Part 15

Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple house is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of shadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be offered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in a vase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better than a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop.

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to the mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single; it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen again, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shifts the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of time, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon its importunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that do not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure, while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel.

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the sudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shed by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes the midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and is about to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, with which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room, play the stealthy game of the year.

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a "repeating pattern."

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the walls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or a picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the days.

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day bright enough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The trees show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million molecules.

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded sun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks still and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so many hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished. Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there may be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.

To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darken his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it pluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. What flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of darkness?

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. If he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadow was a message from the sun.

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goes across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and clings.

In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to make a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs is always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high that though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights.

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside by degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows close, complete.

The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have traced wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling and election to the most wifely of all wifehoods--that of a soldier's wife--history has made her countrymen aware. Inasmuch as Colonel Hutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is something more than his biographer--his historian. And she convinces her reader that her Puritan principles kept abreast of her affections. There is no self-abandonment; she is not precipitate; keeps her own footing; wife of a soldier as she is, would not have armed him without her own previous indignation against the enemy. She is a soldier at his orders, but she had warily and freely chosen her captain.

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarred for her use, she relates her own childhood and youth. She was a child such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had eight tutors in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in Latin, albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except her father's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow." She was not companionable. Her many friends were indulged with "babies" (that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces. She exhorted the maids, she owned, "much." But she also heard much of their love stories, and acquired a taste for sonnets.

It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to him, and discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a woman had made it. Another said, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned, later, that he said "two" out of civility (very good civility of a kind that is not now practised) to a lady who chanced to be present; but that he knew well there was but one; and he named her. From her future husband Lucy Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and always will be, praised: "Mr. Hutchinson," she says, "fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of a she-wit, could scarcely believe it was a woman's."

He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasured conscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her young friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his "fine, thick-set head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor first saw her, she was "not ugly in a careless riding-habit." As for him, "in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one." He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that "the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her."

The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our own time uses. One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of gesture of language; this is where she praises her husband's "handsome management of love." {1} She thus prefaces her description of her honoured lord: "If my treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever I committed to its trust--." She boasts of her country in lofty phrase: "God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common of the world." And again of her husband: "It will be as hard to say which was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator of his soul."

She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their "admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent good-nature as would have thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was not his time to love." In her widowhood she remembered that she had been commanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing."

She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the cause. The fevers, "little less than plagues," that were common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is "the devil's exquisite solicitor." All Royalists are of "the wicked faction." She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence of kindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months. A poison of strange operation! "We must leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God." When he was near death, she adds, "a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked him how he did. He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith."

On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with dignity. Her power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and public interests of her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisite diction, are such as may well make a reader ask how and why the literature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became "feminine" in the estimation of a later age; that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the estimation of men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us marvel at the downfall following--at Goldsmith's invention of the women of "The Vicar or Wakefield" in one age, and at Thackeray's invention of the women of "Esmond" in another.

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears an abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world--in her day an implicit feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of man's life." "He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys." And she describes a dream whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an England was hers! And what an English! A memorable vintage of our literature and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who--as she did--gathered it in.

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} All we have to call her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes means Stella alone," says one of many editors. "The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they were penned." Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And the editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing from the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist--he finds her irksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has but lately called her a "chaperon." A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respect been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD," "saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls," "brats," "huzzies both," "impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and delights," "dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars" (which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD," and so forth in a hundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but obviously not because of their own complaining. Swift called them so because they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved, conscious every day of the price, which is death.