Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/798

792 know why he was loved by all who knew him. The book is full, one might say, of the perfume of a flower which has bloomed its time, and it is rather a gain than a loss that there is no print of the discolored petals on the leaves. If one wishes to see how the dead flower looked in the keen air that killed it, one must turn to Miss Martineau, who made Procter the subject of one of the shrewdest and not the least kindly of her sketches. At first it looks as if it were her talent to pick out the facts of the poet's personality, while it was C. P.'s talent to explain facts away; but after all it is C. P. who leaves the impression of a character which might be conceived as a whole. This is the more important because Mr. Procter, like Lamb, originally owed his place in the literary world quite as much to his personality as to his talent. Lamb's personality had a piquancy which can be explained, but Mr. Procter's charm, though as genuine and as potent, was more indefinite.

"His small figure, his head not remarkable for much beside its expression of intelligent and warm good-will, and its singular likeness to that of Sir Walter Scott; his conversation, which had little decision or 'point' in the ordinary sense, and often dwelt on truths which a novelty-loving society banishes from its repertory as truisms, never disturbed the effect, in any assemblage, of his real distinction. His silence seemed wiser, his simplicity subtler, his shyness more courageous than the wit, philosophy, and assurance of others. When such a man expressed himself more or less truthfully in a series of gracious poems, of which he alone of all his circle did not seem proud, it naturally followed that all who knew him were eager to declare and extend the credit and honor to which he had aspired with so much simplicity, and which he bore with so entire an absence of self-assertion. The tradition of such a character has the power of lingering in the world even when the life has been so uneventful as to leave little scope for biography and even for anecdote. And the writings which are the outcome of that character are floated down by such tradition to a posterity which might never have heard of them but for this proof of their genuineness."

That is true, and admirable, and generous, and yet it points to another point of view. Observe that the system of female kinship is limitation: the chief lesson of the lives of Byron, or Shelley, or Burns, is how much their inspiration cost; but we do not admire the inspiration less because it was visibly at the cost of the life. Their greatness is such that we feel judgment to be an impertinence; it is only of smaller men that the observation holds good. "Their ways cast suspicion on their works, and the reputation of a man of genius who lacks in his life the courage or the habits of his inspiration may suffer for generations, or even forever, if his biography happens to have been such or so written as to go down to posterity with his truer self."

Mr. Procter's life did honor to his poetry, and is in a way in harmony with it; but it is the harmony of contrast, the harmony of the leaf and the flower, one might almost say the harmony of the ashes and the flame. Here, too, we are reminded of Scott, whose practical life as lawyer and laird, with its eager bustle of practical cheerfulness, contrasts oddly with the sentimental regret for the past, on whose ruins he throve; as Mr. Procter's idealism in verse, with its alternations of romantic grace and wilful exaltation, contrasts with the cautious prudence and refinement of his life. Of course if we knew Mr. Procter as well as we know Scott, we should see that the life had its romantic, perhaps even its wilful, element, too. Only with Scott the turn of the homely, practical element came first; with Mr. Procter the turn of the romantic element came earlier, in the long interval between boyhood and middle age. Another difference is that in Scott's large nature there was room for both at once. One side might be more conspicuous at one time and another at another time, but both were always there. The contrast forces itself upon us more in a nature of narrower range, less massive and less complex, and proves perplexing from its very simplicity. The poetry of Barry Cornwall is the record of the extravagances of one who was habitually sober, the audacities of one who was habitually cautious, the eloquence of one who was habitually reserved. And yet there is no inconsistency, the contrasted elements heighten and sustain each other. It is a mistake to suppose that the only way to make the most of what we value in life is to concentrate ourselves upon it. Labor heightens the zest of a holiday, and a holiday restores the energy of the laborer; there is a reaction after a fit of high spirits, but there is a reaction from depression too. The reason that most of us fear to abandon ourselves to the natural 