"Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know."
He smiled.
"You are smiling because you think that a woman's answer? So it is, Mr. Money, and I am afraid it isn't true; but I really didn't think of what I was saying. Idoknow why I don't care much about Keeton."
"Yes, yes; well, I dare say you do. But to return, as the books say—do you know a Mr. Augustus Sheppard?"
She could not help coloring slightly. "Yes, I know him," and a faint smile broke over her face in spite of herself.
"Is he strong in Keeton?"
"Strong?"
"Well liked, respectable, a likely kind of man to get good Conservative support if he stood for Keeton? You don't know, perhaps?"
"Yes, I think I do know. I believe he wishes to get into Parliament, and I am sure he is thought highly of. He is a very good man—a man of very high character," she added emphatically, anxious to repair the mental wrong doing of thinking him ridiculous and tiresome.
Just at this moment Mr. Heron rose to take his leave, and Mr. Money left the room with him, so that the conversation with Miss Grey was broken off. Then Lucy came to Nola again, and Nola was surrounded by the three women, who began to lay out various schemes for seeing her often and making London pleasant to her. Much as our lonely heroine loved her loneliness, she was greatly touched by their spontaneous kindness, but she was alarmed by it too.
A card was brought to Mrs. Money, who passed it on to Lucy.
"Oh, how delightful!" Lucy exclaimed. "So glad he has come, mamma. Nola, dear, a poet—a real poet!"
But Nola would not prolong her visit that day even for a poet. A very handsome, tall, dark-haired man, who at a distance seemed boyishly young, and when near looked worn and not very young, was shown in. For the moment or two that she could see him, Minola thought she had never seen so self-conceited and affected a creature. She did not hear his name nor a word he said, but his splendid, dark eyes, deeply set in hollows, took in every outline of her face and form. She thought him the poet of a schoolgirl's romance made to order.
Minola tore herself from the clinging embraces of Lucy, with less difficulty, perhaps, because of the poet's arrival, to whose society Lucy was clearly anxious to hasten back. It so happened that Mr. Money had kept Mr. Heron for a few minutes in talk, and the result was that exactly as Miss Grey reached the door Mr. Heron arrived there too. They both came out together, and in a moment they were in the gray atmosphere, dun lines of houses, and twinkling gaslights of Victoria street. Minola would much rather have been there alone.
Victor Heron, however, was full of the antique ideas of man's chivalrous duty and woman's sweet dependence, which still lingered in the out-of-the-way colony where he had spent so much of his time. Also, it must be owned that he had not yet quite got rid of the sense of responsibility and universal dictatorship belonging to the chief man in a petty commonwealth. For some time after his return to London he could hardly see an omnibus horse fall in the street without thinking it was an occasion which called for some intervention on his part. Therefore, when Miss Grey and he stood in the street together Mr. Heron at once assumed that the young woman must, as a matter of course, require his escort and protection.
He calmly took his place at her side. Miss Grey was a little surprised, but said nothing, and they went on.
"Do you live far from this, Miss Money?" he began.
"I am not Miss Money. My name is Grey."
"Of course, yes—I beg your pardon for the mistake. It was only a mistake of the tongue, for I knew very well that you were not Miss Money."
"Thank you."
"And your first name is so very pretty and peculiar that I could not have easily forgotten it."
"I am greatly obliged to my godfathers and godmothers."
"Did you say that you lived in this quarter, Miss Grey?"
"No—I did not make any answer; I had not time."
"I hope you do not live very near," the gallant Heron observed.
"Why do you hope that?" Miss Grey said, turning her eyes upon him with an air of cold resolution, which would probably have proved very trying to a less sincere maker of compliments, even though a far more dexterous person than Mr. Heron.
"Of course, because I should have the less of your company."
"But there is no need of your coming out of your way for me. I don't require any escort, Mr. Heron."
"I couldn't think of letting a lady walk home by herself. That would seem very strange to me. Perhaps you think me old-fashioned or colonial?"
