Chapter IV: Part 4

But leaving aside, as a digression, the case of these divine examples of grave fiction, and that of the parables of the Gospel with them, we find an art of story-telling, whether in Arabia or in Tuscany, devised chiefly or altogether for pastime. It is an art of childish origins—the pretending that such or such things came to pass, the making things come to pass at the speaker’s whim. It is an arbitrary make-believe and irresponsible, whereas the drama must, as it were, make good its words by making a show. When the novel began in Italy it raised a childish laugh by jests unchildish. Its stories ended happily even though iniquitously. A mere pastime, it filled none but the idlest hour, or the weariest hour of rest. Boccaccio’s fictions were proportionate. There was little of them, and they did not encroach. It is a question whether the habit into which we in our time have slipped—fiction as a custom and a habit—is proportionate; and all our modern pastimes are in like manner questionable as to their quantity. And when the pastime of the greater number—the reading of the novel—is charged by the novelist with so many functions as it now carries we cannot but wonder that irresponsible hands should claim, and into those hands should be given, purposes so various and purporting to be so grave.

It is the novelist, then, with no one to whom he must answer, with no facts to which he must be bound, and with only such truths as he sets in secret before his eyes—it is the novelist at whose discretion lies the power of suggestion that is followed by a million souls. The idle reader opens the novel for pleasure and learns to find that pleasure in painful things. A pessimist has him by the ear, having captured him at the mischief of his idleness and his desire for passive pleasure. On the pessimist author’s side also there is some spiritual sloth in his activities, for pessimism is the easier way. If he would confess himself he would tell us that it is so. And one of his fruits is the obvious destruction of comedy, but the other, equally lamentable though less obvious, is the destruction of tragedy.

We have all been troubled by Dante’s lack of pity for the people of his infernal pilgrimage. It is true that he has compassion upon Francesca (for the dreadful fact is that he had known as ‘a little radiant girl’ the very woman whom he saw in eternal woe), but he witnesses unmoved the other wounded displaying before him their immortal wounds and the other miserable recounting to him their immedicable grief. Are we to understand that some misery is beneath living compassion, and that pity and terror do not pass the limits of life’s known and intelligible ways, the ways of customary men, where anguish is not cut off from good, and hope, a banished angel, is not abolished? If so, it is easier to understand why the literature of despair is indeed not tragic, why it denies tragedy as comedy itself does not. If pessimism robs us of laughter it has done worse by ‘beguiling us of our tears’, not that for its sake they are, but that they are not, shed.

It is no wonder that the proffer of Browning’s optimism, half-heartedly made again on the day of his centenary, did again fail. His ‘All’s right with the world’ is as vain as the pessimist’s ‘All’s wrong with it’. It is out of the range of customary life. Intelligible joy and grief are in the midways, and in the midways there is cause for as much sadness as our human hearts can hold. One of the most heart-piercing lines in our poetry is Patmore’s

After exceeding ill a little good.

But if the ill had so exceeded that the little good was not, the pierced heart would have closed upon an insensible cicatrice.

Perhaps, by the way, another reason why Browning’s remedies are proffered in vain is his denial of fear. Browning refused to submit to fear, at once the penalty and the duty of mankind. Pessimists, on the other hand, are afraid, and they and Browning do not understand one another in their opposition, they are not intelligible enemies. Our pessimists fear, not without cause, and Browning is vociferously hopeful, without full cause. The antagonists are not within touch. And yet that robustious poet is held, or was held by his own generation, to be a realist. In certain evil things he was, on the contrary, an idealist. Having never known such a Spanish friar, or such a Bishop Blougram, he created them before he detected them—and at such close quarters, so point-blank! He was too intimate with the Sludge he made. But the pessimist, though so partial and so imperfect, is a better realist than he.

A tragedy the noblest and most dreadful of our time—I refer to Monsieur Paul Claudel’s drama, _L’Otage_—is the truer antithesis of pessimism in fiction, whether in the story told or on the stage. It is a tale of exceeding ill and a little good, of a world wherewith all is not right. I have lately read a novel in which everything went wrong, and what final solace appears takes the form of a little chatter about a servant’s photograph. In Monsieur Claudel’s play the solace is in the form of a momentary act of divine death after exceeding ill.

_L’Otage_ should be ministered to pessimists, or rather to their readers, for tears, and Mr. Jacobs for laughter. The age is not without its remedies.

GIACINTO GALLINA

When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the nineteenth century, at the moment of the high tide of his work for the Venetian stage, English people were put into possession of some idea of his drama in the readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to be, more or less, a later Goldoni with a warmer heart. This was a brief description—or rather a mere sign—of an author whom few strangers would ever seek to know better. He is, indeed, so barred out of the knowledge of English readers by his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase was necessary as a first and final _mémoire_. It gave the news of his death with a first mention of his name and a compendious definition of his career, in one sentence.

