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Page 15
The device was ingenious and happy. You yoke one art to serve another.
It can be extended in either direction, working backwards from the
Ramillies, or forwards, as I propose to show. Skip for a moment
the Restoration and the perruque, skip the cropped polls of the
Roundheads; with this you are in full Charles I.
Go, lovely Rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
What vision of what singer does that evoke? What other than that of
a young gallant in a lace collar, with lovelocks over his shoulders,
pointed Vandyke fingers, possibly a peaked chin-beard? There is
accomplishment enough, beauty enough, God knows; but there is
impertinence too; it is _de haut en bas_--
Tell her that wastes her time and me!
Lovelocks and pointed fingers all over it. It is witty, but does not
bite. If you bite you are serious, if you bite you are in love; but
that is elegant make-believe. He will take himself off next minute,
and encountering a friend, hear himself rallied:
Quit, quit, for shame I This will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can her make:
The D----l take her!
Laughter and a shrug are the end of it. With the Carolines it was not
music that was the food of love, but love that was a staple food
of music. A man who lets his hair down over his shoulders may be as
sentimental as you please, or as impudent. He cannot nourish both a
passion and a head of hair. He won't have time.
There, then, again, is a clear congruity established between your
versifying and your clothes; they will both be in the mode, and the
mode the same. One feels about the Cavalier fashion that it was
not serious either one way or the other. It had not the Elizabethan
swagger; it had not the Restoration cynicism; it had not the Augustan
urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as
a law unto himself, which is the right of genius--for the sonnets
have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real
love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could
possibly survive--avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two snatches in
order. Take first--
Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white,
For all those rosy ornaments in thee,--
Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight,
Nor fair nor sweet--unless thou pity me!
That first; and then this:
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain--
and consider them for what they are: unapproachably beautiful,
passionate, serious, on the edge of cynicism, but never over it. There
you have the love of a young age of the world, when young men, hard
hit, could be sharp-tongued, bitter, and often (though not in those
two) too much in earnest not to be shameless. Agree with me, and see
the men who sang and the women they sang of in preposterous stuffed
and starched clothes which made them unapproachable except at the
finger-tips, and yet burning so for each other that by words alone and
the music in them they could rend all the buckram and whalebone and
make such armour vain! You may see in Elizabethan dress a return
to Art, as in Elizabethan poetry you see a return to Learning; but
neither was designed to prevent a return to Nature; rather indeed to
stimulate it. And so you come back to this:
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head ...
which is the perfectly-clothed utterance of an Elizabethan longing to
be rid of his clothes.
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