Volume 5 — Original. Adelaide Anne Procter.
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Next to imagination, genius is, perhaps, the faculty of the human mind about which we have had the most instructiveness and the least instruction. Yet every one who knows anything of it at all knows the two great types of genius that appear in history—extremes between which lie all minds of mark. One is the familiar form that the word itself at once suggests—the regular fashion, as it were, of being exceptional. This is the erratic, fitful, uncontrolled, keen, brilliant, sensitive, sympathetic, eccentric character, who wears regardless collars, fights his publisher on less than no provocation, eats opium if he chooses, and sometimes chooses—or, if not opium, some other stimulant—has whims and moods and irritabilities, and the biggest heart, and the best tongue, and the most heedless head, with the most brilliant oddities in it, wherever he goes—a totally lopsided organism, where the soul cannot be kept from wearing its way through the body, and where a few faculties, preternaturally developed, domineer over a warped and stunted system, to the ultimate ruin of the whole man.
The other kind, calm, clear, broad, poised, equable, powerful, seems exactly the opposite of the first type. The strength of the one is in balance, the force of the other in overbalance. Yet the difference is only that the man of balance is symmetrically developed; it is the difference between the autumn maturity of the full-grown fruit and the hectic ripeness, with the worm at the core, of the August windfall.
Of these two types, the first is vastly the more frequent, the other the higher in history. The reason is simply this, that a moderate degree of uniform development gives neither more nor less than mediocrity, while disproportionate preponderance of the intellect, even where all the faculties are below the average, will reproduce in miniature all the phenomena of the overbalanced kind of genius. Between Byron Don-Juanning it over his gin-and-water, and the brilliant Bohemian who dashes off the cleverest leader of the next day, fresh from the convivial influences of a roystering champagne supper, and the gentle youth who floods the rural poet's corner with heaven-scaling hankerings inspired by green tea, the difference is not in kind, but in degree.
Men of this order are the ones who achieve fame and famine. Their blossoms of promise are bright, their early graves are green on all the paths of human progress. History kindles at their high hopes and deeds, and blushes for the petty failings that suffice to drag them down. Literature, above all, is a very Golgotha, all the ghastlier for its glory, of their self-conscious sensitiveness, their refined self-torture, their blasted lives and miserable deaths. Yet there is hardly one but has his little day, longer or shorter, but with always some little sunshine and flowers of popular favor. Stimulated to their utmost by susceptibility to praise, they are the most brilliant and bizarre in effects, and the most blindly admired. Besides, their eccentricities are an advertisement in themselves, and very often first attract the attention which afterward discovers the powers underneath. The world, on the contrary, finds nothing about the other sort of genius to display any peculiar capabilities—a sort of pleasant self-completeness, it may be, but no salient points and queer angles—and passes on, to gape at the man with half the brains and nothing to balance them. Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous: some one in Elizabeth's reign made a list (is it not D'Israeli who preserves it?) of the best writers of his day, whereon the thirteenth name is that of the successful London manager and decidedly good fellow, William Shakspeare.
In fact, this latter type of genius is not only rare as all well-poised organisms are rare, but seems to evade public appreciation by some hidden inherent law of its nature. It has often happened with men of this order that not only their families—of course, it is the exception, if a man's family ever discover his powers till the rest of the world thunders his fame into their ears—but their daily acquaintance, their most intimate friends, nay, themselves, never suspect their greatness.
But, if such a man of genius is an event of his generation, and, with all a man's opportunities for appreciation, activity, acquaintance, and, above all, women and their ennobling influence, to bring out his best energies, often dies undiscovered, what chance is there for a woman of kindred abilities to struggle into the light of recognition? In literature, men are the severest judges of women possible, except, of course, their own sex. To the best of them the expression "woman of genius" is the mythical relic of some lost tradition as old as Sappho's day, and "women's thought" a contradiction in terms. All their experience teaches them to disbelieve in it utterly. The truth is, most women think very ill in print. The cause lies less in their nature than in their second nature of education. Their thought is beautiful enough—beauty is their mental as their bodily characteristic—but seldom strong, and then its strength is that of the tempered Toledo rather than the shearing Andrea Ferrara. It comes in April gleams from behind cloud after cloud. They lack concentration, terseness, sequence; in a word, training. This breeds, with mainly correct thought, constant loose digressions, diffuseness of expression, and dilution of ideas. (Hence that saddest thing on the earth, wherein women writers so abound, the unexceptionable poem.) It seems as though women wrote as if conversing, forgetting how much of the charm is in themselves and evaporates on the pen. Every reader has noticed how the writings, and, above all, the poems, of really extraordinary women—women that men of mind looked up to—are to us such monuments of apparent mediocrity that we wonder what they found to worship. The most impartial critic's nose inclines involuntarily heavenward the moment a woman comes forward to claim any intellectual place of honor. And genius, the highest quality, man's special prerogative—horror of horrors! All reason says it cannot be; and underneath a subtle male esprit de corps too often adds that it shall not be. Of course, the intruder cannot climb the heights, but to avoid accidents and disappointment she is seldom suffered to try. Such are the difficulties which beset the path of even the most favored female aspirant.
It ought not to surprise us, then, that Adelaide Anne Procter, even had she been the most pushing and irrepressible of blue-stockings, with every vantage-ground of circumstance, was not appreciated as she deserved. But, in addition to the original sin of being a woman, several reasons peculiar to herself concurred to render her, what we think she has been, one of the most underrated writers of her day.
First, she was an Englishwoman. Had she not been, she might never have been anything; but once being something, we do not think it was an utterly inestimable advantage. For, as being English, every one took for granted that she must be a Protestant, and every one was disappointed and provoked to find her a Catholic. Now one of the circumstances which mitigate the glory of being English is that there is very little achromatic criticism in England. As a wise and keen analyst [Footnote 175] complains, each of the reviews has some set of theses nailed to its doors, whose upholding is the first thing, to which all their criticism proper must stand subordinate.
