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diff --git a/1395-h/1395-h.htm b/1395-h/1395-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b947a5b --- /dev/null +++ b/1395-h/1395-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,3535 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>Letters on Literature</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4 { + text-align: left; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h2> +<a href="#startoftext">Letters on Literature, by Andrew Lang</a> +</h2> +<pre> +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters on Literature, by Andrew Lang + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Letters on Literature + + +Author: Andrew Lang + +Release Date: May 13, 2005 [eBook #1395] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE*** +</pre> +<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p> +<p>Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David +Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p> +<h1>LETTERS ON LITERATURE<br /> +by Andrew Lang</h1> +<p>Contents:</p> +<p>Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry<br /> +Of Modern English Poetry<br /> +Fielding<br /> +Longfellow<br /> +A Friend of Keats<br /> +On Virgil<br /> +Aucassin and Nicolette<br /> +Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)<br /> +Lucretius<br /> +To a Young American Book-Hunter<br /> +Rochefoucauld<br /> +Of Vers de Société<br /> +On Vers de Société<br /> +Richardson<br /> +Gérard de Nerval<br /> +On Books About Red Men<br /> +Appendix I<br /> +Appendix II</p> +<h2>DEDICATION</h2> +<p>Dear Mr. Way,</p> +<p><i>After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture +a short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, +and only know him by his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will add +another to these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a +sort experimental in English, and in prose, though Horace—in Latin +and in verse—was successful with it long ago</i>?</p> +<p><i>Very sincerely yours</i>,</p> +<p><i>A. LANG</i>.</p> +<p><i>To W. J. Way</i>, <i>Esq</i>.<br /> +<i>Topeka</i>, <i>Kansas</i>.</p> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> +<p>These Letters were originally published in the <i>Independent</i> +of New York. The idea of writing them occurred to the author after +he had produced “Letters to Dead Authors.” That kind +of Epistle was open to the objection that nobody <i>would</i> write +so frankly to a correspondent about his own work, and yet it seemed +that the form of Letters might be attempted again. The <i>Lettres +à Emilie sur la Mythologie</i> are a well-known model, but Emilie +was not an imaginary correspondent. The persons addressed here, +on the other hand, are all people of fancy—the name of Lady Violet +Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray’s: gifted Hopkins is the +minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Guardian Angel.” +The author’s object has been to discuss a few literary topics +with more freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver +kind of essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more +frequently the author’s critic than his collaborator.</p> +<h2>INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY</h2> +<p><i>To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Wincott,—You write to me, from your “bright home +in the setting sun,” with the flattering information that you +have read my poor “Letters to Dead Authors.” You are +kind enough to say that you wish I would write some “Letters to +Living Authors;” but that, I fear, is out of the question,—for +me.</p> +<p>A thoughtful critic in the <i>Spectator</i> has already remarked +that the great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles—if +they could read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, “I +may write till they can spell”—an exercise of which ghosts +are probably as incapable as was Matt’s little Mistress of Quality. +But Living Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous, +as well as impertinent, to direct one’s comments on them literally, +in the French phrase, “to their address.” Yet there +is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.</p> +<p>Our old English essays, the papers in the <i>Tatler</i> and <i>Spectator</i>, +were originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch +of personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write +my “Letters on Literature,” of the present and of the past, +English, American, ancient, or modern, to <i>you</i>, in your distant +Kansas, or to such other correspondents as are kind enough to read these +notes.</p> +<p>Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor +Poetry! She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out +first at banquets, though many would prefer to sit next some livelier +and younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or even the chattering <i>soubrette</i> +of journalism. <i>Seniores priores</i>: Poetry, if no longer very +popular, is a dame of the worthiest lineage, and can boast a long train +of gallant admirers, dead and gone. She has been much in courts. +The old Greek tyrants loved her; great Rhamses seated her at his right +hand; every prince had his singers. Now we dwell in an age of +democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out of courtesy, +and for old friendship’s sake, than for liking. Though so +many write verse, as in Juvenal’s time, I doubt if many read it. +“None but minstrels list of sonneting.” The purchasing +public, for poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, and <i>they</i> +are usually poor.</p> +<p>Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than +the birth of so many poetical “societies”? We have +the Browning Society, the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, +the Wordsworth Society—lately dead. They all demonstrate +that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for +their proper pleasure; men and women need confederates in this adventure. +There is safety in numbers, and, by dint of tea-parties, recitations, +discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr. Furnivall and his friends keep +blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo. They cannot raise +a flame!</p> +<p>In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable +poets, and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief +singers have outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering +time. Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very +nature, to prefer “the newest songs,” as Odysseus says men +did even during the war of Troy. Or, following another ancient +example, we say, like the rich niggards who neglected Theocritus, “Homer +is enough for all.”</p> +<p>Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately +as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden +book of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall +to a lower place, or be among those whom only curious students pore +over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry +will always read him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, +and Chaucer. Look his defects in the face, throw them into the +balance, and how they disappear before his merits! He is the last +and youngest of the mighty race, born, as it were, out of due time, +late, and into a feebler generation.</p> +<p>Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has +a touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional perversity, +a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets (“windy” and “happy”). +There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his earliest +pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces like +“Lilian” and “Eleanore,” and the others of that +kind and of that date.</p> +<p>Let it be admitted that “In Memoriam” has certain lapses +in all that meed of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which +might deserve (here is an example) “to line a box,” or to +curl some maiden’s locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, +that the poet now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing “because +it must,” now dares to approach questions insoluble, and again +declines their solution. What is all this but the changeful mood +of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old English +heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the walls +of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind night that shall +again receive it.</p> +<p>I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain +of sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated regrets. +It is an easier if not more grateful task to note a certain peevish +egotism of tone in the heroes of “Locksley Hall,” of “Maud,” +of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” “You can’t +think how poor a figure you make when you tell that story, sir,” +said Dr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose “figure” +must certainly have been more respectable than that which is cut by +these whining and peevish lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.</p> +<p>Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the “Idylls,” +is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere +for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The “Idylls,” +with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and +love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. +One wishes, at times, that the “Morte d’Arthur” had +remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished +as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other admirable +things, the “Last Battle in the West.”</p> +<p>People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the +Laureate’s versatility. He has touched so many strings, +from “Will Waterproof’s Monologue,” so far above Praed, +to the agony of “Rizpah,” the invincible energy of “Ulysses,” +the languor and the fairy music of the “Lotus Eaters,” the +grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines to Catullus and +to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning, with Keats for magic +and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, +and, even in the latest volume of his long life, “we may tell +from the straw,” as Homer says, “what the grain has been.”</p> +<p>There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning +as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is +thankful as for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial +posterity will rate him with the Laureate, or that so large a proportion +of his work will endure? The charm of an enigma now attracts students +who feel proud of being able to understand what others find obscure. +But this attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.</p> +<p>Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer +is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may +be made out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as +hard as, for example, he would find it necessary to read the “Logic” +of Hegel. There is a story of two clever girls who set out to +peruse “Sordello,” and corresponded with each other about +their progress. “Somebody is dead in ‘Sordello,’” +one of them wrote to her friend. “I don’t quite know +<i>who</i> it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long +run.” Alas! a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely +clear the stage of “Sordello.” It is hardly to be +hoped that “Sordello,” or “Red Cotton Night Cap Country,” +or “Fifine,” will continue to be struggled with by posterity. +But the mass of “Men and Women,” that unexampled gallery +of portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs, +princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, while +civilization and literature last, while men care to know what is in +men.</p> +<p>No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of +style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like +them in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful +imitators in the future. They will last all the better for a certain +manliness of religious faith—something sturdy and assured—not +moved by winds of doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainly +one of Mr. Browning’s attractions in this fickle and shifting +generation. He cannot be forgotten while, as he says—</p> +<blockquote><p> “A sunset touch,<br /> +A chorus ending of Euripides,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move “a +thousand hopes and fears.”</p> +<p>If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise +most that which best fits one’s private moods, I suppose I should +place Mr. Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. +Reason and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that +he is not quite there.</p> +<p>Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile +mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the microscopic +glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which tears the +life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from the +victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold’s poetry has our +love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the stress and accidents +of life. “The Scholar Gipsy,” “Obermann,” +“Switzerland,” the melancholy majesty of the close of “Sohrab +and Rustum,” the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves +beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder +of “Dover Beach,” with its “melancholy, long-withdrawing +roar;” these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in +that latest hour when life herself ceases to “moan round with +many voices.”</p> +<p>My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic, +that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best +poems are, at most, “a chain of highly valuable thoughts.” +It may be so; but he carries us back to “wet, bird-haunted English +lawns;” like him “we know what white and purple fritillaries +the grassy harvest of the river yields,” with him we try to practise +resignation, and to give ourselves over to that spirit</p> +<blockquote><p>“Whose purpose is not missed,<br /> +While life endures, while things subsist.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. Arnold’s poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth’s +was to his generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, +when nature does for him what his “<i>lutin</i>” did for +Corneille, “takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.” +But he has none of the creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades +even “Tintern Abbey.” He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, +“the surest-footed” of our poets. He can give a natural +and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to “these +bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia.”</p> +<p>Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming +to us “breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians.” +But even the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and +Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold’s song, +that beautiful song in “Empedocles on Etna,” which has the +perfection of sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It +is full of the silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of +the loch’s dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the +heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.</p> +<p>Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the fountains +of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and stony +channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or +who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy +question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) +in my next letter. <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a></p> +<h2>OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY</h2> +<p>My dear Wincott,—I hear that a book has lately been published +by an American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. +The singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put +forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapæst or trochee, +or whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares +that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.</p> +<p>This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very dangerous +it is to write even on the English poetry of the day. Eighteen +is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden, in “Old +Mortality,” tells us that three to one are odds as long as ever +any warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.</p> +<p>I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the +eighteen of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to +speak about three living poets, in addition to those masters treated +of in my last letter. Two of the three you will have guessed at—Mr. +Swinburne and Mr. William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do +not know even by name. I think he is not one of the English eighteen—Mr. +Robert Bridges. His muse has followed the epicurean maxim, and +chosen the shadowy path, <i>fallentis semita vitæ</i>, where the +dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop in autumn +above the yellow St. John’s wort. But you will find her +all the fresher for her country ways.</p> +<p>My knowledge of Mr. William Morris’s poetry begins in years +so far away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. +I remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton’s ruined castle at +St. Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated +“Two Red Roses across the Moon.” And I remember thinking +that the poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris’s other early +verses, “The Defence of Guinevere,” this song of the moon +and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the little book +won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain +in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast “Earthly +Paradise,” that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and +green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich +palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little +by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, +these persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, +and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But +the characters in the lyrics in “The Defence of Guinevere” +are people of flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, +and the trappings of their tabards.</p> +<p>There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris’s +old Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him, +with all its contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest desire +to enjoy this life to the full in war and love, or to make certain of +a future in which war is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If +one were to choose favourites from “The Defence of Guinevere,” +they would be the ballads of “Shameful Death,” and of “The +Sailing of the Sword,” and “The Wind,” which has the +wind’s wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of “Porphyria’s +Lover” in its burden.</p> +<p>The use of “colour-words,” in all these pieces, is very +curious and happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, +“the scarlet roofs of the good town,” in “The Sailing +of the Sword,” make the poem a vivid picture. Then look +at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of his lady, in “The +Wind”:</p> +<blockquote><p>“For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping +green behind<br /> +It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind;<br /> +On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;<br /> +If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,<br /> +And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard’s +jar,<br /> +And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“The Blue Closet,” which is said to have been written +for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic +manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, +when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. +Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, +though “The Haystack in the Floods,” with its tragedy, must +surely appeal to all who read poetry.</p> +<p>For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris’s +long later poems, “The Earthly Paradise” especially, were +less art than “art manufacture.” This may be an ungrateful +and erroneous sentiment. “The Earthly Paradise,” and +still more certainly “Jason,” are full of such pleasure +as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, +they are “good, but copious.” Even from narrative +poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. +Matthew Arnold’s parable of “The Progress of Poetry.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Mount is mute, the channel dry.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Euripides has been called “the meteoric poet,” and the +same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few +readers had heard his name—I only knew it as that of the author +of a strange mediæval tale in prose—when he published “Atalanta +in Calydon” in 1865. I remember taking up the quarto in +white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being instantly led captive by +the beauty and originality of the verse.</p> +<p>There was this novel “meteoric” character in the poem: +the writer seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, +“the blue cold fields and folds of air,” in all the primitive +forces which were alive before this earth was; the naked vast powers +that circle the planets and farthest constellations. This quality, +and his varied and sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth +of a Greek chorus, were the things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. +He was, above all, “a mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies,” +and one looked eagerly for his next poems. They came with disappointment +and trouble.</p> +<p>The famous “Poems and Ballads” have become so well known +that people can hardly understand the noise they made. I don’t +wonder at the scandal, even now. I don’t see the fun of +several of the pieces, except the mischievous fun of shocking your audience. +However, “The Leper” and his company are chiefly boyish, +in the least favourable sense of the word. They do not destroy +the imperishable merit of the “Hymn to Proserpine” and the +“Garden of Proserpine” and the “Triumph of Time” +and “Itylus.”</p> +<p>Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one’s old opinion, +that English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, +and sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young, +remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled +the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he +was learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, +like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world +and in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are +of great excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could +match his Greek lines on Landor.