All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia.  Strange was the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now.  The world has become once again as it was in the mad maid’s heyday, less serious and more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will never recover, that sweetness.  Blake’s was a more starry madness.  Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound 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?

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not for the paradox one might say, it never was so grave.  Everywhere the joke “emerges”—­as an “elegant” writer might have it—­emerges to catch the attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing.  It wears (let the violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance, and an eye in suspense.  It is much at the service of the vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game.  It stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant signalling, an endless recognition.  Forms of approach are remitted.  And the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and down the pages of the paper and the book.  See, again, the theatre.  A somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our present stage that little else can claim—­paradox again apart—­to be taken seriously.