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diff --git a/1395.txt b/1395.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bdb690b --- /dev/null +++ b/1395.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3760 @@ +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*** + + + + + + +Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price, +email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk + + + + + +LETTERS ON LITERATURE +by Andrew Lang + + +Contents: + +Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry +Of Modern English Poetry +Fielding +Longfellow +A Friend of Keats +On Virgil +Aucassin and Nicolette +Plotinus (A.D. 200-262) +Lucretius +To a Young American Book-Hunter +Rochefoucauld +Of Vers de Societe +On Vers de Societe +Richardson +Gerard de Nerval +On Books About Red Men +Appendix I +Appendix II + + + + +DEDICATION + + +Dear Mr. Way, + +_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_? + +_Very sincerely yours_, + +_A. LANG_. + +_To W. J. Way_, _Esq_. +_Topeka_, _Kansas_. + + + + +PREFACE + + +These Letters were originally published in the _Independent_ 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 _would_ write so frankly to a correspondent about +his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be +attempted again. The _Lettres a Emilie sur la Mythologie_ 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. + + + + +INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY + + +_To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas_. + +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. + +A thoughtful critic in the _Spectator_ 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. + +Our old English essays, the papers in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, 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 _you_, in your distant Kansas, or to such other +correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes. + +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 _soubrette_ of journalism. +_Seniores priores_: 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 _they_ are +usually poor. + +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! + +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." + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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." + +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." + +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. + +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 _who_ +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. + +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-- + + "A sunset touch, + A chorus ending of Euripides," + +remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a thousand +hopes and fears." + +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. + +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." + +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 + + "Whose purpose is not missed, + While life endures, while things subsist." + +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 "_lutin_" 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." + +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. + +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. {1} + + + + +OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY + + +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, anapaest 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. + +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. + +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, _fallentis +semita vitae_, 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. + +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. + +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. + +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": + + "For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind + It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind; + On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind; + If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far, + And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar, + And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war." + +"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. + +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." + + "The Mount is mute, the channel dry." + +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 mediaeval 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. + +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. + +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." + +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. + +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 mediaeval 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. _Ne quid nimis_, 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. + +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. _Parva seges satis est_. London: Pickering, +1873." + +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." + + "Let the priests go before, arrayed in white, + And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow + Next they that bear her, honoured on this night, + And then the maidens in a double row, + Each singing soft and low, + And each on high a torch upstaying: + Unto her lover lead her forth with light, + With music and with singing, and with praying." + +This is a stately stanza. + +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: + + "There is a hill beside the silver Thames, + Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine, + And brilliant under foot with thousand gems + Steeply the thickets to his floods decline. + Straight trees in every place + Their thick tops interlace, + And pendent branches trail their foliage fine + Upon his watery face. + + * * * * * + + A reedy island guards the sacred bower + And hides it from the meadow, where in peace + The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower, + Robbing the golden market of the bees. + And laden branches float + By banks of myosote; + And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys + Delay the loitering boat." + +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: + + "Nor is there any spirit on earth astir, + Nor 'neath the airy vault, nor yet beyond + In any dweller in far-reaching space + Nobler or dearer than the spirit of man: + That spirit which lives in each and will not die, + That wooeth beauty, and for all good things + Urgeth a voice, or still in passion sigheth, + And where he loveth, draweth the heart with him." + +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. + +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. {2} + + + + +FIELDING + + +_To Mrs. Goodhart, in the Upper Mississippi Valley_. + +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. + +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. + +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." + +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. + +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? + +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." + +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"? + +"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." + +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. + +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. + +How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly honest, +with his own astonishing lack of _retenue_, 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. + +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: + +"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." + +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." + +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! + +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:-- + +"It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his +Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to _Bridewell_; 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." + +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. + +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 _l'Art pour l'Art_ is all the literary law and the prophets. + +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. + +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! + +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 +_was_ 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. + +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! + +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 _us_ 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. + +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. + + + + +LONGFELLOW + + +_To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_. + +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. + +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. + +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." + +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. + +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, + + "The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair, + The best-beloved Night!" + +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? + +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 _not_ a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience +brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders can. + +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, + + "Then the forms of the departed + Enter at the open door, + The beloved, the true-hearted + Come to visit me once more." + +Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with Theo's +own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," 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. + + "And she sits and gazes at me + With those deep and tender eyes, + Like the stars, so still and saintlike, + Looking downward from the skies." + +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 + + "The white pavilions rose and fell + On the alarmed air;" + +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. + +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. + +Look at his "Endymion." It is the earlier verses that win you: + + "And silver white the river gleams + As if Diana in her dreams + Had dropt her silver bow + Upon the meadows low." + +That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But +the moral and consolatory _application_ is too long--too much dwelt on: + + "Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought, + Love gives itself, but is not bought." + +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 + + "Some heart, though unknown, + Responds unto his own." + +If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl. + +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: + + "I remember the black wharves and the slips, + And the sea-tide, tossing free, + And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, + And the beauty and the mystery of the ships, + And the magic of the sea." + +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: + + "Ye open the eastern windows, + That look towards the sun, + Where thoughts are singing swallows, + And the brooks of morning run." + +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. + +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 _bizarre_ shapes of death, from which Heaven deliver us! + +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. + +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 + + "the gentle Chibiabos + _Sang in tones of deep emotion_!" + +"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. + +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." + +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. + + + + +A FRIEND OF KEATS + + +_To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_. + +Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new "Life of Keats" +{3} 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. + +However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend, +John Hamilton Reynolds. _Noscitur a sociis_--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. + +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 _London Magazine_. 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. + +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. + +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: + + "Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive." {4} + +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." + +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 _forte_, any more than it was Artemus Ward's. At +school I was "more remarkable for what I suffered than for what I +achieved." + +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 _gloves_!), 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! + +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: + + "Were this a feather from an eagle's wing, + And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile + Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile-- + And might I dip my feather in some spring, + Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:-- + And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle + In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile + Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing! + + "But I am mortal: and I cannot write + Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time. + Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb + To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:-- + I have some glimmering of what is sublime-- + But, ah! it is a most inconstant light." + +Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood. + +"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! + +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 _too_ 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! + +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 _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_." + +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. + +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. + +"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 +_two_," 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: + + "I will not tell the world that thou hast chid + My heart for worshipping the idol Muse; + That thy dark eye has given its gentle lid + Tears for my wanderings; I may not choose + When thou dost speak but do as I am bid,-- + And therefore to the roses and the dews, + Very respectfully I make my bow;-- + And turn my back upon the tulips now." + +"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!" + +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 Moliere, + +"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." + +It was "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil." + +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: + + "He read and dreamt of young Endymion, + Till his romantic fancy drank its fill; + He saw that lovely shepherd sitting lone, + Watching his white flocks upon Ida's hill; + The Moon adored him--and when all was still, + And stars were wakeful--she would earthward stray, + And linger with her shepherd love, until + The hooves of the steeds that bear the car of day, + Struck silver light in the east, and then she waned away!" + +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: + + "Her bodice was a pretty sight to see; + Ye who would know its colour,--be a thief + Of the rose's muffled bud from off the tree; + And for your knowledge, strip it leaf by leaf + Spite of your own remorse or Flora's grief, + Till ye have come unto its heart's pale hue; + The last, last leaf, which is the queen,--the chief + Of beautiful dim blooms: ye