Gallina certainly followed Goldoni in finding the arguments, action, and passions of his plays in the home life of the Venetians—a life more domestic than anything an English dramatist would have the courage to offer to a self-conscious public inclined to ‘humour’. Although our countrymen are much afraid lest men should accuse them of exceeding domesticity, and are inclined to defend themselves with irony, they are in fact less domestic than any of their neighbours. You may hear two young Italian men, of what would be called among ourselves with some pride the frivolous world, exchange reports of the state and progress of their children (their babies really, but one hardly dares to say so; and one’s reluctance denotes the peculiar insular sense of dignities and indignities, the reserve, and the clowning that covers its hasty retreat). One hesitates, for fear of burlesque, to report in English a conversation that is in Italy quite simple, human, and unconnected with any kind of raillery.

If this almost majestic candour is found in ‘the world’, the home is at least equally important in the classes whereof Goldoni chiefly wrote, and Giacinto Gallina in succession to him. These middle classes are very homely, and also peculiarly Italian. Nothing quite so local is to be found among the very poor, whose customs are those of necessity all the world over, and whose manners are small; the rich also tend to resemble each other, luxury grows monotonous, and cookery, for example, is as French in a good hotel in Athens as in a good hotel in Rome. But the little professional world everywhere in Italy keeps deep and inner places wherein it is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration. The same thing that makes so much of Goldoni and of Gallina illegible to the rest of Europe encloses that sequestered home, and this is dialect. Business, especially if it be official, the business of an _impiegato_, is done in choice Italian, and all acquaintance with foreigners (which in these classes is not much) uses the same polite manner of speech. ‘Toscaneggia’—‘he tuscanizes’—says one provincial of another, bantering the choice of words and the careful conjugations of verbs which he himself also will put on with the dignities of office.

But within the flat, within the _palazzo_, within the country _villino_ alike, dialect has its nest of intimacy, and makes all speech homely with an intensity of homeliness that people without patois can hardly conceive. It sets up an understanding, it runs up a code of signals, it makes confidence, and is heard in a laugh. Habit has not blunted the people’s sense of their locality of speech, even as it has left them the full consciousness of their sun. The barbarisms of local dialect are to the Italian citizens snug (as Swift would say) beyond description: their speech closes in their gossip, it prompts their allusions, it interprets, it understands, at close quarters. It is a kind of refuge from the generalities of literature; it consoles the heart from the threats of the preacher. But it scolds as no other kind of language can scold: scolds the servants with an equality of expression and a tyranny of oppression together that makes one of the curiosities of Italian domestic life; it scolds with the peculiar fury of the southern kitchen—a fury that casts itself implicitly upon the fellow-feeling of bystanders for excuse in the future time of calm. Dialect, in fine, sustains, comforts, winks, excludes the burden of the unintelligible world, deprecates, assuages; it keeps up the old, old habits of childhood, it knows the things that the citizen and the citizen’s wife know best, it is aloof from politics.

Inasmuch as the little professional classes of the South do not live without society, their dialect associates them closely with their neighbours—closely yet without any defect of ceremony. The rites are as many, the farewells are as repeated, as though Tuscan were the language; and the speakers of a comparatively gross dialect, full of twang, are yet not people to spend their evenings in ungraceful isolation. Their domesticity is not of the English kind that is made by the habit of reading, and dialect dispenses them from none of the duties and dignities of entertainment. It is only that all is done within, within certain bonds of concentrated mutual understanding.

Indeed, the necessity of companionship for every evening causes a very courteous waiving of the differences of rank. The general asks the village druggist (who is also the barber), and all others of like condition, to his country house to play tombola, there being no other neighbours, or but few. The intercourse between them is that of perfectly equal and easy courtesy, the only sign of difference being the use of the address ‘eccellenza’ on one side only, but with the infrequence of natural good manners. Without dialect you could hardly have an understanding so close yet so decorous.

Even a remote dialect serves this intimate purpose. It was my fortune to know in childhood the inner interior of such a house. Genoese was my own tongue, and the barber’s, and all the countryside’s, and the General’s was Modenese. His Modenese and his wife’s had never abated a jot, for all their many years of dwelling in Liguria; as for their Italian, it was singularly exquisite (the General’s recitation of Dante was the most perfect speech in the world), but it was not forthcoming for their tombola parties. Modenese met the quite alien Genoese in a kind of rivalry of historic provincialism. Hosts and guests understood each other barely, and the hard Modenese consonants snapped in reply to the Ligurian sing-song; but it was at any rate dialect, it was _noi altri_, it was the strong Italian home.

