterly overthrow and destroy him. The name was absolutely a bugbear to frighten children with; the young generation then grew up to believe that the man who had usurped empire in France was nothing less than a fiend, a new and unheard-of product of human de

pravity. It is difficult for us now to go back and realize the frenzy of hatred that then convulsed the entire British people; and we all know what tremendous exertions were made under the inspiration of this hatred to unseat the so-called usurper. For any one then to have dreamed even that in two brief generations the time would come when all England would be overwhelmed with grief at the death of the heir of that monster's house, that the greatest in the land would vie with each other in doing honor to the remains of a prince bearing the name of Napoleon, he would have been looked upon as a madman. No imagination then could have conceived such a thing as possible. And it is remarkable, moreover, that this change of feeling has not arisen from any change of political attitude toward the Bonaparte dynasty. It is still a conviction in England that the first Napoleon was a reckless adventurer whose unconquerable ambition drenched Europe in blood; while the history of the Second Empire is to their minds dark with perjury, usurpation, ambitious wars, and other infamies. Even Dean Stanley, who by virtue of his authority permits the erection of a monument to the dead Prince among the royal dead of England in Westminster Abbey, declares that he gloried in Sedan. It is tolerably certain that, while the English people have ceased to hate the name of Bonaparte, they have but little regret for the lost empire. We can only account for the demonstrations over the young Prince's body by excluding political reasons altogether, by recognizing that they were due to the tragic and dramatic contrast of his fate with the immense expectations that once clustered around his name, to the pitiful circumstances of his untimely fate, to a keen respect for a worthy young man, to a deep sympathy for the much afflicted mother, to a disposition always existing on the part of the English people to follow with headlong zeal any course in which the royal family leads the way; but, while these various motives are far from being discreditable, it is impossible not to contrast the striking spectacle with the unspeakable hatred which the name of Bonaparte once excited in the British heart.

PERHA

Books of the Day.

DERHAPS the chief attraction of "The Lover's Tale" lies in the fact that it is one of the earliest works of the poet who more than any other has charmed and delighted his generation. Mr. Tennyson explains in his preface that the first three parts of it were written in his nineteenth year, and that two only of them were printed when, feeling the imperfection of the poem, he withdrew it from the press. "One of my friends, however, who, boylike, admired the boy's work, distributed among our

*The Lover's Tale. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co. 16m0, pp. 32.

common associates of that hour some copies of these two parts, without my knowledge, without the omissions and amendments which I had in contemplation, and marred by the many misprints of the compositors. Seeing that these two parts have of late been mercilessly pirated, and that which I had deemed scarce worthy to live is not allowed to die, may I not be pardoned if I suffer the whole poem at last to come into the light, accompanied with a reprint of the sequel—a work of my mature life- The Golden Supper'?"

These being the circumstances under which the poem at length appears, the critic is debarred from

applying to it the standard of the poet's later workseeing that it was rejected not merely by the matured taste of the more experienced writer, but by the judgment of the boy who wrote it, and before it could be submitted to the test of popular approval. That the judgment which condemned it was on the whole sound, will be readily conceded, we think, though few readers, now that they have it in authentic form, would be willing to lose the opportunity which it affords them of comparing the earlier with the later performances; of discovering to what extent the beauty and the fragrance of the full flower lay concealed in the just-opening bud. Instituting this natural comparison, we find in "The Lover's Tale" -though in an undeveloped form, as it were—several of Mr. Tennyson's greatest excellences, and nearly every one of his most characteristic defects. Taking the latter first, the attentive reader will be at once struck by the lack of skill in the narrativethe absence of that simplicity, directness, and animation which are essential to really good story-telling. This is a defect which Mr. Tennyson has never succeeded in removing from his work, and it is nearly as conspicuous in "Maud," and the Arthurian idylls, as in "The Lover's Tale," though in the former the attention is more apt to be diverted from it by the multiplicity of other beauties. The next unfavorable impression which the reader will probably get will be, that the sentiment is overstrained and somewhat hysterical, or, if not quite this, that the intensity of feeling aimed at is dissipated in the volubility and elaborateness of its expression. This also is a defect which Mr. Tennyson has never quite rid himself of, though some of his later compositions ("Ulysses," for example) show to what tense brevity of expression he can attain when he addresses himself deliberately to it. The other imperfections are of minor importance, and relate chiefly to those crudities of style which would naturally be looked for in the experimental work of a beginner, however marked his poetic faculty might be.