shall not rue, + At sight of that sweet leaf the mischief which ye do." + +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: + + "We gathered wood flowers,--some blue as the vein + O'er Hero's eyelid stealing, and some as white, + In the clustering grass, as rich Europa's hand + Nested amid the curls on Jupiter's forehead, + What time he snatched her through the startled waves;-- + Some poppies, too, such as in Enna's meadows + Forsook their own green homes and parent stalks, + To kiss the fingers of Proserpina: + And some were small as fairies' eyes, and bright + As lovers' tears!" + +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: + + "Sorrow hath made thine eyes more dark and keen, + And set a whiter hue upon thy cheeks,-- + And round thy pressed lips drawn anguish-streaks, + And made thy forehead fearfully serene. + Even in thy steady hair her work is seen, + For its still parted darkness--till it breaks + In heavy curls upon thy shoulders--speaks + Like the stern wave, how hard the storm hath been! + + "So looked that hapless lady of the South, + Sweet Isabella! at that dreary part + Of all the passion'd hours of her youth; + When her green Basil pot by brother's art + Was stolen away; so look'd her pained mouth + In the mute patience of a breaking heart!" + +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. +{5} + + + + +ON VIRGIL + + +_To Lady Violet Lebas_. + +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. + +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. + +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? + + _Id cinerem aut Manes credis curare sepultos_? + +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 +"AEneid" daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish. So I retain a +sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many drawbacks of his +poetry. + +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: + + _Propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus_ + _Mincius et tenera praetexit arundine ripas_. + +"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 _Casmenae_, 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. + +Do you remember that mediaeval 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. + + _Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat_! + +"Oh, for the fields! Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, where wander the +Lacaenian maids! Oh, that one would carry me to the cool valleys of +Haemus, 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. + +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. + +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 +"AEneid," 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." + +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 "AEneid" 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." + +Virgil, in writing the "AEneid," 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. + +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 + + _Lethaeum ad flumen Dues evocat agmine magno_, + +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?" + +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 "OEnone." + +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.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 _best_ 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! + + + + +AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE + + +_To the Lady Violet Lebas_. + +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. + +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 _laisse_, or screed, as in the "Chanson de +Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel sound throughout. + +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: + + "Who would listen to the lay, + Of the captive old and gray;" + +for this is as much sense as one can make out of _del deport du viel +caitif_. + +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. + +It is a love story, a story of love overmastering, without conscience or +care of aught but the beloved. And the _viel caitif_ 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: + + "_When I was young, as you are young_, + _And lutes were touched, and songs were sung_! + _And love-lamps in the windows hung_!" + +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 chateau 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. + +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. + +"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, + + "Was it not the other day + That a pilgrim came this way? + And a passion him possessed, + That upon his bed he lay, + Lay, and tossed, and knew no rest, + In his pain discomforted. + But thou camest by his bed, + Holding high thine amice fine + And thy kirtle of ermine. + Then the beauty that is thine + Did he look on; and it fell + That the Pilgrim straight was well, + Straight was hale and comforted. + And he rose up from his bed, + And went back to his own place + Sound and strong, and fair of face." + +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. + +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? + +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! + +"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." + +So while they speak + + "In debate as birds are, + Hawk on bough," + +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 _fee_, +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. + +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. + +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. + +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? + + "Star that I from far behold + That the moon draws to her fold, + Nicolette with thee doth dwell, + My sweet love with locks of gold," + +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: + + "Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!" + "And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!" + +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." + +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. {6} + + + + +PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262) + + +_To the Lady Violet Lebas_. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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! + +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. + +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 _seance_ 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. + +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." + +How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our modern controversialists +had those accomplishments, and if Mr. Max Muller could, literally, +"double up" Professor Whitney, or if any one could cause Peppmuller to +collapse with his queer Homeric theory! Plotinus had many such arts. A +piece of jewellery was stolen from one of his _protegees_, 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. + +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. + +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. + +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 Naude'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. + +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: + + "So word by word, and line by line, + The dead man touch'd me from the past, + And all at once it seem'd at last + His living soul was flashed on mine. + + And mine in his was wound and whirl'd + About empyreal heights of thought, + And came on that which is, and caught + The deep pulsations of the world." + +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. + +In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he was +at war with pessimism. + +"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. + +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. + + + + +LUCRETIUS + + +_To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford_. + +Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the +creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "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 _numine laeso_, 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. + +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 _sin_, 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. + +That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to +me. The _De Rerum Natura_ 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 _patria potestas_ or _in manu +patris_. + +As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows that +his fellow-countrymen _must_ 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. + +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 +_Purgatorio_, if not in an _Inferno_. + +In the "Phaedo," 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. + +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. + +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. + +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." + +In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large, so +glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the "Fete +Champetre" 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 _tenebras Orci, vastasque +lacunas_. + +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." + +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." + +Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of passion and +of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in _Punch_) is only the +politician, striving always, never attaining; the stone rolls down again +from the hill-crest, and thunders far along the plain. + +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 + + "_Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum_," + +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-- + + "_Novitas tum florida mundi_ + _Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla_;" + +than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain end of +all before the eyes of all. + +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. + + + + +TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER + + +_To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York_. + +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 a 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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'Eternite. Ecrit en Anglois, par Monsieur Bunjan, +F.M., en Bedtfort, et nouvellement traduit en Francois. Avec Figures. A +Amsterdam, chez Jean Boekholt Libraire pres 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. + +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. + +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, +_en hausse_. 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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). + +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. + +Cartier, Perrot, Champlain, and the other early explorers' books are +beyond the means of a working student who needs them. May _you_ 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. + +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. + +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. {7} 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. + +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. + +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, _without the engraving_. It is deplorable, +but I never had a chance of another "Lucasta." This is not a case of +_invenies aliam_. However you fare, you will have the pleasure of Hope +and the consolation of books _quietem inveniendam in abditis recessibus +et libellulis_. + + + + +ROCHEFOUCAULD + + +_To the Lady Violet Lebas_. + +Dear Lady Violet,--I am not sure that I agree with you in your admiration +of Rochefoucauld--of the _Reflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales_, 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 _pensees_, and so much _esprit_ 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. + +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. + +There is more truth in a line of Tennyson's about + + "The praise of those we love, + Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise." + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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 _Maximes_ +were first published in Paris in 1665. {8} "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 +_miserrimi_. + +Do you remember--no, you don't--that meeting in "Candide" of the +unfortunate Cunegonde 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 +Cunegonde. "Unless you have been maltreated by _two_ Bulgarians, +received _two_ stabs from a knife, had _two_ of your castles burned over +your head, seen _two_ fathers and _two_ mothers murdered before your +eyes, and _two_ of your lovers flogged at two autos-da-fe, 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 Cunegonde; +and the old lady was not a little proud of it. + +But can you call _this_ 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." + +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 delicieux"--"Marriage is +sometimes convenient, but never delightful." + +How true is this of authors with a brief popularity: "_Il y a des gens +qui ressemblent aux vaudevilles, qu'on ne chante qu'un certain temps_." +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. + +"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. + +"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 _you_ have occasion to remember, that +"vivacity which grows with age is not far from folly." + + + + +OF VERS DE SOCIETE + + +_To Mr. Gifted Hopkins_. + +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 _me_? His only motive +would be an aversion to disobliging a _confrere_, and why should I put +him in such an unpleasant position? + +But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the _premiere +representation_ 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?-- + + Golden hair is fairy gold, + Fairy gold that cannot stay, + Turns to leaflets green and cold, + At the ending of the day! + Laurel-leaves the Muses may + Twine about your golden head. + Will the crown reward you, say, + When the fairy gold is fled? + + Daphne was a maid unwise-- + Shun the laurel, seek the rose; + Azure, lovely in the skies, + Shines less gracious in the hose! + +Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to _bas-bleus_, if not +indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors will think so, +I fear. Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold _that cannot stay_." If +_Fairy Gold_ were a _horse_, it would be all very well to write that it +"cannot stay." 'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs of the +_salon_. + +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 _vers de societe_ 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 AEolic 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 _vers de societe_ "a model of honourable gallantry." + +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--[Greek text]. Do you remember the +pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"? + + "Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire, + Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire, + Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing, + Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring." + +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. + +The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society +Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a _boudoir_ 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. + +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 + + _Multum lusimus in meis tabellis_, + _Ut convenerat esse delicatos_, + _Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum_. + +Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, are +addressed to _men_, 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 _boudoir_, 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. + +Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so +prettily in a _villanelle_, 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 _English ballade and villanelle_, 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. + +It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing _vers de societe_, +only he never troubles himself for a moment about the "decorum of the +_boudoir_." 