English bigotry, under nineteenth century forms, is to-day as patent, as understood, as calculable a mainspring and motive of public judgment as in Archbishop Laud's era. Miss Procter's chance of any high praise was thus never very great. But appearing as she did on the scene of letters at a time when the Church of England was yet in the full sanctimoniousness of righteous reaction against the dismembering logic of the Puseyites, any good there was in her was very safe from discovery by most of the critics. Had she been a self asserting sectarian, cramming her dogmas, as some of us did their abolitionism, down her readers' throats, she might have been hunted down to fame by the indignant zeal of the saintly star-chamberers of letters, who lead public opinion much as the foam leads the wave. Unfortunately for this opening, Miss Procter was a lady, and such self-assertion the most foreign of traits to her nature. Not loud enough for martyrdom, she was just firmly Catholic enough for misjudgment, or rather for denial of judgment. While the tribunals of criticism could not avoid taking notice of a book by Barry Cornwall's daughter, still, with all the little good and ill the reviewers said of her, they never did her the one essential service they could render, of putting her name where the reading public would see it and pass judgment on her. There is a way of praising that keeps off, and a way of blaming that attracts, the mass of readers.
With the returning tide of ritualism, she has begun to be more appreciated, but it is only a beginning. We are so strongly inclined to think her poems at the outset of a new career in public favor, and we consider that so little justice has been done her in the critical journals of this country, that we cannot help feeling toward them accordingly; and so, in range of our attempted discussion of her merits, and copiousness of citation, we have treated her in all respects precisely as a new author.
For we believe sincerely that the clouds of circumstance and prejudice about Miss Procter's entrance into literary life have obscured from us poetical powers not only of no common order, but of that calm, self-centred kind we have spoken of as rare enough in man, and the feminine counterpart of which is almost unknown in literary history. Her mind is not Shakespeare's, nor Coleridge's, nor Goethe's, but the resistless river and the fountain of the rocks may both be the overflow of the same sunless reservoir in the deep bosom of the mountains. And her poetry is indeed a fountain of the rocks; pure, placid, deep of source, shaded yet sparkling, "making a quiet music all its own;" with no torrent nor show of force, yet musically passing all obstacles, and emerging, clear, bright, and beautiful, in the sunlight beyond. Most varied and versatile in her choice of subjects, she brings to all a poetic insight, a freedom and fancy of expression, a grasp of the topic, and, above all, a strange, noble earnestness, that altogether make up a style whose quiet charm we had rather easily illustrate than elaborately fail in describing.
The key-note of all her writings is thoughtfulness, and withal a peculiar kind of thoroughness of thought such as we have found in no other woman. Mrs. Browning (perhaps we ought to add the new Mrs. Augusta Webster, whose perceptive powers are the theme of the English reviews) is the only one who ever has analyzed nearly so well, and she and all the others seem only incidentally, while Miss Procter is habitually, analytical. Her entire superiority, indeed, is the consequence and corollary of this curious depth of mind. Bold in abstractions, tender in revealings of the heart, ingenious in incident and invention, she is sure to have a well-defined thought at bottom, always suggestive, often philosophic, sometimes profound. The rare combination of entire femininity with this thinking habit is an originality in itself. Very novel and very charming is the effect of seeing together with this strong, clear, searching introspection, all the woman's delicacy of touch.
But the reader is tired of our generalities, and would much rather see for himself how well Miss Procter thinks. So we give him a fair example in the poem called
Incompleteness. Nothing resting in its own completeness Can have power or beauty; but alone Because it leads and tends to further sweetness, Fuller, higher, deeper than its own. Spring's real glory dwells not in the meaning, Gracious though it be, of her blue hours, But is hidden in her tender leaning To the summer's richer wealth of flowers. Dawn is fair because the mists fade slowly Into day, which floods the world with light; Twilight's mystery is so sweet and holy Just because it ends in starry night. Childhood's smiles unconscious graces borrow From strife that in a far-off future lies; And angel glances (veiled now by life's sorrow) Draw our hearts to some beloved eyes. Life is only bright when it proceedeth Toward a truer, deeper life above; Human love is sweetest when it leadeth To a more divine and perfect love. Learn the mystery of progression duly: Do not call each glorious change decay; But know we only hold our treasures truly, When it seems as if they passed away. Nor dare to blame God's gifts for incompleteness; In that want their beauty lies; they roll Toward some infinite depth of love and sweetness, Bearing onward man's reluctant soul.
This poem holds one of the great principles in Miss Procter's very noble theory of life—a theory abundantly developed in her poems. Her cardinal axioms would seem to be three: The great rule of life is progression; its great agent, sorrow; its great fact and end, love. On these pillars she builds, and 'Incompleteness' is one of the most direct statements of one part of her creed. Another fine poem, in thought a kind of companion-piece to this, in which we readily recognize the same underlying thought, is
Beyond. We must not doubt, or fear, or dread that love for life is only given, And that the calm and sainted dead will meet estranged and cold in heaven: Oh! love were poor and vain, indeed, based on so harsh and stern a creed. True that this earth must pass away with all the starry worlds of light, With all the glory of the day, and calmer tenderness of night, For in that radiant home can shine alone the immortal and divine. Earth's lower things—her pride, her fame, her science, learning, wealth, and power, Slow growths that through long ages came, or fruits of some convulsive hour, Whose very memory must decay—heaven is too pure for such as they. They are complete; their work done. So let them sleep in endless rest. Love's life is only here begun, nor is, nor can be, fully blest; It has no room to spread its wings, amid this crowd of meaner things. Just for the very shadow thrown upon its sweetness here below, The cross that it must bear alone, and bloody baptism of woe, Crowned and completed through its pain, we know that it shall rise again. So, if its flame burn pure and bright, here where our air is dark and dense, (And nothing in this world of night lives with a living so intense,) When it shall reach its home at length, how bright its light! how strong its strength! And while the vain weak loves of earth (for such base counterfeits abound) Shall perish with what gave them birth— their graves are green and fresh around— No funeral song shall need to rise for the true love that never dies. If in my heart I now could fear that, risen again, we should not know What was our life of life when here—the hearts we loved so much below I would arise this very day and cast so poor a thing away. But love is no such soulless clod; living, perfected it shall rise, Transfigured in the light, of God, and giving glory to the skies: And that which makes this life so sweet shall render heaven's joy complete.
