Letters from America | Page 5

as who should say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. Any difficulty dropped, however, to the reconciling vision; for that the young man was publicly and responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little over- officiously involved--to the promotion of a certain surprise (on one's own part) at his having to "be" anything. It was to come over me still more afterwards that nothing of that or of any other sort need really have rested on him with a weight of obligation, and in fact I cannot but think that life might have been seen and felt to suggest to him, in an exposed unanimous conspiracy, that his status should be left to the general sense of others, ever so many others, who would sufficiently take care of it, and that such a fine rare case was accordingly as arguable as it possibly could be--with the pure, undischarged poetry of him and the latent presumption of his dying for his country the only things to gainsay it. The question was to a certain extent crude, "Why need he be a poet, why need he so specialise?" but if this was so it was only, it was already, symptomatic of the interesting final truth that he was to testify to his function in the unparalleled way. He was going to have the life (the unanimous conspiracy so far achieved _that_), was going to have it under no more formal guarantee than that of his appetite and genius for it; and this was to help us all to the complete appreciation of him. No single scrap of the English fortune at its easiest and truest--which means of course with every vulgarity dropped out--but was to brush him as by the readiest instinctive wing, never over-straining a point or achieving a miracle to do so; only trusting his exquisite imagination and temper to respond to the succession of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this succession could in the most natural and most familiar way in the world amount to for him that we find this idea of a beautiful crowning modernness above all to meet his case. The promptitude, the perception, the understanding, the quality of humour and sociability, the happy lapses in the logic of inward reactions (save for their all infallibly being poetic), of which he availed himself consented to be as illustrational as any fondest friend could wish, whether the subject of the exhibition was aware of the degree or not, and made his vivacity of vision, his exercise of fancy and irony, of observation at its freest, inevitable--while at the same time setting in motion no machinery of experience in which his curiosity, or in other words, the quickness of his familiarity, didn't move faster than anything else.

II
I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward Marsh the communication of many of his letters, these already gathered into an admirable brief memoir which is yet to appear and which will give ample help in the illustrative way to the pages to which the present remarks form a preface, and which are collected from the columns of the London evening journal in which they originally saw the light. The "literary baggage" of his short course consists thus of his two slender volumes of verse and of these two scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence [Footnote: There remain also to be published a book on John Webster, and a prose play in one act.--E.M.]--though I should add that the hitherto unpublished letters enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, which will have rendered the highest service to each matter. That even these four scant volumes tell the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine young spirit they are concerned with we certainly hold back from allowing; his case being in an extraordinary degree that of a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest, and half of whose manifestation therefore was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication. He did in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, as one reads him, whether in verse or in prose, that distinguished readability seems all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either, an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief, if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the student of the human drama has ever