"I have heard that you are from the colonies. In London people have not time to keep up all these pretty forms and ceremonies. We don't any longer pretend to think that a girl needs to be defended against giants, or robbers, or mad bulls, when crossing two or three streets in open day."
"Well, it is hardly open day now; it is almost quite dark."
"The lamps are lighted," Miss Gray observed.
"Yes, if you call that being lighted! You have such bad gas in London. Why does not somebody stir up people here, and put things to rights? You seem to me the most patient people in all the world. I wish they would give me the ruling of this place for about a twelvemonth."
"I wish they would."
"Do you?" and he looked at her with a glance of genuine gratitude in his dark eyes, for he thought she meant to express her entire confidence in his governing power, and her wish to see him at the head of affairs. Miss Grey, however, only meant that if he were engaged in directing the municipal government of London he probably would be rather too busy to walk with her.
"Yes," he went on, "you should soon see a change. For instance"—they were now at the end of Victoria street, near the Abbey—"I would begin by having a great broad street, like this, running right up from here to the British Museum. You know where the British Museum is, of course?"
"Yes; I live near it."
"Do you really? I am so glad to hear that. I have been there lately very often. How happy you Londoners are to have such glorious places. In that reading-room I felt inclined to bless England."
Miss Grey was now particularly sorry that she had said anything about her place of residence. Still it did not seem as if much would have been gained by any reticence unless she could actually dismiss her companion peremptorily. Mr. Heron was evidently quite resolved to be her escort all the way along. He was clearly under the impression that he was making himself very agreeable. The good-natured youth believed he was doing quite the right thing, and meant it all for the very best, and therefore could not suppose that any nice girl could fail to accept his attendance in a kindly spirit. That Miss Grey must be a nice girl he was perfectly certain, for he had met her at Mr. Money's, and Money was evidently a fine fellow—a very fine fellow. Miss Grey was very handsome too, but that did not count for very much with Heron. At least he would have made himself just as readily, under the circumstances, the escort of little Miss Blanchet.
So he talked on about various things—the Moneys, and what charming people they were! the British Museum, what a noble institution! the National Gallery, how hideous the building!—why on earth didn't anybody do something?—the glorious destiny of England—the utter imbecility of the English Government.
It was not always quite easy to keep up with his talk, for the streets were crowded and noisy, and Mr. Heron talked right on through every interruption. When they came to crossings where the perplexed currents and counter-currents of traffic on wheels would have made a nervous person shudder, Mr. Heron coolly took Miss Grey's hand and conducted her in and out, talking all the while as if they were crossing a ball-room floor. Minola made it a point of honor not to hesitate, or start, or show that she had nerves. But when he began to run into politics he always pulled himself up, for he politely remembered that young ladies did not care about politics, and so he tried to find some prettier subject to talk about. Miss Grey understood this perfectly well, and was amused and contemptuous.
"I suppose this man must be a person of some brains and sense," she thought. "He was in command of something somewhere, and I suppose even the Government he calls so imbecile would not have put him there if he were a downright fool. But because he talks to a woman, he feels bound only to talk of trivial things."
At last the walk came to an end. "Ah, I beg pardon. You live here," Mr. Heron said. "May I have the honor of calling on your family? I sometimes come to the Museum, and if I might call, I should be delighted to make their acquaintance."
"Thank you," Miss Grey said coldly. "I have no family. My father and mother are dead."
"Oh, I am so sorry! I wish I had not asked such a question." He looked really distressed, and the expression of his eyes had for the first time a pleasing, softening effect upon Miss Grey.
"We lodge here all alone—a lady—an old friend of mine—and I. We have no acquaintances, unless Lucy Money's family may be called so. We read and study a great deal, and don't go out, and don't see any one."
"I can quite understand," Mr. Heron answered with grave sympathy. "Of course you don't care to be intruded on by visitors. I thank you for having allowed me the pleasure of accompanying you so far."