As a poem, this latter is superior, because it applies beautifully to a beautiful subject the principle which the other merely enunciates. And the style is not less remarkable than the ideas. Can anything be more clearly, calmly right than the thought, more easy, lucid, real than its utterance? And it is not the bald perspicuity, either, of mere logical disquisition, but full of suggestion and spirit; and it does not flag; especially in Beyond there is not a weak line nor lower thought. Now is not all this refreshing after the diffuse grace and dilute sweetness of female poetry in general? It is to the run of it as a copse of May's arbutus to a meadow strewn with buttercups.
Apropos of this superiority, we find another poem which illustrates it even more strongly, because so very many women have fluttered about the same thought. Every femme incomprise—and what poetess does not think she is one? is full of it; why have none of them said it so broadly and well as this?
Unexpressed. Dwells within the soul of every artist More than all his effort can express, And he knows the best remains unaltered, Sighing at what we call his success. Vainly he may strive; he dare not tell us All the sacred mysteries of the skies: Vainly he may strive; the deepest beauty Cannot be unveiled to mortal eyes. And the more devoutly that he listens, And the holier message that is sent, Still the more his soul must struggle vainly, Bowed beneath a noble discontent. No great thinker ever lived and taught you All the wonder that his soul received; No true painter ever set on canvas All the glorious vision he conceived. No musician ever held your spirit Charmed and bound in his melodious chains, But be sure he heard, and strove to render Feeble echoes of celestial strains. No real poet ever wove in numbers All his dream, but the diviner part, Hidden from all the world, spake to him only In the voiceless silence of his heart. So with love; for love and art united Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same: Poor, indeed, would be the love of any Who could find its full and perfect name. Love may strive, but vain is the endeavor All its boundless riches to unfold; Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers Ever in its deepest depths untold. Things of time have voices, speak and perish: Art and love speak, but their words must be Sighings of illimitable forests, Waves of an unfathomable sea.
The positive merit of this—passing the odious business of comparison—is, to our mind, the well-managed amplification of the main thought, and the swell both of sense and sound at the close, which we find a beauty of high order. The last two lines especially seize the melodic principle of the metre, which, beyond almost any other we know, calls for long musical words. Only "voiceless silence" strikes one as tautological to the last degree. Miss Proctor very rarely makes outright mistakes, and she may have seen some subtle sense added by the word "voiceless" that we cannot. All the silences we have ever known were strictly voiceless, and decidedly apt to terminate about the time any voice began.
The next great topic with our poetess is the sweet uses of adversity. She is never weary of celebrating the beauty and benignity of sorrow. In fact, she appears to have a personal friendship for misfortune, as the great elevating and purifying dispensation of earthly existence. Grief, disappointment, death, are to her philosophy but natural incidents, to be expected and met without fear—processes tending to the higher result hereafter. But here is her whole thought, better set forth than we can say it:
Friend Sorrow. Do not cheat thy heart and tell her Grief will pass away, Hope for fairer times in future And forget to-day. Tell her, if you will, that sorrow Need not come in vain, Tell her that the lesson taught her Far outweighs the pain. Cheat her not with the old comfort, "Soon she will forget:" Bitter truth, alas! but matter Rather for regret. Bid her not "Seek other pleasures, Turn to other things:" Rather nurse her caged sorrow Till the captive sings. Rather bid her go forth bravely And the stranger greet, Not as foes with spear and buckler, But as dear friends meet; Bid her with a strong clasp hold her By her dusky wings, Listening for the murmured blessing Sorrow always brings.
This is only one of a large number of poems full of varied exposition of these same views. Some are so ingenious and happy that we can hardly resist quoting them, were it not that, if those were the only qualifications, we should have to cite the major part of her poems. In fact, this conception of sorrow as a hidden blessing is peculiarly strong in all she has written. And yet, while recognizing in tribulation an elevating grace that wins it a welcome from her heart, she fully feels the sadness, the weariness, the poverty and pain of earthly lives. A strong instance of this is the "Cradle Song of the Poor," with its singular, sad refrain:
"Sleep, my darling, thou art weary, God is good, but life is dreary."
And the miseries of the poor have evoked the only bitter lines she ever wrote, which, coming, as they do, the very last in her book, seem almost like an after-addition—the strange strong lines called "Homeless." There is a force in some of the lines that reminds us of Hood:
It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen To that patter of tiny feet! Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, Who whines in the bleak, cold street? Is it one of your silken spaniels Shut out in the snow and the sleet? My dogs sleep warm in their baskets, Safe from the darkness and snow; All the beasts in our Christian England Find pity wherever they go. (Those are only the homeless children Who are wandering to and fro.) Look out in the gusty darkness: I have seen it again and again, That shadow, that flits so slowly Up and down past the window-pane: It is surely some criminal lurking Out there in the frozen rain! Nay, our criminals all are sheltered, They are pitied and taught and fed: That is only a sister-woman, Who has got neither food nor bed: And the Night cries, "Sin to be living;" And the River cries, "Sin to be dead." .....