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. + + "Ring that shalt bind the finger fair + Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare; + Thou hast not any price above + The token of her poet's love; + Her finger may'st thou mate as she + Is mated every wise with me!" + +And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured, this +fortunate jewel: + + "In vain I wish! So, ring, depart, + And say 'with me thou hast his heart'!" + +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": + + "Margarita first possessed, + If I remember well, my breast, + Margarita, first of all;" + +and then follows a list as long as Leporello's. + +What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of _vers de societe_ 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 _is_ 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. + +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 + + "_Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras_ + _Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis_." + +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: + + Here lies the body of the little maid + Erotion; + From her sixth winter's snows her eager shade + Hath fleeted on! + Whoe'er thou be that after me shalt sway + My scanty farm, + To her slight shade the yearly offering pay, + So--safe from harm-- + Shall thou and thine revere the kindly _Lar_, + And _this_ alone + Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far, + A mournful stone! + +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:" {9} + + "_Haec hora est tua, cum furit Lyaeus_, + _Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli_; + _Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones_." + +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. {10} + + + + +ON VERS DE SOCIETE + + +_To Mr. Gifted Hopkins_. + +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. + +Perhaps we should not expect _vers de societe_ 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 _leviore plectro_. Charles d'Orleans, that captive and +captivating prince, wrote thousands of _rondeaux_; even before his time a +gallant company of gentlemen composed the _Livre des Cent Ballades_, one +hundred _ballades_, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came +Clement 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 _ballade_ of an elopement, and Corneille's proud and graceful +stanzas to Marquise de Gorla. + +But verses in the English tongue are more worthy of our attention. Mr. +Locker begins his collection of them, _Lyra Elegantiarum_ (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. + +"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 _Baisers_: + + "Ask me no more whither do stray + The golden atoms of the day; + For in pure love did Heaven prepare + These powders to enrich your hair." + +It would be affectation, Gifted, if _you_ 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 + + "A cuff neglectful and thereby + Ribbons to flow confusedly; + A winning wave, deserving note + In the tempestuous petticoat." + +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: + + "Quit, quit, for shame: this will not move, + This cannot take her. + If of herself she will not love, + Nothing can make her-- + The devil take her." + +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: + + "March, march (quoth I), the word straight give, + Let's lose no time but leave her: + That giant upon air will live, + And hold it out for ever." + +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?-- + + "Why dost thou say I am forsworn, + Since thine I vowed to be? + Lady, it is already morn; + It was last night I swore to thee + That fond impossibility." + +Has "In Memoriam" nobler numbers than the poem, from exile, to Lucasta?-- + + "Our Faith and troth + All time and space controls, + Above the highest sphere we meet, + Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet." + +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: + + "Why then should I seek further store, + And still make love anew? + When change itself can give no more + 'Tis easy to be true." + +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": + + "To all you ladies now on land + We men at sea indite." + +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: + + "I court others in verse--but I love thee in prose; + And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart." + +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 _vers de societe_; the most gay, frank, good-humoured, tuneful and +engaging. + +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: + + "Tell me not what too well I know + About the Bard of Sirmio-- + Yes, in Thalia's son + Such stains there are as when a Grace + Sprinkles another's laughing face + With nectar, and runs on!" + +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 + + "Captain Hazard wins a bet, + Or Beaulieu spoils a curry"-- + +and I prefer his sombre "Red Fisherman," the idea of which is borrowed, +wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian. + +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." + +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 _vers de +societe_, 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. + + + + +RICHARDSON + + +_By Mrs. Andrew Lang_. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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, _never_!" the nineteenth century +replies unanimously. + +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. + +Little as you read of the book, no doubt you were struck--you _must_ 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 "_his_ 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. + +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. + +Miss Jervois, who is Richardson's idea of a _jeune personne bien elevee_, +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. + +"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 _his_ 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." + +Grandmothers now choose other topics of conversation for their +descendants, but in those old days when sedan-chairs made _enlevements_ +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. + +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. + +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." + +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. + +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. + +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! + +Richardson was a woman's novelist, as Fielding was a man's. I sometimes +think of Dr. Johnson's _mot_: "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 _his_ +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! + + + + +GERARD DE NERVAL + + +_To Miss Girton, Cambridge_. + +Dear Miss Girton,--Yes, I fancy Gerard 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." + +In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles Edgar +Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a _belle morte_ 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, Aurelie and +Sylvie, in _Les Filles de Feu_, 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 _chateau_, 