He spoke in tones much more deferential than before, for he assumed that the young lady was lonely and poor. There was something in his manner, in his eyes, in his grave, respectful voice, which conveyed to Minola the idea of genuine sympathy, and brought to her, the object of it, a new conviction that she really was isolated and friendless, and the springs of her emotions were touched in a moment, and tears flashed in her eyes. Perhaps Mr. Heron saw them, and felt that he ought not to see them, for he raised his hat and instantly left her.
Minola lingered for a moment on the doorstep, in order that she might recover her expression of cheerfulness before meeting the eyes of Miss Blanchet. But that little lady had seen her coming to the door, and seen and marvelled at her escort, and now ran herself and opened the door to receive her.
"My dear Minola, do tell me who that handsome young man was! What lovely dark eyes he had! Where did you meet him? Is he young Mr. Money?"
The poetess's susceptible bosom still thrilled and throbbed at the sight, or even the thought, of a handsome young man. She could not understand how anybody on earth could avoid liking handsome young men. But in this case a certain doubt and dissatisfaction suddenly dissolved away into her instinctive gratification at the sight of Minola's escort. A handsome and young Mr. Money might prove an inconvenient visitor just at present.
Minola briefly told her when they were safe in their room. Miss Blanchet was relieved to find that he was not a young Mr. Money, for a young Mr. Money, if there were one, would doubtless be rich.
"Isn't he wonderfully handsome! Such a smile!"
"I hardly know," Minola said distressedly; "perhaps he is. I really didn't notice. He goes to the Museum, and I must exile myself from the place for evermore, or I shall be always meeting him, and be forced to listen politely to talk about nothing. Mary Blanchet, our days of freedom are gone! We are getting to know people. I foresaw it. What shall we do? We must find some other lodgings ever so far away."
"Do you like Miss Money, dear?" Mary Blanchet asked timidly.
"Lucy? Oh, yes, very much. But there is Mr. Money; and they are going to be terribly kind to us; and they have all manner of friends; and what is to become of my independence? Mary Blanchet, I willnotbear it! Iwillbe independent!"
"I have news for you, dear," Miss Blanchet said.
"If it please the destinies, not news of any more friends! Why, we shall be like the hare in Gay's fable if we go on in this way."
"Not of any more friends, darling, but of one friend. My brother has been here."
"Oh!"
"Yes; and he is longing to see you."
Minola sincerely wished she could say that she was longing to see him. But she could not say it, even to please her friend and comrade.
"You don't want to see him," said Mary Blanchet in piteous reproach.
"But you do, dear," Miss Grey said; "and I shall like to see any one, be sure, who brightens your life."
This was said with full sincerity, although at the very moment the whimsical thought passed through her, "We only want Mr. Augustus Sheppard now to complete our social happiness."
Minola's mind was a good deal disturbed by the various little events of the day, the incidents and consequences of her first visit in London. She began to see with much perplexity and disappointment that her life of lonely independence was likely to be compromised. She was not sure that she could much like the Moneys, and yet she felt that they were disposed and determined to be very kind to her. There was something ridiculous and painful in the fact that Mr. Augustus Sheppard's name was thrust upon her almost at the first moment of her crossing for the first time a strange threshold in London; then there was Mary Blanchet's brother turning up; and Mary Blanchet herself was evidently falling off from the high design of lonely independence. Again, there was Mr. Heron, who now knew where she lived, and who often went to the British Museum, and who might cross her path at any hour. Sweet, lonely freedom, happy carelessness of action, farewell!
Mr. Heron was especially a trouble to Minola. The kindly, grave expression on his face when he heard of her living alone declared, as nearly as any words could do, that he considered her an object of pity. Was she an object of pity? Was that the light in which any one could look at her superb project of playing at a lifelong holiday? And if people chose to look at it so, what did that matter to her? Are women, then, the slaves of the opinion of people all around them? "They are," Minola said to herself in scorn and melancholy—"they are; we are. I am shaken to the very soul, because a young man, for whose opinion on any other subject I should not care anything, chooses to look at me with pity!"
