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?

PATHOS

A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine:
"For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most real
personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that is
worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio."
Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz or
their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of the
French Byronic age was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no
laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham real-
life? So it would seem. Even what the great master has not shown us in
his work, that your critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it.
By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy he will come at it. It is
of little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it is
precisely Snug who stirs their emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they
can make shift to see through that: but the Snug within, the human Snug.
And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the
more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old
Double; and Harpagon is the tragic figure of Monomania; and as to Argan,
ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de Monsieur" must have been wrought by
those prescriptions! _Et patati