Coming now to the distinctive merits of the work, we will mention first that delicate ear for melodious measures, that supreme artistic use of language, that felicitous fitting of words to sense, which have always characterized Mr. Tennyson's poetry. Specimens of this-rare, it is true, but full of promise-may be found in "The Lover's Tale," and would have enabled the reader to identify its authorship with ease, had it been published anonymously. Such an identification would have been materially aided by that exaltation of feeling and refinement of manner which also distinguish Mr. Tennyson's work in all its periods. The original tale, as told by Boccaccio, is, to say the least, warm; in Mr. Tennyson's version it is full of passionate ardor, but perfectly virginal in its purity. Other qualities which can hardly fail to attract admiring attention are the appropriateness of the imagery, the epigrammatic precision and neatness of phrase, and the thus early revealed aptitude for natural description.

Both the faults and the merits we have enumerated are most conspicuously seen in the first part of

[merged small][ocr errors]

Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,
Filling with purple gloom the vacancies
Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas
Hung in mid-heaven, and half-way down rare sails,
White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.
Oh! pleasant breast of waters, quiet bay,
Like to a quiet mind in the loud world,
Where the chafed breakers of the outer sea
Sank powerless, as anger falls aside

And withers on the breast of peaceful love;
Thou didst receive the growth of pines that fledged
The hills that watched thee, as Love watcheth Love,
In thine own essence, and delight thyself
To make it wholly thine on sunny days.

And here is another charming bit of natural description:

We trod the shadow of the downward hill;
We passed from light to dark. On the other side
Is scoop'd a cavern and a mountain hall,
Which none have fathomed. If you go far in
(The country people rumor) you may hear
The moaning of the woman and the child,
Shut in the secret chambers of the rock.

I too have heard a sound—perchance of streams
Running far on within its inmost halls,
The home of darkness; but the cavern-mouth,
Half overtrailed with a wanton weed,

Gives birth to a brawling brook, that passing lightly
Adown a natural stair of tangled roots,
Is presently received in a sweet grave
Of eglantines, a place of burial
Far lovelier than its cradle; for unseen,
But taken with the sweetness of the place,
It makes a constant bubbling melody
That drowns the nearer echoes. Lower down
Spreads out a little lake, that, flooding, leaves
Low banks of yellow sand; and from the woods
That belt it rise three dark, tall cypresses-
Three cypresses, symbols of mortal woe,
That men plant over graves.

As an example of that appropriateness of imagery and exquisite fitting of words to sense, of which we have spoken, we may cite the following passage, which describes the return to consciousness of the lover, who, under the first shock of learning that his beloved loved another, had fainted:

[blocks in formation]

Of the confused floods, and dimly knows
His head shall rise no more: and then came in
The white light of the weary moon above,
Diffused and molten into flaky cloud.

Fine as that is, it is surpassed by the following lines, in which the poem reaches its highest level:

There be some hearts so airily built, that they, They-when their love is wrecked-if Love can wreckOn that sharp ridge of utmost doom ride highly Above the perilous seas of Change and Chance ; Nay, more, hold out the lights of cheerfulness; As the tall ship, that many a dreary year Knit to some dismal sand-bank far at sea, All through the livelong hours of utter dark, Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave. For me what light, what gleam on those black ways Where Love could walk with banished Hope no more?