The night was melancholy. When the outer world was shut out, and the gas was lighted, and the two women sat down to work and talk, nothing seemed to Minola quite as it had been. The evident happiness and passing high spirits of the little poetess oppressed her. Mary Blanchet was so glad to be making acquaintances, and to have some prospect of seeing the inside of a London home. Then Minola's kindlier nature returned to her, and she thought of Mary's delight at seeing her brother, and how unkind it would be if she, Minola, did not try to enter into her feelings. Her mind went back to her own brother, to their dear early companionship, when nothing seemed more natural and more certain than that they two should walk the world arm-in-arm. Now all that had come to an end—faded away somehow; and he had gone into the world on his own account, and made other ties, and forgotten her. But if he were even now to come back, if she were to hear in the street the sound of the peculiar whistle with which he always announced his coming to her—oh, how, in spite of all his forgetfulness and her anger, she would run to him and throw her arms around his neck! Why should not Mary Blanchet love her brother, and gladden when he came?
"What is your brother like, Mary, dear?" she said gently, anxious to propitiate by voluntarily entering on the topic dearest to her friend.
"Oh, very handsome—very, very handsome!"
Miss Grey smiled in spite of herself.
"Now, Minola, I know what you are smiling at; you think it is my sisterly nonsense, and all that; but wait until you see."
"I'll wait," Minola said.
Miss Grey did not go out the next day as usual, although it was one of the soft, amber-gray, autumnal days that she loved, and the Regent's Park would have looked beautiful. She remained nearly all the morning in her own room, and avoided even Mary Blanchet. Some singular change had taken place within her, for which she could not account, otherwise than by assuming that it was begotten of the fear that she would be drawn, willingly or unwillingly, into uncongenial companionship, and must renounce her liberty. She was forced into a strange, painful, self-questioning mood. Was the whole fabric of her self-appointed happiness and independence only a dream, or, worse than a dream, an error? So soon to doubt the value and the virtue of the emancipation she had prayed for and planned for during years? Not often, perhaps, has a warm-hearted, fanciful, and spirited girl been pressed down by such peculiar relationship as hers at Keeton lately; a twice removed stepfather and stepmother, absolutely uncongenial with her, causing her soul and her youth to congeal amid dull repression. What wonder that to her all happiness seemed to consist in mere freedom and unrestricted self-development? And now—so soon—why does she begin to doubt the reality, the fulfilment of her happiness? Only because an impulsive and kindly young man, whom she saw for the first time, looked pityingly at her. This, she said to herself, is what our self-reliance and our emancipation come to after all.
It was a positive relief to her, after a futile hour or so of such questioning, when Mary Blanchet ran up stairs, and with beaming eyes begged that Minola would come and see her brother. "He is longing to see you—and you will like him—oh, you will like him, Minola dearest?" she said beseechingly.
Miss Gray went down stairs straightway, without stopping to give one touch to her hair, or one glance at the glass. The little poetess was waiting a moment, with an involuntary look toward the dressing table, as if Miss Grey must needs have some business there before she descended, but Miss Grey thought nothing of the kind, and they went down stairs together.
Minola expected, she could not tell why, to see a small and withered man in Mary Blanchet's brother. When they were entering the drawing-room, he was looking out of the window, and had his back turned, and she was surprised to see that he was decidedly tall. When he turned around she saw not only that he was handsome, but that she had recognized the fact of his being handsome before. For he was unmistakably the ideal poet of schoolgirls whom she had met at Mr. Money's house the day before.