</p> +<p>What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even +higher than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There +is no science that can master this chemistry of the brain. He +is too copious. “Bothwell” is long enough for six +plays, and “Tristram of Lyonesse” is prolix beyond even +mediæval narrative. He is too pertinacious; children are +the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburne +almost makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his endless odes to +Hugo, and rondels to small boys and girls. <i>Ne quid nimis</i>, +that is the golden rule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, +too emphatic, and as fond of repeating himself as Professor Freeman. +Such are the defects of so noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has +decided that it shall be, Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.</p> +<p>The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers +of poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with +his verse. But his verse is not so easily found. This poet +never writes in magazines; his books have not appealed to the public +by any sort of advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth +in the regular way. The first was “Poems, by Robert Bridges, +Batchelor of Arts in the University of Oxford. <i>Parva seges +satis est</i>. London: Pickering, 1873.”</p> +<p>This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has +distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books +printed at Mr. Daniel’s private press in Oxford. In these, +as in all Mr. Bridges’s poems, there is a certain austere and +indifferent beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, +Milton and the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased +with the “Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed +Killed.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,<br /> + And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow<br /> +Next they that bear her, honoured on this night,<br /> + And then the maidens in a double row,<br /> + Each singing soft and low,<br /> +And each on high a torch upstaying:<br /> +Unto her lover lead her forth with light,<br /> +With music and with singing, and with praying.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This is a stately stanza.</p> +<p>In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets, +turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular. +In spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still, +in their humble twittering way. Much more in his true vein were +the lines, “Clear and Gentle Stream,” and all the other +verses in which, like a true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:</p> +<blockquote><p>“There is a hill beside the silver Thames,<br /> + Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,<br /> +And brilliant under foot with thousand gems<br /> + Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.<br /> + Straight trees in every place<br /> + Their thick tops interlace,<br /> + And pendent branches trail their foliage fine<br /> + Upon his watery face.</p> +<p>* * * * *</p> +<p>A reedy island guards the sacred bower<br /> + And hides it from the meadow, where in peace<br /> +The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,<br /> + Robbing the golden market of the bees.<br /> + And laden branches float<br /> + By banks of myosote;<br /> + And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys<br /> + Delay the loitering boat.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I cannot say how often I have read that poem, and how delightfully +it carries the breath of our River through the London smoke. Nor +less welcome are the two poems on spring, the “Invitation to the +Country,” and the “Reply.” In these, besides +their verbal beauty and their charming pictures, is a manly philosophy +of Life, which animates Mr. Bridges’s more important pieces—his +“Prometheus the Firebringer,” and his “Nero,” +a tragedy remarkable for the representation of Nero himself, the luxurious +human tiger. From “Prometheus” I make a short extract, +to show the quality of Mr. Bridges’s blank verse:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Nor is there any spirit on earth astir,<br /> +Nor ’neath the airy vault, nor yet beyond<br /> +In any dweller in far-reaching space<br /> +Nobler or dearer than the spirit of man:<br /> +That spirit which lives in each and will not die,<br /> +That wooeth beauty, and for all good things<br /> +Urgeth a voice, or still in passion sigheth,<br /> +And where he loveth, draweth the heart with him.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. Bridges’s latest book is his “Eros and Psyche” +(Bell & Sons, who publish the “Prometheus”). It +is the old story very closely followed, and beautifully retold, with +a hundred memories of ancient poets: Homer, Dante, Theocritus, as well +as of Apuleius.</p> +<p>I have named Mr. Bridges here because his poems are probably all +but unknown to readers well acquainted with many other English writers +of late days. On them, especially on actual contemporaries or +juniors in age, it would be almost impertinent for me to speak to you; +but, even at that risk, I take the chance of directing you to the poetry +of Mr. Bridges. I owe so much pleasure to its delicate air, that, +if speech be impertinence, silence were ingratitude. <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a></p> +<h2>FIELDING</h2> +<p><i>To Mrs. Goodhart, in the Upper Mississippi Valley</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Madam,—Many thanks for the New York newspaper you have +kindly sent me, with the statistics of book-buying in the Upper Mississippi +Valley. Those are interesting particulars which tell one so much +about the taste of a community.</p> +<p>So the Rev. E. P. Roe is your favourite novelist there; a thousand +of his books are sold for every two copies of the works of Henry Fielding? +This appears to me to speak but oddly for taste in the Upper Mississippi +Valley. On Mr. Roe’s works I have no criticism to pass, +for I have not read them carefully.</p> +<p>But I do think your neighbours lose a great deal by neglecting Henry +Fielding. You will tell me he is coarse (which I cannot deny); +you will remind me of what Dr. Johnson said, rebuking Mrs. Hannah More. +“I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once,” writes +that sainted maiden lady. “I alluded to some witty passage +in ‘Tom Jones.’” He replied: “I am shocked +to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you +have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make.”</p> +<p>You remind me of this, and that Johnson was no prude, and that his +age was tolerant. You add that the literary taste of the Upper +Mississippi Valley is much more pure than the waters of her majestic +river, and that you only wish you knew who the two culprits were that +bought books of Fielding’s.</p> +<p>Ah, madam, how shall I answer you? Remember that if you have +Johnson on your side, on mine I have Mrs. More herself, a character +purer than “the consecrated snow that lies on Dian’s lap.” +Again, we cannot believe Johnson was fair to Fielding, who had made +his friend, the author of “Pamela,” very uncomfortable by +his jests. Johnson owned that he read all “Amelia” +at one sitting. Could so worthy a man have been so absorbed by +an unworthy book?</p> +<p>Once more, I am not recommending Fielding to boys and girls. +“Tom Jones” was one of the works that Lydia Languish hid +under the sofa; even Miss Languish did not care to be caught with that +humorous foundling. “Fielding was the last of our writers +who drew a man,” Mr. Thackeray said, “and he certainly did +not study from a draped model.”</p> +<p>For these reasons, and because his language is often unpolished, +and because his morality (that he is always preaching) is not for “those +that eddy round and round,” I do not desire to see Fielding popular +among Miss Alcott’s readers. But no man who cares for books +can neglect him, and many women are quite manly enough, have good sense +and good taste enough, to benefit by “Amelia,” by much of +“Tom Jones.” I don’t say by “Joseph Andrews.” +No man ever respected your sex more than Henry Fielding. What +says his reformed rake, Mr. Wilson, in “Joseph Andrews”?</p> +<p>“To say the Truth, I do not perceive that Inferiority of Understanding +which the Levity of Rakes, the Dulness of Men of Business, and the Austerity +of the Learned would persuade us of in Women. As for my Wife, +I declare I have found none of my own Sex capable of making juster Observations +on Life, or of delivering them more agreeably, nor do I believe any +one possessed of a faithfuller or braver Friend.”</p> +<p>He has no other voice wherein to speak of a happy marriage. +Can you find among our genteel writers of this age, a figure more beautiful, +tender, devoted, and in all good ways womanly than Sophia Western’s? +“Yes,” you will say; “but the man must have been a +brute who could give her to Tom Jones, to ‘that fellow who sold +himself,’ as Colonel Newcome said.” “There you +have me at an avail,” in the language of the old romancers. +There we touch the centre of Fielding’s morality, a subject ill +to discuss, a morality not for everyday preaching.</p> +<p>Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist. He preaches +as continually as Thackeray. And his moral is this: “Let +a man be kind, generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest—and +we may pardon him vices of young blood, and the stains of adventurous +living.” Fielding has no mercy on a seducer. Lovelace +would have fared worse with him than with Richardson, who, I verily +believe, admired that infernal (excuse me) coward and villain. +The case of young Nightingale, in “Tom Jones,” will show +you what Fielding thought of such gallants. Why, Tom himself preaches +to Nightingale. “Miss Nancy’s Interest alone, and +not yours, ought to be your sole Consideration,” cried Thomas, +. . . “and the very best and truest Honour, which is Goodness, +requires it of you,” that is, requires that Nightingale shall +marry Miss Nancy.</p> +<p>How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly honest, +with his own astonishing lack of <i>retenue</i>, and with Lady Bellaston, +is just the puzzle. We cannot very well argue about it. +I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partly excuse Jones in +a number of very delicate situations. If you ask me whether Sophia +had not, after her marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I +must admit that probably it was so. But Dr. Johnson himself thought +little of that.</p> +<p>I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding’s morality +is to take the best of it and leave the remainder alone. Here +I find that I have unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, +Mr. James Boswell, the younger, of Auchinleck:</p> +<p>“The moral tendency of Fielding’s writings . . . is ever +favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous +affections. He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an +amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructions +to a higher state of ethical perfection.”</p> +<p>Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his +oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones’s faults, +and what a world of men and women it will become! Fielding did +not paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well. +He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties +of charity in every sense of the word. He found that the only +man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and +beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral character. +In short, he knew that respectability often practised none but the strictly +self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always +extinguish a native goodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery +made him leniently disposed to “characters and situations so wretchedly +low and dirty, that I,” say the author of “Pamela,” +“could not be interested for any one of them.”</p> +<p>How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, +spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken +seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of “those deplorably +tedious lamentations, ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Sir Charles +Grandison,’” as Horace Walpole calls them!</p> +<p>Fielding asks his Muse to give him “humour and good humour.” +What novelist was ever so rich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind +with so much affection for mankind in his heart? This love shines +in every book of his. The poor have all his good-will, and in +him an untired advocate and friend. What a life the poor led in +the England of 1742! There never before was such tyranny without +a servile insurrection. I remember a dreadful passage in “Joseph +Andrews,” where Lady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph’s +sweetheart, locked up in prison:—</p> +<p>“It would do a Man good,” says her accomplice, Scout, +“to see his Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to <i>Bridewell</i>; +he takes so much pleasure in it. And when once we ha’ ’um +there, we seldom hear any more o’ ’um. He’s +either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month’s Time.”</p> +<p>This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber +barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from +some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, +it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England +of to-day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.</p> +<p>He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have +nothing but “Art for Art’s sake,” that burly body +of Harry Fielding’s must even go to the wall. The first +Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him aside. He +preaches like Thackeray; he writes “with a purpose” like +Dickens—obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into +Bridewell he goes, if <i>l’Art pour l’Art</i> is all the +literary law and the prophets.</p> +<p>But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His noble English, +his sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly +heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried +along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one’s +self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, +of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a +scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his +innocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek +in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up +correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece +of Aristotle—not hackneyed—to show you that if he is writing +about “characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty,” +he is yet a student and a critic.</p> +<p>Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson, +was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth’s conversations +with the author who remarked that “Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the +French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes +of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius.” What knew Samuel +of Eustathius? I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I +like it! I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little +pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer +to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him but in his +faults. They make him more human; one loves him for them as he +loves Squire Western, with all his failings. Delightful, immortal +Squire!</p> +<p>It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out “Hurray +for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in +Sussex.” But it <i>was</i> Western that talked of “One +Acton, that the Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own +Dogs kill’d ’un, and eat ’un.” And have +you forgotten the popular discussion (during the Forty-five) of the +affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire Western said, “all of +us understand”? Said the Puppet-Man, “I don’t +care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not uppermost, +for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows.” But the Puppet-Man +had no vote in 1745. Now, to our comfort, he can and does exercise +the glorious privilege of the franchise.</p> +<p>There is no room in this epistle for Fielding’s glorious gallery +of characters—for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her debaucheries, +and is therefore so unlike our modern representative of her class, Lady +Betty, in Miss Broughton’s “Doctor Cupid;” for Square, +and Thwackum, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady Booby, and +Honour, that undying lady’s maid, and Partridge, and Captain Blifil +and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!</p> +<p>It is like the whole world of that old England—the maids of +the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, +the beaux, the starveling authors—all alive; all (save the authors) +full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a +brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty +old militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer +to Fielding—a number of meritorious moderns? Who knows? +But do not let <i>us</i> prefer anything to our English follower of +Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, +like Don Quixote on the paths of Spain.</p> +<p>But I cannot convert you. You will turn to some story about +store-clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues +with the fair.</p> +<h2>LONGFELLOW</h2> +<p><i>To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford</i>.</p> +<p>My dear Mainwaring,—You are very good to ask me to come up +and listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the +minor characters in “Sordello;” but I think it would suit +me better, if you didn’t mind, to come up when the May races are +on. I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in “Sordello,” +and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through +this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello’s story told in an intelligible +manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, +taking up a volume of poetry here and there.</p> +<p>What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember, +and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books have made +on him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for example. +I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, +and what a flood of memories his music brings with it! To me it +is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing over the empty +fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a belated bird, +and here and there a red leaf from the tree. There is that autumnal +sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not +there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. +Yes, it comes to one out of one’s boyhood; it breathes of a world +very vaguely realized—a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings +of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later +sense of what poetry means, which comes with early manhood.</p> +<p>Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his +battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had +a touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in +a boy’s favourites, such as “Of Nelson and the North,” +or “Ye Mariners of England.”</p> +<p>His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were +neither when one was fifteen. To read the “Voices of the +Night,” in particular—those early pieces—is to be +back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer’s +day, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardens and fields.</p> +<p>There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first +found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and +fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,</p> +<blockquote><p>“The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,<br /> + The best-beloved Night!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Is not that version of Euripides exquisite—does it not seem +exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from +Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human matter than +for an indefinable beauty of manner?</p> +<p>I believe it is the manner, after all, of the “Psalm of Life” +that has made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent +people, that it is “as good as a sermon,” that they value +it for this reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men +in our difficult life. They say so, and they think so: but the +poem is not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent. +But it really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes; +and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that they +are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the “Psalms +of Life” a masterpiece. You—my learned prosodist and +student of Browning and Shelley—will agree with me that it is +<i>not</i> a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the +experience brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your +elders can.</p> +<p>How many other poems of Longfellow’s there are that remind +us of youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us +when we read “The Reaper and the Flowers”! I read +again, and, as the poet says,</p> +<blockquote><p>“Then the forms of the departed<br /> + Enter at the open door,<br /> +The belovèd, the true-hearted<br /> + Come to visit me once more.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Compare that simple strain, you lover of Théophile Gautier, +with Théo’s own “Château de Souvenir” +in “Emaux et Camées,” and confess the truth, which +poet brings the break into the reader’s voice? It is not +the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it is the +simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a ballad moves +you. I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one’s old +self of the old years. I don’t know a poem “of the +affections,” as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that +I like better than Thackeray’s “Cane-bottomed Chair.” +Well, “The Fire of Driftwood” and this other of Longfellow’s +with its absolute lack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is +not less tender and true.</p> +<blockquote><p>“And she sits and gazes at me<br /> + With those deep and tender eyes,<br /> +Like the stars, so still and saintlike,<br /> + Looking downward from the skies.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read +the “Voices of the Night” from the same book with us, how +long ago! So long ago that one was half-frightened by the legend +of the “Beleaguered City.” I know the ballad brought +the scene to me so vividly that I expected, any frosty night, to see +how</p> +<blockquote><p>“The white pavilions rose and fell<br /> + On the alarmed air;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark “Three +Brethren’s Cairn,” that I half-hoped to watch when “the +troubled army fled”—fled with battered banners of mist drifting +through the pines, down to the Tweed and the sea. The “Skeleton +in Armour” comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the “Wreck +of the Hesperus” touches one in the old, simple way after so many, +many days of verse-reading and even verse-writing.</p> +<p>In brief, Longfellow’s qualities are so mixed with what the +reader brings, with so many kindliest associations of memory, that one +cannot easily criticize him in cold blood. Even in spite of this +friendliness and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of course, +that he does moralize too much. The first part of his lyrics is +always the best; the part where he is dealing directly with his subject. +Then comes the “practical application” as preachers say, +and I feel now that it is sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and +even manufactured.