There is one other piece perhaps even sadder than this when we penetrate its full, stern significance:
The Requital. Loud roared the tempest, fast fell the sleet; A little child-angel passed down the street With trailing pinions and weary feet. The moon was hidden; no stars were bright; So she could not shelter in heaven that night, For the angels' ladders are rays of light. She beat her wings at each window-pane, And pleaded for shelter, but all in vain: "Listen," they said, "to the pelting rain!" She sobbed, as the laughter and mirth grew higher, "Give me rest and shelter beside your fire, And I will give you your heart's desire." The dreamer sat watching his embers gleam, While his heart was floating down hope's bright stream, So he wove her wailing into his dream. The worker toiled on, for his time was brief; The mourner was nursing her own pale grief: They heard not the promise that brought relief. But fiercer the tempest rose than before, When the angel paused at a humble door And asked for shelter and help once more. A weary woman, pale, worn, and thin, With the brand upon her of want and sin, Heard the child-angel and took her in. Took her in gently, and did her best To dry her pinions; and made her rest With tender pity upon her breast. When the eastern morning grew bright and red, Up the first sunbeam the angel fled, Having kissed the woman, and left her—dead.
Human waifs forgotten by all their kind are a sorrowful picture enough, but this of a human heart so desolate, so blank, so seared, so far from all hope or joy in life, that even God its Creator does not deny its supreme wish to die, is inexpressibly dreary. This is worthy to stand beside Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange."
One touch worth noticing is the fiction by which the angel is detained on earth; that "the angels' ladders are rays of light." It strikes us as one of the most ingenious we have ever met, and no less beautiful than happy. The whole structure of the narrative indeed, is admirable; it is difficult to see how the parts could be fitted more nicely. This skill Miss Procter has in an uncommon degree, and all her longer narrative poems exemplify it.
Of course, such thoughts on life as these last verses contain blend naturally with noble thoughts on death. Here, again, Miss Procter's prevailing thoughtfulness has developed her ideas into many beautiful applications. The lines called "The Angel of Death," which so touchingly close Charles Dickens's late sketch of her, the sweet, weary "Tryst with Death," and many others, are examples of this. But among them all there is none which more truly embodies her conceptions, or which, at the same time, is more deeply instinct with the hopefulness which underlies all her graver utterances, than the admirable lines:
Our Dead. Nothing is our own; we hold our treasures Just a little time ere they are fled: One by one life robs us of our treasures: Nothing is our own except our dead. They are ours, and hold in faithful keeping, Safe for ever, all they took away. Cruel life can never stir that sleeping; Cruel time can never seize that prey. Justice pales, truth fades, stars fall from heaven: Human are the great whom we revere; No true crown of honor can be given, Till we place it on a funeral bier. How the children leave us, and no traces Linger of that smiling angel hand; Gone, for ever gone; and in their places Weary men and anxious women stand.
Yet, we have some little ones, still ours; They have kept the baby smile, we know, Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers, On their dead white faces, long ago. When our joy is lost—and life will take it— Then no memory of the past remains, Save with some strange, cruel sting, to make it Bitterness beyond all present pains. Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow Still the radiant shadow, fond regret; We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow Joy that he has taken, living yet. "Is love ours, and do we dream we know it Bound with all our heart-strings all our own? Any cold and cruel dawn may show it Shattered, desecrated, overthrown. Only the dead hearts forsake us never: Death's last kiss has been the mystic sign Consecrating love our own for ever, Crowning it eternal and divine. So when Fate would fain besiege our city, Dim our gold or make our flowers fall, Death, the angel, comes in love and pity And, to save our treasures, claims them all.
Her ideas regarding death are very lofty. They are equally removed from the timorous, painful harping on dissolution that characterizes the underdone poetic organism, from the graphic grimness of Miss Rossetti's class of thinkers, who seem to take a ghastly delight in anatomizing the subject, and last from the passionate weak welcoming of the end—the coward courage which dares not live. In a word, Miss Procter was a Christian.
In quitting her poems of thought, it will perhaps be well to pretermit our long course of praise, and speak of the faults of her writing, most of which are strongest in these very poems. In verbal correctness, she is far above the average; for so voluminous a writer, singularly free from them. Still, by G. Washington-Moon-light, we can discover certain errors, principally of accent or collocation. Some few appear in the verses we have cited. In "Beyond," "baptism" is made a trisyllable; though, standing where it does, an appeal might well be taken to the higher equity of rhythm against the arbitrary technicality of the law of orthoepy. Also, we doubt if "perfécted" be the best pronunciation to-day. And in "Homeless," in the expression,
"Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, Who whines in the bleak, cold street?"
it might with all respect for the intelligence of the race at large, and, above all, for the prodigious latent capabilities of all ladies' dogs—it might be seriously questioned whether the canine personality is so marked as to admit of the relative "who." We feel quite sure that the original idea was to reserve this particular pronoun for selfish mankind, and we fear that the slow science of grammar is still fettered, even as to the most marvellous of the dog kind, by the trammelling traditions of comparative anatomy.
But such flaws as these are venial, occurring as they do at rare intervals, in a very large number of verses, written young, and crowded into the compass of a few years. Many of them were mere passing contributions to the periodical press of the day, and, taken as a whole, compare to advantage with the hasty emanations of almost any author.
In metre Miss Procter achieves no high effects, and attempts none. With very fair taste in selection of metre, she is by no means an artist in rhythm, and appears to aim at little or nothing beyond passable metrical correctness. She is carelessly harsh and incidentally melodious. Once or twice she tries some sort of irregular or lyric measure, and it appears rather to impede than aid her accustomed clear flow of thought.
In style she has two prominent though not great faults. One is her refinement. She is so refined that it would, even had she reached the full promise of her life, have prevented her, in all probability, from ever being broadly popular. Her field is too high and narrow: she deals mainly with sentiments and sympathies which interest only those who have not only sorrowed, but reflected. But this blame is praise in itself. The other is more of a real fault. Miss Procter tempts us to believe that the diffuseness which we have attributed chiefly to their education has some foundation in woman's nature itself. Different as she is from the ordinary type, her womanhood vindicates itself, though still in a way of her own. The effect on her style is not what we spoke of—dilution—but amplification. Sometimes she is led away by her fertility of illustration to illustrate too much. She holds up the idea in too many lights, more than are needful to understand her. There is a little of this even in "Incompleteness," before cited, but the illustrations are so happy that the effect is not perceived: it is seldom we are troubled with too many good things in a poem. Very often, however, this practice of ramifying thoughts into so many applications—one natural result of her thorough thinking—greatly injures the whole, and almost always, where there is much of this amplification, it passes beyond the strict limits of the strongest effect.
