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Page 17
That is like nothing on earth: music and diction are stark new. And
that was the way of it for a forty years of freedom.
Then came a reaction. With Queen Victoria we all went to church again
in our Sunday clothes. You cannot date Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth
by the fashions; but you can date Tennyson assuredly. He belongs
to the top-hat and the crinoline; to _Friends in Council_ and "nice
feelings." True, there was nothing dressy about Tennyson himself. I
doubt if he ever wore a top-hat. But is not _The Gardener's Daughter_
in ringlets? Did not Aunt Elizabeth and Sister Lilia wear crinolines?
And as for _Maud_--
Look, a horse at the door,
And little King Charley snarling:
Go back, my lord, across the moor,
You are not her darling.
That settles it. "Little King Charley's" name would have been Gyp.
I yield to no man in my admiration of _In Memoriam_; but when one
compares it with _Adonais_ it is impossible not to allocate the one
and salute the other as for all time and place:
When in the down I sink my head
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead.
And then:
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.
No: _In Memoriam_ is a beautiful poem, and technically a much better
one than _Adonais_. But the spirit is different; narrower, more
circumscribed; in a word, it dates, like the top-hat and the
crinoline.
In our day, clothes have lost touch with mankind, they cover the body
but do not express the soul. With the vogue of the short coat, short
skirt, slouch hat, and brown boots, style has gone out and ease come
in; and with ease, it would seem, easy, not to say free-and-easy,
manners. I speak not of the "nineties" when a young degenerate could
lightly say,
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion,
and be praised for it, but rather of the Georgians, of whom a golden
lad, who happily lived long enough to do better, wrote thus of a lady
of his love:
And I shall find some girl, perhaps,
And a better one than you,
With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
And lips as soft, but true.
And I daresay she will do.
If that is not slouch-hat and brown boots, I don't know what to call
it. For that golden lad I think _The Shropshire Lad_ must answer, who
perhaps brought corduroys into the drawing-room. And if that is to be
the way of it, we should do well to go back to Lovelace or Waller, and
make believe with a difference. I shall find myself watching the sunny
side of Bond Street for a revival--because while one does not ask for
passion, or even object to the tart flavours of satiety, I feel that
there is a standard somewhere, and a line to be drawn. Taste draws it.
I trouble myself very little with the morals of the matter, yet must
think manners very nearly half of the conduct of life. And the manners
which are expressed in clothes are those which are instilled in art.
They are symptomatic alike and correlated. There is nothing surprising
about it, or even curious. It would be so, and it is so. If Milton
had not on a prim white collar and a doctor's gown I misread _Paradise
Lost_ and _Lycidas_ too.
POLYOLBION
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