RETICENCE IN LITERATURE.

THE passion for detailed information about every con- spicuous person must be energetic in mankind to con- sume the piles of biography which are annually heaped up

for it,—fuel enough to smother an ordinary flame. After all, biography is Clio's last word ; it is generally by reference to the personal memoirs that a student of history checks and com- pletes his chronicles. For even of men of action history re- cords the bare acts, and without the motive actions are only half understood; while among all books none are more valuable than those rare ones which present men whose personality more than any separable achievement confers on them a.

claim to greatness; men like Johnson, Maurice, or Jowett. But for artists of all sorts, and above all for poets, silence is the best endowment. What they produced, not what they did or what they were, is the thing to preserve. The life of

Turner conveys curious information, but how does it help one to enjoy Turner's pictures ? When we are told that Keats used to pepper his tongue to intensify the pleasure of a drink, we may understand better how he came to write the

stanza,- " 0 for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth ; "- it stamps the fact that Keats lived intensely in the senses ; but will the knowledge heighten our pleasure in his poetry ? Very often, indeed, biography ruins a work of art for us ; inquisitive mankind rakes about in the dust-heaps of antique

scandal, and pays for its curiosity in lost illusions. A poet has to make statements about feelings, often in his own per- son ; his subject-matter is frequently suggested by his own experience and desires, always somehow connected with them; the web of lyrical thought is spun mostly spider-fashion.

Then in steps biography with a string of names and dates, and falls to work identifying Byron's " Thyrza," Shelley's "Miranda," and so forth. Who can take a pleasure in the stanzas to Lady Byron (" Fare thee well, and if for ever, then for ever fare thee well") for thinking of the rascality it was to publish them? Yet, considered apart from circumstances— considered as a poem—they are, in spite of their tawdriness, a splendid protest against cold, unforgiving severity. We read, with delight in the workmanship, Horace's-

" Audivere, Lyce, Di min. vota, Di Audivere, Lyce ; fin anus et tamen Vis formosa videri."

Bat then we have not Lyce's side of the story. Is Shakespeare the happier, or are we, that the sonnets may be read merely as the painting of passion in such verse as no one has equalled ? —verse that we read with more exquisite pleasure, because in

it the chief of all writers expresses to us not another's feelings, but his own. Of the squalid circumstances we know nothing ;

only we know that the feelings are not imagined. Mr. Browning, it is true, doubted whether Shakespeare truly" un- locked his heart ; " and, " if Shakespeare did, then the less Shakespeare he." If Shakespeare did not, language has no meaning; but whether Shakespeare was right to do so, is another matter. Mr. Browning, for his own part, says that "he too has his cowslips, dewy and dear," but he declines to bring the world in upon them ; still, there lies an appeal from the writer of " Pacchiarotto " (in which volume these senti- ments occur) to the poet who wrote "One Word More," the poem in which he dedicates to his wife the fifty " Men and Women" :—

" Take them, love, the book and me together ;

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also ; "

the poem written in the metre that he used—

"Once, and only once, and for one only."

Choice has to be made between the poem and the principle, and by a chorus of votes overboard goes the principle,—Mr.

Browning voting with the majority. For what is he saying in this identical poem but that, were the book extant in which

Raphael " wrote his century of Sonnets," he and she—

"Would rather read that volume (Taken to his beating bosom by it)

Would we not ? than wonder at Madonnas:" and again, had the angei been finished that Dante prepared to paint for Be:ttrice,—

" You and I would rather see that angel,

Painted by the tenderness of Dante,

Would we not ? than read a fresh Inferno."

The curious thing is that all we English-speaking people approve of Browning's principle. It shocks many minds that a widower should publish poems describing his bereavement ; they think that a man possessed by a great and real grief does not string rhymes about it ; when a poet's own personal feelings are admittedly his stock-in-trade, the feelings become suspect ; and the best possible poem on widowhood would be discredited if the poet remarried within a year. This is a perfectly uncritical point of view ; poetry demands that a feeling should be felt, and no more ; that it should convey through the words a sense of reality ; whether historically the artist did or did not experience what he describes, whether or not the circumstances were as he puts them, literature does not care; it only desires that he should give the impression of a feeling arising naturally from certain causes. Poetry demands a certain reticence no doubt ; reticence is the supreme virtue in style ; but that is only a restraint to heighten the effect produced. Ferdinand, in " The Duchess of Malfi," looks at his sister whom he has done to death, and says nothing but- " Cover her face ; mine eyes dazzle ; she died young."

But the brevity of the words does not lessen the emotion ex- pressed. And, language apart, a man who squanders himself in a display of feeling will stir his reader less intensely than another with one flash of self-revelation. The better artist will briefly convey the presence of a greater volume of passion than one who toils to unpack his heart in words ; but the difference is one of art, not of conduct; the greatest artist reveals most of what he desires to reveal. The question of conduct is, what feelings may without impropriety be revealed.

Admitting at once, as a curse upon the artist nature, that it can experience no emotion without at the same instant, and by a kind of recoil, perceiving how the feeling could be turned to artistic account, it must also be admitted that for men whose business it is to express emotions in words, it becomes almost a necessity to throw into literary form their own masterful emotions. Even Scott, so sedulous in repressing his feelings, did this in his "Journal." But Scott, it is answered, did not publish the "Journal" in his life. Where the exposure affects no one but the writer, it is hard to see why it should be lees indecent after his death. If it is in- decent to recall the secrets of your heart, death alters nothing in the case. The truth is. that a poet, like any other artist, obeys his instinct to produce ; and having produced, an instinct no less imperious bids him communicate to others the finished work. That is the law of his artist-nature ; to make something, so that other people may see and feel the beauty, the terror or the sadness, of what he has made. Only by communicating his work can he test the success of his effort to embody the feeling in his own mind and thereby produce like feelings in other minds. Why express if not to impart ? And in this peculiar power to express resides his best justification, for, as the expressing of his feelings solaces himself, so it gives relief to others, in whom feeling is a dumb inarticulate murmur, when they find their inmost thought worthily set forth. That a man should not lightly parade bereavement, whether real or imagined, is well ; but if he can make sorrow beautiful, and in the doing of it relieve not his heart only but other hearts, perhaps in other ages,—is he to be silent, to hide away his music, lest he should be suspected of shallowness? Decency and self-respect must fix the limit; and the question is complicated by sex,—since things that women talk of freely enough to one another have, until recently, been kept out of books written for men as well as women. But upon many matters a writer may use language that he would avoid with his closest friend in the small hours of morning: for though writing of feelings as his own, under circumstances known to be real, he addresses no one directly and looks for no answer; no matter how intimate a friend may be, you cannot grow lyrical with him over your sorrows, because if you did he would not know which way to look ; he can read with sympathy and a tragic pleasure what he could not hear

• uttered without confusion and awkwardness.