</p> +<p>Look at his “Endymion.” It is the earlier verses +that win you:</p> +<blockquote><p>“And silver white the river gleams<br /> +As if Diana in her dreams<br /> + Had dropt her silver bow<br /> + Upon the meadows low.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. +But the moral and consolatory <i>application</i> is too long—too +much dwelt on:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,<br /> +Love gives itself, but is not bought.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, +and not only does the poet “moralize his song,” but the +moral is feeble, and fantastic, and untrue. There are, though +he denies it, myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that</p> +<blockquote><p>“Some heart, though unknown,<br /> + Responds unto his own.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.</p> +<p>A poem like “My Lost Youth” is needed to remind one of +what the author really was, “simple, sensuous, passionate.” +What a lovely verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath +of Longfellow’s favourite Finnish “Kalevala,” “a +verse of a Lapland song,” like a wind over pines and salt coasts:</p> +<blockquote><p>“I remember the black wharves and the slips,<br /> + And the sea-tide, tossing free,<br /> +And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,<br /> +And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,<br /> + And the magic of the sea.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language—not +a Keats by any means—has often, by sheer force of plain sincerity, +struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that +haunts us and will not be forgotten:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Ye open the eastern windows,<br /> + That look towards the sun,<br /> +Where thoughts are singing swallows,<br /> + And the brooks of morning run.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli’s, the Virgin seated +with the Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn +in Paradise. This poem of Longfellow’s, “The Children’s +Hour,” seems, like Botticelli’s painting, to open a door +into the paradise of children, where their angels do ever behold that +which is hidden from men—what no man hath seen at any time.</p> +<p>Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who, with all his science +of verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of it into +his lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the other +is the poet of Death, and of <i>bizarre</i> shapes of death, from which +Heaven deliver us!</p> +<p>Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American, though +Longfellow, in “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” +and the “New England Tragedies,” sought his topics in the +history and traditions of the New World.</p> +<p>To me “Hiawatha” seems by far the best of his longer +efforts; it is quite full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, +birds, weather, and wind and snow. Everything lives with a human +breath, as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild +folk, to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. +Of course there are lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars +on us in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the +Indian Eleusinia, to be told that</p> +<blockquote><p> “the gentle Chibiabos<br /> +<i>Sang in tones of deep emotion</i>!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“Tones of deep emotion” may pass in a novel, but not +in this epic of the wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all +ways a worthy record of those dim, mournful races which have left no +story of their own, only here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the +forest leaves.</p> +<p>A poet’s life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does +not wish he knew as little of Burn’s as of Shakespeare’s? +Of Longfellow’s there is nothing to know but good, and his poetry +testifies to it—his poetry, the voice of the kindest and gentlest +heart that poet ever bore. I think there are not many things in +poets’ lives more touching than his silence, in verse, as to his +own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddles not with it, and he +kept secret his brief lay on that insuperable and incommunicable regret. +Much would have been lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes +him better for it than if he had given us a new “Vita Nuova.”</p> +<p>What an immense long way I have wandered from “Sordello,” +my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, +like those of a boy, “are long, long thoughts.” I +have not written on Longfellow’s sonnets, for even you, impeccable +sonneteer, admit that you admire them as much as I do.</p> +<h2>A FRIEND OF KEATS</h2> +<p><i>To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Egerton,—Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin’s new +“Life of Keats” <a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a> +has only one fault, it’s too short. Perhaps, also, it is +almost too studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers +how Keats (like Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is to +gush about Keats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example of reserve. +What a good fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best +sense, moral he seems, when one compares his life and his letters with +the vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longer than he, though +they, too, died young, and who left more work, though not better, never +so good, perhaps, as Keats’s best.</p> +<p>However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend, +John Hamilton Reynolds. <i>Noscitur a sociis</i>—a man is +known by the company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been +excellent company, if we may judge him by his writings. He comes +into Lord Houghton’s “Life and Letters of Keats” very +early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet writing to him in the +April of 1817, from the Isle of Wight. “I shall forthwith +begin my ‘Endymion,’ which I hope I shall have got some +way with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful +place I have set my heart upon, near the castle.” Keats +ends “your sincere friend,” and a man to whom Keats was +a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.</p> +<p>About Reynolds’s life neither time nor space permits me to +say very much, if I knew very much, which I don’t. He was +the son of a master in one of our large schools. He went to the +Bar. He married a sister of Thomas Hood. He wrote, like +Hood, in the <i>London Magazine</i>. With Hood for ally, he published +“Odes and Addresses to Great People;” the third edition, +which I have here, is of 1826. The late relations of the brothers-in-law +were less happy; possibly the ladies of their families quarrelled; that +is usually the way of the belligerent sex.</p> +<p>Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of +Wight, some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of +“Endymion.” “It is to be lamented,” says +Lord Houghton, “that Mr. Reynolds’s own remarkable verse +is not better known.” Let us try to know it a little better.</p> +<p>I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds’s first volume of +poems, which was published before “Endymion.” It contained +some Oriental melodies, and won a careless good word from Byron. +The earliest work of his I can lay my hand on is “The Fancy, a +Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray’s +Inn, Student at Law, with a brief memoir of his Life.” There +is a motto from Wordsworth:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive.” +<a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a></p> +</blockquote> +<p>It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how +Byron took lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at +Eton in which he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how +Christopher North whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats himself +never had enough of fighting at school, and beat the butcher afterwards. +His friend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His +imaginary character, Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad, who becomes +possessed by a passion for prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, +but “the stains are fugitive.”</p> +<p>We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and improving +his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving anxious thought +to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested preference, +as fighting was never my <i>forte</i>, any more than it was Artemus +Ward’s. At school I was “more remarkable for what +I suffered than for what I achieved.”</p> +<p>Peter Corcoran “fought nearly as soon as he could walk,” +wherein he resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have +been borrowed from the author of the “Ode to the Nightingale.” +Peter fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a “mill” at +the Fives-Court, and became the Laureate of the Ring. “He +has made a good set-to with Eales, Tom Belcher (the monarch of the <i>gloves</i>!), +and Turner, and it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging +hand even of Randall himself.” “The difficult and +ravaging hand”—there is a style for you!</p> +<p>Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember +that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies +with admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellars +and coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a sonnet that applies +well enough to Reynolds’s own career:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Were this a feather from an eagle’s wing,<br /> + And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile<br /> + Taken from ancient Jove’s majestic pile—<br /> +And might I dip my feather in some spring,<br /> +Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:—<br /> + And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle<br /> + In Heaven’s blue sea—I then might with a smile<br /> +Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!</p> +<p>“But I am mortal: and I cannot write<br /> + Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.<br /> + Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb<br /> +To where her Temple is—Not mine the might:—<br /> + I have some glimmering of what is sublime—<br /> +But, ah! it is a most inconstant light.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.</p> +<p>“About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a +fight he had witnessed to a lady.” Unlucky Peter! +“Was ever woman in this manner wooed?” The lady “glanced +her eye over page after page in hopes of meeting with something that +was intelligible,” and no wonder she did not care for a long letter +“devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco and the Brummagem +youth.” Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before her +with glorious scars, “two black eyes” in fact, and she “was +inexorably cruel.” Peter did not survive her disdain. +“The lady still lives, and is married”! It is ever +thus!</p> +<p>Peter’s published works contain an American tragedy. +Peter says he got it from a friend, who was sending him an American +copy of “Guy Mannering” “to present to a young lady +who, strange to say, read books and wore pockets,” virtues unusual +in the sex. One of the songs (on the delights of bull-baiting) +contains the most vigorous lines I have ever met, but they are <i>too</i> +vigorous for our lax age. The tragedy ends most tragically, and +the moral comes in “better late,” says the author, “than +never.” The other poems are all very lively, and very much +out of date. Poor Peter!</p> +<p>Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether +the poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his +own more lucky love affair. “Upon my soul,” writes +Keats, “I have been getting more and more close to you every day, +ever since I knew you, and now one of the first pleasures I look to +is your happy marriage.” Reynolds was urging Keats to publish +the “Pot of Basil” “as an answer to the attack made +on me in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i> and the <i>Quarterly Review</i>.”</p> +<p>Next Keats writes that he himself “never was in love, yet the +voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.” +On September 22, 1819, Keats sent Reynolds the “Ode to Autumn,” +than which there is no more perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare. +This was the last of his published letters to Reynolds. He was +dying, haunted eternally by that woman’s shape and voice.</p> +<p>Reynolds’s best-known book, if any of them can be said to be +known at all, was published under the name of John Hamilton. It +is “The Garden of Florence, and Other Poems” (Warren, London, +1821). There is a dedication—to his young wife.</p> +<p>“Thou hast entreated me to ‘write no more,’” +and he, as an elderly “man of twenty-four,” promises to +obey. “The lily and myself henceforth are <i>two</i>,” +he says, implying that he and the lily have previously been “one,” +a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran. There is +something very pleasant in the graceful regret and obedience of this +farewell to the Muse. He says to Mrs. Reynolds:</p> +<blockquote><p>“I will not tell the world that thou hast chid<br /> + My heart for worshipping the idol Muse;<br /> +That thy dark eye has given its gentle lid<br /> + Tears for my wanderings; I may not choose<br /> +When thou dost speak but do as I am bid,—<br /> + And therefore to the roses and the dews,<br /> +Very respectfully I make my bow;—<br /> +And turn my back upon the tulips now.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“The chief poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were +to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to +have been written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting +engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the +time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever!”</p> +<p>I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats’s kindness, +to the most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that +was Scott’s in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Molière,</p> +<p>“He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever +possessed, and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others. +His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done +the world some service had his life been spared—but he was of +too sensitive a nature—and thus he was destroyed! One story +he completed, and that is to me now the most pathetic poem in existence.”</p> +<p>It was “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.”</p> +<p>The “Garden of Florence” is written in the couplets of +“Endymion,” and is a beautiful version of the tale once +more retold by Alfred de Musset in “Simone.” From +“The Romance of Youth” let me quote one stanza, which applies +to Keats:</p> +<blockquote><p>“He read and dreamt of young Endymion,<br /> + Till his romantic fancy drank its fill;<br /> +He saw that lovely shepherd sitting lone,<br /> + Watching his white flocks upon Ida’s hill;<br /> +The Moon adored him—and when all was still,<br /> + And stars were wakeful—she would earthward stray,<br /> +And linger with her shepherd love, until<br /> + The hooves of the steeds that bear the car of day,<br /> +Struck silver light in the east, and then she waned away!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It was on Latmos, not Ida, that Endymion shepherded his flocks; but +that is of no moment, except to schoolmasters. There are other +stanzas of Reynolds worthy of Keats; for example, this on the Fairy +Queen:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Her bodice was a pretty sight to see;<br /> + Ye who would know its colour,—be a thief<br /> +Of the rose’s muffled bud from off the tree;<br /> + And for your knowledge, strip it leaf by leaf<br /> +Spite of your own remorse or Flora’s grief,<br /> + Till ye have come unto its heart’s pale hue;<br /> +The last, last leaf, which is the queen,—the chief<br /> + Of beautiful dim blooms: ye shall not rue,<br /> +At sight of that sweet leaf the mischief which ye do.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>One does not know when to leave off gathering buds in the “Garden +of Florence.” Even after Shakespeare, and after Keats, this +passage on wild flowers has its own charm:</p> +<blockquote><p>“We gathered wood flowers,—some blue as the +vein<br /> +O’er Hero’s eyelid stealing, and some as white,<br /> +In the clustering grass, as rich Europa’s hand<br /> +Nested amid the curls on Jupiter’s forehead,<br /> +What time he snatched her through the startled waves;—<br /> +Some poppies, too, such as in Enna’s meadows<br /> +Forsook their own green homes and parent stalks,<br /> +To kiss the fingers of Proserpina:<br /> +And some were small as fairies’ eyes, and bright<br /> +As lovers’ tears!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I wish I had room for three or four sonnets, the Robin Hood sonnets +to Keats, and another on a picture of a lady. Excuse the length +of this letter, and read this:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Sorrow hath made thine eyes more dark and keen,<br /> + And set a whiter hue upon thy cheeks,—<br /> + And round thy pressèd lips drawn anguish-streaks,<br /> +And made thy forehead fearfully serene.<br /> +Even in thy steady hair her work is seen,<br /> + For its still parted darkness—till it breaks<br /> + In heavy curls upon thy shoulders—speaks<br /> + Like the stern wave, how hard the storm hath been!</p> +<p>“So looked that hapless lady of the South,<br /> + Sweet Isabella! at that dreary part<br /> +Of all the passion’d hours of her youth;<br /> + When her green Basil pot by brother’s art<br /> +Was stolen away; so look’d her painèd mouth<br /> + In the mute patience of a breaking heart!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There let us leave him, the gay rhymer of prize-fighters and eminent +persons—let us leave him in a serious hour, and with a memory +of Keats. <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a></p> +<h2>ON VIRGIL</h2> +<p><i>To Lady Violet Lebas</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Lady Violet,—Who can admire too much your undefeated resolution +to admire only the right things? I wish I had this respect for +authority! But let me confess that I have always admired the things +which nature made me prefer, and that I have no power of accommodating +my taste to the verdict of the critical. If I do not like an author, +I leave him alone, however great his reputation. Thus I do not +care for Mr. Gibbon, except in his Autobiography, nor for the elegant +plays of M. Racine, nor very much for some of Wordsworth, though his +genius is undeniable, nor excessively for the late Prof. Amiel. +Why should we force ourselves into an affection for them, any more than +into a relish for olives or claret, both of which excellent creatures +I have the misfortune to dislike? No spectacle annoys me more +than the sight of people who ask if it is “right” to take +pleasure in this or that work of art. Their loves and hatreds +will never be genuine, natural, spontaneous.</p> +<p>You say that it is “right” to like Virgil, and yet you +admit that you admire the Mantuan, as the Scotch editor joked, “wi’ +deeficulty.” I, too, must admit that my liking for much +of Virgil’s poetry is not enthusiastic, not like the admiration +expressed, for example, by Mr. Frederic Myers, in whose “Classical +Essays” you will find all that the advocates of the Latin singer +can say for him. These heights I cannot reach, any more than I +can equal that eloquence. Yet must Virgil always appear to us +one of the most beautiful and moving figures in the whole of literature.</p> +<p>How sweet must have been that personality which can still win our +affections, across eighteen hundred years of change, and through the +mists of commentaries, and school-books, and traditions! Does +it touch thee at all, oh gentle spirit and serene, that we, who never +knew thee, love thee yet, and revere thee as a saint of heathendom? +Have the dead any delight in the religion they inspire?</p> +<blockquote><p><i>Id cinerem aut Manes credis curare sepultos</i>?</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I half fancy I can trace the origin of this personal affection for +Virgil, which survives in me despite the lack of a very strong love +of parts of his poems. When I was at school we met every morning +for prayer, in a large circular hall, round which, on pedestals, were +set copies of the portrait busts of great ancient writers. Among +these was “the Ionian father of the rest,” our father Homer, +with a winning and venerable majesty. But the bust of Virgil was, +I think, of white marble, not a cast (so, at least, I remember it), +and was of a singular youthful purity and beauty, sharing my affections +with a copy of the exquisite Psyche of Naples. It showed us that +Virgil who was called “The Maiden” as Milton was named “The +Lady of Christ’s.” I don’t know the archeology +of it, perhaps it was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of +this image, beheld daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of +the “Æneid” daily parsed, not without stripes and +anguish. So I retain a sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive +the many drawbacks of his poetry.</p> +<p>It is not always poetry at first hand; it is often imitative, like +all Latin poetry, of the Greek songs that sounded at the awakening of +the world. This is more tolerable when Theocritus is the model, +as in the “Eclogues,” and less obvious in the “Georgics,” +when the poet is carried away into naturalness by the passion for his +native land, by the longing for peace after cruel wars, by the joy of +a country life. Virgil had that love of rivers which, I think, +a poet is rarely without; and it did not need Greece to teach him to +sing of the fields:</p> +<blockquote><p><i>Propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus</i><br /> +<i>Mincius et tenera prætexit arundine ripas</i>.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“By the water-side, where mighty Mincius wanders, with links +and loops, and fringes all the banks with the tender reed.” +Not the Muses of Greece, but his own <i>Casmenæ</i>, song-maidens +of Italy, have inspired him here, and his music is blown through a reed +of the Mincius. In many such places he shows a temper with which +we of England, in our late age, may closely sympathize.</p> +<p>Do you remember that mediæval story of the building of Parthenope, +how it was based, by the Magician Virgilius, on an egg, and how the +city shakes when the frail foundation chances to be stirred? This +too vast empire of ours is as frail in its foundation, and trembles +at a word. So it was with the Empire of Rome in Virgil’s +time: civic revolution muttering within it, like the subterranean thunder, +and the forces of destruction gathering without. In Virgil, as +in Horace, you constantly note their anxiety, their apprehension for +the tottering fabric of the Roman state. This it was, I think, +and not the contemplation of human fortunes alone, that lent Virgil +his melancholy. From these fears he looks for a shelter in the +sylvan shades; he envies the ideal past of the golden world.</p> +<blockquote><p><i>Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat</i>!</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“Oh, for the fields! Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, +where wander the Lacænian maids! Oh, that one would carry +me to the cool valleys of Hæmus, and cover me with the wide shadow +of the boughs! Happy was he who came to know the causes of things, +who set his foot on fear and on inexorable Fate, and far below him heard +the roaring of the streams of Hell! And happy he who knows the +rural deities, Pan, and Sylvanus the Old, and the sisterhood of the +nymphs! Unmoved is he by the people’s favour, by the purple +of kings, unmoved by all the perfidies of civil war, by the Dacian marching +down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of the Roman state, and the +Empire hurrying to its doom. He wasteth not his heart in pity +of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what fruits the branches +bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings forth; he knows not +our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the records of the common +weal”—does not read the newspapers, in fact.</p> +<p>The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the +Empire, the shame and dread of each day’s news, we too know them; +like Virgil we too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for +some such careless paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the +Islands of the Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper +that Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, +so distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed +and unforced, is wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style.</p> +<p>But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought, +that style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on telling +a story that is only of feigned and foreign interest. Doubtless +it was the “Æneid,” his artificial and unfinished +epic, that won Virgil the favour of the Middle Aces. To the Middle +Ages, which knew not Greek, and knew not Homer, Virgil was the representative +of the heroic and eternally interesting past. But to us who know +Homer, Virgil’s epic is indeed, “like moonlight unto sunlight;” +is a beautiful empty world, where no real life stirs, a world that shines +with a silver lustre not its own, but borrowed from “the sun of +Greece.”</p> +<p>Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs +and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, +and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the +marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea +unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun +in Elizabeth’s reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil +could only follow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the +things that were alive for Homer. What could Virgil care for a +tussle between two stout men-at-arms, for the clash of contending war-chariots, +driven each on each, like wave against wave in the sea? All that +tide had passed over, all the story of the “Æneid” +is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle Ages of Sir Walter Scott; +but the borrower had none of Scott’s joy in the noise and motion +of war, none of the Homeric “delight in battle.”</p> +<p>Virgil, in writing the “Æneid,” executed an imperial +commission, and an ungrateful commission; it is the sublime of hack-work, +and the legend may be true which declares that, on his death-bed, he +wished his poem burned. He could only be himself here and there, +as in that earliest picture of romantic love, as some have called the +story of “Dido,” not remembering, perhaps, that even here +Virgil had before his mind a Greek model, that he was thinking of Apollonius +Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be himself, too, in +passages of reflection and description, as in the beautiful sixth book, +with its picture of the under world, and its hints of mystical philosophy.</p> +<p>Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysian world might +Virgil be well content to dwell, in the shadow of that fragrant laurel +grove, with them who were “priests pure of life, while life was +theirs, and holy singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo.” +There he might muse on his own religion and on the Divinity that dwells +in, that breathes in, that is, all things and more than all. Who +could wish Virgil to be one of the spirits that</p> +<blockquote><p><i>Lethæum ad flumen Dues evocat agmine magno</i>,</p> +</blockquote> +<p>that are called once more to the Lethean stream, and that once more, +forgetful of their home, “into the world and wave of men depart?”</p> +<p>There will come no other Virgil, unless his soul, in accordance with +his own philosophy, is among us to-day, crowned with years and honours, +the singer of “Ulysses,” of the “Lotus Eaters,” +of “Tithonus,” and “Œnone.”</p> +<p>So, after all, I have been enthusiastic, “maugre my head,” +as Malory says, and perhaps, Lady Violet, I have shown you why it is +“right” to admire Virgil, and perhaps I have persuaded nobody +but myself.</p> +<p>P.S.—Mr. Coleridge was no great lover of Virgil, inconsistently. +“If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave +him?” Yet Mr. Coleridge had defined poetry as “the +<i>best</i> words, in the best order”—that is, “diction +and metre.” He, therefore, proposed to take from Virgil +his poetry, and then to ask what was left of the Poet!</p> +<h2>AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE</h2> +<p><i>To the Lady Violet Lebas</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Lady Violet,—I do not wonder that you are puzzled by the +language of the first French novel. The French of “Aucassin +et Nicolette” is not French after the school of Miss Pinkerton, +at Chiswick. Indeed, as the little song-story has been translated +into modern French by M. Bida, the painter (whose book is very scarce), +I presume even the countrywomen of Aucassin find it difficult. +You will not expect me to write an essay on the grammar, nor would you +read it if I did. The chief thing is that “s” appears +as the sign of the singular, instead of being the sign of the plural, +and the nouns have cases.</p> +<p>The story must be as old as the end of the twelfth century, and must +have received its present form in Picardy. It is written, as you +see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose. The verse, which +was chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each <i>laisse</i>, or screed, +as in the “Chanson de Roland,” runs on the same final assonance, +or vowel sound throughout.</p> +<p>So much for the form. Who is the author? We do not know, +and never shall know. Apparently he mentions himself in the first +lines:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Who would listen to the lay,<br /> +Of the captive old and gray;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>for this is as much sense as one can make out of <i>del deport du +viel caitif</i>.</p> +<p>The author, then, was an old fellow. I think we might learn +as much from the story. An old man he was, or a man who felt old. +Do you know whom he reminds me of? Why, of Mr. Bowes, of the Theatre +Royal, Chatteris; of Mr. Bowes, that battered, old, kindly sentimentalist +who told his tale with Mr. Arthur Pendennis.</p> +<p>It is a love story, a story of love overmastering, without conscience +or care of aught but the beloved. And the <i>viel caitif</i> tells +it with sympathy, and with a smile. “Oh, folly of fondness,” +he seems to cry; “oh, pretty fever and foolish; oh, absurd happy +days of desolation:</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>When I was young, as you are young</i>,<br /> +<i>And lutes were touched, and songs were sung</i>!<br /> +<i>And love-lamps in the windows hung</i>!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It is the very tone of Thackeray, when Thackeray is tender; and the +world heard it first from this elderly nameless minstrel, strolling +with his viol and his singing boys, a blameless D’Assoucy, from +castle to castle in the happy poplar land. I think I see him and +hear him in the silver twilight, in the court of some château +of Picardy, while the ladies around sit listening on silken cushions, +and their lovers, fettered with silver chains, lie at their feet. +They listen, and look, and do not think of the minstrel with his gray +head, and his green heart; but we think of him. It is an old man’s +work, and a weary man’s work. You can easily tell the places +where he has lingered and been pleased as he wrote.</p> +<p>The story is simple enough. Aucassin, son of Count Garin, of +Beaucaire, loved so well fair Nicolette, the captive girl from an unknown +land, that he would never be dubbed knight, nor follow tourneys; nor +even fight against his father’s mortal foe, Count Bougars de Valence. +So Nicolette was imprisoned high in a painted chamber. But the +enemy were storming the town, and, for the promise of “one word +or two with Nicolette, and one kiss,” Aucassin armed himself and +led out his men. But he was all adream about Nicolette, and his +horse bore him into the press of foes ere he knew it. Then he +heard them contriving his death, and woke out of his dream.</p> +<p>“The damoiseau was tall and strong, and the horse whereon he +sat fierce and great, and Aucassin laid hand to sword, and fell a-smiting +to right and left, and smote through helm and headpiece, and arm and +shoulder, making a murder about him, like a wild boar the hounds fall +on in the forest. There slew he ten knights, and smote down seven, +and mightily and knightly he hurled through the press, and charged home +again, sword in hand.” For that hour Aucassin struck like +one of Mallory’s men in the best of all romances. But though +he took Count Bougars prisoner, his father would not keep his word, +nor let him have one word or two with Nicolette, and one kiss. +Nay, Aucassin was thrown into prison in an old tower. There he +sang of Nicolette,</p> +<blockquote><p>“Was it not the other day<br /> +That a pilgrim came this way?<br /> +And a passion him possessed,<br /> +That upon his bed he lay,<br /> +Lay, and tossed, and knew no rest,<br /> +In his pain discomforted.<br /> +But thou camest by his bed,<br /> +Holding high thine amice fine<br /> +And thy kirtle of ermine.<br /> +Then the beauty that is thine<br /> +Did he look on; and it fell<br /> +That the Pilgrim straight was well,<br /> +Straight was hale and comforted.<br /> +And he rose up from his bed,<br /> +And went back to his own place<br /> +Sound and strong, and fair of face.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Thus Aucassin makes a Legend of his lady, as it were, assigning to +her beauty such miracles as faith attributes to the excellence of the +saints.</p> +<p>Meanwhile, Nicolette had slipped from the window of her prison chamber, +and let herself down into the garden, where she heard the song of the +nightingales. “Then caught she up her kirtle in both hands, +behind and before, and flitted over the dew that lay deep on the grass, +and fled out of the garden, and the daisy flowers bending below her +tread seemed dark against her feet, so white was the maiden.” +Can’t you see her stealing with those “feet of ivory,” +like Bombyca’s, down the dark side of the silent moonlit streets +of Beaucaire?</p> +<p>Then she came where Aucassin was lamenting in his cell, and she whispered +to him how she was fleeing for her life. And he answered that +without her he must die; and then this foolish pair, in the very mouth +of peril, must needs begin a war of words as to which loved the other +best!</p> +<p>“Nay, fair sweet friend,” saith Aucassin, “it may +not be that thou lovest me more than I love thee. Woman may not +love man as man loves woman, for a woman’s love lies no deeper +than in the glance of her eye, and the blossom of her breast, and her +foot’s tip-toe; but man’s love is in his heart planted, +whence never can it issue forth and pass away.”</p> +<p>So while they speak</p> +<blockquote><p>“In debate as birds are,<br /> +Hawk on bough,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger. And Nicolette +flees, and leaps into the fosse, and thence escapes into a great forest +and lonely. In the morning she met shepherds merry over their +meat, and bade them tell Aucassin to hunt in that forest, where he should +find a deer whereof one glance would cure him of his malady. The +shepherds are happy, laughing people, who half mock Nicolette, and quite +mock Aucassin, when he comes that way. But at first they took +Nicolette for a <i>fée</i>, such a beauty shone so brightly from +her, and lit up all the forest. Aucassin they banter; and indeed +the free talk of the peasants to their lord’s son in that feudal +age sounds curiously, and may well make us reconsider our notions of +early feudalism.</p> +<p>But Aucassin learns at least that Nicolette is in the wood, and he +rides at adventure after her, till the thorns have ruined his silken +surcoat, and the blood, dripping from his torn body, makes a visible +track in the grass. So, as he wept, he met a monstrous man of +the wood, that asked him why he lamented. And he said he was sorrowing +for a lily-white hound that he had lost. Then the wild man mocked +him, and told his own tale. He was in that estate which Achilles, +among the ghosts, preferred to all the kingship of the dead outworn. +He was hind and hireling to a villein, and he had lost one of the villein’s +oxen. For that he dared not go into the town, where a prison awaited +him. Moreover, they had dragged the very bed from under his old +mother, to pay the price of the ox, and she lay on straw; and at that +the woodman wept.</p> +<p>A curious touch, is it not, of pity for the people? The old +poet is serious for one moment. “Compare,” he says, +“the sorrows of sentiment, of ladies and lovers, praised in song, +with the sorrows of the poor, with troubles that are real and not of +the heart!” Even Aucassin the lovelorn feels it, and gives +the hind money to pay for his ox, and so riding on comes to a lodge +that Nicolette has built with blossoms and boughs. And Aucassin +crept in and looked through a gap in the fragrant walls of the lodge, +and saw the stars in heaven, and one that was brighter than the rest.</p> +<p>Does one not feel it, the cool of that old summer night, the sweet +smell of broken boughs and trodden grass and deep dew, and the shining +of the star?</p> +<blockquote><p>“Star that I from far behold<br /> +That the moon draws to her fold,<br /> +Nicolette with thee doth dwell,<br /> +My sweet love with locks of gold,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>sings Aucassin. “And when Nicolette heard Aucassin, right +so came she unto him, and passed within the lodge, and cast her arms +about his neck and kissed and embraced him:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!”<br /> +“And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There the story should end, in a dream of a summer’s night. +But the old minstrel did not end it so, or some one has continued his +work with a heavier hand. Aucassin rides, he cares not whither, +if he has but his love with him. And they come to a fantastic +land of burlesque, such as Pantagruel’s crew touched at many a +time. And Nicolette is taken by Carthaginian pirates, and proves +to be daughter to the King of Carthage, and leaves his court and comes +to Beaucaire in the disguise of a ministrel, and “journeys end +in lovers’ meeting.”</p> +<p>That is all the tale, with its gaps, its careless passages, its adventures +that do not interest the poet. He only cares for youth, love, +spring, flowers, and the song of the birds; the rest, except the passage +about the hind, is mere “business” done casually, because +the audience expects broad jests, hard blows, misadventures, recognitions. +What lives is the touch of poetry, of longing, of tender heart, of humorous +resignation. It lives, and always must live, “while the +nature of man is the same.” The poet hopes his tale will +gladden sad men. This service it did for M. Bida, he says, in +the dreadful year of 1870-71, when he translated “Aucassin.” +This, too, it has done for me in days not delightful. <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a></p> +<h2>PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262)</h2> +<p><i>To the Lady Violet Lebas</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Lady Violet,—You are discursive and desultory enough, +as a reader, to have pleased even the late Lord Iddesleigh. It +was “Aucassin and Nicolette” only a month ago, and to-day +you have been reading Lord Lytton’s “Strange Story,” +I am sure, for you want information about Plotinus! He was born +(about A.D. 200) in Wolf-town (Lycopolis), in Egypt, the town, you know, +where the natives might not eat wolves, poor fellows, just as the people +of Thebes might not eat sheep. Probably this prohibition caused +Plotinus no regret, for he was a consistent vegetarian.</p> +<p>However, we are advancing too rapidly, and we must discuss Plotinus +more in order. His name is very dear to mystic novelists, like +the author of “Zanoni.” They always describe their +favourite hero as “deep in Plotinus or Iamblichus,” and +I venture to think that nearly represents the depth of their own explorations. +We do not know exactly when Plotinus was born. Like many ladies +he used to wrap up his age in a mystery, observing that these petty +details about the body (a mere husk of flesh binding the soul) were +of no importance. He was not weaned till he was eight years old, +a singular circumstance. Having a turn for philosophy, he attended +the schools of Alexandria, concerning which Kingsley’s “Hypatia” +is the most accessible authority.</p> +<p>All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learn from Porphyry, +the Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus. The philosopher +himself often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson is +described by Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was a sound +Churchman in the beginning of the age of new ideas, so Plotinus was +a sound pagan in the beginning of the triumph of Christianity.</p> +<p>Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic and short-sighted. +He wrote a very large number of treatises, but he never took the trouble +to read through them when once they were written, because his eyes were +weak. He was superstitious, like Dr. Johnson, yet he had lucid +intervals of common sense, when he laughed at the superstitions of his +disciples. Like Dr. Johnson, he was always begirt by disciples, +men and women, Bozzys and Thrales. He was so full of honour and +charity, that his house was crowded with persons in need of help and +friendly care. Though he lived so much in the clouds and among +philosophical abstractions, he was an excellent man of business. +Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous, dreading the +plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the tempest that fell on +him when he was voyaging to Coll.</p> +<p>You will admit that the parallel is pretty close for an historical +parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town and +the sage of Bolt Court, hard by Fleet Street!</p> +<p>To return to the education of Plotinus. He was twenty-eight +when he went up to the University of Alexandria. For eleven years +he diligently attended the lectures of Ammonius. Then he went +on the Emperor Gordian’s expedition to the East, hoping to learn +the philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishads would have puzzled +Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did. Gordian’s +army was defeated in Mesopotamia, no “blessed word” to Gordian, +and Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. He must have felt like +Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.</p> +<p>From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led him to Rome, and here, +as novelists say, “a curious thing happened.” There +was in Rome an Egyptian priest, who offered to raise up the Demon, or +Guardian Angel, of Plotinus in visible form. But there was only +one pure spot in all Rome, so said the priest, and this spot was the +Temple of Isis. Here the <i>séance</i> was held, and no +demon appeared, but a regular God of one of the first circles. +So terrified was an onlooker that he crushed to death the living birds +which he held in his hands for some ritual or magical purpose.</p> +<p>It was a curious scene, a cosmopolitan confusion of Egypt, Rome, +Isis, table-turning, the late Mr. Home, religion, and mummery, while +Christian hymns of the early Church were being sung, perhaps in the +garrets around, outside the Temple of Isis. The discovery that +he had a god for his guardian angel gave Plotinus plenty of confidence +in dealing with rival philosophers. For example, Alexandrinus +Olympius, another mystic, tried magical arts against Plotinus. +But Alexandrinus, suddenly doubling up during lecture with unaffected +agony, cried, “Great virtue hath the soul of Plotinus, for my +spells have returned against myself.” As for Plotinus, he +remarked among his disciples, “Now the body of Alexandrinus is +collapsing like an empty purse.”</p> +<p>How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our modern controversialists +had those accomplishments, and if Mr. Max Müller could, literally, +“double up” Professor Whitney, or if any one could cause +Peppmüller to collapse with his queer Homeric theory! Plotinus +had many such arts. A piece of jewellery was stolen from one of +his <i>protégées</i>, a lady, and he detected the thief, +a servant, by a glance. After being flogged within an inch of +his life, the servant (perhaps to save the remaining inch) confessed +all.</p> +<p>Once when Porphyry was at a distance, and was meditating suicide, +Plotinus appeared at his side, saying, “This that thou schemest +cometh not of the pure intellect, but of black humours,” and so +sent Porphyry for change of air to Sicily. This was thoroughly +good advice, but during the absence of the disciple the master died.</p> +<p>Porphyry did not see the great snake that glided into the wall when +Plotinus expired; he only heard of the circumstance. Plotinus’s +last words were: “I am striving to release that which is divine +within us, and to merge it in the universally divine.” It +is a strange mixture of philosophy and savage survival. The Zulus +still believe that the souls of the dead reappear, like the soul of +Plotinus, in the form of serpents.</p> +<p>Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics. +Like all great men, he was accused of plagiarism. A defence of +great men accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naudé’s +work of a like name about magic. On his death the Delphic Oracle, +in very second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a +demon.</p> +<p>Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so +modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted. His +character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural virtues +brought “fools into a circle.” What he meant by his +belief that four times he had, “whether in the body or out of +the body,” been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows? +What does Tennyson mean when he writes:</p> +<blockquote><p>“So word by word, and line by line,<br /> + The dead man touch’d me from the past,<br /> + And all at once it seem’d at last<br /> +His living soul was flashed on mine.</p> +<p>And mine in his was wound and whirl’d<br /> + About empyreal heights of thought,<br /> + And came on that which is, and caught<br /> +The deep pulsations of the world.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the +souls of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul. They are +wise with a wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more +wise.