The knowledge produced a sort of embarrassment to begin with. Minola was about to throw her soul into the sacrifice, and greet her friend's brother with the utmost cordiality. But she had pictured to herself a sort of Mary Blanchet in trousers, a gentle, old-fashioned, timid person, whom, perhaps, the outer world was apt to misprize, if not even to snub, and whom therefore it became her, Minola Grey, as an enemy and outlaw of the common world, to receive with double consideration. But this brilliant, self-conceited, affected, oppressively handsome young man, on whom she had seen Lucy Money and her mother hanging devotedly, was quite another sort of person. His presence seemed to overcharge the room; the scene became all compound of tall, bending form and dark eyes.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Blanchet," Miss Grey began, determined not to be put out by any self-conceited poet and ideal of schoolgirls. "I must be glad to see you, because you are Mary's brother."
"You ought rather to be not glad to see me for that reason," he said, with a deprecating bow and a slight shrug of the shoulders, "for I have been a very neglectful brother to Mary."
"So I have heard," Miss Grey said, "but not from Mary. She always defended you. But I have seen you before, Mr. Blanchet, have I not?"
"At Mrs. Money's yesterday? Oh, yes; I only saw you, Miss Grey. I went there to see you, and only in the most literal way got what I wanted."
"But, Herbert, you never told me that you were going, or that you knew Mrs. Money," his sister interposed.
"No, dear; that was an innocent deceit on my part. You told me that Miss Grey had gone there, and as I knew the Moneys I hurried away there without telling you. I wanted to know what you were like, Miss Grey, before seeing my sister again. I hope you are not angry? She is so devoted to you that she painted you in colors the most bewitching; but I was afraid her friendship was carrying her away, and I wanted to see for myself when she was not present."
Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this beginning particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should never be able to like Mary Blanchet's brother. "Oh, why do women have brothers?" she asked herself. There seemed something dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's proceeding despite the frank completeness of his confession.
"Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice; didn't do her common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed.
"If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, "I would say that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the kind and generous things I have heard of."
"Yes; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with tears of gratefulness blinking in her eyes; "and we'll not say a word more about it, Minola; not a word, indeed, dear." And she put a deprecating little hand upon Minola's arm.
Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls.
"You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you."
"If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.
"But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly.
"Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a living. I liveonsuch stuff as that. I liveforArt."
"It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her thin, tiny hands together.
Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval.
"My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know."
"I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly.
"I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that. Doyoulove your neighbor, Miss Grey?"
"I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it, only that I don't care for people."
Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display. Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured her own.
Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces.
"The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh, yes!"
"There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself."
"For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do some good for your fellow creatures?"
"But I don't want to do any good to my fellow creatures. I don't care about my fellow creatures, and I don't even admit that they are my fellow creatures, those men and those women too that one sees about. Why should the common possession of two legs make us fellow creatures with every man, more than with every bird? No, I don't love the human race at all."
"This is nonsense, Minola; you won't believe a word of it," the little poetess eagerly said, divided between admiration and alarm.
"You good, little, innocent dear, is it not perfectly true? What did I ever do for you, let me ask? There, Miss Grey, you see as kind an elder sister as ever lived. I remember her a perfect mother to me. I dare say I should have been dead thirty years ago but for her, though whether I ought to thank her for keeping me alive is another thing. Anyhow, what was my way of showing my gratitude? As soon as I could shake myself free, I rambled about the world, a very vagrant, and never took any thought of her. We are all the same, Miss Grey, believe me—we men."
"I can well believe it," Miss Grey said.
"Of course you can. In all our dealings with you women we are just the same. Our sisters and mothers take trouble without end for us, and cry their eyes out for us, and we—what do we care? I am not worse than my neighbors. But if you ask me, do I admire my fellow man, I answer frankly, no. Not I. What should I admire him for?"
"One must live for something," the poetess pleaded, much perplexed in her heart as to what Miss Grey's opinion might be about all this.
"Of course one must live for art; for music and poetry, and colors and decoration."
"And Nature?" Mary Blanchet gently insinuated.
"Nature—no! Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy poets. We only affect to admire Nature because people think we can't be good if we don't. No one really cares about great cauliflower suns, and startling contrasts of blazing purple and emerald green. There is nothing really beautiful in Nature except her decay; her rank weeds, and dank grasses, and funereal evening glooms."