There are, furthermore, some few poems liable to cavil which seem to have been mere exercises or experiments, and call for other criticism than her finished performances. Others suffer from their author's inveterate habit of seizing on every-day subjects. Now and then she takes up one so trite that all the charm of her manner cannot mend it. The result is like a pebble set in filigree.
The only grave artistic fault we ever found in her poems occurs in the Legend of Provence, one of her best narrative pieces, founded on the exquisite Legend of the Virgin Mary's assuming the personality and filling the place of a nun who has proved false to her vows and fled her convent. Repentant at last, she returns, a worn-out beggar, to die where her religion died, meets her semblance, recognizes it as what she might have been, and implores Mary's aid.
And Mary answered: "From thy bitter past, Welcome, my child! Oh! welcome home at last! I filled thy place: thy flight is known to none, For all thy daily duties I have done; Gathered thy flowers and prayed, and sung, and slept; Didst thou not know, poor child, thy place was kept?"
This strikes us as a tremendous blunder. For the nun to know that her place was kept would knock the bottom out of the entire legend. Who wouldn't sin with his pardon drawn up in advance, and entire secrecy and perfect restoration awaiting the first active twinge of repentance? We cannot imagine for an instant how Miss Procter could overlook this; unless we have made some equally egregious error in our understanding of the poem and its scope.
We find, or fancy we find, in her writings, a shade of resemblance to the taste and tact of her father, "Barry Cornwall." Perhaps it was because she feared her generic tendencies of style, that she has written few or no songs, and none at all like his sort. If her object was to avoid suspicious resemblance, she has succeeded. The likeness is utterly intangible, and there is not a trace anywhere of an imitation most natural to her relations with him, and which must have proved easy to talent like hers.
Another noteworthy fact about her is also alluded to by Mr. Dickens. It is the total absence of humor, and the sober and shaded style of what she has written. He takes occasion, while speaking of this prevailing seriousness in one so young, expressly to bar the inference that she was of the melancholy moonlit sort, and mentions her abundant wit, and keen sense of the ludicrous, and the joyous quality of her laugh. We do not think an observant reader would misconceive her, as her kind-hearted biographer apprehended. She lacks the distinctive element of morbidness. There is a soundness in her sadness, so to speak, that makes us feel it to be the shadow of a soul that knows the sunshine also. Mournful people of the true chronic mournfulness show it far more by taking dismal views of ordinary subjects than by dealing only in dismal things. But the fact itself suggests a curious question which our aphorists have not yet answered. How is it that some men naturally rollick in print, while others, not less humorous, write nothing but the gravest stuff? What made Hood's pen merry on his death-bed, and took the wit so out of Sydney Smiths's sermons? These two classes are so marked that one would think there must be a principle of some sort dividing them. Yet no one has ever laid down this principle. We no more pretend to do this than the rest, but merely raise the question, leaving it to some future critic to disentangle us from a most Cartesian dubitation.
Thus far we have quoted mainly in illustration of Miss Procter's characteristics. It must not be inferred, however, that there are not in her books excellences not specially arising out of her peculiar ideas of life. On the contrary, there are a number of pieces of that provoking class of good things which we might just as well have written ourselves—only we didn't. Very few of our friends, though, would think of looking in an English author for the following strong, spirited protest, written in 1861, when it was proposed to "strengthen the hands" of the mission for the conversion of Irish Catholics:
An Appeal. Spare her, O cruel England! Thy sister lieth low: Chained and oppressed she lieth; Spare her that cruel blow. We ask not for the freedom Heaven has vouchsafed to thee, Nor bid thee share with Ireland The empire of the sea. Her children ask no shelter— Leave them the stormy sky; They ask not for thy harvests, For they know how to die; Deny them, if it please thee, A grave beneath the sod; But we do cry, O England, Leave them their faith in God! Take, if thou wilt, the earnings Of the poor peasant's toil; Take all the scanty produce That grows on Irish soil, To pay the alien preachers Whom Ireland will not hear— To pay the scoffers at the creed Which Irish hearts hold dear: But leave them, cruel England, The gift their God has given; Leave them their ancient worship, Leave them their faith in heaven. You come and offer learning— A mighty gift, 'tis true, Perchance the greatest blessing, That now is known to you; But not to see the wonders Sages of old beheld Can they peril a priceless treasure, The faith their fathers held. For in learning and in science They may forget to pray: God will not ask for knowledge On the great judgment day. When, in their wretched cabins, Racked by the fever pain. And the weak cries of their children Who ask for food in vain; When, starving, naked, helpless, From the shed that keeps them warm Man has driven them forth to perish In a less cruel storm; Then, then we plead for mercy; Then, sister, hear our cry; For all we ask, O England, Is—leave them there to die! Cursed is the food and raiment For which a soul is sold; Tempt not another Judas To barter God for gold. You offer food and shelter If they their faith deny; What do you gain, O England! By such a shallow lie? We will not judge the tempted— May God blot out their shame— He sees the misery round them, He knows man's feeble frame. His pity still may save them. In his strength they must trust Who calls us all his children. Yet knows we are but dust. Then leave them the kind tending, Which helped their childish years; Leave them the gracious comfort Which dries their mourner's tears; Leave them to that great mother In whose bosom they were born, Leave them the holy mysteries That comfort the forlorn; And, amid all their trials, Let the great gift abide, Which you, O prosperous England! Have dared to cast aside. Leave them the pitying angels, And Mary's gentle aid, For which earth's dearest treasures Were not too dearly paid. Take back your bribes, then, England, Your gold is black and dim; And if God sends plague and famine, They can die and go to him.