Of course these quotations, and a few more like them which might be culled, exhibit the poem at its best; but it will be admitted, we think, that they almost excuse the piracy of which the author complains, and they certainly convey a keen sense of the severity of the standard by which Mr. Tennyson has been accustomed to judge his work.

In spite of its inapt and somewhat fantastic title, Mr. Mallock's "Is Life worth Living?" is one of the most important books which recent literature has offered to those readers for whom the great questions of life, death, and the future destiny of man still retain some vitality. In the long conflict between Religion and Science, there has been no lack on the part of the former of able and zealous championship; but it may be said that the wellnigh universal defect of the works of such champions has been that they started from premises which Science categorically denies, and cited evidence which Science found it only too easy to refute or discredit. The special and peculiar strength of Mr. Mallock's book lies in the fact that, for the purposes of his argument, he accepts as proved the most radical and far-reaching dogmas of Science, and in fact constitutes them the chief weapons of his armory. It is on the assumption of the truth and universal acceptance of these dogmas that the power of his attack depends, and in so far as the attack is suc

cessful the fate of his antagonists is that of engineers who are "hoist with their own petard."

For example, one of the most common claims of the Positive Philosophy, as Mr. Mallock calls it, is that the progress of Science has utterly discredited all definite forms of theistic faith, or at least relegated them to the domain of dreams and visions. Accepting this as a fact, Mr. Mallock proceeds to show that the same logic which crumbles away the theories of the theologian is equally destructive to the theories of the scientist-that, in fact, the so-called certitudes of the one involve precisely the same fun

* Is Life worth Living? By William Hurrell Mallock. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 12mo, pp. 323.

damental assumptions as the so-called certitudes of the other. This demonstration is, of course, not new; it being now one of the easiest and most familiar performances of schoolboy logicians to show that the agnostic doctrine is self-destructive—that if we can know nothing we can not even know that we know nothing, and hence that the mutually exclusive affirmations that we know nothing and that we know everything stand on precisely the same basis. If Mr. Mallock contented himself with this sterile logic of negation, his book would deserve but a passing mention for its literary skill; for the great questions which come profoundly home to men's deepest affections and convictions are not to be settled by a mere juggle with words. This, however, is simply an episode in his argument; and much the greater share of his effort is directed to showing that, on principles of exact thought, the truths of morality have precisely the same basis as the truths of religion, that the reasoning which destroys the one set equally destroys the other, and that by the admission of scientists themselves the truths of the moral order are indispensable to any belief in man's dignity or life's worth-are, in fact, the only thing which lift him above the beasts that perish. If, says Mr. Mallock in substance, your positive philosophy has proved that the belief in God and the other truths of religion is a vain dream, then it has proved in precisely the same manner and to precisely the same extent that the truths of morality, the distinction between right and wrong, virtue and vice, truth and falsehood, are also vain dreams; and yet the most impassioned utterances of the leading exponents of your philosophy imply unmistakably that these distinctions are the loftiest and most significant of realities. If, on the other hand, you really mean what you say when you insist upon the worth and the compelling efficacy of moral truths, then the boasted ruthlessness of your logic evaporates in words, and you are completely estopped from heaping contumely upon those truths of theism which stand upon exactly the same evidence, and the only defect of which, as you admit, is the lack of proof of their objective existence.

Such, in very brief and general terms, is Mr. Mallock's argument; and it will be conceded, we think, by the candid and intelligent reader that he

demonstrates that the evidence for theism is precisely as strong as that for any other theory of nature or life which does not altogether deny the existence of tented himself with fortifying this argument along the moral element in man. Had Mr. Mallock conall the avenues through which he has led up to it, his book, it seems to us, could hardly have failed to make a profound impression upon the thinking world; but, without any assault from outside critics,

his last three chapters go far to discredit if not to stultify his entire performance. In these three chapters he attempts to attack, as a sort of corollary to the proposition we have explained, the additional one that the Church of Rome embodies the only religion or scheme of faith possible to man, and offers the only refuge from the "brutal negations of posi

« AnkstesnisTęsti »