While he talked this way he was seated on the piano stool, with his face turned away from the piano, on whose keys he touched every now and then with a light and seemingly careless hand, bringing out only a faint note that seemed to help the conversation rather than to interrupt it. He was very handsome, Minola could not help thinking, and there was something in his colorless face and deep eyes that seemed congenial with the talk of glooms and decay. Still, true to her first feeling toward all men, Minola was disposed to dislike him, the more especially as he spoke with an air of easy superiority, as one who would imply that he knew how to maintain his place above women in creation.
"I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," she said. "I mean you younger poets," and she emphasized the word "younger" with a certain contemptuous tone, which made it just what it meant to be—"smaller poets."
"Why younger poets?"
"Well, because the elder ones I think really were in love with Nature, and didn't affect anything."
He smiled pityingly.
"No," he said decisively, "we don't care about Nature—our school."
"I am from the country; I don't think I know what your school is."
"We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't endure to be known in the country."
"But fame?" Minola asked—"does fame not go outside the twelve-mile radius?"
"Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't understand us; we don't want fame. What is fame? Vulgarity made immortal."
"Then what do you publish for?"
He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again.
"My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does have a public—or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot——"
"That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified—"that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!"
"My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics."
"Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing rather amused.
"Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it matter whether the Reform bill is carried—is there a Reform bill going on now?—I believe there always is—or what becomes of the Eastern Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man."
"There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love man; I think he is a poor creature at his best."
"So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy in our own way and forgetting him."
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. In that instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into his, and he knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a proud fencer suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. For, as he was speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to herself, "This man, I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has found people cold, and mean, and selfish—asIhave—and he feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him wrong; he is not a fribble or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer." The sympathy which she felt showed itself only too quickly in her very eloquent eyes.
Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his leave, asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would have gladly refused if she could have stood up against the appealing looks of Mary. So she had to grant him the permission, thinking as she gave it that another path of her liberty was closed.
Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's gratification, remained a long time talking with him there.
Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing; softly to herself, that she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal day was already closing in London. Out in the country there would be two hours yet of light before the round, red sun went down behind the sloping fields, with the fresh upturned earth, and the clumps of trees, but here, in West-Central regions of London, the autumn day dies in its youth. The dusk already gathered around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe herself. In any troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to clear her spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday at home—in the place that was called her home—she had committed the not impious fraud of singing her favorite ballads to slow, slow time, that they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her voice and way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive recitative, just the singing to hear in the "gloaming," to draw a few people hushed around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful to lose a single note, and miss the charm of expression. In truth, the charm of it sprang from the fact that the singer sang to express her own emotions, and thus every tone had its reality and its meaning. When women sing for a listening company, they sing conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has taught, or in what they believe to be the manner of some great artist; or they sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression of real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather than a means; a relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing away from poor and personal emotions into ideal regions, where melancholy, if it must be, was always divine; and pain, if it would intrude, was purifying and ennobling. So, while the little poetess talked with her brother in the dusk, at the doorway, with the gas lamps just beginning to light the monotonous street, Minola was singing herself into the pure blue ether, above the fogs, and clouds, and discordant, selfish voices.
She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed—
"Now, do tell me—how do you like my brother?"
To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody.
When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance: "The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been, one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the mill-pool—
A water-rat from off the bankPlunged in the stream.
Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred:
Then leapt a trout. In lazy moodI watch'd the little circles die;They passed into the level flood,And there a vision caught my eye.
Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes, creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations we seem to watch the artist at his work—to enter in some sort into his very consciousness—as we see him manipulating the form or the thought of his verses:
Τὰ δὲ τορνεύει,τὰ δὲκολλομελεῖ,καὶ γνωμοτυπεῖ, κᾀυτονομάζει.
Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems, frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837 to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of any other poet. Tasso'svariæ lectionesare numerous, but they were mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest, but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still: Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which this is not the occasion.
