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Page 48
Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
And see a myriad souls adrift,
Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
Shuddering across the void: "The truth!
Succour! The truth!" None can reply.
That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy,
tragedy, farce. The things that happen to us are not our life. They
are imposed upon life, they come and go. But life is a secret process.
We only see the accretions.
The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather
begun, by Miss Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane
Austen by telling us much more about what seems to be infinitely less,
but is not so in reality. She dips into the well whereof Miss Austen
skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of a
young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four,
if not five, volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a
mother and the marriage of a sister or so. She may write forty, and I
shall be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states of
the soul, emotional reaction--these as they are moved in us by other
people are Miss Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these
are handled is the interest we can devote to her novels. These
fleeting things are Miss Richardson's game, and they are the things
which interest us most in ourselves, and the things which we desire to
know most about in our neighbours.
But, of course, it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot,
tell us all. A novel is a piece of art which does not so much report
life as transmute it. She takes up what she needs for her purpose, and
that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry--we don't go to
that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us
all about himself at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for
it is his affair to transfigure rather than transmute, to move us by
beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully
in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished
article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry
which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that
which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact,
to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer.
Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now
no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so
it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think,
by analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in _In
Memoriam_. Again, _The Angel in the House_ brought Patmore as near to
self-explication as a poet can go. Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more
doubtful field of experiment.
What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers--to Madame de Sevigne, to
Gray, to Walpole and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies
a letter-reader, and just that inadequacy of spoken communication
will smother up our written words. Madame de S�vign� must placate her
high-sniffing daughter, Gray must please himself; Walpole must at any
cost be lively, Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate
the judgment of the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the
looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose
that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin
thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree
with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be
merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic
turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it
in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on account of my
dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that
but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to
confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I can utter can be
taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature."
So I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his
states of soul, until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of
mind and disease of body. Revelation, then, like gouts of blood,
did issue, but of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a
crisis.
_Parva componere magnis_, there is a letter contained in _The Early
Diary of Frances Burney_(ed. Mrs. A.R. Ellis, 1889), more completely
apocalyptic than anything else of the kind accessible to me. Its
writer was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife,
therefore half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young
lady who could let herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal,
as Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous, uncommon, lively, comical,
entertaining, frank, and undisguised"--or because of it--she
did contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more
thoroughly than the many times more expert. You have her here in the
pangs of a love-affair, of how long standing I don't know, but now
evidently in a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in elopement,
post-chaise, clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth-century. Here
it is in an earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of
the shoulder. I reproduce it with Maria's punctuation, which shows it
to have proceeded, as no doubt she did herself, in gasps:
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