Essays on Life, Art and Science | Page 7

moment of its occurrence. If Lucy was the kind of person not
obscurely pourtrayed in the poem; if Wordsworth had murdered her,
either by cutting her throat or smothering her, in concert, perhaps, with
his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if he had thus found himself

released from an engagement which had become irksome to him, or
possibly from the threat of an action for breach of promise, then there is
not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns his crime that is not
alive with meaning. On any other supposition to the general reader it is
unintelligible.
We cannot be too guarded in the interpretations we put upon the words
of great poets. Take the young lady who never loved the dear
gazelle--and I don't believe she did; we are apt to think that Moore
intended us to see in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable, but
most unfortunate young woman, whereas all he has told us about her
points to an exactly opposite conclusion. In reality, he wished us to see
a young lady who had been an habitual complainer from her earliest
childhood; whose plants had always died as soon as she bought them,
while those belonging to her neighbours had flourished. The inference
is obvious, nor can we reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to
draw it; if her plants were the very first to fade away, she was evidently
the very first to neglect or otherwise maltreat them. She did not give
them enough water, or left the door of her fern-ease open when she was
cooking her dinner at the gas stove, or kept them too near the paraffin
oil, or other like folly; and as for her temper, see what the gazelles did;
as long as they did not know her "well," they could just manage to exist,
but when they got to understand her real character, one after another
felt that death was the only course open to it, and accordingly died
rather than live with such a mistress. True, the young lady herself said
the gazelles loved her; but disagreeable people are apt to think
themselves amiable, and in view of the course invariably taken by the
gazelles themselves any one accustomed to weigh evidence will hold
that she was probably mistaken.
I must, however, return to Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians." I will
leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and
Wordsworth seem to have delighted. I am very sorry the book is gone,
and know not where to turn for its successor. Till I have found a
substitute I can write no more, and I do not know how to find even a
tolerable one. I should try a volume of Migne's "Complete Course of
Patrology," but I do not like books in more than one volume, for the
volumes vary in thickness, and one never can remember which one
took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in Giles's "Anglican Fathers"

are not open to this objection, and I have reserved them for favourable
consideration. Mather's "Magnalia" might do, but the binding does not
please me; Cureton's "Corpus Ignatianum" might also do if it were not
too thin. I do not like taking Norton's "Genuineness of the Gospels," as
it is just possible some one may be wanting to know whether the
Gospels are genuine or not, and be unable to find out because I have
got Mr. Norton's book. Baxter's "Church History of England," Lingard's
"Anglo-Saxon Church," and Cardwell's "Documentary Annals," though
none of them as good as Frost, are works of considerable merit; but on
the whole I think Arvine's "Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious
Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in the room which comes within
measurable distance of Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it
has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I am not curious," as
Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but I like to know," and I
might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it,
so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is.
I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible,
but no one thinks of calling them either moral or religious, though
some of them certainly seem as if they might fairly find a place in Mr.
Arvine's work. There are some things, however, which it is better not to
know, and take it all round I do not think I should be wise in putting
myself in the way of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the successor
to my beloved and lamented Frost.
Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether, and