The Secret Life. Elizabeth Bisland

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СКАЧАТЬ scientists. They got at essential truths by instinct and revealed their knowledge by beautiful suggestion rather than by exact analysis. The dry-as-dusts fail even yet to see that their marbles and legends are as valuable in the study of life as German theses.

      "The Sonnets from the Portuguese" give me the unwholesome, uncomfortable sense that one gets from those unlucky feminine men and masculine women. They mingle in a disagreeable fashion the pride and reserve of the woman who receives worship and the abandon and aggressiveness of the man who sues.

      One wonders why women cannot write poetry? – or rather, to speak with more exactness – are never poets. Once or twice in their lives, perhaps, they may speak with sacred fire, but they are never, in the full meaning of the word, poets. They cannot rise out of themselves.

      Gosse says of Mrs. Browning: "She was not striving to produce an effect; she was trying with all the effort of which her spirit was capable to say exactly what was in her heart."

      There is the whole secret of the feminine failure in art. It always degenerates into an attempt to express, not humanity, but the individual woman. Woman is inevitably personal. She still sits alone at the door of her wigwam. Of humanity, she is ignorant, and to it is, moreover, indifferent.

      Mrs. Browning was only once shaken out of herself – when she wrote that fine plaint "De Profundis" – voicing the griefs of the many in telling of her own. After all, a portrait of one's self only is not art, or is art in its most limited form. Aurora Leigh and all the rest are simply Elizabeth Barrett masking under other names. However much the hand may resemble Esau's, the voice is always the voice of Jacob.

      Byron had these same feminine limitations – "dressing up" (as the children say) as a Pirate, a Turk, or the like, and reciting a rhymed Baedeker for the benefit of the untravelled; but whether Pirate or Giaour, always unmistakably Byron.

      What the women with poetic gifts can do is to translate delightfully. Mrs. Browning's translations of Heine are quite the best in existence. Emma Lazarus made an English version of "Une Nuit de Mai" that is almost more delightful than the original. She might have enriched our treasury of verse with priceless transferences; instead of which she wasted her gifts upon unimportant "expressions of herself."

      November 20.

      Two Siegfrieds

      A – says there is no definite, abstract standard of beauty or perfection.

      We were talking of Jean de Reszke's Siegfried. A – was completely satisfied with it. I explained that he was so only because he had not seen Alvary in the part. A – was sure that even if he had done so de Reszke might still be best to his taste; asserting again that there was no ideal good in art, but only preference. Of course he does say this for the very reason that I advanced – because he had not seen Alvary.

      Poor beautiful young creature! He died recently in Germany in horrible, useless, ridiculous pain. Wagner, I am sure, would have thought him the ideal Siegfried, for he never made vocal gymnastics a fetish, but demanded satisfaction for the eye as much as for the ear.

      Alvary's Siegfried was the very embodiment of splendid, golden, joyous youth. Balmung beaten into shape, he sprang from the forge, whirling it and laughing at its glitter as an ecstatic child might. The splitting of the anvil was the mere sudden caprice of youthful bravado and mischief. He looked about for an instant to find something on which to test his new toy, and struck the iron in half as a boy would snip off the head of a daisy with his new whip. All his movements had the unpremeditatedness of youth.

      Drunk with the struggle and the triumph of his contest with the dragon, he killed Mime more to sate this new lust of power than to mete out justice or due punishment. He threw himself, sweating with exertion, and swelling with a new realization of his manhood, upon the grasses by the stream, and as the breezes cooled his body and spirit, and the soft peace of the green world stole upon him, romance woke in his face and voice: the rough uncouthness of boyhood fell away like a discarded garment.

      Who that once saw and heard it can ever forget those fresh tones or that slim-waisted boy wandering away into the sunlit forest, his beautiful dreaming face lifted yearningly to the thrilling bird voice that sang of love?.. Youth seeking passion – the sleeping woman ringed with fire.

      Ah me! – all our hearts ached after him; after our own splendid moment.

      It is useless to say that this is not absolute beauty. It is impossible that a heavy-footed tenor (whose belt would have served for a saddle girth) with a square Sclav head and pendulous cheeks can be equalized to the other by individual taste. Such taste is simply bad.

      January 6.

      A Door Ajar

      I have been reading Pater's "Greek Studies"; a volume which an amiable friend presented to me as a Christmas gift.

      It affects me physically as well as mentally. I must lay the book down now and then, because I find my heart beats and my temples grow moist. It is as if its covers were doors opening into the other world – that world that is always just beyond one.

      I don't know whether it is a common experience, but from my earliest childhood I have always had a sort of belief that if one stooped very low, held one's breath, and made a bold spring, one would break through and under the barrier, and be There!

      Or one might go very suddenly around a corner and be There. Always there was the sensation that it was lying just beyond, just outside of one's self, and that only a certain heaviness of the flesh, a certain lack of concentration of attention, prevented one's participation in it.

      Twice the door almost opened. I sprang in spirit to cross the threshold, and there was – nothing. The door was slammed in my face, but I never forgot that I had nearly got through. It was like death. As if one's brain and heart had suddenly grown vast and vapourized. Pater's book rouses some echo of those sensations.

      I can't define what the other life is. It is all around me. I feel it in the water when I swim – a sentiency. If I could only look close enough into the shifting depths, I should see – a hand clasped quickly enough would grasp – what always just evades.

      I feel it around me, breathing and watching in the woods. It is what I cannot quite catch in the talk of the birds. It is what the animals say with their eyes.

      The Greeks understood it. They called it Pan, and Cybele, and Dionysus, or dryads in the woods, or nymphs in the fountain, but those were only terms by which they tried to express the inexpressible. It is so subtle – so intoxicating. It is like love – a reblending with all the elements of nature. One aches and strains toward it, and yet feels a delicious, shuddering reluctance to know.

      January 7.

      At Time of Death

      Oh High Heart of mine,

      Now list to a wonder!

      Thou shalt vent thy great rages

      In lightning and thunder.

      And the force of thy fury, more mighty than they,

      Shall rock mountains, and rip them asunder.

      When thou weepest, oh Heart!

      All thy bitter deploring

      In the white whirling rains

      Shall have anguished outpouring.

      And the salt and the sound of thy grief, like the sea,

      Shake the night with its sullen wild roaring.

      When СКАЧАТЬ