6 and disappointment and severe suffering ensued, although 'there were many and many happy days to follow, and with them successes, and fine experiences, and progress in knowledge, and bright achievements, still the same lightness of heart and the same freedom from care never returned.' The effects of his first passion, however, were not such as to preclude a second. This took possession of him some two years later when he was residing for some months in Jersey. If the first was love at first sight, the second was not unlike it—a fascination at first sight, growing into a passion by successive sights, and subsisting apparently upon nothing else; how long it is not easy to make out. The face which inspired the passion seems, for many weeks at least, to have been seen only at church. That face, those eyes, first gave me comfort. I used ' to delight in watching them Sunday after Sunday.' He kept the secret of his love for nearly two years, even from his brother, to whom he divulges it in a letter of September 1862, in language of impetuous emotion; the less controlled, perhaps, from having been so long suppressed. And even in this letter he writes: She probably never bestowed a thought on me.' Two days later he returns to the subject:— 'What will come of it? Is it but a poet's dream? . . . Is the beautiful form, the spiritual eye, the brow encircled with the wreath of magic light, a phantom or a reality? The wild romance of Lamia is an intensely vivid vision to me. A strain of sorrowful music has ere now crept through me like a mighty spirit, stirring the roots of my hair and causing me to shudder in the delicious agony even to my very feet. Is this sweet sad enchantment of love like that mournful song? Will it pass away and leave me as before, cold as marble, gloomy as the sepulchre? Or will it not rather grow more and more entrancing, richer, lovelier, nobler-a deep divine harmony welling out from my own solitary soul, gushing forth from unknown depths of feeling and fountains of frozen tears, and rolling onward and onward, broader, deeper, nobler still, till the low sweet chaunt of human love shall become a portion of that magnificent burst of praise and joy which swells around the throne of the Lamb for ever?' (Life and Works, p. 401.) This is not the language that would be employed in reference to such subject-matter by an Englishman, or even perhaps by an Irishman of mature age and of ordinary thinking and writing habits. But Armstrong when he used it was an Irishman hardly out of his boyhood, and one to whom, whether in or out of it, the language of the imagination was a familiar tongue. What became of the passion in the years that followed is not told, and the only allusion to the subject is in a letter of February in the following year, describing a delightful but delusive dream which came to him one night, and in which all that he had longed for had seemed to come to pass. That nothing of the kind had actually come to pass, is to be inferred from the agony which he says that he had suffered on awakening. Of other encounters with women, whether social or sentimental, two only are mentioned. One was in his eighteenth year when he walked in the gardens of a house in Derbyshire with a beautiful Miss S- who is conjectured to have been the model from which he drew one of the characters in his poem of that year entitled Ovoca.' The mention of another occurs in a diary of the same year written in Latin : May 17.-Cælum adhuc contristatum est, et sol quasi mærens funebribus in modis inter cæca nubila fulget. Et ego et G▬▬s per florea rura ambulavimus. Italicum sermonem ut disceremus, operam dabamus. . . . Puellam quamdam pulcherrimam in via R-ia quum conspexissem, haud multum afuit quin amore misere flagrarem-sed me servavit Apollo.' Possibly it was the two unhappy passions for the two unnamed ladies that swept the rest of womankind from his path. And his companions amongst men seem to have been but a chosen few till the last year or two of his life. An ardent love for his brother, a heartfelt affection for his friend B.,' and a romantic and enthusiastic attachment to his seldom-seen friend 'G. A. C.' cover the ground. When, the prospect of independent means, and ultimately the inheritance of a large landed property, being removed from him, he betook himself to an academical career, he was friendly and cordial enough with his fellow students, and occasionally also as riotous in his gambols as they could desire. But his life was elsewhere. It was a life in which he found relief from melancholy thoughts, and also perhaps from excess of intellectual excitement, in laborious studies and acquisitions. In a letter to his brother, of August 1863, he writes:-'I believe it to be the true maxim for attaining happiness, to work hard at all times and at all seasons. The world is a laboratory, Sir, and by no means a pleasure-garden.' Applied to most men, and especially to men like Edmund Armstrong, susceptible of every sort of emotion and liable to incessant vicissitudes of the feelings, this is true doctrine; but it is not applicable to all men, nor even to all poets. There are to be found amongst the varieties of human temperaments some which can afford to dispense with labour. Wordsworth speaks of glad hearts,' with whom joy is its own security,' and he himself lived a life which was certainly not a life of labour, a life which in one sense might be called idle, though in another it was eminently active and productive. A poet of a very different order, Anacreon Moore, if he was not idle, was certainly far from industrious, and one of his friends was of opinion that no amount of idleness would have prevailed over his constitutional joyousness. One evening at Holland House, when some one who was of Edmund Armstrong's way of thinking, insisted on the necessity of occupation to happiness, Lord Holland observed-' But there is Moore' (who was present); nothing can depress his spirits. If they were to 'make a duke of him, he would be as happy as ever.' And in truth a policy of industry, as a means