I make no allusion here to the heroine of Mr. Haggard’s well-known romance. What I am thinking of at the moment is not the impossible ‘She’ of recent fiction, but the ‘not impossible She’ of Master Richard Crashaw—the ‘perfect monster,’ in female form, who was to ‘command his heart and him,’ and whom he was good enough to sketch for us in advance within the limits of some forty verses—the damsel whose beauty was to ‘Owe not all its duty whose face was to be ‘Made up who was to have ‘a well-tamed heart,’
and so on, and of whom the poet was so kind as to say that, if Time knew of anyone who answered the description, ‘Her that dares be Master Crashaw is not the only man by many who in the past has been seduced into putting into words and verse the aspirations, on this subject, which filled his soul. It would probably be found, if anyone had the requisite patience to go through with it, that there has been scarcely a poet who has not thus given expression to his conception of an ideal woman and to his desire for her companionship. Much more numerous, to be sure, are the rapturous tributes which have been paid to actual persons of the other sex: the poetry of praise, as written by men of women, has not yet been exhausted, and probably never will be. But the ideal description has generally come first, and very ‘A face that should content me wondrous well et cÆtera. He further asserted that ‘her tress also should be of crispÈd gold,’ and intimated graciously that ‘With wit, and these, perchance I might be tied, His contemporary, Lord Surrey, included among ‘the means to attain happy life,’ ‘the faithful wife, without debate’—that is, I suppose, a lady without forty-parson-power of talk—a not impossible, nay, fairly common, She. In a lyric by Beaumont and Fletcher, we find the supposed speaker giving utterance to a series of such wishes. ‘May I,’ he says, ‘find a woman fair, And her mind as clear as air!’ ‘May I find a woman rich, And, in truth, he talks throughout as if he did not expect to discover any such rarity. Everyone knows the little poem in which Ben Jonson details his preferences in women’s dress, declaring that ‘a sweet disorder’ does more bewitch him ‘than when art Is too precise in every part.’ But elsewhere he paints for us, not a perfect feminine attire, but the faultless maid herself, as he would have her: ‘I would have her fair and witty, That, it would seem, was rare Ben’s ideal. Carew, it is notorious, professed to despise ‘lovely cheeks or lips or eyes,’ if they were not combined with ‘A smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.’ A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even ‘A crystal brow, the moon’s despair, and so on, but instead, ‘A tender heart, a loyal mind, So Bedingfield, conceding to friend Damon ‘the nymph that sparkles in her dress,’ avows his own fondness for the maid ‘whose cheeks the hand of Nature paints.’ Of this young person he says: ‘No art she knows or seeks to know; ‘A mistress moderately fair, With that ‘one dear She’—and a few other things—he thought he could get on pretty comfortably. But probably at once the most obliging and most exigent of modern lovers was the sentimental gentleman to whose feelings Mrs. Bowen-Graves (‘Stella’) gave appropriate voice in the over-familiar ‘My Queen.’ ‘I will not dream of her tall and stately— nay, more: ‘I will not say she should walk sedately— (as if anyone could be a ‘sweet calm’!); moreover:
but there is at least one point upon which this gentleman insists: ‘She must be courteous, she must be holy, and, being that, she may depend upon the stars falling, and the angels weeping, ere he ceases to love her, his Queen, his Queen! Ah! the poets have much to answer for. Here is Mr. Longfellow assuring his readers that ‘No one is so utterly desolate, and here is Sir Edwin Arnold declaring, with equal confidence, that ‘Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours et cÆtera, et cÆtera. Is it any wonder that, in the face of such encouragement, young men go on dreaming, each of the dimidium suÆ animÆ whom he is to meet by-and-by, and framing to that end all sorts of beautiful |