</p> +<p>In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least +he was at war with pessimism.</p> +<p>“They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world—bear +lightly whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement +of things.” He believed in a rest that remains for the people +of God, “where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand +many things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where +the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned.” +The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called metaphysical, +and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the beauty of the language +in which it is stated, remain immortal possessions.</p> +<p>Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while +Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell? Probably +natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson—conservatism and +taste—caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older +creeds. There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. +But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will +be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked +his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield’s tale) +knew his name better than his doctrine. His “Enneads,” +even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light +subjects of study.</p> +<h2>LUCRETIUS</h2> +<p><i>To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Martin,—“How individuals found religious consolation +from the creeds of ancient Greece and Rome” is, as you quote C. +O. Müller, “a very curious question.” It is odd +that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology +and the ritual of the classic peoples, we hear about their religion +in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody. We know very +well what gods they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to +the Olympians, and what stories they told about their deities, and about +the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that +the gods were interested in morality. They would all punish offences +in their own department, at least when it was a case of <i>numine læso</i>, +when the god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality, +or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury.</p> +<p>But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What +hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? +Had he any sense of <i>sin</i>, as more than a thing that could be expiated +by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing +the prayers and “masses,” so to speak, of the mendicant +clergy or charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the “Republic”? +About these great questions of the religious life—the Future and +man’s fortunes in the future, the punishment or reward of justice +or iniquity—we really know next to nothing.</p> +<p>That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable +to me. The <i>De Rerum Natura</i> was written for no other purpose +than to destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men’s +minds from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all +dread or desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life +of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to +“know the causes of things,” except that the knowledge would +bring “emancipation,” as people call it, from the gods, +to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the +Roman sire, under the <i>patria potestas</i> or <i>in manu patris</i>.</p> +<p>As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows +that his fellow-countrymen <i>must</i> have gone in a constant terror +about spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with +the “blithe” and careless existence of the ancient peoples. +In every line of Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the +slave just escaped from an intolerable thraldom to fear. Nobody +could well have believed on any other evidence that the classical people +had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time. True, as early as Homer, +we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls, and of the torments endured +by the notably wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus +and Tantalus. But when we read the opening books of the “Republic,” +we find the educated friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives’ +fables. They have heard, they say, that such notions circulate +among the people, but they seem never for a moment to have themselves +believed in a future of rewards and punishments.</p> +<p>The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria or Attica, usually +show us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or receiving +sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants, or, +perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends who have just rejoined +them. But it is only in the descriptions by Pausanias and others +of certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked, +of the demons that torture them and, above all, of the great chief fiend, +coloured like a carrion fly. To judge from Lucretius, although +so little remains to us of this creed, yet it had a very strong hold +of the minds of people, in the century before Christ. Perhaps +the belief was reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision +of Er, in the “Republic,” brings back, in a myth, the old +popular faith in a <i>Purgatorio</i>, if not in an <i>Inferno</i>.</p> +<p>In the “Phædo,” for certain, we come to the very +definite account of a Hell, a place of eternal punishment, as well as +of a Purgatory, whence souls are freed when their sins are expiated. +“The spirits beyond redemption, for the multitude of their murders +or sacrileges, Fate hurls into Tartarus, whence they never any more +come forth.” But souls of lighter guilt abide a year in +Tartarus, and then drift out down the streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. +Thence they reach the marsh of Acheron, but are not released until they +have received the pardon of the souls whom in life they had injured.</p> +<p>All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of +Plato’s, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular +unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been +raised by him to the rank of “pious opinion,” if not of +dogma. Now, Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against +all this dread of future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by +Platonic philosophy or by popular belief. The latter must have +been much the more powerful and widely diffused. It follows that +the Romans, at least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of +judgment to come, from which, but for the testimony of Lucretius and +his manifest sincerity, we might have believed them free.</p> +<p>Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it +did its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language +of Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the +closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and +his power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble +amplitude of manner—these, with a burning sincerity, mark him +above all others that smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualities +are half-crushed by his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory +into verse, by his unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and hope, +because these were united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron.</p> +<p>It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal +sleep, without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly +divorced from joy, which inspires all the best art. This negation +of hope has “close-lipped Patience for its only friend.”</p> +<p>In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large, +so glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the “Fête +Champêtre” of Giorgione, in the Louvre. All that life +is a thing we must leave soon, and forever, and must be hopelessly lapped +in an eternity of blind silence. “I shall let men see the +certain end of all,” he cries; “then will they resist religion, +and the threats of priests and prophets.” But this “certain +end” is exactly what mortals do not desire to see. To this +sleep they prefer even <i>tenebras Orci, vastasque lacunas</i>.</p> +<p>They will not be deprived of gods, “the friends of man, merciful +gods, compassionate.” They will not turn from even a faint +hope in those to the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferent +repose and divine “delight in immortal and peaceful life, far, +far away from us and ours—life painless and fearless, needing +nothing we can give, replete with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer +and promise, untouched by anger.”</p> +<p>Do you remember that hymn, as one may call it, of Lucretius to Death, +to Death which does not harm us. “For as we knew no hurt +of old, in ages when the Carthaginian thronged against us in war, and +the world was shaken with the shock of fight, and dubious hung the empire +over all things mortal by sea and land, even so careless, so unmoved, +shall we remain, in days when we shall no more exist, when the bond +of body and soul that makes our life is broken. Then naught shall +move us, nor wake a single sense, not though earth with sea be mingled, +and sea with sky.” There is no hell, he cries, or, like +Omar, he says, “Hell is the vision of a soul on fire.”</p> +<p>Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of passion +and of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in <i>Punch</i>) +is only the politician, striving always, never attaining; the stone +rolls down again from the hill-crest, and thunders far along the plain.</p> +<p>Thus his philosophy, which gives him such a delightful sense of freedom, +is rejected after all these years of trial by men. They feel that +since those remotest days</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum</i>,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretius describes to +little avail, if they may not keep their hopes and fears. Robbed +of these we are robbed of all; it serves us nothing to have conquered +the soil and fought the winds and waves, to have built cities, and tamed +fire, if the world is to be “dispeopled of its dreams.” +Better were the old life we started from, and dreams therewith, better +the free days—</p> +<blockquote><p> “<i>Novitas tum florida mundi</i><br /> +<i>Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla</i>;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain +end of all before the eyes of all.</p> +<p>Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the +noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved, who sought, at last, by his +own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the season appointed.</p> +<h2>TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER</h2> +<p><i>To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Dodsworth,—Let me congratulate you on having joined the +army of book-hunters. “Everywhere have I sought peace and +found it nowhere,” says the blessed Thomas à Kempis, “save +in a corner with a book.” Whether that good monk wrote the +“De Imitatione Christi” or not, one always likes him for +his love of books. Perhaps he was the only book-hunter that ever +wrought a miracle. “Other signs and miracles which he was +wont to tell as having happened at the prayer of an unnamed person, +are believed to have been granted to his own, such as the sudden reappearance +of a lost book in his cell.” Ah, if Faith, that moveth mountains, +could only bring back the books we have lost, the books that have been +borrowed from us! But we are a faithless generation.</p> +<p>From a collector so much older and better experienced in misfortune +than yourself, you ask for some advice on the sport of book-hunting. +Well, I will give it; but you will not take it. No; you will hunt +wild, like young pointers before they are properly broken.</p> +<p>Let me suppose that you are “to middle fortune born,” +and that you cannot stroll into the great book-marts and give your orders +freely for all that is rich and rare. You are obliged to wait +and watch an opportunity, to practise that maxim of the Stoic’s, +“Endure and abstain.” Then abstain from rushing at +every volume, however out of the line of your literary interests, which +seems to be a bargain. Probably it is not even a bargain; it can +seldom be cheap to you, if you do not need it, and do not mean to read +it.</p> +<p>Not that any collector reads all his books. I may have, and +indeed do possess, an Aldine Homer and Caliergus his Theocritus; but +I prefer to study the authors in a cheap German edition. The old +editions we buy mainly for their beauty, and the sentiment of their +antiquity and their associations.</p> +<p>But I don’t take my own advice. The shelves are crowded +with books quite out of my line—a whole small library of tomes +on the pastime of curling, and I don’t curl; and “God’s +Revenge against Murther,” though (so far) I am not an assassin. +Probably it was for love of Sir Walter Scott, and his mention of this +truculent treatise, that I purchased it. The full title of it +is “The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and +Execrable Sinne of (willful and premeditated) Murther.” +Or rather there is nearly a column more of title, which I spare you. +But the pictures are so bad as to be nearly worth the price. Do +not waste your money, like your foolish adviser, on books like that, +or on “Les Sept Visions de Don Francisco de Quevedo,” published +at Cologne, in 1682.</p> +<p>Why in the world did I purchase this, with the title-page showing +Quevedo asleep, and all his seven visions floating round him in little +circles like soap-bubbles? Probably because the book was published +by Clement Malassis, and perhaps he was a forefather of that whimsical +Frenchman, Poulet Malassis, who published for Banville, and Baudelaire, +and Charles Asselineau. It was a bad reason. More likely +the mere cheapness attracted me.</p> +<p>Curiosity, not cheapness, assuredly, betrayed me into another purchase. +If I want to read “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” of course +I read it in John Bunyan’s good English. Then why must I +ruin myself to acquire “Voyage d’un Chrestien vers l’Eternité. +Ecrit en Anglois, par Monsieur Bunjan, F.M., en Bedtfort, et nouvellement +traduit en François. Avec Figures. A Amsterdam, chez +Jean Boekholt Libraire près de la Bourse, 1685”? +I suppose this is the oldest French version of the famed allegory. +Do you know an older? Bunyan was still living and, indeed, had +just published the second part of the book, about Christian’s +wife and children, and the deplorable young woman whose name was Dull.</p> +<p>As the little volume, the Elzevir size, is bound in blue morocco, +by Cuzin, I hope it is not wholly a foolish bargain; but what do I want, +after all, with a French “Pilgrim’s Progress”? +These are the errors a man is always making who does not collect books +with system, with a conscience and an aim.</p> +<p>Do have a specially. Make a collection of works on few subjects, +well chosen. And what subjects shall they be? That depends +on taste. Probably it is well to avoid the latest fashion. +For example, the illustrated French books of the eighteenth century +are, at this moment, <i>en hausse</i>. There is a “boom” +in them. Fifty years ago Brunet, the author of the great “Manuel,” +sneered at them. But, in his, “Library Companion,” +Dr. Dibdin, admitted their merit. The illustrations by Gravelot, +Moreau, Marillier, and the rest, are certainly delicate, graceful, full +of character, stamped with style. But only the proofs before letters +are very much valued, and for these wild prices are given by competitive +millionaires. You cannot compete with them.</p> +<p>It is better wholly to turn the back on these books and on any others +at the height of the fashion, unless you meet them for fourpence on +a stall. Even then should a gentleman take advantage of a poor +bookseller’s ignorance? I don’t know. I never +fell into the temptation, because I never was tempted. Bargains, +real bargains, are so rare that you may hunt for a lifetime and never +meet one.</p> +<p>The best plan for a man who has to see that his collection is worth +what it cost him, is probably to confine one’s self to a single +line, say, in your case, first editions of new English, French, and +American books that are likely to rise in value. I would try, +were I you, to collect first editions of Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, +Poe, and Hawthorne.</p> +<p>As to Poe, you probably will never have a chance. Outside of +the British Museum, where they have the “Tamerlane” of 1827, +I have only seen one early example of Poe’s poems. It is +“Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe. +Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829, 8vo, pp. 71.” The book +“came to Mr. Locker (Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson), through Mr. +R. H. Stoddard, the American poet.” So says Mr. Locker-Lampson’s +Catalogue. He also has the New York edition of 1831.</p> +<p>These books are extraordinarily rare; you are more likely to find +them in some collection of twopenny rubbish than to buy them in the +regular market. Bryant’s “Poems” (Cambridge, +1821) must also be very rare, and Emerson’s of 1847, and Dr. Oliver +Wendell Holmes’s of 1836, and Longfellow’s “Voices +of the Night,” 1839, and Mr. Lowell’s “A Year’s +Life;” none of these can be common, and all are desirable, as +are Mr. Whittier’s “Legends of New England” (1831), +and “Poems” (1838).</p> +<p>Perhaps you may never be lucky enough to come across them cheap; +no doubt they are greatly sought for by amateurs. Indeed, all +American books of a certain age or of a special interest are exorbitantly +dear. Men like Mr. James Lenox used to keep the market up. +One cannot get the Jesuit “Relations”—shabby little +missionary reports from Canada, in dirty vellum.</p> +<p>Cartier, Perrot, Champlain, and the other early explorers’ +books are beyond the means of a working student who needs them. +May <i>you</i> come across them in a garret of a farmhouse, or in some +dusty lane of the city. Why are they not reprinted, as Mr. Arber +has reprinted “Captain John Smith’s Voyages, and Reports +on Virginia”? The very reprints, when they have been made, +are rare and hard to come by.</p> +<p>There are certain modern books, new books, that “go up” +rapidly in value and interest. Mr. Swinburne’s “Atalanta” +of 1865, the quarto in white cloth, is valued at twenty dollars. +Twenty years ago one dollar would have purchased it. Mr. Austin +Dobson’s “Proverbs in Porcelain” is also in demand +among the curious. Nay, even I may say about the first edition +of “Ballades in Blue China” (1880), as Gibbon said of his +“Essay on the Study of Literature:” “The primitive +value of half a crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or +thirty shillings,” or even more. I wish I had a copy myself, +for old sake’s sake.</p> +<p>Certain modern books, “on large paper,” are safe investments. +The “Badminton Library,” an English series of books on sport, +is at a huge premium already, when on “large paper.” +But one should never buy the book unless, as in the case of Dr. John +Hill Burton’s “Book-Hunter” (first edition), it is +not only on large paper, and not only rare (twenty-five copies), but +also readable and interesting. <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a> +A collector should have the taste to see when a new book is in itself +valuable and charming, and when its author is likely to succeed, so +that his early attempts (as in the case of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Lord +Tennyson, and a few others of the moderns) are certain to become things +of curious interest.</p> +<p>You can hardly ever get a novel of Jane Austen’s in the first +edition. She is rarer than Fielding or Smollett. Some day +it may be the same in Miss Broughton’s case. Cling to the +fair and witty Jane, if you get a chance. Beware of illustrated +modern books in which “processes” are employed. Amateurs +will never really value mechanical reproductions, which can be copied +to any extent. The old French copper-plate engravings and the +best English mezzo-tints are so valuable because good impressions are +necessarily so rare.</p> +<p>One more piece of advice. Never (or “hardly ever”) +buy an imperfect book. It is a constant source of regret, an eyesore. +Here have I Lovelace’s “Lucasta,” 1649, <i>without +the engraving</i>. It is deplorable, but I never had a chance +of another “Lucasta.” This is not a case of <i>invenies +aliam</i>. However you fare, you will have the pleasure of Hope +and the consolation of books <i>quietem inveniendam in abditis recessibus +et libellulis</i>.</p> +<h2>ROCHEFOUCAULD</h2> +<p><i>To the Lady Violet Lebas</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Lady Violet,—I am not sure that I agree with you in your +admiration of Rochefoucauld—of the <i>Réflexions, ou Sentences +et Maximes Morales</i>, I mean. At least, I hardly agree when +I have read many of them at a stretch. It is not fair to read +them in that way, of course, for there are more than five hundred <i>pensées</i>, +and so much <i>esprit</i> becomes fatiguing. I doubt if people +study them much. Five or six of them have become known even to +writers in the newspapers, and we all copy them from each other.</p> +<p>Rochefoucauld says that a man may be too dull to be duped by a very +clever person. He himself was so clever that he was often duped, +first by the general honest dulness of mankind, and then by his own +acuteness. He thought he saw more than he did see, and he said +even more than he thought he saw. If the true motive of all our +actions is self-love, or vanity, no man is a better proof of the truth +than the great maxim-maker. His self-love took the shape of a +brilliancy that is sometimes false. He is tricked out in paste +for diamonds, now and then, like a vain, provincial beauty at a ball. +“A clever man would frequently be much at a loss,” he says, +“in stupid company.” One has seen this embarrassment +of a wit in a company of dullards. It is Rochefoucauld’s +own position in this world of men and women. We are all, in the +mass, dullards compared with his cleverness, and so he fails to understand +us, is much at a loss among us. “People only praise others +in hopes of being praised in turn,” he says. Mankind is +not such a company of “log-rollers” as he avers.</p> +<p>There is more truth in a line of Tennyson’s about</p> +<blockquote><p> “The praise of those we love,<br /> +Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I venture to think we need not be young to prefer to hear the praise +of others rather than our own. It is not embarrassing in the first +place, as all praise of ourselves must be. I doubt if any man +or woman can flatter so discreetly as not to make us uncomfortable. +Besides, if our own performances be lauded, we are uneasy as to whether +the honour is deserved. An artist has usually his own doubts about +his own doings, or rather he has his own certainties. About our +friends’ work we need have no such misgivings. And our self-love +is more delicately caressed by the success of our friends than by our +own. It is still self-love, but it is filtered, so to speak, through +our affection for another.