SOUL AND BODY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1186, 22 July 1911, Page 9

SOUL AND BODY.

In one of the finest passnges in "In Memoriam" Tennyson tells us how, seated on tho lawn late one evening, reading, the letters of Arthur Hallam, his dead friend's soul "Hashed upon him" as he read. There may be believed to be more of. a writers soul in his letters than in more impersonal forms of composition, nevertheless all' literary matter may be said to (lash upon the mind "of an intelligent reader some glimpse of the soul - 'of him who composed it. From this contact With tho soul of the author there arises, as Addison pointed out, a curiosity as to his life and character, and even his bodily appearance, so that the man who came from Spain, not'to make Virgil's acquaintance, but merely to "see" him, did so in obedience to a human instinct.

It is perhaps as well that it is hot given to all readers to see their favourite authors in the flesh, for there might be many disappointments. There would not bo if the , l'vthagorcan theory wero true that the soul pre-existed and fashioned a body for itself according to its own inherent qualities. •; In-that caso no, doubt the beauty .of tho soul, would always be reflected in the body., lii experience, .however, that does not always happen,, and nature hjis .a curious- trhim, at one time of enclosing a fonl soul in a fair envelope,' 'and at another of encasing a soul, beautiful as the-passion flower in-ii body grotesque, enough to swell the train of the Abbot Of Unreason. The principle is well known to writers of fiction, and there is a subtle instance in the most popular of M. Eostand's plays. There it is the. passionate soul of Cyrano which appeals. ..to.. lioxaiVe in the letters her handsome young lover Sends her, but shq never tjiinks.of. associating, it with so. ungainly 'a jnersnn asCyrano. The'picture Misf!Bi'addon '.paints of Lady Audley"is.another case whei-e. ; .the disparity, of-'-what'lare, Nevertheless,.. twp-co-members of brie organism ' is'"' made literary capital of. Lady Audley, .it ;will be remembered, is a'monster of'crime. She is a bigamist and an incendiary,'and if she is not' a murderess it is not her fault. Yet this tiend of a sou! is enclosed in a body of such an innocent beauty that Scotland Yard itself might be excused for being incredulous of her criminality. Hers is "a childish beauty"; her eyes are blue and "clear as the skies on a "bright summer's day"; her hair is golden, and cither "falls iii' a feathery shower over her throat and shoulders" or shines'.about her face, "like the pale.goldon halo you see round the head of n Madonna in an Italian picture." This is, of course, extreme and absurd, nevertheless the remark which a lady made to Joubert might be extended to jjiany others—that he had the .air; of a'so.til that had met a body, by chance and , was making the best'of it. ' '■ -.•"■- • .'. Milton vras l'latonising when he declared in "Comus" that Uoro 'are certain virtues that come to "cast a beam on the outward shape"; at any rate, gifts- of imagination do not necessarily do so; and we are perhaps happier in contemplating our favourite poets in their portraits than in their reality. Thus Tennyson will always bo to us the weird, grand, Merlinlike being who' looks down unon us out of the second portrait by Watts, but this is how he impressed Allingham at first:—"Soon came in a t'all, broad-shouldered, swarthy man, slightly stooping, with loose dark hair and beard. He wore spectacles, and was obviously very near-sitthted. Hollow; cheeks and tho dark pallor of his skin gave him an unhealthy appearance. He was a strange and almost spectral figure." Similarly, Clint's Shelley suffices us, although .to a snap-shot'ter tho poet's may have been the freckled face with the turncd-up nose that portrayers of the "real Shelley" toll us it was.—"Manchester Guardian."