This is by far the most unpolished and unequal thing Miss Procter has ever written, and full of faults of detail. But, spite of loose texture and repetition, and weak lines, and identical rhymes, there is a strength in all the essential features, and a spirit everywhere, that contrast strongly with the patriotic effusions that we have had so much of these last few years.
Another poem which has incidentally attracted no little notice is Homeward Bound, which anticipates the whole plot of Enoch Arden so completely that some shallow people felt called upon to say a number of very foolish things about the coincidence when Enoch Arden came out. The chief differences are that the ship-wrecked hero is thrown on a desert island in the one and captured by Moors in the other. Enoch Arden also turns away from the agonizing picture of his forfeited home in silence, while Miss Procter's mariner reveals himself, kisses his wife once more as if she were his, and departs, leaving the very awkward bigamy question wide open behind him, and in general evincing a noble ignorance of the law of England. He also perpetrates the dramatic error of surviving in a state of marine vagrancy for a quarter of a century. But, though inferior to Tennyson's, this poem has many excellent touches of pathos and nature, and must claim, equally with Enoch Arden, the full merit of its simple yet most telling conception.
Apropos of resemblances, we are tempted to quote another of her best known poems, both for its real beauty and because it subtly reminds us of Longfellow, and we should be thankful if some one would only tell us why:
The Storm. The tempest rages wild and high; The waves lift up their voice and cry Fierce answers to the angry sky. Miserere Domine Through the black night and driving rain, A ship is struggling, all in vain, To live upon the stormy main. Miserere Domine The thunders roar, the lightnings glare, Vain is it now to strive or dare; A cry goes up of great despair. Miserere Domine The stormy voices of the main, The moaning wind and pelting rain Beat on the nursery window-pane, Miserere Domine Warm curtained was the little bed, Soft pillowed was the little head: "The storm will wake the child," they said. Miserere Domine Cowering among his pillows white, He prays, his blue eyes dim with fright, "Father, save those at sea to-night!" Miserere Domine The morning shone all clear and gay On a ship at anchor in the bay, And on a little child at play. Gloria tibi Domine!
Out of many which commend themselves, we select only one more, a little gem which we were surprised and pleased to find copied the other day in a little New York evening paper. We think it very suggestive and sweet.
A Lost Chord Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease, And my fingers wandered idly Over the noisy keys. I do not know what I was playing, Or what I was dreaming then, But I struck one chord of music Like the sound of a great Amen. It flooded the crimson twilight Like the close of an angel's psalm, And it lay on my fevered spirit With a touch of infinite calm. It quieted pain and sorrow, Like love overcoming strife; It seemed the harmonious echo From our discordant life. It linked all perplexed meanings Into one perfect peace, And trembled away into silence As if it were loth to cease. I have sought, but I seek it vainly, That one lost chord divine, That came from the soul of the organ, And entered into mine. It may be that Death's bright angel Will speak in that chord again, It may be that only in heaven I shall hear that grand Amen.
We have yet to speak of one great element in these poems, their religion. With those who are born and bred in a church, their belief sits on them like their clothes—becomes a part of themselves. With converts it is oftener like a badge which they are proud to wear, and which some are fond of displaying. Miss Procter's was one of those rare natures in which religion seems to stain back, as it were, and color the very fountain-heads of all thought and impulse, as they are colored by the associations of childhood. In her, it was not like regalia for the processions of life or a reserve fund for emergencies, but thoroughly assimilated and vitalized; a living faith; an actual, practical element in her daily doings, as present in her consciousness as her own individuality. Nor had she any of the combativeness of converts, whose zeal is apt sometimes to be aggressively meek and intolerantly lowly. Hers was a faith full of the charity that judges not. Like all real feeling, it never obtrudes itself, and never shrinks from appearing in its proper place. Thus she has very few devotional and no sectarian pieces at all in her Legends and Lyrics, but once professedly entering on that line of thought, in her Chaplet of Verses, she is both Christian and Catholic throughout.
Yet among the few devotional pieces in the earlier series we find one of the best:
The Peace of God. We ask for peace, O Lord! Thy children ask thy peace; Not what the world calls rest, That toil and care should cease; That through bright sunny hours Calm life should fleet away, And tranquil night should fade In smiling day: It is not for such peace that we would pray. We ask for peace, Lord! Yet not to stand secure, Girt round with iron pride, Contented to endure; Crushing the gentle strings That human hearts should know, Untouched by others' joy Or others' woe: Thou, dear Lord! wilt never teach us so. We ask thy peace, Lord! Through storm, and fear, and strife, To light and guide us on Through a long, struggling life: While no success or gain Shall cheer the desperate fight, Or nerve what the world calls Our wasted might; Yet pressing through the darkness to the light. It is thine own, Lord! Who toil while others sleep; Who sow with loving care What other hands shall reap: They lean on thee entranced In calm and perfect rest: Give us that peace, Lord! Divine and blest, Thou keepest for those hearts who love thee best.
Very like this in sentiment are several of her best pieces, "Per Pacem ad Lucem," "Ministering Angels," and "Thankfulness." There are a number also addressed to the Virgin Mary, the best of which are too long for insertion. It is this which will restrict our quotations to one more piece, which breathes that lofty ardor that every struggling Christian has felt in his brighter hours of exaltation, and sighed to know that common moods cannot rise to it.
Our Titles. Are we not Nobles? we who trace Our pedigree so high That God for us and for our race Created earth and sky, And light and air and time and space, To serve us and then die? Are we not Princes? we who stand As heirs beside the throne, We who can call the promised land Our heritage, our own; And answer to no less command Than God's, and his alone? Are we not Kings? both night and day, From early until late, About our bed, about our way, A guard of angels wait; And so we watch and work and pray In more than royal state. ...... Are we not more? our life shall be Immortal and divine. The nature Mary gave to thee, Dear Jesus, still is thine: Adoring in thy heart I see Such blood as beats in mine. O God! that we can dare to fail And dare to say we must! O God! that we can ever trail Such banners in the dust, Can let such starry honors pale And such a blazon rust! Shall we upon such titles bring The taint of sin and shame? Shall we, the children of the King, Who hold so grand a claim, Tarnish by any meaner thing The glory of our name?