</p> +<p>What are human motives, according to Rochefoucauld? Temperament, +vanity, fear, indolence, self-love, and a grain of natural perversity, +which somehow delights in evil for itself. He neglects that other +element, a grain of natural worth, which somehow delights in good for +itself. This taste, I think, is quite as innate, and as active +in us, as that other taste for evil which causes there to be something +not wholly displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends.</p> +<p>There is a story which always appears to me a touching proof of this +grain of goodness, as involuntary, as fatal as its opposite. I +do not remember in what book of travels I found this trait of native +excellence. The black fellows of Australia are very fond of sugar, +and no wonder, if it be true that it has on them an intoxicating effect. +Well, a certain black fellow had a small parcel of brown sugar which +was pilfered from his lair in the camp. He detected the thief, +who was condemned to be punished according to tribal law; that is to +say, the injured man was allowed to have a whack at his enemy’s +head with a waddy, a short club of heavy hard wood. The whack +was duly given, and then the black who had suffered the loss threw down +his club, burst into tears, embraced the thief and displayed every sign +of a lively regret for his revenge.</p> +<p>That seems to me an example of the human touch that Rochefoucauld +never allows for, the natural goodness, pity, kindness, which can assert +itself in contempt of the love of self, and the love of revenge. +This is that true clemency which is a real virtue, and not “the +child of Vanity, Fear, Indolence, or of all three together.” +Nor is it so true that “we have all fortitude enough to endure +the misfortunes of others.” Everybody has witnessed another’s +grief that came as near him as his own.</p> +<p>How much more true, and how greatly poetical is that famous maxim: +“Death and the Sun are two things not to be looked on with a steady +eye.” This version is from the earliest English translation +of 1698. The <i>Maximes</i> were first published in Paris in 1665. +<a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a> “Our +tardy apish nation” took thirty-three years in finding them out +and appropriating them. This, too, is good: “If we were +faultless, we would observe with less pleasure the faults of others.” +Indeed, to observe these with pleasure is not the least of our faults. +Again, “We are never so happy, nor so wretched, as we suppose.” +It is our vanity, perhaps, that makes us think ourselves <i>miserrimi</i>.</p> +<p>Do you remember—no, you don’t—that meeting in “Candide” +of the unfortunate Cunégonde and the still more unfortunate old +lady who was the daughter of a Pope? “You lament your fate,” +said the old lady; “alas, you have known no such sorrows as mine!” +“What! my good woman!” says Cunégonde. “Unless +you have been maltreated by <i>two</i> Bulgarians, received <i>two</i> +stabs from a knife, had <i>two</i> of your castles burned over your +head, seen <i>two</i> fathers and <i>two</i> mothers murdered before +your eyes, and <i>two</i> of your lovers flogged at two autos-da-fé, +I don’t fancy that you can have the advantage of me. Besides, +I was born a baroness of seventy-two quarterings, and I have been a +cook.” But the daughter of a Pope had, indeed, been still +more unlucky, as she proved, than Cunégonde; and the old lady +was not a little proud of it.</p> +<p>But can you call <i>this</i> true: “There is nobody but is +ashamed of having loved when once he loves no longer”? If +it be true at all, I don’t think the love was much worth having +or giving. If one really loves once, one can never be ashamed +of it; for we never cease to love. However, this is the very high +water of sentiment, you will say; but I blush no more for it than M. +le Duc de Rochefoucauld for his own opinion. Perhaps I am thinking +of that kind of love about which he says: “True love is like ghosts; +which everybody talks about and few have seen.” “Many +be the thyrsus-bearers, few the Mystics,” as the Greek proverb +runs. “Many are called, few are chosen.”</p> +<p>As to friendship being “a reciprocity of interests,” +the saying is but one of those which Rochefoucauld’s vanity imposed +on his wit. Very witty it is not, and it is emphatically untrue. +“Old men console themselves by giving good advice for being no +longer able to set bad examples.” Capital; but the poor +old men are often good examples of the results of not taking their own +good advice. “Many an ingrate is less to blame than his +benefactor.” One might add, at least I will, “Every +man who looks for gratitude deserves to get none of it.” +“To say that one never flirts—is flirting.” +I rather like the old translator’s version of “Il y a de +bons mariages; mais il n’y en a point de délicieux”—“Marriage +is sometimes convenient, but never delightful.”</p> +<p>How true is this of authors with a brief popularity: “<i>Il +y a des gens qui ressemblent aux vaudevilles, qu’on ne chante +qu’un certain temps</i>.” Again, “to be in haste +to repay a kindness is a sort of ingratitude,” and a rather insulting +sort too. “Almost everybody likes to repay small favours; +many people can be grateful for favours not too weighty, but for favours +truly great there is scarce anything but ingratitude.” They +must have been small favours that Wordsworth had conferred when “the +gratitude of men had oftener left him mourning.” Indeed, +the very pettiness of the aid we can generally render each other, makes +gratitude the touching thing it is. So much is repaid for so little, +and few can ever have the chance of incurring the thanklessness that +Rochefoucauld found all but universal.</p> +<p>“Lovers and ladies never bore each other, because they never +speak of anything but themselves.” Do husbands and wives +often bore each other for the same reason? Who said: “To +know all is to forgive all”? It is rather like “On +pardonne tant que l’on aime”—“As long as we +love we can forgive,” a comfortable saying, and these are rare +in Rochefoucauld. “Women do not quite know what flirts they +are” is also, let us hope, not incorrect. The maxim that +“There is a love so excessive that it kills jealousy” is +only a corollary from “as long as we love, we forgive.” +You remember the classical example, Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier +des Grieux; not an honourable precedent.</p> +<p>“The accent of our own country dwells in our hearts as well +as on our tongues.” Ah! never may I lose the Border accent! +“Love’s Miracle! To cure a coquette.” +“Most honest women are tired of their task,” says this unbeliever. +And the others? Are they never aweary? The Duke is his own +best critic after all, when he says: “The greatest fault of a +penetrating wit is going beyond the mark.” Beyond the mark +he frequently goes, but not when he says that we come as fresh hands +to each new epoch of life, and often want experience for all our years. +How hard it was to begin to be middle-aged! Shall we find old +age easier if ever we come to its threshold? Perhaps, and Death +perhaps the easiest of all. Nor let me forget, it will be long +before <i>you</i> have occasion to remember, that “vivacity which +grows with age is not far from folly.”</p> +<h2>OF VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ</h2> +<p><i>To Mr. Gifted Hopkins</i>.</p> +<p>My Dear Hopkins,—The verses which you have sent me, with a +request “to get published in some magazine,” I now return +to you. If you are anxious that they should be published, send +them to an editor yourself. If he likes them he will accept them +from you. If he does not like them, why should he like them because +they are forwarded by <i>me</i>? His only motive would be an aversion +to disobliging a <i>confrère</i>, and why should I put him in +such an unpleasant position?</p> +<p>But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the <i>première +représentation</i> of your little poem. “To Delia +in Girton” you call it, “recommending her to avoid the Muses, +and seek the society of the Graces and Loves.” An old-fashioned +preamble, and of the lengthiest, and how do you go on?—</p> +<blockquote><p>Golden hair is fairy gold,<br /> + Fairy gold that cannot stay,<br /> +Turns to leaflets green and cold,<br /> + At the ending of the day!<br /> + Laurel-leaves the Muses may<br /> +Twine about your golden head.<br /> + Will the crown reward you, say,<br /> +When the fairy gold is fled?</p> +<p>Daphne was a maid unwise—<br /> + Shun the laurel, seek the rose;<br /> +Azure, lovely in the skies,<br /> + Shines less gracious in the hose!</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Don’t you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to <i>bas-bleus</i>, +if not indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors +will think so, I fear. Besides, I don’t like “Fairy +gold <i>that cannot stay</i>.” If <i>Fairy Gold</i> were +a <i>horse</i>, it would be all very well to write that it “cannot +stay.” ’Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs +of the <i>salon</i>.</p> +<p>This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you +whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. +You kindly ask my opinion on <i>vers de société</i> in +general. Well, I think them a very difficult sort of thing to +write well, as one may infer from this, that the ancients, our masters, +could hardly write them at all. In Greek poetry of the great ages +I only remember one piece which can be called a model—the Æolic +verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff. +It was a present, you remember, to the wife of his friend Nicias, the +physician of Miletus. The Greeks of that age kept their women +in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias would +have liked it if Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan or +a jewel. But there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all +the compliments to the lady, “the dainty-ankled Theugenis,” +turn on her skill, and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV., +no mean authority, called this piece of <i>vers de société</i> +“a model of honourable gallantry.”</p> +<p>I have just looked all through Pomtow’s pretty little pocket +volumes of the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature +of the lighter verse than this of Alcman’s—ου +μ' ετι παρθενικαι. +Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in “Love in Idleness”?</p> +<blockquote><p>“Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that +breathe desire,<br /> +Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire,<br /> +Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing,<br /> +Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for +his limbs weary with old age—with old age sadder for the sight +of the honey-voiced girls.</p> +<p>The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of “Society +Verses,” where, as Mr. Locker says, “a <i>boudoir</i> decorum +is, or ought always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into +passion, and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment.” +Honest women were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.</p> +<p>The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannot expect the +genius of Catullus not to “surge into passion,” even in +his hours of gayer song, composed when</p> +<blockquote><p><i>Multum lusimus in meis tabellis</i>,<br /> +<i>Ut convenerat esse delicatos</i>,<br /> +<i>Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum</i>.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, +are addressed to <i>men</i>, his friends, and thus they scarcely come +into the category of what we call “Society Verses.” +Given the character of Roman society, perhaps we might say that plenty +of this kind of verse was written by Horace and by Martial. The +famous ode to Pyrrha does not exceed the decorum of a Roman <i>boudoir</i>, +and, as far as love was concerned, it does not seem to have been in +the nature of Horace to “surge into passion.” So his +best songs in this kind are addressed to men, with whom he drinks a +little, and talks of politics and literature a great deal, and muses +over the shortness of life, and the zest that snow-clad Soracte gives +to the wintry fire.</p> +<p>Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered +so prettily in a <i>villanelle</i>, may come within the scope of this +Muse, for it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness +in its play. Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, +these old French forms seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry +that was written in the exotic measures of Greece. There is a +foreign grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the <i>English +ballade and villanelle</i>, as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics. +I would not say so much, on my own responsibility, nor trespass so far +on the domain of scholarship, but this opinion was communicated to me +by a learned professor of Latin. I think, too, that some of the +lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay, would +be well wedded with the verse of Horace. But perhaps no translator +will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace every man must be +his own translator.</p> +<p>It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing <i>vers de +société</i>, only he never troubles himself for a moment +about the “decorum of the <i>boudoir</i>.” Do you +remember the lines on the ring which he gave his lady? They are +the origin and pattern of all the verses written by lovers on that pretty +metempsychosis which shall make them slippers, or fans, or girdles, +like Waller’s, and like that which bound “the dainty, dainty +waist” of the Miller’s Daughter.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Ring that shalt bind the finger fair<br /> +Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare;<br /> +Thou hast not any price above<br /> +The token of her poet’s love;<br /> +Her finger may’st thou mate as she<br /> +Is mated every wise with me!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured, +this fortunate jewel:</p> +<blockquote><p>“In vain I wish! So, ring, depart,<br /> +And say ‘with me thou hast his heart’!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Once more Ovid’s verses on his catholic affection for all ladies, +the brown and the blonde, the short and the tall, may have suggested +Cowley’s humorous confession, “The Chronicle”:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Margarita first possessed,<br /> +If I remember well, my breast,<br /> + Margarita, first of all;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and then follows a list as long as Leporello’s.</p> +<p>What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of <i>vers de société</i> +is not so much his lack of “decorum” as the monotonous singsong +of his eternal elegiacs. The lightest of light things, the poet +of society, should possess more varied strains; like Horace, Martial, +Thackeray, not like Ovid and (here is a heresy) Praed. Inimitably +well as Praed does his trick of antithesis, I still feel that it <i>is</i> +a trick, and that most rhymers could follow him in a mere mechanic art. +But here the judgment of Mr. Locker would be opposed to this modest +opinion, and there would be opposition again where Mr. Locker calls +Dr. O. W. Holmes “perhaps the best living writer of this species +of verse.” But here we are straying among the moderns before +exhausting the ancients, of whom I fancy that Martial, at his best, +approaches most near the ideal.</p> +<p>Of course it is true that many of Martial’s lyrics would be +thought disgusting in any well-regulated convict establishment. +His gallantry is rarely “honourable.” Scaliger used +to burn a copy of Martial, once a year, on the altar of Catullus, who +himself was far from prudish. But Martial, somehow, kept his heart +undepraved, and his taste in books was excellent. How often he +writes verses for the bibliophile, delighting in the details of purple +and gold, the illustrations and ornaments for his new volume! +These pieces are for the few—for amateurs, but we may all be touched +by his grief for the little lass, Erotion. He commends her in +Hades to his own father and mother gone before him, that the child may +not be frightened in the dark, friendless among the shades</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras</i><br /> +<i>Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, and the pity of a man +for a child; pity that shows itself in a smile. I try to render +that other inscription for the tomb of little Erotion:</p> +<blockquote><p>Here lies the body of the little maid<br /> + Erotion;<br /> +From her sixth winter’s snows her eager shade<br /> + Hath fleeted on!<br /> +Whoe’er thou be that after me shalt sway<br /> + My scanty farm,<br /> +To her slight shade the yearly offering pay,<br /> + So—safe from harm—<br /> +Shall thou and thine revere the kindly <i>Lar</i>,<br /> + And <i>this</i> alone<br /> +Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far,<br /> + A mournful stone!</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial, who claimed +for the study of his book no serious hours, but moments of mirth, when +men are glad with wine, “in the reign of the Rose:” <a name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9">{9}</a></p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Hæc hora est tua, cum furit Lyæus</i>,<br /> +<i>Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli</i>;<br /> +<i>Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But enough of the poets of old; another day we may turn to Carew +and Suckling, Praed and Locker, poets of our own speech, lighter lyrists +of our own time. <a name="citation10"></a><a href="#footnote10">{10}</a></p> +<h2>ON VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ</h2> +<p><i>To Mr. Gifted Hopkins</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Gifted,—If you will permit me to use your Christian, and +prophetic, name—we improved the occasion lately with the writers +of light verse in ancient times. We decided that the ancients +were not great in verses of society, because they had, properly speaking, +no society to write verses for. Women did not live in the Christian +freedom and social equality with men, either in Greece or Rome—at +least not “modest women,” as Mr. Harry Foker calls them +in “Pendennis.” About the others there is plenty of +pretty verse in the Anthology. What you need for verses of society +is a period in which the social equality is recognized, and in which +people are peaceable enough and comfortable enough to “play with +light loves in the portal” of the Temple of Hymen, without any +very definite intentions, on either part, of going inside and getting +married.</p> +<p>Perhaps we should not expect <i>vers de société</i> +from the Crusaders, who were not peaceable, and who were very earnest +indeed, in love or war. But as soon as you get a Court, and Court +life, in France, even though the times were warlike, then ladies are +lauded in artful strains, and the lyre is struck <i>leviore plectro</i>. +Charles d’Orleans, that captive and captivating prince, wrote +thousands of <i>rondeaux</i>; even before his time a gallant company +of gentlemen composed the <i>Livre des Cent Ballades</i>, one hundred +<i>ballades</i>, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came +Clément Marot, with his gay and rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, +with his mythological compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and +led like lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra. A few, here +and there, of his pieces are lighter, more pleasant, and, in a quiet +way, immortal, such as the verses to his “fair flower of Anjou,” +a beauty of fifteen. So they ran on, in France, till Voiture’s +time, and Sarrazin’s with his merry <i>ballade</i> of an elopement, +and Corneille’s proud and graceful stanzas to Marquise de Gorla.</p> +<p>But verses in the English tongue are more worthy of our attention. +Mr. Locker begins his collection of them, <i>Lyra Elegantiarum</i> (no +longer a very rare book in England), as far back as Skelton’s +age, and as Thomas Wyat’s, and Sidney’s; but those things, +the lighter lyrics of that day, are rather songs than poems, and probably +were all meant to be sung to the virginals by our musical ancestors.</p> +<p>“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” says the great Ben +Jonson, or sings it rather. The words, that he versified out of +the Greek prose of Philostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune. +It is the same with Carew’s “He that loves a rosy cheek,” +or with “Roses, their sharp spines being gone.” The +lighter poetry of Carew’s day is all powdered with gold dust, +like the court ladies’ hair, and is crowned and diapered with +roses, and heavy with fabulous scents from the Arabian phoenix’s +nest. Little Cupids flutter and twitter here and there among the +boughs, as in that feast of Adonis which Ptolemy’s sister gave +in Alexandria, or as in Eisen’s vignettes for Dorat’s <i>Baisers</i>:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Ask me no more whither do stray<br /> +The golden atoms of the day;<br /> +For in pure love did Heaven prepare<br /> +These powders to enrich your hair.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It would be affectation, Gifted, if <i>you</i> rhymed in that fashion +for the lady of your love, and presented her, as it were, with cosmical +cosmetics, and compliments drawn from the starry spaces and deserts, +from skies, phoenixes, and angels. But it was a natural and pretty +way of writing when Thomas Carew was young. I prefer Herrick the +inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul +of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!) +in Devonshire. His Julia is the least mortal of these “daughters +of dreams and of stories,” whom poets celebrate; she has a certain +opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and “rich +eyes,” like Keats’s lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but +a handsome English wench, with</p> +<blockquote><p>“A cuff neglectful and thereby<br /> +Ribbons to flow confusedly;<br /> +A winning wave, deserving note<br /> +In the tempestuous petticoat.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Then Suckling strikes up a reckless military air; a warrior he is +who has seen many a siege of hearts—hearts that capitulated, or +held out like Troy-town, and the impatient assailant whistles:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Quit, quit, for shame: this will not move,<br /> + This cannot take her.<br /> +If of herself she will not love,<br /> + Nothing can make her—<br /> + The devil take her.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So he rides away, curling his moustache, hiding his defeat in a big +inimitable swagger. It is a pleasanter piece in which Suckling, +after a long leaguer of a lady’s heart, finds that Captain honour +is governor of the place, and surrender hopeless. So he departs +with a salute:</p> +<blockquote><p>“March, march (quoth I), the word straight give,<br /> + Let’s lose no time but leave her:<br /> +That giant upon air will live,<br /> + And hold it out for ever.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Lovelace is even a better type in his rare good things of the military +amorist and poet. What apology of Lauzun’s, or Bussy Rabutin’s +for faithlessness could equal this?—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Why dost thou say I am forsworn,<br /> + Since thine I vowed to be?<br /> +Lady, it is already morn;<br /> + It was last night I swore to thee<br /> + That fond impossibility.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Has “In Memoriam” nobler numbers than the poem, from +exile, to Lucasta?