The Colour of Life | Page 6

he can so ill guard that he could
hardly have even resented it.
The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door of
Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His mortal
illness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affected
objection is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts
(others being already well known) in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless,
these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is not biography is
the detail of the accident of the manner of his death, the detail of his
cremation. Or if it was to be told - told briefly - it was certainly not for
marble. Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as he died
young. It was a detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that was a
frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing with an
insignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality. Those are
ill-named biographers who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of
death is a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a
last chapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, of
all survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon a
death with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely, this
is, for a time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year,
disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night. They
have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have to
mourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling of
distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known even to
dreams save in that first year of separation. But they are not

biographers.
If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret
because it is their only privacy. You may watch or may surprise
everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes on
everywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no
perpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is undefended, careless,
nimble and noisy.
It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, to
paint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually in that British
School of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, it
was agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him,
for he is not to be caught dead. A bird is more easily caught alive than
dead.
A poet, on the contrary, is easily - too easily - caught dead. Minor
artists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor and
a University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentially
drowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante
Rossetti.

CLOUD

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see the
clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of
England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear sky
is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go for a
week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you walk,
and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you shall
see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form.
Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled
glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are,
therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were

used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so
much as whether there were a sky.
But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows.
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but
the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the world.
It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The
terrestrial scenery - the tourist's - is a prisoner compared with this. The
tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden,
with earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for
its changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green
flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the
greater it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are
inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a
cloud.
The cloud controls the light,