Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1012

948 life; but they have never yet inspired a work of art.

"Poverty," said old Robert Burton, "is a most odious calling," and it has not grown any more enjoyable in the past three hundred years. Nothing is less worth while than to idealize its discomforts, unless it be to sourly exaggerate them. But there has arisen of late years a school of writers—for the most part English, though we have our representatives—who paint realistically the squalor and wretchedness of penury, without admitting into their pictures one ray of the sunshine that must sometimes gild the dreariest hovel or the meanest street. A notable example of this black art is Mr. George Gissing, whose novels are too powerful to be ignored and too depressing to be forgotten. The London of the poor is not a cheerful place; it is perhaps the most cheerless place in Christendom; but this is the way it appears in Mr. Gissing's eyes when he is compelled to take a suburban train:

"Over the pest-stricken region of East London, sweltering in sunlight which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal—the train made its way at length beyond the outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges and trees, of crops and cattle."

Surely this is a trifle strained. The "nameless populace" would be not a little surprised to hear itself described with such dark eloquence. I remember once encountering in a third-class English railway carriage a butcher-boy—he confided to me his rank and profession—who waxed boastful over the size and wealth of London. "It's the biggest city in the world, that's wot it is; it's got five millions of people in it, that's wot it's got; and I'm a Londoner, that's wot I am," he said, glowing with pride that was not without merit in one of mean estate. The "city of the damned" appeared a city of the gods to this son of poverty.

Such books sin against the gayety of life.

and there is no form of sadness more wasteful than that which is bred of a too steadfast consideration of pain. It is not generosity of spirit which feeds this mood. The sorrowful acceptance of life's tragedies is of value only when it prompts us to regard more jealously or to impart more freely life's manifold benefactions. Mr. Pater has subtly defined the mental attitude which is often mistaken for sympathy, but which is a mere ineffectual yielding to depression over the sunless scenes of earth.

"He"—Carl of Rosenmold—"had fits of the gloom of other people, their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals, which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times outward things would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadows about him."

This is precisely the temper which finds expression in much modern verse. Its perpetrators seem wrapped in endless contemplation of other people's gloom, until, having absorbed all they can hold, they relieve their oppressed souls by unloading it in song. Women are especially prone to mournful measures, and I am not without sympathy for that petulant English critic who declined to read their poetry on the plea that it was "all dirges." But men can be mourners too, and

is too often the burden of their verse, the unsolicited assurance with which they cheer us on our way. We do not believe them, of course, except in moments of dejection; but these are just the moments in which we would like to hear something different. When our share of gayety is running pitifully low, and the sparks of joy are dying on life's hearth, we have no courage to laugh down the voices of those who, "wilfully living in sadness, speak but the truths thereof."