Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.
All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia.  Strange was
the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now.  The world has
become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and
more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will
never recover, that sweetness.  Blake's was a more starry madness.
Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to the
legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful
but dull, and sings of her own "burning brow," as Herrick's wild one
never sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks of
flowers, or, rather, "the herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the
surest of all signs that the strange inspiration of the past centuries
was lost, vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself.  It had been wholly
English, whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English.
It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example, could
so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligible
sentiment.  And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into the
momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his disregard of this
northern dream of innocence.  If the mad maid was an alien upon earth,
what were she in the Inferno?  What word can express her strangeness
there, her vagrancy there?  And with what eyes would they see this dewy
face glancing in at the windows of that City?

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain
nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not for
the paradox one might say, it never was so grave.  Everywhere the joke
"emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to catch the
attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humour
wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.
It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing.  It wears (let the violent
personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance,
and an eye in suspense.  It is much at the service of the vagrant
encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game.  It
stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is
early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the
compliant jest.
All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant
signalling, an endless recognition.  Forms of approach are remitted.  And
the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no
gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and
down the pages of the paper and the book.  See, again, the theatre.  A
somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our