—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Our Faith and troth<br /> +All time and space controls,<br /> +Above the highest sphere we meet,<br /> +Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>How comes it that in the fierce fighting days the soldiers were so +tuneful, and such scholars? In the first edition of Lovelace’s +“Lucasta” there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English, +Latin, even Greek, by the gallant Colonel’s mess-mates and comrades. +What guardsman now writes like Lovelace, and how many of his friends +could applaud him in Greek? You, my Gifted, are happily of a pacific +disposition, and tune a gentle lyre. Is it not lucky for swains +like you that the soldiers have quite forsworn sonneting? When +a man was a rake, a poet, a warrior, all in one, what chance had a peaceful +minor poet like you or me, Gifted, against his charms? Sedley, +when sober, must have been an invincible rival—invincible, above +all, when he pretended constancy:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Why then should I seek further store,<br /> + And still make love anew?<br /> +When change itself can give no more<br /> + ’Tis easy to be true.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivating are those +Cavalier singers—their numbers flowing fair, like their scented +lovelocks—than the prudish society poets of Pope’s day. +“The Rape of the Lock” is very witty, but through it all +don’t you mark the sneer of the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, +the crooked dandy? He jibes among his compliments; and I do not +wonder that Mistress Arabella Fermor was not conciliated by his long-drawn +cleverness and polished lines. I prefer Sackville’s verses +“written at sea the night before an engagement”:</p> +<blockquote><p>“To all you ladies now on land<br /> + We men at sea indite.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and even Matt Prior, +when he writes of ladies occasionally, writes down to them, or at least +glances up very saucily from his position on his knees. But Prior +is the best of them, and the most candid:</p> +<blockquote><p>“I court others in verse—but I love thee +in prose;<br /> +And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dally with the light +lyre which thrills to the wings of fleeting Loves—the greatest +English writer of <i>vers de société</i>; the most gay, +frank, good-humoured, tuneful and engaging.</p> +<p>Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the bees that hummed over +Plato’s cradle have left their honey on his lips; none but Landor, +or a Greek, could have written this on Catullus:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Tell me not what too well I know<br /> +About the Bard of Sirmio—<br /> + Yes, in Thalia’s son<br /> +Such stains there are as when a Grace<br /> +Sprinkles another’s laughing face<br /> + With nectar, and runs on!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarest things in the +Anthology. It is a sorrow to me that I cannot quite place Praed +with Prior in my affections. With all his gaiety and wit, he wearies +one at last with that clever, punning antithesis. I don’t +want to know how</p> +<blockquote><p>“Captain Hazard wins a bet,<br /> + Or Beaulieu spoils a curry”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>and I prefer his sombre “Red Fisherman,” the idea of +which is borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.</p> +<p>Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in +breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal +that song, “Once you come to Forty Year,” or the lines on +the Venice Love-lamp, or the “Cane-bottomed Chair”? +Of living English writers of verse in the “familiar style,” +as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender and not untouched +with melancholy, as in “The Portrait of a Lady,” and Mr. +Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the “Song +of Four Seasons” and “The Dead Letter.” He has +ingenuity, pathos, mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic +of poets, is “conveniently learned.”</p> +<p>Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse +of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the +“Heathen Chinee,” as tender as the lay of the ship with +its crew of children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To +me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte’s poems have never (at least in +this country) been sufficiently esteemed. Mr. Lowell has written +(“The Biglow Papers” apart) but little in this vein. +Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written much +with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of <i>vers +de société</i>, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you +will think, if ever you sit down steadily to read right through any +collection of poems in this manner. So do not add too rapidly +to your own store; let them be “few, but roses” all of them.</p> +<h2>RICHARDSON</h2> +<p><i>By Mrs. Andrew Lang</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Miss Somerville,—I was much interested in your fruitless +struggle to read “Sir Charles Grandison,”—the book +whose separate numbers were awaited with such impatience by Richardson’s +endless lady friends and correspondents, and even by the rakish world—even +by Colley Cibber himself. I sympathize entirely with your estimate +of its dulness; yet, dull as it is, it is worth wading through to understand +the kind of literature which could flutter the dove-cotes of the last +century in a generation earlier than the one that was moved to tears +by the wearisome dramas of Hannah More.</p> +<p>There is only one character in the whole of “Sir Charles Grandison” +where Richardson is in the least like himself—in the least like +the Richardson of “Pamela” and “Clarissa.” +This character is Miss Charlotte Grandison, the sister of Sir Charles, +and later (after many vicissitudes) the wife of Lord G. Miss Grandison’s +conduct falls infinitely beneath the high standard attained to by the +rest of Sir Charles’s chosen friends. She is petulant and +loves to tease; is uncertain of what she wants; she is lively and sarcastic, +and, worse than all, abandons the rounded periods of her brother and +Miss Byron for free, not to say slang, expressions. “Hang +ceremony!” she often exclaims, with much reason, while “What +a deuce!” is her favourite expletive.</p> +<p>The conscientious reader heaves a sigh of relief when this young +lady and her many indiscretions appear on the scene; when Miss Grandison, +like Nature, “takes the pen from Richardson and writes for him.” +But I gather that you, my dear Miss Somerville, never got far enough +to make her acquaintance, and therefore are still ignorant of the singular +qualities of her brother, Sir Charles—Richardson’s idea +of a perfect man, for both brother and sister are introduced at almost +the same moment.</p> +<p>Now it is nearly as difficult to realize that Sir Charles is a young +man of twenty-six, as it is to feel that his antithesis, the adorable +Pepys of the “Diary,” was of that precise age. Sir +Charles might be borne with good-naturedly for a short time as an old +gentleman who had become garrulous from want of contradiction, but in +any other aspect he would be shunned conscientiously. Yet Richardson +is not content with putting into his mouth lengthy discourses tending +chiefly, though expressed with mock humility, to his own glorification; +but he keeps all the other characters perpetually dancing round the +Baronet in a chorus of praise. “Was there ever such a man, +my Harriet, so good, so just, so noble in his sentiments?” +“Ah, my Lucy, dare I hope for the affection of the best of men?” +Some people would have begged their friends to cease making them ridiculous, +but not so Sir Charles.</p> +<p>But, my dear, trying as Sir Charles is at all moments, he is infinitely +at his worst when he attempts to be jocose, when he rallies the step-mother +of his friend Beauchamp in a sprightly manner, or exchanges quips with +Harriet’s cousins at the house of “that excellent ancient,” +her grandmother. It is a mammoth posing as a kitten, though whatever +he says or does, his audience throw up their hands and eyes and ask: +“Was there ever such a man?” “Thank Heaven, +<i>never</i>!” the nineteenth century replies unanimously.</p> +<p>Secure as he is of the contemporary public verdict, Sir Charles does +not attempt to repress his love of “pawing” all his female +acquaintances. He is eternally taking their hands, putting his +arm round their waists, leading them up and down, and permitting himself +liberties that in a less perfect character would be considered intolerable. +It is also interesting to note that he never addresses any of his female +friends without the prefix “my.” “My Harriet,” +“my Emily,” “my Charlotte,” are his usual forms, +and he is likewise very much addicted to the use of the third person, +which may, however, have been the result of his long residence in Italy.</p> +<p>Little as you read of the book, no doubt you were struck—you +<i>must</i> have been—by the singular practice in this very matter +of Christian names, and also by the enormous satisfaction with which +every one promptly adopts every one else as his brother or sister. +As regards names, no sooner has Sir Charles rescued Harriet from the +clutches of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, than he calls her “<i>his</i> +Harriet,” though, when he is once engaged to her, then this is +changed into “infinitely obliging Miss Byron.” His +eldest sister, one year his senior, is always “Lady L.” +to him, and on her marriage “his Charlotte,” aged twenty-four, +becomes “Lady G.;” but no one ever ventures to address him +with anything more familiar than “Sir Charles.” Harriet, +indeed, once gets as far as “my Cha-” but this was in a +moment of extreme emotion—one of the excesses of youth.</p> +<p>Of course the method of telling his story in letters necessitates +the acceptance of various improbabilities; reticence has sometimes to +be violated, and confidences to be unduly made. Still, with all +these allowances, the gossip of every one with regard to the likelihood +of Sir Charles returning Harriet’s very thinly veiled attachment +is highly undignified, and often indecent. The Object himself, +for whom no less than seven ladies were at that time openly sighing, +alone ignores Harriet’s love, or, at any rate, appears to do so. +But his sisters freely and frequently charge her with having fallen +in love with him. She writes pages to her whole family as to his +behaviour on particular occasions, while his ward, Emily Jervois, begs +permission to take up her abode with Harriet when she and Sir Charles +are married.</p> +<p>Miss Jervois, who is Richardson’s idea of a <i>jeune personne +bien élevée</i>, is a compound of tears, of servility, +and of undisguised love for her guardian. She is much more like +the heroine of a French drama than an English girl of fourteen, and +I dread to think what effect she would have on a free-born American! +Harriet, as you know, is not quite hopeless at first, but the descent +is easy, and, in the end, we quite agree with all the admiring circle, +that they were made for each other. They were equally pompous, +and used stilts of equal height.</p> +<p>“Sir Charles Grandison” was the last, the most socially +ambitious, and much the worst of Richardson’s novel’s. +Smollett came to his best in his last, “Humphrey Clinker.” +Fielding sobered down into the kind excellence of <i>his</i> last, “Amelia.” +Neither had been flattered and coddled by literary ladies, like Richardson. +What of “Pamela” and “Clarissa”? May a +maiden read the book that the young lady studied over Charles Lamb’s +shoulder? Well, I think, as you have now passed your quarter of +a century, it would do you no harm to read the other two, which are +infinitely better than “Sir Charles.” The worthy Miss +Byron, aged only twenty, indeed, writes to her Lucy to remind her that +“their grandmother had told them twenty and twenty frightful stories +of the vile enterprises of men against innocent creatures,” and +that they can both “call to mind stories which had ended much +worse than hers (the affair with Sir Hargrave Pollexfen) had done.”</p> +<p>Grandmothers now choose other topics of conversation for their descendants, +but in those old days when sedan-chairs made <i>enlèvements</i> +so very easy, it was considered necessary to caution girls against all +the possible wiles of man. Even little boys, strange as it may +sound, were given “Pamela” to read after the Bible. +More than this, one small creature, Harry Campbell by name, so young +that he always spoke of himself as “little Harry,” obtained +the book by stealth in his guardian’s house, and never stopped +till he finished it. When Richardson, on being told of this, sent +him a copy for his own, he nearly went out of his senses with delight.</p> +<p>Of course you know the outline of Pamela’s story. How +at eleven she was taken and educated by a lady, who on her death, when +Pamela was sixteen, left her not only more beautiful, but more accomplished +than any girl of her years. How Pamela’s young master fell +in love with her, persecuted her, and after moving adventures of all +kinds, being convinced that she was not to be overcome, married her, +and they lived happy, with one brief exception, ever after. The +proper frame of mind in which to read “Pamela” is to consider +it in the light of an historical joke.</p> +<p>The absolute want of dignity that is almost as marked a characteristic +in Richardson as his lack of humour, shows itself again and again. +After all, Mr. B. would never have married Pamela if he could have persuaded +her to live with him in any other way; so the cringing gratitude expressed +by Pamela and her parents to the “good gentleman” and the +“dear obliger” is only revolting. No woman with any +delicacy of feeling could have sat complacently at her own table, while +her husband entertained his company with prolonged and minute accounts +of his attempts on her virtue. Can you fancy Fielding composing +such a scene, Fielding whom Richardson scouts as a profligate? +It is impossible not to laugh at the bare idea; and no less funny are +Pamela’s poetical flights, especially when, like Hamilton of Bangour +in exile, she paraphrases the paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, about her +captivity in Lincolnshire. All through one has to remind one’s +self perpetually that Pamela must not be expected to behave like a lady, +and that if her father had done as he ought and removed her from her +place when she first told him of her uneasiness, there would have been +no story at all, and some other book would have had to rank in the opinion +of Richardson’s adorers “next to the Bible.”</p> +<p>Still, whatever may have to be said as to Richardson’s subjects, +he is never coarse in his treatment of them. The pursuit of Pamela +by Mr. B., or of Clarissa by Lovelace, through eight volumes, may weary; +it does not corrupt. No man or maid on earth could lay it to his +charge that he or she had been corrupted by these books, while no man +on earth could read “Clarissa” without being touched by +the noble ending. If “Clarissa” had never been written +we should have said that the good-natured, fussy, essentially middle-class +bookseller, Samuel Richardson, was unable to draw a lady; and it is +curious to see how Clarissa stands out, not only among Richardson’s +female characters, but among the female characters of all time; eminent +she is for purity of soul, and nobility of feeling. There is no +cant about her anywhere, no effort to pose or to strain after a state +of mind which she cannot naturally experience. The business-like +manner in which she makes her preparations for death have nothing sentimental +about them, nothing that even faintly suggests the pretty death-beds +with which Mr. Dickens and others have made us familiar; but I doubt +if the most practical money-maker in Wall Street could read it without +feeling uncomfortable.</p> +<p>How, after describing such a character as Clarissa, Richardson could +turn to the whale-bone figures in “Sir Charles Grandison” +is quite incomprehensible. Had he been ruined by his numerous +female admirers and correspondents, or by his desire to become fashionable, +or, as is most likely, by the wish to create in Sir Charles a virtuous +foil to him whom he thought the wicked, witty, delightful, and detestable +Lovelace? Whatever the reason, it is a thousand pities that he +gave way to his impulse.</p> +<p>It would interest you as well as me to note little points of manners +that are to be gathered from the three books. I have not time +to write much more, but will tell you two or three that have struck +me. If you read them, as I still hope you may, you will see what +early risers they all are, even the wicked Mr. B.; while Clarissa, when +in Dover Street, usually gives Lovelace his interviews at six in the +morning. One hears of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. +How much more wonderful is love that rises at six!</p> +<p>Richardson was a woman’s novelist, as Fielding was a man’s. +I sometimes think of Dr. Johnson’s <i>mot</i>: “Claret for +boys, port for men, and,” smiling, “brandy for heroes.” +So one might fancy him saying: “Richardson for women, Fielding +for men, Smollett for ruffians,” though some of <i>his</i> rough +customers were heroes, too. But we now confine ourselves so closely +to “the later writers” of Russia, France, England, America, +that the woman who reads Richardson may be called heroic. “To +the unknown heroine” I dedicate my respect, as the Athenians dedicated +an altar to “the unknown hero.” Will you be the heroine? +I am afraid you won’t!</p> +<h2>GÉRARD DE NERVAL</h2> +<p><i>To Miss Girton, Cambridge</i>.</p> +<p>Dear Miss Girton,—Yes, I fancy Gérard de Nerval is one +of that rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will +allow you to read. But even if you read him, I do not think you +will care very much for him. He is a man’s author, not a +woman’s; and yet one can hardly say why. It is not that +he offends “the delicacy of your sex,” as Tom Jones calls +it; I think it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of +the kind you like. Let it be admitted that, when his characters +make love, they might do it “in a more human sort of way.”</p> +<p>In this respect, and in some others, Gérard de Nerval resembles +Edgar Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a <i>belle +morte</i> in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in +the family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud—no, +Aurélie and Sylvie, in <i>Les Filles de Feu</i>, are nice and +natural girls; but their lover is not in love with them “in a +human sort of way.” He is in love with some vaporous ideal, +of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal +passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old <i>château</i>, +or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert +tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, +in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, +and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him +pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this +earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts graveyards, +or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested never, rests +in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.</p> +<p>All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man +and his work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the +personal influence of one who is your friend, though other people cannot +see what you see in him.</p> +<p>Gérard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young +man of the young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and +Gautier. Their gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar +to be dwelt upon. They were much of Scott’s mind when he +was young, and translated Bürger, and “wished to heaven he +had a skull and cross-bones.” Two or three of them died +early, two or three subsided into ordinary literary gentlemen (like +M. Maquet, lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets—Victor +Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval. It +is not necessary to have heard of Gérard; even that queer sham, +the lady of culture, admits without a blush that she knows not Gérard. +Yet he is worth knowing.</p> +<p>What he will live by is his story of “Sylvie;” it is +one of the little masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. +One reads it, and however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and +a thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs, +of brooks trotting merrily under the rustic bridges. And this +fresh nature is peopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, or pensive, +standing with eager feet on the threshold of their life, innocent, expectant, +with the old ballads of old France on their lips. For the story +is full of those artless, lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, +the ancient ballads that Gérard collected and put in the mouth +of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.</p> +<p>Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what +good company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway? +Just so companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted +country of Gérard’s fancy, in the land of the Valois. +All the while you read, you have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, +you know that the hero cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves, +the cottage and its shelter, are not for him. He is only passing +by, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons are alluring him, the +great city is drawing him to herself and will slay him one day in her +den, as Scylla slew her victims.</p> +<p>Conceive Gérard living a wild life with wilder young men and +women in a great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused themselves +by decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play, or rather +from watching the particular actress for whom he had a distant, fantastic +passion. He leaves the theatre and takes up a newspaper, where +he reads that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archers +of Loisy. These were places in his native district, where he had +been a boy. They recalled many memories; he could not sleep that +night; the old scenes flashed before his half-dreaming eyes. This +was one of the visions.</p> +<p>“In front of a <i>château</i> of the time of Henri IV., +a <i>château</i> with peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing +of red brick varied by stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn +set round with limes and elms, and through the leaves fell the golden +rays of the setting sun. Young girls were dancing in a circle +on the mossy grass, to the sound of airs that their mothers had sung, +airs with words so pure and natural that one felt one’s self indeed +in that old Valois land, where for a thousand years has beat the heart +of France.</p> +<p>“I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little +friend, Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylvie, so full of +life, so fresh, with her dark eyes, her regular profile, her sunburnt +face. I had loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, till the +daughter of the <i>château</i>, fair and tall, entered the circle +of peasant girls. To obtain the right to join the ring she had +to chant a scrap of a ballad. We sat round her, and in a fresh, +clear voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance, full of love +and sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the great trees grew deeper, +and the broad light of the risen moon fell on her alone, she standing +without the listening circle. Her song was over, and no one dared +to break the silence. A light mist arose from the mossy ground, +trailing over the grass. We seemed to be in Paradise.”