That the women should have their interests in these narrow things—narrow but not dull—is intelligible enough. Many of the older women remain indoors from Sunday noon to the next Sunday morning, in a jacket and slippers; not a few of the younger have their distractions, romances, emotions, at the window. Poverty, moreover, fosters these customs by forbidding much toilette, and thus the Italian woman of these middle classes, and of remote towns, who always dresses _much_, is content to dress _seldom_, and this perforce means a habit of home-keeping. But the men, with the slight alternative of the _caffè_, are equally absorbed by the things of the house. So does Goldoni show them to be in the whole series of his plays, and so must the men of his audience have been in the eighteenth century, or they would not have endured this perpetual comedy of domestic affairs, in the least exalted sense of the word domestic. Venetian men, and the citizens of other cities equally noble, sat to see the play that turns chiefly on the strife of a man’s mother and his wife for the services of a single maid, and they sit to-day to see the same thing. Giacinto Gallina, too, has half a comedy occupied with that contention. He need hardly—but for its unflagging popularity—have taken the self-same motive, inasmuch as Goldoni is by no means out of date; he holds the stage as freshly as ever. Indeed, Italian women, except in the richer classes that have international examples more constantly before their eyes, alter little in a matter of a hundred or two hundred years. In the women of Goldoni and in the women of Giacinto Gallina you may see the virtual contemporaries of Mrs. Samuel Pepys and of Mercer.

THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR

The cause of the modern monotony of ‘you’ might be sought in the mere slovenliness of our civilization in the practice of the inflexions of grammar. All things tend to become specialized, except only words. Though in the house of life itself the organs, as life grows more perfect, begin to draw apart to their own separate functions; though the labourer, in the later association of mankind, finds his task by degrees to dwindle in range and to be enforced within closer and closer repetitions; and though only a small division of any of the sciences that have come towards adult and responsible age falls to the share of a single specialist, the word alone grows not expert and special, but general and inexpert.

It is obliged to do more various things, and to do them with less directness and, as it were, a less sequestered intention. It is engaged upon enterprises of unskilled labour. The industrial word has less and less craft, less dignity, less leisure, less rest, and more mere utility.

Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its own varieties, amid the varieties of the casual task. It changes not its vesture, and the inflexion is lost.

Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized peoples, in the inevitable evolution of things, should tend to become poor, careless, and inexact grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact is, needless to say, well enough known. Some of the French missionaries, students of American-Indian languages, have astonished us with reports of the enormous vocabularies and the scientific order of those tongues. The people are in the nomadic stage of society, their languages in the finished, the special, the sub-divided condition; intricate in system, organic, arranged, logical, full of expressive differences, cases that precisely assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time, turning the future to look upon the past, and anticipating that turn, and making a shifting perspective of the past; distinguishing persons not merely by pointing the rude forefinger of a pronoun, but by the allusion of all the inflexions of a verb. All that the antique grammars did, and more, is done, we hear, by those doomed languages of an unaltering people, a people with neither literature nor history, a people whose antiquities have no interest nor value, nor date, because their centuries resembled each other.

Not only the tactics of grammar, but an innumerable variety of words is theirs, so that a speaker might hardly name a common thing without a conscious play of choice, according as the syllables of a sentence were to fold and close. Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has the charge of thought, without some degree of a like liberty of choice, and modern prose in all languages has, obviously, for the lack of this liberty—for lack of rich alternatives—somewhat forgone the practice of rhythm; forgone it altogether in the explanations of science, for instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red-Indian speech, translated even into sentimental English, as used formerly to be done, must have undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier change when it was done into sentimental French.

It is, however, among English races chiefly that an unwillingness to be troubled with the distinctions of grammar has had this effect of making a word run errands and serve the first purpose at hand; and it is among English races that inflexions (never very numerous or subtle) have been neglected and let fall. That most orderly of grammars, the Spanish, is still in full use; the Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in Rome, retain as few as possible in Liguria—making shift with auxiliary verbs rather than conjugate properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts. The French go about to avoid certain of their own subjunctives, even in literature, and in speech the perfect tenses are passed askance, for fear of pedantry. None but ourselves have been so impatient as to put out of common use the second person singular. ‘You’ was manifestly a trick of politeness in all languages, until it became depreciated by general use, when Germans, Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more distant pronoun of courtesy.

