Ceres’ Runaway & Other Essays(逃跑的色拉)

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Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

Ceres' Runaway & Other

Essays

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

CERES' RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a

Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the charming

quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does not exist that

would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the

high places of the city. It is true that there have been the famous

captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover

a less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in

some miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed in

weeding the roadside. They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the

ancient stones--rows of little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper

Tooting; one wonders why. The governors of the city will not succeed in

making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a

thriving commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and

shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of

buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread," says

Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a couple

of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring--not that the

grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, but because

flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessible

places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success and

victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun,

swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and blooms

aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, of the seventeenth, and of

the eighteenth. As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike.

The flagrant flourishing statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment

(and Rome is chiefly the city of the broken pediment) are the opportunities

of this vagrant garden in the air. One certain church, that is full of

attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great stature

and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest summit tiptoe

against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fair middle of Rome

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of accidental marigolds.

Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the Renaissance early and late, the

newer modern, this wild summer finds its account in travertine and tufa,

reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone. "A bird of the air carries the

matter," or the last sea- wind, sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana,

gold and blue, has lodged in a little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat,

wild oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and

cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot catch it.

And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of the agile

fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the place of the fallen

mosaics and coloured tiles of a twelfth-century tower, and in any case

inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet. It actually

casts a flush of green over their city piazza--the wide light-grey pavements

so vast that to keep them weeded would need an army of workers. That

army has not been employed; and grass grows in a small way, but still

beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles. Perhaps a

hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly prompts the civic

government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazza into a square. The

shrub is to take the place not so much of the pavement as of the

importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--and the weed does so

prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes its part, and one

might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears, to see grass

running, overhead and underfoot, through the "third" (which is in truth the

fourth) Rome.

When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf; it is

full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer scents throng

each other, close and warm, than these from a little hand-space of the grass

one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine or the Alban

hills. Moreover, under the name I will take leave to include lettuce as it

grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican.

That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house

upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious

and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window on a ledge to the

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham Palace has

nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot well think of little

cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any parapet it may have round a

corner.

Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness, a

suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the tilling. Wildish

peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which seems to have

disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his

manifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than half-way

from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent of

the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost--these are all

Italian things of savage savour and simplicity. The most cultivated of all

countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but something better, as

her city is yet not a town but something better, and her wilderness

something better than a desert. In all the three there is a trace of the little

flying heels of the runaway.

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

A VANQUISHED MAN

Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event, until

1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as he

wished, but by Tom Taylor. Turning over these familiar and famous

volumes, often read, I wonder once more how any editor was bold to "take

upon himself the mystery of things" in the case of Haydon, and to assign

to that venial moral fault or this the ill-fortune and defeat that beset him,

with hardly a pause for the renewal of the resistance of his admirable

courage.

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowly

and lofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself to answer

to Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its reproach, to bear

its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is all his history. There was

no fault of the intellect in his apprehension of the thing he thought to stand

possessed of. He conceived it aright, and he was just in his rebuke of a

world so dull and trivial before the art for which he died. He esteemed it

aright, except when he deemed it his.

His editor, thinking himself to be summoned to justify the

chastisement, the destruction, the whole retribution of such a career, looks

here and there for the sins of Haydon; the search is rewarded with the

discovery of faults such as every man and woman entrusts to the common

generosity, the general consciousness. It is a pity to see any man conning

such offences by heart, and setting them clear in an editorial judgement

because he thinks himself to hold a trust, by virtue of his biographical

office, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but

satisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever must be with

him who yields to--," or whatever else may be the manner of ratifying the

sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon, we hear, omitted to ask

advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his course thereby unless it pleased

him. Haydon was self-willed; he had a wild vanity, and he hoped he

could persuade all the powers that include the powers of man to prosper

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

the work of which he himself was sure. He did not wait upon the

judgement of the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world?

He was foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when

there was a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the

possession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake. There he

was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, the first,

the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle blow that sent him on his career

so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the mere course and action

of life must ruin him--this judgement, in art, directed him in the decision

of the most momentous of all public questions. Haydon admired, wrote,

protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it seems, we owe our

perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which are the fragments

of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon trusted himself with the

trust that worked his own destruction. Into the presence especially of those

seated figures, commonly called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts for

sentence. He lent an effectual hand to the setting-up of that Tribunal of

headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused,

neglected, forgot him--and by chance-medley was right, was right!-- had

no possible authority for anything that it did against him, and that he might

have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover, that he was

mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battle by this ironic

wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Houses of

Parliament with fresco, he was not one. This affront he took at the hands

of men who had no real distinctions in their gift. He might well have had,

by mere chance, some great companion with whom to share that rejection.