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. + +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. + +Gerard 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 Burger, +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, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval. It is not necessary to +have heard of Gerard; even that queer sham, the lady of culture, admits +without a blush that she knows not Gerard. Yet he is worth knowing. + +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 +Gerard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl. + +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 +Gerard'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. + +Conceive Gerard 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. + +"In front of a _chateau_ of the time of Henri IV., a _chateau_ 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. + +"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 +_chateau_, 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." + +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. + +All this Gerard 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. + +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, _piquante_, 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. + +The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the royal +woods, was not far to seek, and Gerard 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 _naive_ +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." + +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: + + "_A Dammartin, l'y a trois belles filles_, + _L'y en a z'une plus belle que le jour_!" + +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. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the +proofs of it (_Le Reve et la Vie_) were in his pocket when they found him +dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne. + +Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace of +his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like this: + + "_Ou sont nos amoureuses_? + _Elles sont au tombeau_! + _Elles sont plus heureuses_ + _Dans un sejour plus beau_." + +But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air: + + "_Neither good morn nor good night_." + + The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone; + Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed; + But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn, + And night shall bring forgetfulness at last! + +Gerard'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 _Chimeres_, 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: + + "_Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron_: + _Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d'Orphee_ + _Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee_." + +Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet called-- + + "_El Desdichado_." + + I am that dark, that disinherited, + That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine, + The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled; + A black sun on my lute doth yet remain! + Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain, + Within the tomb, among the midnight dead, + Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed, + The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain. + + Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been + Or Lusignan or Biron? By a Queen + Caressed within the Mermaid's haunt I lay, + And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream, + And touched on Orpheus' lyre as in a dream, + Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay! + + + + +ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN + + +_To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor_. + +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. + +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! + +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. + +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. + +By way of an awful warning to you on this score, and also, as you say you +want a _true_ book about Red Indians, let me recommend to you the best +book about them _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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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, _after the manner of the +scalp dance_!" 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?" + +"Dead, two months since." + +"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. + +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. + +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 _Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut_--"the place of two +Dead Men." Two Indians of the same _totem_ had killed each other there. +Now, their _totem_ was that which Tanner bore, the _totem_ 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 _totem_. He had seen +enough of them. + +Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit, he did +_not_ 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. + +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. + +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. + +Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (at least _he_ 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. + +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. + +"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. + +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. + + + + +APPENDIX I + + +_Reynolds's Peter Bell_. + +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 _Macmillan's Magazine_, 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?-- + + "He is rurally related; + Peter Bell hath country cousins, + (He had once a worthy mother), + Bells and Peters by the dozens, + But Peter Bell he hath no brothers, + Not a brother owneth he, + Peter Bell he hath no brother; + His mother had no other son, + No other son e'er called her 'mother,' + Peter Bell hath brother none." + +As Keats says in a review he wrote for _The Examiner_, "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." + +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 _Blackwood_! 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 _Blackwood_ (where he had praised her +_Frankenstein_), 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. + + + + +APPENDIX II + + +_Portraits of Virgil and Lucretius_. + +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 "AEneid." 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. + +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 Muller. 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! {11} + + + + +FOOTNOTES + + +{1} This was written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnold and Mr. Browning. + +{2} Since this was written, Mr. Bridges has made his lyrics accessible +in "Shorter Poems." (G. Bell and Sons: 1890) + +{3} Macmillans. + +{4} Reynolds was, perhaps, a little irreverent. He anticipated +Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" by a premature parody, "Peter Bell the First." + +{5} Appendix on Reynolds's "Peter Bell." + +{6} "Aucassin and Nicolette" has now been edited, annotated, and +equipped with a translation by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon (Kegan Paul & Trench, +1887). + +{7} Edinburgh, 1862. + +{8} The Elzevir piracy was rather earlier. + +{9} Pindar, perhaps, in one of his fragments, suggested that pretty _Cum +regnat Rosa_. + +{10} See next letter. + +{11} Mr. Munro calls the stone "a black agate," and does not mention its +_provenance_. 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. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE*** + + +******* This file should be named 1395.txt or 1395.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. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. 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