to happiness, should be regarded as susceptible of many modifications in its application to individual temperaments. It is not the best course for all industrious men to find something to do for every hour of the day. It may be well that they should look at their life as a picture, and see if it would not gain by a certain breadth being given to it. Nor did Armstrong himself adopt his own precept to the letter. He lived in the laboratory, but he 6 walked into the garden. It was in the garden that his poetry was conceived, and in the laboratory that it was again and again revised and brought into a form with which he could be content, or if not, purged as with fire;' for much of it was destroyed. This was the fate of his only dramatic poem. His brother had objected, probably with reason, to the intermixture of the tragic and comic elements in its composition-with reason if the intermixture had not been so managed as to harmonise the effects. And there is no exercise of the arts of idealisation for which a nicer sense of harmony is needed. A discussion and correspondence arose between the brothers on the relations between tragedy and comedy and their compatibility in one production, and it ended in a compromise. Edmund of course appealed to Shakespeare and the other masters of the mixed drama. But he appealed also to nature: 'Your father is dead, your mistress is irrevocably alienated, your finances are engulfed in ruin. In a state of frenzy you walk out into the public highway. The first object that meets your gaze is an inflated calf in love, a coquetting damsel making a fool of him, an old dandy in as painful a suit of fashionable clothes as Malvolio's crossgarters, an antiquated virgin in ravishing little boots and a soulannihilating bonnet? Is this an overdrawn sketch of life? If not, let it be always borne in mind that the skilful introduction of the comic element invariably heightens, instead of marring, the effect of the tragic. As in life, so in art.' (Life and Works, pp. 424-5.) Some forty or fifty years ago a dramatist of that day 6 expressed to Wordsworth (in conversation) the difficulty he had in defending Hamlet's strange exclamation uttered when the ghost from beneath' requires Horatio and Marcellus to 'swear.'' Ah, ha, boy! Say'st thou so? Art thou there, 'Truepenny?' Wordsworth admitted the difficulty; but added, We are to consider how closely connected in nature are the grotesque and the horrible.'* They are connected in nature as extremes meet, the mind impelled to the one extreme as a refuge from the other. In art it is necessary that some amalgam shall be found through an idealisation common to both. And from this point of view one conclusion which Edmund Armstrong was led to adopt that what is comic should be in prose-ought not perhaps to be accepted absolutely and without reference to what may be the particular collocation in question. In this, too, the authority of Shakespeare is appealed to; but, if most of Shakespeare's comic colloquies are in prose, there is no small minority of them in blank verse; and there is this also to be borne in mind, that we moderns read in Shakespeare a diction no longer familiar to us in life, which in itself is one element of harmonising idealisation. And whatever models we may follow, the truth is that, in our times, there are no portions of the mixed drama which should be written, whether in prose or verse, with so much care to lift them, imperceptibly as it were, off the level of common life and conversation, as those which are comic. change to prose may not be inconsistent with this effect, but not seldom it will be best accomplished by an adherence to verse. A Shakespeare may be quoted as alternating prose with verse, not only in colloquies partly comic, but in those also which deal with what is neither comic nor tragic, but simply familiar; those, it may be, in which the business of the play is to be transacted, or, as Hamlet says, 'some necessary question of the play is to be considered." In these also no pains should be spared (if the unconscious sense of harmony shall not dispense with painstaking endeavours) to avert any incongruities of the actual with the ideal. It will sometimes be desirable, even when no business is to be transacted, to interpose what may be called a neutral parenthesis between two dramatic effects which are highly wrought but wholly different; and this also should be done without too much lowering the level. When Shakespeare sees occasion for a touch at once quieting and realising between the exit of Cassius after his *Ex auc. aurium. quarrel with Brutus and the entrance of Cæsar's ghost, he takes an incident of ordinary occurrence in life, and expresses it in the simplest language; but he does not descend from blank verse to prose: 'Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for so; I put it in the pocket of my gown.' Into the extant lyrical poems of Edmund Armstrong-the extant miscellaneous lyrical, that is as well as into the nonextant dramatic, the element of humour found its way; not however into those which are lyrical in the stricter sense, not into the songs. These spring from an unmixed emotion, simple and sad; and as in the case of Kingsley (to whose noble nature and wide range of faculties and feelings those of Armstrong have rather a singular resemblance) his saddest songs may be said to be born of the sea; and his saddest are, of course, his sweetest: 'At night in the fisherman's hut The door blew open and shut, When the two little babes were sleeping. The wail of the deep never broke on their sleep, 'Clasped they lay, and alone; For their mother was cold as a stone, 'The fisherman tost in his grave In the seaweed below the wild wave; The wail of the deep never broke on their sleep, Another sea-born song is less gently sad :— 'Boom, storm-bell! Swing from thy rusted chain, Boom away and away Over the darkling main! And I will walk with folded arms, And I will walk alone, And I will talk to the winds and waves Of the love that is over and gone. * Poetical Works, p. 212. |