And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort "restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death, 1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed, are slight—the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetictechnique, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to suchvariæ lectionesas may be referred to motives of more general interest.[B]
The first question which we naturally ask about Wordsworth's corrections is this: Were they improvements? My readers will decide for themselves; for my own part, it seems to me that they generally were improvements; that Wordsworth bettered his text three times out of four when he changed it. Nor is this surprising; few admirers of Wordsworth's poetry will deny that there were many passages quite susceptible of amendment in it; for that task there was ample room. But on the other hand, it happened not infrequently, as we might expect, that when the poet returned, in the critical mood, to mend his first form of expression, he marred it instead. In the poem, for instance, beginning, "Strange fits of passion have I known," the second stanza as originally published ran thus:
When she I loved was strong and gay,And like a rose in June,I to her cottage bent my way,Beneath the evening moon.
—Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
The passage stood thus for many years, and was finally altered to read:
When she I loved looked every dayFresh as a rose in June,I to her cottage bent my way,Beneath an evening moon.
Is there not some loss of vividness here? The later reading is perhaps the more graceful, and yet the picture seems to me brighter in the early version. This, too, seems a doubtful improvement; it occurs in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale." Wordsworth wrote at first:
His staff is a sceptre—his gray hairs a crown:Erect as a sunflower he stands, and the streakOf the unfaded rose is expressed on his cheek.
—1815.
In later editions we read:
His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streakOf the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.
Here the last line is bettered; but I, for one, am sorry to lose the sunflower comparison; it is picturesque, and it aptly describes this hearty child of the earth.
Look now at the poem "We are Seven," as it began in the "Lyrical Ballads":
A simple child, dear brother Jim,That lightly draws its breath,And feels its life in every limb—What should it know of death?
It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his place in these lines—dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction because the stanza was written by another hand—Coleridge's—as an introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there, we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.
But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and early Youth"—a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems, and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many times longer than itself:
"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds."
Titles like these are not only fatiguing in the very reading, a preliminary disenchantment, but they are not properly names at all; they are headings, rubrics, captions which do not name. Wordsworth seems to send forth these unlucky children of the muse with a full description of their eyes, hair, and complexion, but forgets to christen them; and I believe that this oversight, though it may not appear a very serious one, has interfered more than a little with the effectiveness of his minor poetry, and consequently with the fame and influence of the poet. For it makes reference to them difficult, almost impossible: how is one to refer to a favorite passage, for instance, in a poem "Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds"? These titles are fit to discourage even the admirers of Wordsworth, and to repel his intending students; nor will they attract any one, for they are formless; they are the abstracts of essays, theprécisof an argument, rather than fit designations for works of poetic art. A considerable number, too, of Wordsworth's minor pieces remain without name, title, or description of any kind whatever. If that desirable thing, a satisfactory edition of his poems, should ever appear, it will be given us by some editor who shall be sensitive to this northern formlessness, and who may venture, perhaps, to improve the state of Wordsworth's titles.
Let me end this digression by noting another singular title, with its emendation. In the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 appeared a poem with this extraordinary caption:
"Anecdote for Fathers, shewing how the art of Lying may be taught."
Now, certainly, Wordsworth did not intend to teach the art of lying, yet nothing can be clearer than his declaration. He failed to see the ludicrous meaning of these words, and it took him thirty years, apparently, to find out what he had said; but he saw it at last, and dropped the explanatory clause of the title, quoting in its place an apt motto from Eusebius; and we now read:
"Anecdote for Fathers.Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges;" and the charming story professes no longer to show how boys may be taught to lie, but to point out the danger of making them lie when you press them to give reasons for their sentiments.
And now, returning to the corrections of text in the descriptive passages, let us note a curious change in the poem already mentioned, "On the Influence of Natural Objects," etc. Wordsworth is describing the pleasures of skating; and these are some of them, according to the passage as originally published in "The Friend":