Gala-Days

by Gail Hamilton

[* The Atlantic Monthly]

Here, if I may be allowed, I should like to make a digression. In an early stage of my journeying, I spoke of the pleasure I had taken in reading "The Betrothal" and "The Espousals." I cannot suppose that it is of any consequence to the world whether I think well or ill of a poem, but the only way in which the world will ever come out right is by everyone's putting himself right; and I don't wish even my influence to seem to be thrown in favor of so objectionable a book as "Faithful Forever," a continuation of the former poems by the same author. Coventry Patmore's books generally are made up of poetry and prattle, but the poetry makes you forgive the prattle. The tender, strong, wholesome truths they contain steady the frail bark through dangerous waters; but "Faithful Forever" is wrong, false, and pernicious, root and branch, and a thorough misnomer besides. Frederic loves Honoria, who loves and marries Arthur, leaving Frederic out in the cold; whereupon Frederic turns round and marries Jane, knowing all the while that he does not love her and does love Honoria. What kind of a Faithful Forever is this? A man cannot love two women simultaneously, whatever he may do consecutively. If he ceases to love the first, he is surely not faithful forever. If he does not cease to love her, he is false forever to the second,—and worse than false. Marrying from pique or indifference or disappointment is one of the greatest crimes that can be committed, as well as one of the greatest blunders that can be made. The man who can do such a thing is a liar and a perjurer. I can understand that people should give up the people they love, but there is no possible shadow of excuse for their taking people whom they don't love. It is no matter how inferior Jane may be to Frederic. A woman can feel a good many things that she cannot analyze or understand, and there never yet was a woman so stupid that she did not know whether or not her husband loved her, and was not either stricken or savage to find that he did not. No woman ever was born with a heart so small that anything less than the whole of her husband's heart could fill it.

Moreover, apart from unhappy consequences, there is a right and a wrong about it. How dare a man stand up solemnly before God and his fellows with a lie in his right hand? and if he does do it, how dare a poet or a novelist step up and glorify him in it? The man who commits a crime does not do so much mischief as the man who turns the criminal into a hero. Frederic Graham did a weak, wicked, mean, and cowardly deed, not being in his general nature weak, wicked, mean, or cowardly, and was allowed to blunder on to a tolerable sort of something like happiness in the end. No one has a right to complain, for all of us get a great deal more and better than we deserve. We have no right to complain of Providence, but we have a right to complain of the poet who comes up and says not a word in reprobation of the meanness and cowardice, not a word of the cruelty inflicted upon Jane, nor the wrong done to his own soul; but veils the wickedness, excites our sympathy and pity, and in fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr. He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for years. This is what we are to admire! This is the knight without reproach! This is to be Faithful Forever! I suppose Coventry Patmore thinks Frederic is to be commended because he did not break into Honoria's house and run away with her. That is the only thing he could have done worse than he did do, and that I have no doubt he would have done if he could. I have no faith in the honor or the virtue of men or women who will marry where they do not love. I think it is just as sinful—and a thousand times as vile—to marry unlovingly, as to love unlawfully.[*]

[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.

There is this about mountains,—you cannot get away from them. Low country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,—we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower. Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness. Even in its cloudy, distant fairness, there is a concise, emphatic reality altogether uncloudlike."

Seeing them from afar, lovely rather than terrible, we feel that though between the mountain and its valley, with much friendly service and continual intercourse, there can be no real communion, still the mountain is not utterly lonely, but has yonder in the east its solace, and in the north a companion, and over toward the west its coterie. Solitary but to the lowly-living, in its own sphere there is immortal companionship, and this vast hall of the heavens, and many a draught of nectar borne by young Ganymede.

The Alpine House seems to be the natural caravansary for Grand Trunk travellers, being accessible from the station without the intervention of so much as an omnibus, and being also within easy reach of many objects of interest. Here, therefore, we lay over awhile to strike out across the mountains and into the valleys, and to gather health and serenity for the weeks that were to come, with their urgent claims for all of both that could be commanded.

Eastern Massachusetts is a very pretty place to live in, and the mutual admiration society is universally agreed by its members to be the very best society on this continent. Nevertheless, by too long and close adherence to that quarter of the globe, one comes to forget how the world was made, and, in fact, that it ever was made. We silently take it for granted. It was always there. Smooth, smiling plains, gentle hills, verdurous slopes, blue, calm streams, and softly wooded banks,—a courteous, well-bred earth it is, and we forget that it has not been so from the beginning. But here among the mountains, Genesis finds exegesis. We stand amid the primeval convulsions of matter,—the first fierce throes of life. Marks of the struggle still linger; nay, the struggle itself is not soothed quite away. No more unexceptionable surfaces, but yawns and fissures, chasms and precipices, deep gashes in the hills, hills bursting up from the plains, rocks torn from their granite beds and tossed hither and thither in some grand storm of Titan wrath, rivers with no equal majesty, but narrow, deep, elfish, rising and falling in wild caprice, playing mad pranks with their uncertain shores, treacherous, reckless, obstreperous. Here we see the changes actually going on. The earth is still a-making. More than one river, scorning its channel, has, within the memory of man, hewn out for itself another, and taken undisputed, if not undisturbed possession. The Peabody River, which rolls modestly enough now, seeming, indeed, a mere thread of brook dancing through a rocky bed by far too large for it, will by and by, when the rains come, rise and roar and rush with such impetuosity that these great water-worn stones, now bleaching quietly in the sun, shall be wrenched up from their resting-places, and whirled down the river with such fury and uproar that the noise of their crashing and rolling shall break in upon your dreams at night. Wild River, a little farther down, you may ford almost dry-shod, and in four hours it shall reach such heights and depths as might upbear our mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the scars of their wounds. No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous processes. Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are not Time's; they are the doings of an early force, beneficent, but dreadful. It is Time's to soothe and adorn.

We connect the idea of fixity with the mountains, but they seem to me to be continually pirouetting with each other,—exchanging or entirely losing their identity. You are in the Alpine Valley. Around you stand Mount Hayes, so named in honor of a worthy housekeeper; the Imp, sobriquet of a winsome and roguish little girl, who once made the house gay; the Pilot range,—because they pilot the Androscoggin down to the sea, says one to whom I never appeal in vain for facts or reasons; Mount Madison, lifting his shining head beyond an opening niched for him in the woods of a high hill-top by Mr. Hamilton Willis of Boston, whom let all men thank. I thanked him in my heart every morning, noon, and night, looking up from my seat at table to that distant peak, where otherwise I should have seen only a monotonous forest line. Over against the sunset is Mount Moriah, and Carter, and Surprise. You know them well. You can call them all by name. But you have no sooner turned a corner than—where are they? Gone,—all changed. Every line is altered, every contour new. Spurs have become knobs. Peaks are ridges; summits, terraces. Madison probably has disappeared, and some Adams or Jefferson rises before you in unabashed grandeur. Carter and the Imp have hopped around to another point of the compass. All the lesser landmarks, as the old song says,

"First upon the heel-tap, then upon the toe,
Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so."