But, although just to-day, in the present undeveloped state of woman's intellect, Miss Procter may strike us most by her advance in thought beyond her sex, she has a far higher claim on us for the admiration due to true womanhood. Where do these poets school their souls, that they come forth full of the experience of threescore years and ten? We know that Miss Procter died in the prime and summer of her days, with most of the great epochs and experiences of a woman's life yet before her. It is not even said that she ever loved; for the sake of him who should lose her, we hope it may be so. Yet her poems hold more tenderness and truth, more of real love, its anxiety, faith, fulfilment, more of woman's inner life, than any ten of the sweet soft natures who have taken these things to be their sole province; who fancy their inkstands are in their souls, and devote a lifetime of harmless harpings to rhyming some flutterings of heart and more flutterings of nerves. Here, as everywhere, we meet with Miss Procter's unfailing force and clearness, and tremble at first to meet it. For of all agonizing things (as many a sensitive nature can testify) there is none like the unconscious cruelty of pure intellect when it comes to deal with the strange intuitions, the noble unreason, the holy follies of the heart. But hand in hand with her inborn analysis comes such a womanhood, so deep, so delicate, so full of sympathy and sweet counsel, as passes words. This union it is, as we said before, that stamps Miss Procter a poet. We men cannot half appreciate this; the sisterhood of sex that her poems must establish with women who have loved and suffered is for some woman only to set forth.
It is difficult to choose any one poem which stands pre-eminent in these qualities. One which will show her insight into the seemingly contradictory impulses of a woman's breast is
A Woman's Question. Before I trust my fate to thee, Or place my hand in thine; Before I let thy future give Color and form to mine, Before I peril all for thee. Question thy soul to-night for me. I break all slighter bonds, nor feel A shadow of regret: Is there one link within the past That holds thy spirit yet? Or is thy faith as clear and free As that which I can pledge to thee? Does there within thy dimmest dreams A possible future shine, Wherein thy life could henceforth breathe Untouched, unshared by mine? If so, at any pain or cost, Oh! tell me before all is lost. Look deeper still. If thou canst feel Within thy inmost soul That thou hast kept a portion back, While I have staked the whole, Let no false pity spare the blow, But in true mercy tell me so. Is there within thy heart a need That mine cannot fulfil? One chord that any other hand Could better wake or still? Speak now—lest at some future day My whole life wither and decay. Lives there within thy nature hid The demon-spirit Change, Shedding a passing glory still On all things new and strange? It may not be thy fault alone— But shield my heart against thy own. Couldst thou withdraw thy hand one day, And answer to my claim That fate, and that to day's mistake— Not thou had been to blame? Some soothe their conscience thus; but thou Wilt surely warn and save me now. Nay, answer not—I dare not hear, The words would come too late; Yet I would spare thee all remorse, So comfort thee, my fate— Whatever on my heart may fall, Remember, I would risk it all.
The strength of this is in the rendering of that eloquent instinct of love which intuitively strikes the most responsive chord. Here it hits on the strongest appeal a woman can make to a man—to save her against himself. And no one can deny the boldness and beauty of the closing turn of thought.
The following poem bears a strong resemblance to the last in tone and train of analysis, with an element of calm fruition instead of the utter devotion. The one is love's June of trust; the other its September of fulfilment.
A Retrospect. From this fair point of present bliss, Where we together stand, Let me look back once more, and trace That long and desert land Wherein till now was cast my lot, And I could live, and thou wert not. ...... What had I then? A hope that grew Each hour more bright and dear, The flush upon the eastern skies That showed the sun was near. Now night has faded far away, My sun has risen, and it is day. A dim ideal of tender grace In my soul reigned supreme; Too noble and too sweet, I thought, To live save in a dream; Within thy heart to-day it lies, And looks on me from thy dear eyes. Some gentle spirit—love, I thought— Built many a shrine of pain; Though each false idol fell to dust, The worship was not vain, But a faint radiant shadow, cast Back from our love upon the past. And grief, too, held her vigil there; With unrelenting sway, Breaking my cloudy visions down, Throwing my flowers away: I owe to her fond care alone That I may now be all thine own. Fair joy was there: her fluttering wings At time she strove to raise; Watching through long and patient nights, Listening long eager days: I know now that her heart and mine Were waiting, love, to welcome thine. Thus I can read thy name throughout, And, now her task is done, Can see that even that faded past Was thine, beloved one. And so rejoice my life may be All consecrated, dear, to thee.
There could scarcely be a truer sign of poetic power than the fidelity and finish of some of these heart-pictures. Out of many others we select two for contrast: one tracing the deep, dreary introspection of passive suffering; the other following out the subtle, restless impulses of pain with pangs. The first we take from a longer poem, "Philip and Mildred."
Dawn of day saw Philip speeding on his road to the great city, Thinking how the stars gazed downward just with Mildred's patient eyes. Dreams of work and fame and honor struggling with a tender pity, Till the loving past receding saw the conquering future rise. Daybreak still found Mildred watching, with the wonder of first sorrow, How the outward world unaltered shone the same this very day, How unpitying and relentless human life met this new morrow— Earth, and sky, and man unheeding that her joy had passed away. Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came to meet her, With the life within departed that had given them each a soul; And her sick heart even slighted gentle words that came to greet her; For grief spread its shadowy pinions, like a blight, upon the whole. Jar one chord, the harp is silent; move one stone, the arch is shattered; One small clarion-cry of sorrow bids an armed host awake. One dark cloud can hide the sunlight; loose one string, the pearls are scattered; Think one thought, a soul may perish; say one word, a heart may break. Life went on, the two lives running side by side, the outward seeming, And the truer and diviner hidden in the heart and brain: Dreams grow holy put in action, work grows fair through starry dreaming: But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.