</p> +<p>So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress, the daughter +of a line of nobles with king’s blood in her veins. And +little brown, deserted Sylvie cried.</p> +<p>All this Gérard remembered, and remembering, hurried down +to the old country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful, +unspoiled, still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales. +They walked together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of +Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared +dinner for them, and sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to ransack +the peasant treasures in the garret.</p> +<p>Two portraits were hanging there—one that of a young man of +the good old times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in +an oval frame. Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, +gay, <i>piquante</i>, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with +a bird perched on her finger. It was the old aunt in her youth, +and further search discovered her ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade. +Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour; patches were found in a box +of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber.</p> +<p>The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the +royal woods, was not far to seek, and Gérard and Sylvie appeared +before the aunt, as her old self, and her old lover. “My +children!” she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears at +the cruel and charming apparition of youth. Presently she dried +her tears, and only remembered the pomp and pride of her wedding. +“We joined hands, and sang the <i>naïve</i> epithalamium +of old France, amorous, and full of flowery turns, as the Song of Songs; +we were the bride and the bridegroom all one sweet morning of summer.”</p> +<p>I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things +I ever tried to write. The passages are as touching and fresh, +the originals I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice +of Sylvie singing:</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>A Dammartin, l’y a trois belles filles</i>,<br /> +<i>L’y en a z’une plus belle que le jour</i>!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the “Ballad +of Forty Years,” “Adrienne’s dead” in a convent. +That is all the story, all the idyll. Gérard also wrote +the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (<i>Le Rêve +et la Vie</i>) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La Rue +de la Vieille Lanterne.</p> +<p>Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace +of his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like +this:</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Où sont nos amoureuses</i>?<br /> + <i>Elles sont au tombeau</i>!<br /> +<i>Elles sont plus heureuses</i><br /> + <i>Dans un sêjour plus beau</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:</p> +<blockquote><p> “<i>Neither good morn nor good +night</i>.”</p> +<p>The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;<br /> + Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;<br /> +But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,<br /> + And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Gérard’s poems are few; the best are his vision of a +lady with gold hair and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier +existence, and his humorous little piece on a boy’s love for a +fair cousin, and on their winter walk together, and the welcome smell +of roast turkey which greets them on the stairs, when they come home. +There are also poems of his madness, called <i>Chimères</i>, +and very beautiful in form. You read and admire, and don’t +understand a line, yet it seems that if we were a little more or a little +less mad we would understand:</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé +l’Achéron</i>:<br /> +<i>Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée</i><br /> +<i>Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet called—</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>El Desdichado</i>.”</p> +<p>I am that dark, that disinherited,<br /> + That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine,<br /> + The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled;<br /> +A black sun on my lute doth yet remain!<br /> +Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain,<br /> + Within the tomb, among the midnight dead,<br /> + Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed,<br /> +The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain.</p> +<p>Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been<br /> +Or Lusignan or Biron? By a Queen<br /> + Caressed within the Mermaid’s haunt I lay,<br /> +And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream,<br /> +And touched on Orpheus’ lyre as in a dream,<br /> + Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay!</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN</h2> +<p><i>To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor</i>.</p> +<p>My Dear Dick,—It is very good of you, among your severe studies +at Eton, to write to your Uncle. I am extremely pleased to hear +that your football is appreciated in the highest circles, and shall +be happy to have as good an account of your skill in making Latin verses.</p> +<p>I am glad you like “She,” Mr. Rider Haggard’s book +which I sent you. It is “something like,” as you say, +and I quite agree with you, both in being in love with the heroine, +and in thinking that she preaches rather too much. But, then, +as she was over two thousand years old, and had lived for most of that +time among cannibals, who did not understand her, one may excuse her +for “jawing,” as you say, a good deal, when she met white +men. You want to know if “She” is a true story. +Of course it is!</p> +<p>But you have read “She,” and you have read all Cooper’s, +and Marryat’s, and Mr. Stevenson’s books, and “Tom +Sawyer,” and “Huckleberry Finn,” several times. +So have I, and am quite ready to begin again. But, to my mind, +books about “Red Indians” have always seemed much the most +interesting. At your age, I remember, I bought a tomahawk, and, +as we had also lots of spears and boomerangs from Australia, the poultry +used to have rather a rough time of it.</p> +<p>I never could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a +spear to a hair’s breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. +When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember that all this +was very wrong, and that you will consider we are civilized people, +not Mohicans, nor Pawnees. I also made a stone pipe, like Hiawatha’s, +but I never could drill a hole in the stem, so it did not “draw” +like a civilized pipe.</p> +<p>By way of an awful warning to you on this score, and also, as you +say you want a <i>true</i> book about Red Indians, let me recommend +to you the best book about them <i>I</i> ever came across. It +is called “A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John +Tanner, during Thirty Years’ Residence among the Indians,” +and it was published at New York by Messrs. Carvill, in 1830.</p> +<p>If I were an American publisher, instead of a British author (how +I wish I was!) I’d publish “John Tanner” again, or +perhaps cut a good deal out, and make a boy’s book of it. +You are not likely to get it to buy, but Mr. Steevens, the American +bookseller, has found me a copy. If I lend you it, will you be +kind enough to illustrate it on separate sheets of paper, and not make +drawings on the pages of the book? This will, in the long run, +be more satisfactory to yourself, as you will be able to keep your pictures; +for I want “John Tanner” back again: and don’t lend +him to your fag-master.</p> +<p>Tanner was born about 1780; he lived in Kentucky. Don’t +you wish you had lived in Kentucky in Colonel Boone’s time? +The Shawnees were roaming about the neighbourhood when Tanner was a +little boy. His uncle scalped one of them. This made bad +feeling between the Tanners and the Shawnees; but John, like any boy +of spirit, wished never to learn lessons, and wanted to be an Indian +brave. He soon had more of being a brave than he liked; but he +never learned any more lessons, and could not even read or write.</p> +<p>One day John’s father told him not to leave the house, because +from the movements of the horses, he knew that Indians were in the woods. +So John seized the first chance and nipped out, and ran to a walnut +tree in one of the fields, where he began filling his straw hat with +walnuts. At that very moment he was caught by two Indians, who +spilled the nuts, put his hat on his head, and bolted with him. +One of the old women of the tribe had lost her son, and wanted to adopt +a boy, and so they adopted Johnny Tanner. They ran with him till +he was out of breath, till they reached the Ohio, where they threw him +into a canoe, paddled across, and set off running again.</p> +<p>In ten days’ hard marching they reached the camp, and it was +worse than going to a new school, for all the Indians kicked John Tanner +about, and “their dance,” he says, “was brisk and +cheerful, <i>after the manner of the scalp dance</i>!” Cheerful +for John! He had to lie between the fire and the door of the lodge, +and every one who passed gave him a kick. One old man was particularly +cruel. When Tanner was grown up, he came back to that neighbourhood, +and the first thing he asked was, “Where is Manito-o-geezhik?”</p> +<p>“Dead, two months since.”</p> +<p>“It is well that he is dead,” said John Tanner. +But an old female chief, Net-ko-kua, adopted him, and now it began to +be fun. For he was sent to shoot game for the family. Could +anything be more delightful? His first shot was at pigeons, with +a pistol. The pistol knocked down Tanner; but it also knocked +down the pigeon. He then caught martins—and measles, which +was less entertaining. Even Indians have measles! But even +hunting is not altogether fun, when you start with no breakfast and +have no chance of supper unless you kill game.</p> +<p>The other Red Indian books, especially the cheap ones, don’t +tell you that very often the Indians are more than half-starved. +Then some one builds a magic lodge, and prays to the Great Spirit. +Tanner often did this, and he would then dream how the Great Spirit +appeared to him as a beautiful young man, and told him where he would +find game, and prophesied other events in his life. It is curious +to see a white man taking to the Indian religion, and having exactly +the same sort of visions as their red converts described to the Jesuit +fathers nearly two hundred years before.</p> +<p>Tanner saw some Indian ghosts, too, when he grew up. On the +bank of the Little Saskawjewun there was a capital camping-place where +the Indians never camped. It was called <i>Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut</i>—“the +place of two Dead Men.” Two Indians of the same <i>totem</i> +had killed each other there. Now, their <i>totem</i> was that +which Tanner bore, the <i>totem</i> of his adopted Indian mother. +The story was that if any man camped there, the ghosts would come out +of their graves; and that was just what happened. Tanner made +the experiment; he camped and fell asleep. “Very soon I +saw the two dead men come and sit down by my fire opposite me. +I got up and sat opposite them by the fire, and in this position I awoke.” +Perhaps he fell asleep again, for he now saw the two dead men, who sat +opposite to him, and laughed and poked fun and sticks at him. +He could neither speak nor run away. One of them showed him a +horse on a hill, and said, “There, my brother, is a horse I give +you to ride on your journey home, and on your way you can call and leave +the horse, and spend another night with us.” So, next morning, +he found the horse and rode it, but he did not spend another night with +the ghosts of his own <i>totem</i>. He had seen enough of them.</p> +<p>Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit, he +did <i>not</i> believe in those of his Indian mother. He thought +she used to prowl about in the daytime, find tracks of a bear or deer, +watch where they went to, and then say the beast’s lair had been +revealed to her in a dream. But Tanner’s own visions were +“honest Injun.” Once, in a hard winter, Tanner played +a trick on the old woman. All the food they had was a quart of +frozen bears’ grease, kept in a kettle with a skin fastened over +it. But Tanner caught a rabbit alive and popped him under the +skin. So when the old woman went for the bears’ grease in +the morning, and found it alive, she was not a little alarmed.</p> +<p>But does not the notion of living on frozen pomatum rather take the +gilt off the delight of being an Indian? The old woman was as +brave and resolute as a man, but in one day she sold a hundred and twenty +beaver skins and many buffalo robes for rum. She always entertained +all the neighbouring Indians as long as the rum lasted, and Tanner had +a narrow escape of growing up a drunkard. He became such a savage +that when an Indian girl carelessly allowed his wigwam to be burned, +he stripped her of her blanket and turned her out for the night in the +snow.</p> +<p>So Tanner grew up in spite of hunger and drink. Once, when +starving, and without bullets, he met a buck moose. If he killed +the moose he would be saved, if he did not he would die. So he +took the screws out of the lock of his rifle, loaded with them in place +of bullets, tied the lock on with string, fired, and killed the moose.</p> +<p>Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (at least <i>he</i> +says he did it because the girl wanted it), and this led to all his +sorrows—this and a quarrel with a medicine-man. The medicine-man +accused him of being a wizard, and his wife got another Indian to shoot +him. Tanner was far from surgeons, and he actually hacked out +the bullet himself with an old razor. Another wounded Indian once +amputated his own arm. The ancient Spartans could not have been +pluckier. The Indians had other virtues as well as pluck. +They were honest and so hospitable, before they knew white men’s +ways, that they would give poor strangers new mocassins and new buffalo +cloaks.</p> +<p>Will it bore you, my dear Dick, if I tell you of an old Indian’s +death? It seems a pretty and touching story. Old Pe-shau-ba +was a friend of Tanner. One day he fell violently ill. He +sent for Tanner and said to him: “I remember before I came to +live in this world, I was with the Great Spirit above. I saw many +good and desirable things, and among others a beautiful woman. +And the Great Spirit said: ‘Pe-shau-ba, do you love the woman?’ +I told him I did. Then he said, ‘Go down and spend a few +winters on earth. You cannot stay long, and you must remember +to be always kind and good to my children whom you see below.’ +So I came down, but I have never forgotten what was said to me.</p> +<p>“I have always stood in the smoke between the two bands when +my people fought with their enemies . . . I now hear the same voice +that talked to me before I came into the world. It tells me I +can remain here no longer.” He then walked out, looked at +the sun, the sky, the lake, and the distant hills; then came in, lay +down composedly in his place, and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.</p> +<p>If we would hardly care to live like Indians, after all (and Tanner +tired of it and came back, an old man, to the States), we might desire +to die like Pe-shau-ba, if, like him, we had been “good and kind +to God’s children whom we meet below.” So here is +a Christmas moral for you, out of a Red Indian book, and I wish you +a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.</p> +<h2>APPENDIX I</h2> +<p><i>Reynolds’s Peter Bell</i>.</p> +<p>When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds (“A Friend of Keats”) +was written, I had not seen his “Peter Bell” (Taylor and +Hessey, London, 1888). This “Lyrical Ballad” is described +in a letter of Keats’s published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in <i>Macmillan’s +Magazine</i>, August, 1888. The point of Reynolds’s joke +was to produce a parody before the original. Reynolds was annoyed +by what Hood called “The Betty Foybles” of Wordsworth, and +by the demeanour of a poet who was serious, not only in season, but +out of season. Moreover, Wordsworth had damned “a pretty +piece of heathenism” by Keats, with praise which was faint even +from Wordsworth to a contemporary. In the circumstances, as Wordsworth +was not yet a kind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills, +and hear chanting the swan song of the dying England, perhaps Reynolds’s +parody scarce needs excuse. Mr. Ainger calls it “insolent,” +meaning that it has an unkind tone of personal attack. That is, +unluckily, true, but to myself the parody appears remarkably funny, +and quite worthy of “the sneering brothers, the vile Smiths,” +as Lamb calls the authors of “Rejected Addresses.” +Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not see the fun of the parody—perhaps +it is as well that we should fail to see the fun of jests broken on +our friends. But will any Wordsworthian deny to-day the humour +of this?—</p> +<blockquote><p>“He is rurally related;<br /> +Peter Bell hath country cousins,<br /> +(He had once a worthy mother),<br /> +Bells and Peters by the dozens,<br /> +But Peter Bell he hath no brothers,<br /> +Not a brother owneth he,<br /> +Peter Bell he hath no brother;<br /> +His mother had no other son,<br /> +No other son e’er called her ‘mother,’<br /> +Peter Bell hath brother none.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>As Keats says in a review he wrote for <i>The Examiner</i>, “there +is a pestilent humour in the rhymes, and an inveterate cadence in some +of the stanzas that must be lamented.” In his review Keats +tried to hurt neither side, but his heart was with Reynolds; “it +would be just as well to trounce Lord Byron in the same manner.”</p> +<p>People still make an outcry over the trouncing of Keats. It +was bludgeonly done, but only part of a game, a kind of horseplay at +which most men of letters of the age were playing. Who but regrets +that, in his “Life of Keats,” Mr. Colvin should speak as +if Sir Walter Scott had, perhaps, a guilty knowledge of the review of +Keats in <i>Blackwood</i>! There is but a tittle of published +evidence to the truth of a theory in itself utterly detestable, and, +to every one who understands the character of Scott, wholly beyond possibility +of belief. Even if Lockhart was the reviewer, and if Scott came +to know it, was Scott responsible for what Lockhart did in 1819 or 1820, +the very time when Mrs. Shelley thought he was defending Shelley in +<i>Blackwood</i> (where he had praised her <i>Frankenstein</i>), and +when she spoke of Sir Walter as “the only liberal man in the faction”? +Unluckily Keats died, and his death was absurdly attributed to a pair +of reviews which may have irritated him, and which were coarse, and +cruel even for that period of robust reviewing. But Keats knew +very well the value of these critiques, and probably resented them not +much more than a football player resents being “hacked” +in the course of the game. He was very willing to see Byron and +Wordsworth “trounced,” and as ready as Peter Corcoran in +his friend’s poem to “take punishment” himself. +The character of Keats was plucky, and his estimate of his own genius +was perfectly sane. He knew that he was in the thick of a literary +“scrimmage,” and he was not the man to flinch or to repine +at the consequences.</p> +<h2>APPENDIX II</h2> +<p><i>Portraits of Virgil and Lucretius</i>.</p> +<p>In the Letter on Virgil some remarks are made on a bust of the poet. +It is wholly fanciful. Our only vestiges of a portrait of Virgil +are in two MSS.; the better of the two is in the Vatican. The +design represents a youth, with dark hair and a pleasant face, seated +reading. A desk is beside him, and a case for manuscript, in shape +like a band-box. (See Visconti, “Icon. Rom.” i. 179, +plate 13.) Martial tells us that portraits of Virgil were illuminated +on copies of his “Æneid.” The Vatican MS. is +of the twelfth century. But every one who has followed the fortunes +of books knows that a kind of tradition often preserves the illustrations, +which are copied and recopied without material change. (See Mr. +Jacobs’s “Fables of Bidpai,” Nutt, 1888.) Thus +the Vatican MS. may preserve at least a shadow of Virgil.</p> +<p>If there be any portrait of Lucretius, it is a profile on a sard, +published by Mr. Munro in his famous edition of the poet. The +letters LVCR are inscribed on the stone, and appear to be contemporary +with the gem. This, at least, is the opinion of Mr. A. S. Murray, +of the late Mr. C. W. King, Braun, and Müller. On the other +hand, Bernouilli (“Rom. Icon.” i. 247) regards this, and +apparently most other Roman gems with inscriptions, as “apocryphal.” +The ring, which was in the Nott collection, is now in my possession. +If Lucretius were the rather pedantic and sharp-nosed Roman of the gem, +his wife had little reason for the jealousy which took so deplorable +a form. Cold this Lucretius may have been, volatile—never! +<a name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11">{11}</a></p> +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> +<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> This was +written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnold and Mr. Browning.</p> +<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a> Since +this was written, Mr. Bridges has made his lyrics accessible in “Shorter +Poems.” (G. Bell and Sons: 1890)</p> +<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a> Macmillans.</p> +<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a> Reynolds +was, perhaps, a little irreverent. He anticipated Wordsworth’s +“Peter Bell” by a premature parody, “Peter Bell the +First.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a> Appendix +on Reynolds’s “Peter Bell.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a> “Aucassin +and Nicolette” has now been edited, annotated, and equipped with +a translation by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon (Kegan Paul & Trench, 1887).</p> +<p><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a> Edinburgh, +1862.</p> +<p><a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a> The Elzevir +piracy was rather earlier.</p> +<p><a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9">{9}</a> Pindar, +perhaps, in one of his fragments, suggested that pretty <i>Cum regnat +Rosa</i>.</p> +<p><a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10">{10}</a> See +next letter.</p> +<p><a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11">{11}</a> Mr. +Munro calls the stone “a black agate,” and does not mention +its <i>provenance</i>. The engraving in his book does no justice +to the portrait. There is another gem representing Lucretius in +the Vatican: of old it belonged to Leo X. The two gems are in +all respects similar. A seal with this head, or one very like +it, belonged to Evelyn, the friend of Mr. Pepys.</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 1395-h.htm or 1395-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/9/1395 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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