Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 5

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It was a month after Swinburne had been laid by the sea that he loved in Bonchurch churchyard that the very last of the old Victorian guard was buried under his beloved Surrey hill, after the honour of a Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey. It was well that George Meredith should be so honoured. He belonged to the high race: and he lived his life out in simple devotion to the work given him to do. Once again, as Swinburne’s death set us shouting again the brave rhymes that had fired us long ago, so we crooned over the wonderful words in which Meredith swayed our souls. We all read over again the idyllic scene in the river meadows where Richard Feverel passed into the magic land. There has been no such love scene as that since Shakespeare dreamed of Ferdinand and Miranda. How deep a pathos the death of the man, who gave life to man and maid in that mystic hour, infused into the familiar words! And there are certain poems that we read over again--since he has gone--with a deeper touch at the heart. The charm and movement of “Love in the Valley,” put out their old haunting power.

“When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,

Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,

Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,

More love should I have, and much less care.

When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,

Loosening her laces, combing down her curls,

Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,

I should miss but one for many boys and girls.

. . . . . .

“Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,

Arm in arm, all against the raying West,

Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,

Brave is her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.

Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking

Whispered the world was; morning light is she.

Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;

Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

. . . . . .

“When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window

Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams,

Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily

Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams.

When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle

In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May,

Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily

Pure from the night, and splendid for the day.

. . . . . .

“Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,

I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need

Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood,

Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed.

Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October;

Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown;

Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam:

All seem to know what is for heaven alone.”

How beautiful the swing and joy of it all! And over against it we may put that sonnet of “Dreadful Night” in which the “Modern Love” opens:--

“By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head,

The strange low sobs that shook their common bed,

Were called into her with a sharp surprise,

And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,

Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay

Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away

With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes

Her giant heart of Memory and Tears

Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat

Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet

Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,

By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.

Like sculptured effigies they might be seen

Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;

Each wishing for the sword that severs all.”

And to relieve the terror of the depression, we will recall the tender lyrical fall of “Dirge in Woods”:--

“A wind sways the pines

And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase:

And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

Even we,

Even so.”

All these quotations show how great was the beauty that Meredith could throw into words. Yet he and Browning will still remain to us, as the men, who, over against the perfect melodiousness of Tennyson, flung up tempestuous defiance against all that was smooth and conventional and easy and limpid in literature. Carlyle, too, was storming his way through: but his heated vehemence sprang from indignation at the follies of men rather than from an artistic impulse. The other two definitely set themselves to forge a novel armoury. Romance was aflame in them both: and romance asked for new worlds to conquer. How was it to be done? What new worlds in the domain of language had classicalism left unperfected? Oddly enough, both of them attempted to answer this question by the same method. Classicalism had attained its effects by selection, exclusion, simplicity, purity: it worked on aristocratic lines. It pruned off all that obscured the prime result. It shed all excess: it elided the incidental: it cut down to the core: it purged the dross. So it offered men the flawless expression of a perfect thought. It secured its result by elimination: and the product was a jewel.

But for Meredith and Browning thought was a living growth. It grew in a context. It was in touch with thousand-fold accidents. It belonged to a mind: and that mind was rich with possibilities. The thought that finally emerged was the triumphant residue of all that went to its making. It was only intelligible in its triumph, by virtue of all that through which it triumphantly forced its way to the front. It carried traces of all that it has survived: it arrived, bedraggled by all that was caught in it, in the way, to tangle it and to withstand it. You must know what it has scraped through, if you would estimate its value. You must throw into it the complex materials out of which it has built itself together. Let anyone look at one of his own imaginations or decisions. Even as he holds it up for inspection, half a hundred irrelevant fancies have crossed his mind: endless suggestions have all but over-topped it: cross-currents of thought have flashed, and passed, and disappeared: a dozen alternatives have come and gone. And all this hubbub curls and whirls round the main matter: and it is in contrast with all this ferment, that its own permanence is tested, and its own value appraised.

So they saw. So they said. Therefore, their method is inclusive. It prunes nothing away. It drags all in. It is democratic: it knocks the dominant idea up against a whole mob of competitive wranglers. In order to exhibit their meaning, these two bring in as much half-alive matter as they can: not as little. There is no allusion, or hint, or parody, or paraphrase, or counter-fancy, or illustration that may not serve their need in elucidating the main thesis. So they go off at a tangent: they bring in the contingent: they fly off in parenthesis: they fling in cross-lights: they take up anything and everything that the mind may have dropped upon: for all this tangled noise goes to the making of the one loud dominant hum that holds the ear spell-bound. The by-products of the central thought are all included in the process. They come and go, helter-skelter: the only hope of understanding is to read on very fast, refusing to be arrested in the details. For these details do not bear fixing or defining, any more than you can fix or define the varying sights and sounds and smells that vaguely accompany all mental activity.

So the leading theme arrives, thronged about with compromise. And the artistic result is not like Venus rising from the sea, stark and sweet, in clean fine naked outline: but rather like Glaucus, as Plato pictures him, dragging himself to shore, a human thing, but still meshed in a tangle of shells and seaweed, to show whence he has emerged. Sometimes our two writers will even like to make us aware of that effort that went to the production--of the whirling wheels of the machinery, as if this too could not be left out of the full account. So the music of the organ is all the more impressive because it works its way out into beautiful sound through the noise of straining pipes and pedals. And even in the finest tone that soars away into high space from the violin, we should still value it all the more because we are kept aware of the physical rasp of the horse-hair against the catgut.

Thus it was that Meredith and Browning arrived at their characteristic styles. And whenever the imagination is strong enough at work to fuse, with its heat, the whole complicated mass of the materials, the effect is overwhelming. The danger is lest the fine ardour should slacken: and then the weight of material imperils the result. They have chosen to dare a great risk, which demands that they should ever be at their highest level. And both have justified the risk by the splendour of their best.