The Spirit of Place and Other Essays by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell


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Page 2

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; the
custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist
complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear
an honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous tourist has not,
perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal to
him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by
one, the belfries stand and play their tunes. Variable are those lonely
melodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air
is played for the burial of a villager.

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that
seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when
the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to
earth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that sways across
one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered."




MRS. DINGLEY


We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to call
her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times
than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight
times in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes means
Stella alone," says one of many editors. "The letters were written
nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not
require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they
were penned." Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And the
editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against
the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love,
and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that
they make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper
of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In
love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half
of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing
from the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has fought
against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her,
misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist--he finds her
irksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has but
lately called her a "chaperon." A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been
pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respect
been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD,"
"saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little
mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls," "brats," "huzzies both,"
"impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and
delights," "dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars"
(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD," and so forth in a
hundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but
obviously not because of their own complaining. Swift called them so
because they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved,
conscious every day of the price, which is death.

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with his
summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put them
asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly play
havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing in
the world. "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters,
except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done.
But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:
but methinks," he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but we
are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it
looks like PMD." Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you
must know, are not women." "God Almighty preserve you both and make us
happy together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may
never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives." "Farewell,
dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy
day since he left you, as hope saved."

With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of
St. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was
"in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting." He hid with them in the
long labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning. If no
letter came, he comforted himself with thinking that "he had it yet to be
happy with." And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold and
lachrymose blunders the grace and singularity--the distinction--of this
sweet romance. "Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though
"the many could not miss it," but not even the few have found it.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Thu 28th Mar 2024, 17:15