The literary Genius was kind to its wayward chosen people, and kept for us a plot of the language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry. As things are, we need not envy the French their second person singular. For them it has but two keen significances—the first use in love and the disuse in the reproof of children. The second is, perhaps, the more important; it is renewed, and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence. To say ‘vous’ to a naughty child is to enforce insatiate retribution; few children deserve so much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches the personality, and alters the relations of life.

As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is by no means certain that the second person singular, with its single delight—the first—never to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar regrets of the world for the flights of its joys. ‘Toi’, the first ‘toi’, is an arbitrary, a conventional happiness, a happiness because it is single—it has no quality but that. The ‘many thousand’ of ‘toi’ are insignificant, and therefore it has no ‘poor last’; it sets a paltry example, therefore.

And then, while the second person singular plays this ambiguous part in love, see how primly it is eschewed in prayer. ‘May your name be sanctified’ is a second phrase of the _oraison dominicale_ (_oraison dominicale!_ the name says everything) which we should be loth to have in place of our own. With us there is not only the poetic ‘thy’, but the obsolete valuing of the last syllable of the past participle—‘hallowed’—and the unworn, the still fresh word itself to make the sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such words into familiar use we should gain much, but we should lose a most distinctive characteristic, bestowed upon us by the literary Genius, as though in reward of our very sins—our unique plot of disregarded language that the traffic of the world passes by. For though the Italians have a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their daily prose are rather in the form of the words than in the words themselves. Now the French have the Psalms of David in the language of the trade circular charged with a little rhetoric.

As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and its effectual influence in effacing them, it could not be more distinctly proved than by the Quaker speech. Restoring the second person singular to the language (by way of denying the primitive hyperbole of courtesy from which the general second person plural took its use), the followers of Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for a generation or so these were in practice, yet the increase of carelessness and the generalizing habit of speech in a world more and more intent upon special tasks in all things else, quickly made an end of them. So that Quakerism began to talk a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If Mrs. Beecher Stowe makes Quakers speak according to their use, they suppressed ‘thou’ more or less, and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing but the slovenly indifference that has made all our verbs so dull could be the cause of this perversion of a reform.

Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of our own poets, who seem to find a difficulty in carrying the second person singular safely through a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one there is another, a little more out of sight, that does not. As Shelley wrote—

Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety,

so write others of the moderns.

Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not done in the other centuries. Must we needs, as we go on, grow so lax, and do these unhandsome things? If we do by some obscure process grow so lax, why should there not be, in a time of revisions, a revision of these customs? A little of the subjunctive was restored many years ago by Mr. Henley in the _National Observer_; that this little soon fell aside again is not encouraging; nevertheless, ‘it were’ worth while for some author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the second person singular, and with it certain tenses long out of use.

There might be such a literary restoration—a literary and a familiar restoration—as would make our language again more various and more charming, and yet would not turn the speech poetic to vulgar use, nor decrease the dignity of what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ‘the essential and ornamental measures of address’.

Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary grammar, we have the treasure of the sequestered poetic and religious language in good order and perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two derivations may well be dwelt upon afresh, now when so many of our writers are obsequious to the French language. (How is it, by the way, that Ireland is so little joyful for the gift of English?) French cannot be the great poetic language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc, delivered from a grandfatherly hearth-rug: ‘L’anglais et le français; ce sont les deux langues qui resteront; l’anglais pour le commerce, le français pour la littérature.’ The blood of a silent listener was only ten years old, but it boiled. And here is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French judgement upon Browning: ‘What a singular man! his middle is not in the centre.’ That Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle of an English poet is not in the centre; it is one focus of an ellipse, like the sun. Our national imagination takes wide adventures and unequal velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler) that the earth’s orbit must be circular, because a circle is ‘perfect’. And this is the kind of perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the French mind has long cherished.

Not only in this matter of middles and centres is English poetry out of bounds. She does not know when she is beaten, as was said of English armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow her way in? Into great drama she intrudes, bidding the stage to wait; by lyre and song she commands epic narrative to halt the marching columns of its processions; waves rhetoric from its right throne in the grand style and in heroic verse, and usurps its place by an imperial supersession; scatters literary boundaries, and makes all the kingdoms hers—Poetry’s. And no imaginable academies could have prevailed against her.

French lacks much besides those alien powers, our Latin and Teutonic inheritances, forbidden as it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with the Danube between, or the Alps between.

It lacks also negatives worth having; making shift with half-hearted particles or the grotesquely insufficient _peu_. _Peu_ is the only negative for some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile we have our profound and powerful particle, in our ‘undone’, ‘unloved’ ‘unforgiven’, the ‘un’ that summons in order that it may banish, and keeps the living word present to hear sentence and denial, showing the word ‘unloved’ to be not less than archangel ruined.

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AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Renumbered footnotes. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.