The unfortunate man had no such fortuitous fellowship at hand. How

strange, the solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst, and capable of

making common cause indomitably with the good, had there been any

such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none. There were ranged the unjust judges with their

blunders all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and there was

no artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better than their

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned, and a

man besides through whose heart the public reproach was able to cut

keenly.

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon? It has always

seemed to me that he was not without greatness--yet he was always

without dignity--in those most cruel passages of his life, such as that of his

defeat, towards the close of his war, by the show of a dwarf, to which all

London thronged, led by Royal example, while the exhibition of his

picture was deserted. He was not betrayed by anger at this end of hopes

and labours in which all that a man lives for had been pledged. Nay, he

succeeded in bearing what a more inward man would have taken more

hardly. He was able to say in his loud voice, in reproach to the world,

what another would have barred within: one of his great pictures was in

a cellar, another in an attic, another at the pawnbroker's, another in a

grocer's shop, another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames and

colours and the rent were unpaid. Some solace he even found in stating a

few of these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic visitor to

London, interested in the condition of the arts. Well, who shall live

without support? A man finds it where he can.

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us some

other little thing--I think it is inaccuracy. Poor Haydon says in one

phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in another soon

following that the money given or lent to him had been insufficient to pay

them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions, after-thoughts,

or other accidents to account for such a slip. His editor says the

discrepancy is "characteristic," but I protest I cannot find another like it

among those melancholy pages. If something graver could but be sifted

out from all these journals and letters of frank confession, by the explainer!

Here, then, is the last and least: Haydon was servile in his address to

"men of rank." But his servility seems to be very much in the fashion of

his day--nothing grosser; and the men who set the fashion had not to shape

their style to Haydon's perpetual purpose, which was to ask for

commissions or for money.

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this exercise

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

of historical morality, until a man in flourishing London is not afraid to

assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there is not a watering place

upon our coasts but is securely aware of merited misfortune on the

Adriatic.

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils, and

never a shilling in pay for teaching them. He painted a good thing--the

head of his Lazarus. He had no fault of theory: what fault of theory can

a man commit who stands, as he did, by "Nature and the Greeks"? In

theory he soon outgrew the Italians then most admired; he had an honest

mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to be

gained, the impossible pardon--pardon for that first and last mistake--the

mistake as to his own powers. If to pardon means to dispense from

consequence, how should this be pardoned? Art would cease to be itself,

by such an amnesty.

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

A NORTHERN FANCY

"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat

Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty

answer to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like a

madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a madman,

but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.'" Nevertheless, the difficult

song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in English poetry

throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet lately set that

untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against the

crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made

the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy--may

have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and

this carol of liberty, to be held so dear. "I heard a maid in Bedlam," runs

the old song. High and low the poets tried for that note, and the singer

was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love. Except for the

temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now

deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays

with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe (and this,

too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have found his

story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met elsewhere than in

England this solitary and detached poetry of the treble note astray.

At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast

Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high note, so

delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of words might yet,

indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed at gilded

butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the strange health of

an emancipated brain as to wear out

Packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon.

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry

and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid called

Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays

Barbara.

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona

remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs of

the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing

more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have died for

love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this poem and

who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it, it was

a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in Modern Painters, where this

grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. It is the

mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara died") who

has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of the insane.

Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam

entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could

endure to lose "the bliss, but not the place." (And although this dramatic

"Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except to be

scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought.) It is

nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of

English poets with such a wild recurrence. The Englishman of the far

past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill- lighted winters, and the intricate life

and customs of the little town, must have been generally a home-keeper.

No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But Tom-a-

Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his

horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free

to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy of the

villager followed him out to the heath on a journey that had no law. Was

it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the swinging song: "From

the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it was one who wrote like a

madman and not like a fool.

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English

Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they had a

name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow,

Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came the

"Abram men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to the fairs

and wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed

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Ceres'Runaway&OtherEssays1Ceres'Runaway&OtherEssaysCeres'Runaway&OtherEssays2CERES'RUNAWAYOnecanhardlybedullpossessingthepleasantimaginarypictureofaMunicipalityhotinchaseofawildcrop--atleastwhilethecharmingquarryescapes,asitdoesinRome.TheMunicipalitydoesnotexistthatwouldbenimbleenoughtoovertaketheRo...

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