We hardly know which to like the better, the description itself or the moralizing. Very different, very far from moralizing, and yet even more to the life, is
A Comforter. "Will she come to me, little Effie, Will she come to my arms to rest, And nestle her head on my shoulder, While the sun goes down in the west? "I and Effie will sit together All alone in this great arm-chair: Is it silly to mind it, darling, When life is so hard to bear? "No one comforts me like my Effie. Just, I think, that she does not try, Only looks with a wistful wonder Why grown people should ever cry; "While the little soft arms close tighter Round my neck in their clinging hold: Well, I must not cry on your hair, dear, For my tears might tarnish the gold. "I am tired of trying to read, dear; It is worse to talk and seem gay; There are some kinds of sorrow, Effie, It is useless to thrust away. "Ah! advice may be wise, my darling, But one always knows it before; And the reasoning down one's sorrow Seems to make one suffer the more. "But my Effie won't reason, will she? Or endeavor to understand; Only holds up her mouth to kiss me, As she strokes my face with her hand. "If you break your plaything yourself, dear, Don't you cry for it all the same? I don't think it is such a comfort, One has only one's self to blame. "People say things cannot be helped, dear, But then that is the reason why; For, if things could be helped or altered One would never sit down to cry. "They say, too, that tears are quite useless To undo, amend, or restore: When I think how useless, my Effie, Then my tears only fall the more. "All to-day I struggled against it, But that does not make sorrow cease; And now, dear, it such a comfort To be able to cry in peace. "Though wise people would call that folly, And remonstrate with grave surprise, We won't mind what they say, my Effie; We never professed to be wise. "But my comforter knows a lesson Wiser, truer than all the rest, That to help and to heal a sorrow, Love and silence are always best. "Well, who is my comforter tell me! Effie smiles, but she will not speak, Or look up through the long, curled lashes That are shading her rosy cheek. "Is she thinking of talking fishes, The blue-bird, or magical tree? Perhaps I am thinking, my darling, Of something that never can be. "You long, don't you, dear, for the genii, Who were slaves of lamps and of rings? And I—I am sometimes afraid, dear, I want as impossible things. "But, hark! there is nurse calling Effie! It is bedtime, so run away; And I must go back, or the others Will be wondering why I stay. "So good-night to my darling Effie; Keep happy, sweetheart, and grow wise: There's one kiss for her golden tresses And two for her sleepy eyes."
We do not know where to look for anything like this. It is so graphic, so simple, so true. We, at least, never realized a scene so vividly, so minutely, with all the details we would notice if it actually happened, and not a touch beyond, unless perhaps after reading Maud Müller. The kind of force is in many respects the same, except that the woman-poet, as usual, says what the man-poet suggests of the inner life underlying. But it is excellently said, so well that one mentally declines to apply the principles of aesthetics, which would dictate Whittier's method as the more thoroughly artistic. How well the whole logic, or illogic, of that grand solace, a good cry, is given, and how natural and how sweet if one could only chance on an Effie that would not tell nurse all about it, to have a little "comforter" that would only know the grief and never care for the causes!
We have only one more poem to quote—one which we consider in many respects Miss Procter's best. If feeling, delicacy, pathos, truth, make beauty and poetry, this alone ought to entitle its author to distinction. Bare of all factitious ornament, carrying no overload of elegances, it goes straight to the heart of every mother, and strikes the deepest key-note in the organism of the world—motherhood. And it seems to us that, if all men today were to league against her memory, this poem should win her an immortality in the hearts of womankind:
Links With Heaven. Our God in heaven, from that holy place To each of us an angel guide has given; But mothers of dead children have more grace, For they give angels to their God and heaven. How can a mother's heart feel cold or weary, Knowing her dearer self safe, happy, warm? How can she feel her road too dark or dreary, Who knows her treasure sheltered from the storm? How can she sin? Our hearts may be unheeding, Our God forgot, our holy saints defied; But can a mother hear her dead child pleading, And thrust those little angel hands aside? Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever Nearer to God by mother love: we all Are blind and weak, yet surely she can never, With such a stake in heaven, fail or fall. She knows that, when the mighty angels raise Chorus in heaven, one little silver tone Is hers forever; that one little praise, One little happy voice, is all her own. We may not see her sacred crown of honor, But all the angels flitting to and fro Pause smiling as they pass—they look upon her As mother of an angel whom they know; One whom they left nestled at Mary's feet— The children's place in heaven—who softly sings A little chant to please them, slow and sweet, Or, smiling, strokes their little folded wings; Or gives them her white lilies or her beads To play with: yet, in spite of flower or song, They often lift a wistful look that pleads And asks them why their mother stays so long. Then our dear Queen makes answer she will call Her very soon: meanwhile they are beguiled To wait and listen while she tells them all A story of her Jesus as a child. Ah! saints in heaven may pray with earnest will And pity for their weak and erring brothers; Yet there is prayer in heaven more tender still, The little children pleading for their mothers.
In conclusion, we think the world will not know for a while yet how much it has lost in Adelaide Anne Procter. Her time to be missed will come when Catholic England will need to be represented in the national literature. For those who will force it into recognition, there will of necessity be strong rather than fine intellects. Then the world will turn back to her pages, and wish she were but there to represent Catholicity in England; then she will be carefully read, and, once this happens, her place is assured. And yet, even then, we can never know her as she was; for beyond almost any author we recall, Miss Procter impresses us as being far superior to her works. She is the best of examples of her own doctrine of imperfect expression. The fulness and fineness of her nature strike one from the beginning as being immeasurable by what she has written. There is something exalted and tender, rich and yet reserved, about the life which animates her poems, that interests us uncommonly. And when we come to read of her, what was her life and what its aims, and, above all, when we see how she is mourned by those who held her dear here, we recognize her for one of those rare and beautiful hearts whom God loves too well to leave us long, and conclude, in laying down these broken reflections of her spirit, that her noblest poem was herself.